Lit Crit 2.0

Dalhousie University

2007

sabbatical!

The Victorian Art of Fiction

19th-Century Criticism

• not professionalized
• non-specialist
• critic mediates between literature and reading public
• focus on social, moral, political effects

Academic literary criticism at the present time:

• professionalized
• highly specialized
• audience is other academics
• high level of abstraction
• isolated from broader book culture

Novel Readings

"Books About Books":

• Jane Smiley, 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel
• Francine Prose, Reading Like a Writer
• John Sutherland, How to Read a Novel
• James Wood, How Fiction Works

Academic Criticism in the Public Sphere:

• "Academic Criticism Criticized (and Defended)" - Ozick and Franzen
• "Academics and Literary Culture"
• "Mad as Hell - At Literary Critics?"

criticism

academic

blogging

personal

How different are these activities, really?

academic blogging

FOR:

practical

• pressures on print publishing, particularly in academic publishing
• slow timeline

…the demands placed on candidates for tenure, especially demands for publication, have been expanding in kind and increasing in quantity…

…junior faculty members are meeting these ever-growing demands even though this is a time when universities have lowered or eliminated subsidies for scholarly presses and libraries have dramatically reduced their purchases of books in the humanities. And despite a worsening climate for book publication, the monograph has become increasingly important in comparison with other forms of publication.

Report of the MLA Task Force on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion (December 2006)

Recommendations from the MLA Task Force Report:

• 3. The profession as a whole should develop a more capacious conception of scholarship by rethinking the dominance of the monograph, promoting the scholarly essay, establishing multiple pathways to tenure, and using scholarly portfolios.

• 4. Departments and institutions should recognize the legitimacy of scholarship produced in new media, whether by individuals or in collaboration, and create procedures for evaluating these forms of scholarship.

historical

• proliferation of new forms of publishing, including e-publishing and self-publishing

The granting of tenure should not be reliant on whether the vagaries of any publishing system did or did not allow a text to come into circulation, but rather on the value of that text, and on the importance it bears for its field. Peer-review thus demands to be transformed from a system of gatekeeping to a mode of manifesting the responses to and discussion of a multiplicity of ideas in circulation.

Kathleen Fitzpatrick, “On the Future of Academic Publishing, Peer Review, and Tenure Requirements” (The Valve, 2006)

principled

• limited audience
• alienation
• professional goals vs intellectual exchange and communication

The problem, according to university presses, is that we are not reading one another as much as we once did - or at least that we are not buying one another's books and assigning them to our classes. There are, I know, economic factors here: we are reluctant to buy, let alone compel students to buy, expensive books. But judging from the fate of even modestly priced academic books in our field, the problem is not exclusively economic. Somewhere over the past decade, our interest in one another's work - or, again, at least in owning one another's work - seems to have declined.

Stephen Greenblatt, MLA Presidential Address 2002

[T]he models for inquiry that dominate the humanities now also make a direct theoretical assault on the humane principles and aspirations that many students came into the discipline with. So students learn to interpret those aspirations, and the younger self that embraced them, as incoherent and shameful, and are rewarded for treating that prior self with a kind of intellectual sadism.

Lisa Ruddick,”The Near Enemy of the Humanities is Professionalism” (Inside Higher Education 2001)

(Academic theorists equipped with advanced degrees, who make up yet another species of limited reviewers, are worthy only of a parenthesis. Their confining ideologies, heavily politicized and rendered in a kind of multi-syllabic pidgin, have for decades marinated literature in dogma. Of these inflated dons and doctors it is futile to speak, since, unlike the hardier customer reviewers, they are destined to vanish like the fog they evoke.)

Cynthia Ozick, "Literary Entrails" (Harper's, April 2007)

Lit crit should finally die the death it so much deserves. Lit departments have floundered for decades because they have forgotten the text. Instead, they have pandered to the politically correct idiots who can neither read with sense nor write with style. May they ALL be flushed down the toilet where they belong.

Comment in Chronicle of Higher Education (September 2007)

AGAINST:

preoccupation with peer review

If closed peer review processes aren’t serving scholars in their need for feedback and discussion, and if they can’t be wholly relied upon for their quality-control functions — if they appear, at least to some, “quaint and primitive” — why do we cling so ferociously to them? Arguably, the primary purpose that anonymous peer review actually serves today, at least in the humanities, is that of institutional warranting, of conveying to college and university administrations that the work their employees are doing is appropriate and well-thought-of in its field, and thus that these employees are deserving of ongoing appointments, tenure, promotions, raises, and so forth.

Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Planned Obsolescence

prejudice against form

For the record, he does not call this a blog, partly, he says, because “I hate that particular syllable,” but also, more importantly, because “it doesn’t catch what I’m really trying to do, whether successfully or not. These are essays. When I think of a blog — and maybe I’m being unfair to bloggers because I don’t spend much time in the blogosphere — my sense of blogs is that that they’re written very quickly. This is stuff that I compose and recompose, and then recompose and recompose and recompose. It’s very written.”

(Interview with Jeff Nunokawa about FB 'essays')

Another thing about blogging: lots of people with certain reading habits don't read blogs. I have nothing against them, but I don't read them, either. This is as much a function of available time as anything else. By restricting myself to published writing (whether digital or print), I am in effect ascribing value to the gatekeeping function of editors. I don't do this because I'm a snob, but rather because there are only so many hours in a day.

(Leonard Cassuto in Guardian 'live chat,' 2011)

Blogs are just like other forms of writing, such as books, in that there's a whole lot of trash out there—and some gems worth reading. It just depends on what you choose to read (or write). And of course many (most? all?) other genres of writing have elements of self-promotion and narcissism. After all, a basic requirement of writing is the (often mistaken) belief that you have something to say that's important. . .

Dan Cohen, "Professors, Start Your Blogs"

the fear factor

part of the kneejerk response to blogging on the part of established academics might be the concern that the field and its practices are getting away from them.

It would seem to me that the average academic (or academic journal) seeks to avoid exposure. Publishing an article in the "Journal of narrowly-focused humanities studies" is a good way to hide. Those who do manage to find you will probably be sympathetic. Plus you always have the shield of peer-review: clearly someone thought what you said was ok. Even if someone disagrees with you, the differences will likely be on details that very few people will know or care about. Besides, by the time that person manages to write and publish a response, your article is in the distant past. In any case, this almost never happens. Since 93% of humanities articles are never cited you can safely publish with the assumption that no one will ever mention your article again. Phew!

Alex Reid, "Digital Digs"

Open Letters Monthly

blog posts

• reading Soueif
• Soueif and George Eliot
• Soueif and post-colonial theory

ACCUTE 2009

But Why Always George Eliot? Ahdaf Soueif's In the Eye of the Sun and Middlemarch

"Ahdaf Soueif: Is Everything I’ve Done Now Obsolete?"

bleg

Yes, it's "knowledge dissemination" ...

but is it "scholarship"? should it "count"?

Traditional scholarly publication is:

• gated
• impermeable
• slow
• inward-directed

Online scholarly activity is:

• open
• porous
• responsive
• outward-looking

Both require and demonstrate expertise.

COMPLEMENTARY

not

OPPOSITIONAL

Enhancing Understanding

Lit Crit 2.0

BAVS 2011

Rohan Maitzen

Blog Posts:

?

Blogging,

Jo VanEvery:

Scholars lose sight of the fact that academic publishing is about communication. Or, perhaps more accurately, communication appears disconnected from the validation process.

Dan Cohen:

Viewed properly, the open web is perfectly in line with the fundamental academic goals of research, sharing of knowledge, and meritocracy. . . .

Academic Publishing,

The Blogging Debate

Blogging does not "count"!

Knowledge Dissemination:

This Week in My Classes

Novel Readings

Sjowall and Wahloo's The Story of Crime

Mystery and Detective Fiction

Ahdaf Soueif

Trollope

The Valve

Thackeray

George Eliot

Knowledge Dissemination

Harman, Jane's Fame

Maddox, George Eliot in Love

Garber, The Use and Abuse of Literature

2011 Revolution

invitation to serve as external reader

on Honours thesis about Soueif