Pre-preprofessionalization

A reader sent me the link to Craig Fehrman's recent essay in College Literature, "Prepreprofessionalism: Rankings, Rewards, and the Graduate Admissions Process" (behind the Project Muse firewall). Fehrman's central argument, based on a couple of years trawling through graduate admissions websites, message boards, and wikis (better you than me, Craig!), is that although much has been written about the professionalization that goes on in graduate school, the process is one that actually begins much earlier.

What Fehrman calls prepreprofessionalism is visible in the applicants, some of them still undergraduates, who already have a focused area of study, a preferred theoretical approach, and an awareness of the job-market exigencies that they believe make such intellectual and rhetorical tailoring attractive to admissions committees (by convincing them that they, the applicants, are focused and motivated and ready to hit the ground running).

Anyone who has met recent graduate-school applicants knows that this is true--and those of us who advise students considering graduate school probably recommend at least some of these behaviors (don't write a statement of purpose that natters on about your love of literature; do show that you're interested in doing work in a particular area and that your interests are a good match for that specific department and faculty). But I'm quite sure I'd never thought about this as part of the professionalization process, and neither had it occurred to me that it could be a bad thing.

To be sure, Fehrman does not assert that it's either good or bad; he works hard to avoid the moralizing that attends most discussions of preprofessionalization (either it signals the death of the life of the mind! or it's the only way these kids will get jobs ever!). But reading his article, which is peppered with excerpted message-board posts from strung-out would-be graduate students obsessed with department rankings and looking for every possible competitive angle, is enough to bring out the curmudgeon in almost any reader: graduate students should be trained broadly! They should be open to changing subfields entirely! (And they should GET OFF MY LAWN!)

I'm generally in favor of professionalizing graduate students--not because I think they're DOOOOMED otherwise, but because I'm impatient with the gauzy, romanticized notion of the humanities that is often presented as the alternative (and also because I support an understanding of our profession as a profession: a creative and rewarding one, to be sure, but one that benefits from generally-accepted standards of evidence, rules of comportment, and the like). And yet, Fehrman's article inspires me to just that kind of guaziness about how things should be--perhaps because his article doesn't, as it couldn't, track what happens to these message-board-posters once they actually get into graduate school: are their interests really that narrow and targeted, and they themselves such hyperprofessionalized automata? I hope not, but I also rather doubt it; nothing rids a person of the belief that she has the key to success faster than graduate school.

But wise readers--especially those of you with more recent experience with graduate school admissions than I--what do you see and what do you think?

Many are the ways of sucking

Apologies for the unannounced hiatus--I had a couple of posts brewing, but not yet fully thought through, when Cosimo and I left for a week with his extended family in New England.

Our cabin in the Maine woods, less than a quarter-mile from the beach:



(One of my friends in Boston said to Cosimo, upon meeting him and hearing how we'd spent the previous several days, "You took Flavia to nature?" Yes: and nature survived.)

But because it's August and crunch time, I brought work with me: a book manuscript I'm reviewing. I read half the thing the day before we left, in a splendid blaze of productivity, and the other half in dribs and drabs in the car to and from our various destinations.

It's a collection of essays on a topic of immediate interest to me, so the task was worthwhile even though the essays themselves varied widely in quality. Having just read a dozen pre-publication essays, though, I now consider myself in a position to give advice to essay-writers everywhere.

So! Among the things I would strongly recommend you not do, especially if you have any regard for your future reviewer's travel companion, who may not be wholly interested in hearing her exclaim about the iniquities of your essay for miles on end:

• Refer repeatedly (and in tedious detail) to your article on the same topic published fifteen long years ago, which apparently didn't get the attention you think it deserved.
• Mention how poorly-received the conference-paper version of your essay was.
• Spend nearly half your essay on a lit review establishing how appropriate a particular critical approach is to your topic--and how entirely validated that approach has been by major scholars in the field for nigh on 20 years now. Especially do not do this if you subsequently
• Spend pages and pages patting yourself on the back for the boldness and radicalism of your approach.
• Change your topic--not just your argument, but your entire topic, including the texts you're looking at and the theoretical approach you're taking--in the middle of your essay.
• Open with a long and self-congratulatory anecdote that has no real connection to the rest of your essay.

Seriously, dudes. I know we're academics, and thus inherently self-involved--but please try not to appear that way.

A gift unlooked for

I just discovered that RU's classes begin on August 31st--not August 24th, as I've believed since May.

Holy shit, people! I just found an extra week of summer.

Loss of faith

I've published several articles derived from my dissertation/book manuscript, and although there are things that embarrass me a bit about all of them--especially the brash, pugnacious tone I now recognize as peculiar to the graduate student--I still consider them basically solid pieces of work.

However, there's one whose central argument I no longer fully believe in. It's still a plausible argument, I think, and even a profitably provocative one, but I'm not prepared to go to the stake for it.

The problem is, the material from that article accounts for nearly half of the chapter I'm currently revising. And it's the better half.

I think that the way I'm reframing both the chapter and the book will allow me to moderate and rephrase that particular claim while still retaining nearly all my sub-arguments and local readings, but I'm torn between wanting essentially to keep the damn argument--I wouldn't write that tendentiously now, but I kinda enjoy the confidence behind it--and fearing it will weaken the entire chapter. I'm also not sure what my ethical obligations are: if one changes an argument radically between one published work and another, does one need to acknowlege that fact in the text? In a footnote? Anywhere at all?

I'm sure such losses of faith or changes of heart must be relatively common, especially over the course of a long career working on the same or similar texts and topics. If you've ever had a loss of faith in your earlier claims and have contemplated publicly revising them, what have you done?

Avoidant personality disorder*

Almost every day that I write, I begin by avoiding writing. Some days I'm so successful that I don't write at all, but most days I eventually settle down to it. After I:

-Call or instant-message a friend

-Discover a bunch of magazines or journals that I really have to plow through and get out of my life and my living room

-Look at pictures of shelter cats online and think about adopting a second one

-Vacuum

-Browse sabbaticalhomes.com and fantasize about a summer or leave semester abroad

-Crack open those books from inter-library loan

-Balance my chequebook

Indeed, if I get interrupted in my writing, I sometimes go through this process all over again: I settle down to work and within 60 seconds have lept back up to do something else.

Nevertheless, I am working, and I'm taking comfort in the argument that self-discipline breeds more self-discipline.

Right now I'm revising what was the first chapter of my dissertation and is now the second chapter of my book. I've got a core of basically strong readings that I have to rework to fit my now rather different argument, relate closely to a chapter that previously didn't exist, and strip of the embarrassingly tendentious and unscholarly surrounding verbiage that I was very proud of 4-7 years ago.

So I'm doing my usual plodding series of revisions by hand: 10-15 pages a day of careful, interlineated changes; input onto computer when done; print out new draft; repeat. With each round I know there's stuff I'm missing--I get so wrapped up in one paragraph that I forget what happens two pages later and that I need to set up or lead into in some way--but I figure I'll catch it in the next round. Or the one after that.

Gradually, it sucks less. In the end it might not suck at all. And the process isn't without its pleasures--but it's certainly not as compelling as kittens, apartments in Florence, or even the mysteriously tenacious crud in my bathtub.


---------------
*Dude, it's totally in the DSM.

Who do you say that you are?

This here's a question for my Renaissance peeps (and scholars of religion and lit or religious history more generally):

How common is the term "Protestant," when applied to the people we now call Protestants, by the people we now call Protestants?

My sense has been that "Christian" (or something similarly broad and/or vague, like "our church") is usually preferred, and that "Protestant" is more often used by Catholic polemicists than by actual Protestants--but that's just my sense, and although there's been a lot of scholarship challenging "Anglican" and "Puritan" as meaningful descriptive labels, I can't remember reading anything similar about "Protestant."

A preliminary EEBO search reveals that there are actually quite a few positive or neutral usages of the word, even in the sixteenth century. But since it's hard to search for the terms people use if they're NOT using "Protestant," that still doesn't give me a sense of its relative frequency or popularity.

Anyone have any sources or data points--either scholarly or Early Modern--to throw my way?

Home furnishings

My book manuscript, I have decided, is a piano. And I don't know how to play the piano! But that's only part of the problem.

Several nights ago, I was out for dinner with a friend in the profession whose monograph is at about the same stage as mine.

"I think about my book every day," she said. "It's like a physical presence, like a piece of furniture."

We started talking about what kind of furniture our manuscripts would be, if that's what they were: something hideous? merely functional? twee and filligreed in a house full of midcentury-modern?

"Well," I said. "Mine's been in the corner with a sheet over it for ages. And it's nice there. Doesn't get in my way, and I can forget about it for long periods of time."

"But under that sheet, it's actually, uh. . ." I thought for a minute. "A piano. An upright piano. Nothing fancy, like a grand, but old and rather handsome--maybe something I inherited from a great-aunt?"

"I can't get rid of it. But I don't know how to play it. And it would be pretty just to look at, I guess, and for sentimental value--except that it doesn't really fit in my apartment, and I'd have to organize a whole room around it, and if I'm going to have it, I want to be able to play it, and not just, like, put doilies on it or whatever."

It was one of the more illuminating conversations I've had about my work--or, really, my vision of my career--in a while.

*

If your book manuscript (or dissertation, or latest research project) were a piece of furniture, what would it be?

Random bullets of coming back from Cali

You'll be gratified to hear that my trip to SoCal was entirely worth my week-long absence from this blog. At least, for me.

Some highlights:

• I got to see my grandmother, who's very weak, but not in any pain. It was lovely to see how much she's meant to so many people: she's 88 and has hordes of friends and family members trooping in to visit her week after week.
• Cosimo met my folks. Nothing disastrous happened, at least to my knowledge.
• I saw my brother, albeit all too briefly, as he was down from SF for a couple of weddings (neither of them his).
• Attending July 4th fireworks in La Jolla, followed by drinks and a late dinner at a bar overlooking the ocean.
• Seeing this awesome production of Coriolanus. I'm now officially a Darko Tresnjak groupie.
• Spending a long day L.A. with Cosimo's brother and his brother's girlfriend, who live on Sunset. We drove around the hills, spent hours on the beach in Santa Monica and Venice, and stopped in at a club where Cosimo's brother--a comedy writer and occasional performer--got some open-mike time.
• I'm a wee bit tan.
• I wouldn't mind living in California. But right now I'm damn glad to be teaching in my own state system, and not California's.

Toodles!

I'm off for a week with the fam, chez my grand-maman.

It'll be pretty much like this:

There is no normal life

My summer-session class ends this week. It's been a relatively easy gig, and even a fun one, but it's got me on a strange schedule: I teach Tuesday and Thursday nights from 5.30 to 9.30 p.m. Now, I love a world in which I don't have to leave for the office until after 3 p.m., and teaching for four hours is a breeze when it's my only class (and one whose material I could teach in my sleep). But then I get home at 10 or 10.30, fix dinner, and read or write until 3 a.m.

I'm looking forward to having a more normal schedule for the last seven weeks of the summer, although I guess that "normal" isn't an accurate term: even if I were to spend all my time in the same city, going to bed at a decent hour and following something that looked like a regular routine, a schedule that one has for eight or ten or fourteen weeks is not, by definition, normal.

But is my term-time schedule normal? In the sense that I do it for the greatest number of weeks out of the year, yes--but given that a significant portion of my professional responsibilities, namely, most of my research, writing, and just plain thinking happens when school is not in session, then no: I alternate between one half of my job and the other (or, if you count service as an equivalent third, between two-thirds of my job and the other third).

I don't mind that division, but it leads to a peculiar understanding of time and timing. The belief that there is, or will be, a time for everything encourages deferral--which isn't a problem when it's an article or a syllabus (as long as those things eventually get done), but which has the potential to affect all areas of our lives: we can't clean the house until those papers are graded; can't work on the new book until we're on leave; can't have a baby until tenure.

This kind of deferral isn't unique to academia, of course; people in other professions let the rest of their lives slip when a big deal is closing or a case is going to trial--or simply because they feel they need to wait to do X or Y or Z until they're at a better or more secure place: with more money in the bank, a more stable job, a spouse. But I do think that academia, and especially the pre-tenure years of academia, encourages a continuing series of deferrals, large and small, as one jumps through a continuing series of hoops.

Cosimo, my gentleman friend, is up for tenure in the fall. Last week he submitted his final book manuscript. He's also been teaching summer school (and on a schedule radically incompatible with mine: five days a week, starting at eight a.m.). He's been a model of how to meet one's obligations without using them as an excuse not to do or talk or think about other things. But it's still hard, I think, for both of us--I suspect it's hard for all of us--not to say or believe, "as soon as this is done, I'll have time."

Time for ourselves, for other people, for everything. Not now, no. But soon.

Friends and colleagues

Last weekend was Augie's wedding. As long-time readers may recall, Augie is someone I knew slightly in graduate school who moved to Cha-Cha City the same year I did, for a job at a neighboring university, and who has since become a good friend. We were a couple of cohorts apart and technically in different deparments--but, given our shared background, I expected to see a bunch of people at the wedding whom I knew from grad school. What I didn't expect was to feel such a rush of warmth for them.

This has been happening to me a lot lately--not nostalgia for grad school, which I don't think is a period of my life I'll ever romanticize, but a sense of real affection and esteem for many of the people I knew there. Over the past year or two I've also had several friendships that began at INRU suddenly deepen and become more personal; I'm much better friends, now, with people I knew in grad school than I was while I was actually in grad school.

There are probably several reasons for this. One may be that I don't need the same things from these people now that I did then: during my first four years in the program, while I was actually living in Grad School City, I was terribly lonely and terribly insecure and my cohort was flying apart. I needed close, local friends who had some idea of what I was doing and enduring (academically and otherwise)--and my classmates for various reasons were not those people. These days I'm not lonely and not unduly insecure, and I have a great group of friends and colleagues. I don't need Grad School Friend A or Grad School Friend B to be my bestest friend ever, or my social or intellectual support system. That makes it easier to get to know them at whatever speed and with whatever limitations the relationship might turn out to have.

I got unlucky with my cohort (and possibly with my emotional and psychological makeup), but I don't think it's just me; everyone's happier now. Even when your program isn't cutthroat, as ours was not, grad school means living in a constant state of low-level panic about your abilities and your prospects; under those circumstances, it's hard to be someone you yourself like, much less to be open and generous enough to be a good friend to others.

I had a similar experience in college. Unlike in graduate school, in college I had a great group of friends--with whom I'm still very close--and yet I found INRU a socially and emotionally stressful place. One of my friends called it the "INRU cold shoulder": that experience we all had of walking down the street, seeing someone we knew from section coming toward us, and having a frantic 15-second internal monologue about whether we should say hello. (Will he recognize me? know my name? think he's too cool to talk to me? probably he IS too cool--but I should say hi anyway--well, I'll see if he says hi first--oh, no. . . he didn't.)

And yet, when I ran into exactly those same people in Manhattan, years after we'd graduated from college and years after whatever class we'd had together, we'd stop and talk for 35 minutes: eagerly, enthusiastically, unwilling to let the other person go. I think we missed college--or rather, we missed being so surrounded by smart, interesting people that we'd had the luxury of not bothering to know most of them.

So maybe that's what's happening here, too; it's been long enough for us to miss each other. This August it will be ten years since I started graduate school, six years since I moved out of that city, and three years since I took this job. I've been startled by the number of people from grad school who have recently friended me on Facebook, but perhaps we all want the same thing: to reconnect with those who went through it with us and whom we're abashed to find we never really knew.

Professional beginnings

I've been a reader for as long as I can remember. But although I can't isolate the moment that I knew I wanted to study literature any more than the moment that I knew I wanted to write (which came much earlier), I think I can identify the first time I realized that analyzing literature was a thing one did--and maybe something I had an aptitude for.

It was in ninth-grade English. We were reading a novel whose title and precise plot I no longer remember, but its protagonist was a pre-adolescent boy. I believe he was an orphan, and he might have been a Native American (I grew up in the Pacific Northwest, where we were assigned a lot of books about Native American boys). In one of the chapters the boy befriended, or maybe was just fascinated by, a wild or semi-wild animal; I think it was an unbroken horse. Our teacher asked us to look through the chapter and pick out the adjectives used to describe the horse, and as we called them out she wrote them on the overhead projector.

We had come up with perhaps a half-dozen words and phrases, not yet very far into the chapter, when I looked up, studied the list for a minute, and raised my hand.

"Those words?" I said, tentatively. "I think they don't just describe the horse. They also describe [the protagonist]."

My teacher gave me what may be the purest and most radiant smile of satisfaction I have ever received, as if I'd passed a test she'd set up in the hope but not the expectation that I might have exactly the skills--or talent or moxie--to succeed where others had failed.

The confident warmth of her approval is, in fact, probably why I remember this moment--for as literary insights go, it was not one for the ages. Maybe that's why I got into and persist in this business: in the hope of once again being told that I've gotten it exactly right.

Working: not actually so bad!

After various delays and false starts and irritating side projects to attend to, I returned to my manuscript last week. As I've suggested, I've been fighting a rising sense of panic as that day approached--believing my manuscript to lie in pieces, parts of which I knew to be good, but with lots of work to be done in lots of places and an overall logic that felt as if it were shifting and changing into something I no longer quite grasped.

But I got my ass and a chapter draft to the coffeeshop where I did most of my revising last summer (working at home is hopeless for me unless I'm reading or merely transcribing changes from longhand onto my computer). I bought my coffee and an M&M cookie, found a table ideally situated--my back to the plate-glass windows, not too close to the speakers--and spread out my materials and started reading.

I've been working on this chapter for ages, albeit with large gaps of time in between whiles, and I'd remembered it as being in decent shape but in need of a solid week or two of work. This depressed me, because the chapter after this one is truly a mess, but I felt I had to plow through this one and get it in the best possible shape before moving on.

But as I read and edited in longhand--mostly minor matters of phrasing, with a few new or substantially revised sentences here and there to clarify my argument--I had the experience that I never have.

Hey! I thought. This is fine.

It'll need work later, but it's fine to send to my mentor-type person in the fall. It's probably even fine to send to a press if anyone ever asks for the complete manuscript (once there is a complete manuscript, and a book proposal, and all that jazz). I can move on.

I doubt the rest of my revision process will be as agreeable, but for the moment I feel as though things are under control. I just need to keep getting out of the house and buying my M&M cookies and everything will be fine.

Textual scholarship is bunk

Several weeks ago I picked up an edition of Golding's translation of Ovid at a used bookstore. It was $12, and since I only wanted it for casual reference, I didn't care about having an especially scholarly edition. This looked like a perfectly serviceable transcription.

It is, and I'm happy with it. But I didn't expect its editor to be so aggressive about not having undertaken a more bibliographically ambitious edition. This is from his note on the text:

This present edition is based on the copy of the first edition (1567) now in the Library of the University of Illinois. Its purpose is simply to present the pleasant and delectable work to a reader interested in what must have been one of the favorite books of the young Shakespeare. . . . It is not, then, primarily a textual edition--one scrupulously based on a collation of many copies of the first and later editions, with the laudable purpose of arriving at a text scientifically as pure as possible--purer, in fact, than any Elizabethan ever happened upon. The boy from Stratford, for example, probably not long before 1580, would simply have picked up a copy of the book; it would not have occurred to him to compare it with other copies for variants in phrasing, spelling, punctuation, most of these due to human accidents--to the extra tankard of beer the compositor had at lunch, to the pretty girl who brushed by his window and set his hand a-fumbling among the letters, to failing light or weariness at the end of the day.

Ovid's Metamorphoses: The Arthur Golding Translation, 1567, ed. John Frederick Nims. New York: Macmillan, 1965

Wow. Contempt for textual scholarship just drips from those lines, doesn't it? Oh, those textual scholars, with their "laudable" (by which I mean, sweetly pathetic) devotion to a "scientifically pure" text! They should drink more beer and eye more pretty women and really, you know: live life. Like Shakespeare! And Golding's compositor! (And perhaps Professor Nims himself, who appears from his acknowledgements to have fobbed most of the edition's actual labor off on the English department's secretaries and typists.)

So those of you currently collating and shit? Stop right this minute!

Unexpected events

Things I did not expect, ex-boyfriend edition:

1. That I would still not be speaking to my ex-partner, two years after the end of our six-year relationship.

2. That scarcely two months after the not-great end of a not-quite year-long relationship, I'd have resumed hanging out and even getting shitfaced drunk with my most recent ex-boyfriend--and that it would be entirely fun and entirely un-weird, and we'd be talking even more frankly than we had when we were together.

I'm not sure which of these two circumstances surprises me more. And while it would be incorrect to say that I find them equally agreeable, taken together they're a pleasant reminder (for apparently I need frequent reminding) that life is rarely what we expect.