Last night I dreamed I was writing an article proving that the book Polonius hands Ophelia in 3.1 (when he sends her to confront Hamlet) is Lewis Bayly's "The Practice of Piety."
This was such a weirdly specific dream, about texts I've never worked on--I haven't even taught Hamlet in three or four years and I'm pretty sure I've never read Bayly--that I awoke wondering if there might actually be something to this: could my subconscious mind have produced something totally brilliant? Or maybe even received some kind of supernatural transmission??
Alas, a quick database search revealed that Bayly's book was probably first published in 1611, at least a decade too late.
Still, now that I know my subconscious can produce plausible-sounding scholarly arguments, I'm pissed it hasn't been helping me with my actual work all these years.
Monday, June 16, 2014
Thursday, June 12, 2014
Clumsy incompetence is just part of my process
I remember how hard it was to write my first dissertation chapter--and, worse, how incomprehensible it seemed that it should be so hard: I'd read hundreds of academic book chapters! I'd written a dozen 20-page seminar papers! I knew what a chapter-length scholarly argument looked like, and I could confidently tell you which ones were stronger and which ones were weaker, and why. I knew all the kinds of moves a book chapter might make. But I couldn't apply that knowledge to my own writing.
To say that my advisor wasn't helpful in navigating that particular psychodrama would be an understatement; our relationship came close to collapsing over that chapter. But after I'd produced a draft that was firing on a few of its cylinders, she gave me some of the most useful writing advice I've ever received: It's time to move on, she said. Start your second chapter. You can return to this one later.
I didn't like that advice. I'd been living inside that chapter for a long time, and I couldn't bear the idea of leaving it messy and half-formed, especially when it finally seemed to be getting somewhere. But I did as she said. And for whatever reason, my second chapter just came: it wound up being the longest and maybe the meatiest of my dissertation chapters, but the easiest of the four to write. My remaining chapters were still a frustrating, difficult slog, but neither was as hard as the first. The difference, I think, was that while I was still struggling with ideas, argument, and organization, once I'd written one good chapter, the form itself no longer felt like an obstacle. I'd made it my own.
The experience taught me that the point of writing a dissertation chapter is, on some level, to learn how to write a dissertation chapter. And you don't learn by tinkering endlessly with the same chapter--you learn by writing other chapters. The same is true for every literary form I can think of, from the tweet to the novel. (Most "first novels," after all, aren't the first novel the author wrote, but the first one she got published.) Reading a lot of works in a given genre is crucial, but you only learn how to inhabit a form by inhabiting it. Repeatedly.
But though I tell my students the kind of things I've just said here--that the point of writing a research paper is to learn how to write a research paper; that you can't master a form without first doing it badly--that doesn't mean I've fully learned my own lessons.
Recently, I was invited to write something on spec for a general-interest publication. It was a topic comfortably within my wheelhouse, for a publication I've subscribed to for years. I was excited by the opportunity and thought I could probably do a pretty good job. But I'm telling you: it was the hardest thing I've written in ages--maybe the hardest thing I've written since that first dissertation chapter. As with my dissertation, the problem was mostly one of form (or, more accurately, with negotiating the relationship between self and form). I didn't know who I was writing as, or to whom, or why. The editors were kind enough to read two significantly different versions of my essay over a couple of months, but in the end decided it wasn't the right fit for them.
That was disappointing, but still useful. Useful as a reminder that when I assign my M.A. students to write a 750-word book review, no matter how many they've read, most are not quite going to get it on the first go-round. Useful because though I frequently tell others that writing isn't magic, I'm prey to the same belief that, if I can't do something the first time, I probably don't have the ability to do it at all. And useful because now I guess I have something new to work on.
To say that my advisor wasn't helpful in navigating that particular psychodrama would be an understatement; our relationship came close to collapsing over that chapter. But after I'd produced a draft that was firing on a few of its cylinders, she gave me some of the most useful writing advice I've ever received: It's time to move on, she said. Start your second chapter. You can return to this one later.
I didn't like that advice. I'd been living inside that chapter for a long time, and I couldn't bear the idea of leaving it messy and half-formed, especially when it finally seemed to be getting somewhere. But I did as she said. And for whatever reason, my second chapter just came: it wound up being the longest and maybe the meatiest of my dissertation chapters, but the easiest of the four to write. My remaining chapters were still a frustrating, difficult slog, but neither was as hard as the first. The difference, I think, was that while I was still struggling with ideas, argument, and organization, once I'd written one good chapter, the form itself no longer felt like an obstacle. I'd made it my own.
The experience taught me that the point of writing a dissertation chapter is, on some level, to learn how to write a dissertation chapter. And you don't learn by tinkering endlessly with the same chapter--you learn by writing other chapters. The same is true for every literary form I can think of, from the tweet to the novel. (Most "first novels," after all, aren't the first novel the author wrote, but the first one she got published.) Reading a lot of works in a given genre is crucial, but you only learn how to inhabit a form by inhabiting it. Repeatedly.
But though I tell my students the kind of things I've just said here--that the point of writing a research paper is to learn how to write a research paper; that you can't master a form without first doing it badly--that doesn't mean I've fully learned my own lessons.
Recently, I was invited to write something on spec for a general-interest publication. It was a topic comfortably within my wheelhouse, for a publication I've subscribed to for years. I was excited by the opportunity and thought I could probably do a pretty good job. But I'm telling you: it was the hardest thing I've written in ages--maybe the hardest thing I've written since that first dissertation chapter. As with my dissertation, the problem was mostly one of form (or, more accurately, with negotiating the relationship between self and form). I didn't know who I was writing as, or to whom, or why. The editors were kind enough to read two significantly different versions of my essay over a couple of months, but in the end decided it wasn't the right fit for them.
That was disappointing, but still useful. Useful as a reminder that when I assign my M.A. students to write a 750-word book review, no matter how many they've read, most are not quite going to get it on the first go-round. Useful because though I frequently tell others that writing isn't magic, I'm prey to the same belief that, if I can't do something the first time, I probably don't have the ability to do it at all. And useful because now I guess I have something new to work on.
Saturday, June 07, 2014
Worse than the two-body problem is the two-home problem
We're in the midst of moving selves, cats, and a goodly number of our possessions from Punchline Rustbelt City to Other Rustbelt City. It's not a bad move, as moves go: we're keeping this apartment for next year, so it's just a matter of schlepping a couple of carloads and a vanload back to our house (and then unpacking everything we stored in the attic while the renters were there). And I'm dying to be back home for the summer.
But three of the last four summers have involved some kind of move, most of them logistically complicated ones: 2011 involved moving among four different residences, and last year it was three. In addition to the endless U-Haul and packing-tape drama, each move has involved new decisions about which items to consolidate in one location, to buy in duplicate, or to purge.
And in approximately twelve months we'll be moving again, for the most complicated, expensive, and stressful move of all. (Another three-corner move, but this time with a house to sell and another to buy--and an apartment, a storage unit, and infinite unknowns about timing and money.)
It's too exhausting even to contemplate. Time to pour some wine and watch the cats play with the bubble wrap.
But three of the last four summers have involved some kind of move, most of them logistically complicated ones: 2011 involved moving among four different residences, and last year it was three. In addition to the endless U-Haul and packing-tape drama, each move has involved new decisions about which items to consolidate in one location, to buy in duplicate, or to purge.
And in approximately twelve months we'll be moving again, for the most complicated, expensive, and stressful move of all. (Another three-corner move, but this time with a house to sell and another to buy--and an apartment, a storage unit, and infinite unknowns about timing and money.)
It's too exhausting even to contemplate. Time to pour some wine and watch the cats play with the bubble wrap.
Saturday, May 31, 2014
But I DID go to school in New England!
L. V. Anderson has an article in Slate whose title pretty much sums up its content: "People Still Say They 'Went to College in Boston,' Meaning Harvard? Please Stop Doing This."
It's an article of interest to maybe 5% of the entire internet, but since I'm part of that 5%, I'll take the bait. Do I do this now? Of course not. But when I was 18 to 24 I did it plenty of times. If I was back home working a temp job for the summer or making small talk with a hairdresser or dental hygienist, then sure. I'd say I go to school "back east" or "in New England."
Anderson gives passing attention to the explanation that I'd have given for why I did this--that announcing your fancy-pants affiliation derails conversation, leads to awkwardness, and so forth--but she concludes that "it is not your job to anticipate and preemptively manage another person's emotional response to your biography. If you tell people you went to Harvard and they respond by freaking out, that reflects poorly on them." On the other hand, if you "withhold" the name of your college from someone else,
Now, if we're talking about recent college grads talking to other recent college grads--friends of friends at a party, new co-workers, whatever--and hiding the name of their alma mater, then I'd agree: it's douchey and patronizing to think that you're somehow protecting other people's self-esteem by not mentioning the name of a school you presume they didn't get into. But Anderson misunderstands the context in which most of this coyness occurs, or the kind of awkwardness that this evasiveness is meant to forestall. Most undergrads at fancy schools (like most PhDs) have had the experience of saying something neutral that mentions their educational background--only to receive some weird, sarcastic, and/or hostile response along the lines of, "Oooooh. Can I touch you?" or mock bows or genuflections. If that happens a few times (that is, if you get responses that assume you're bragging or are stuck-up just for answering a question truthfully) then you learn to avoid bringing it up if it's not strictly necessary.
Moreover, most people who are cagey about where they went to college know perfectly well that the rest of the world doesn't actually care where they went to school, even when it's asked as a direct question. Most people who ask the question are just making small talk and looking for a casual opportunity for connection. If all your aunt's friend from church really wants to know is whether you're an Oregon or Oregon State fan--or if you might have gone to the same school as her kid or her sister or her nephew--then saying you went to some far-away school with a fancy name changes the conversation she thought she were having.
Most of the time, when I said "back east," my interlocutors didn't ask "where?" They said, "oh wow, that's far." Or, "do you have family there, too?" Or "how do you like it? I hear it snows a lot." They were just making chit-chat, and I'd given them an answer that kept the conversation on that level. (And if they actually asked, "but what school?" I'd tell them.)
Reading Anderson's essay, though, made me realize that it's been a long time since I gave an evasive answer to a question about my educational background. Some of that is just pragmatic: I'm old enough that "where did you go to college?" is no longer the first (or second, or third) thing people ask. And I live in the East, and most of the people I meet are interested in higher education.
But most importantly: I'M A COLLEGE PROFESSOR. I HAVE A PH.D. If people are going to act weird about something in my educational history, it's my having a Ph.D. in English ("Oh, boy. So I guess I have to watch my grammar around you!")
Maybe the other thing that's changed is where I live and where I work. When someone in Cha-Cha City asks me what I do, and then asks me where I went to school, I'm pleased by both parts of the equation. I like my city and I like my job, and it's good for my neighbors to know that RU has highly-trained and well-credentialed faculty who are thrilled to be there. It reflects well on the community and the state university system. (And if they're the ones inclined to be snobbish--about where I teach, or about public colleges in general--then I'm happy enough to unsettle their presumptions.)
It's an article of interest to maybe 5% of the entire internet, but since I'm part of that 5%, I'll take the bait. Do I do this now? Of course not. But when I was 18 to 24 I did it plenty of times. If I was back home working a temp job for the summer or making small talk with a hairdresser or dental hygienist, then sure. I'd say I go to school "back east" or "in New England."
Anderson gives passing attention to the explanation that I'd have given for why I did this--that announcing your fancy-pants affiliation derails conversation, leads to awkwardness, and so forth--but she concludes that "it is not your job to anticipate and preemptively manage another person's emotional response to your biography. If you tell people you went to Harvard and they respond by freaking out, that reflects poorly on them." On the other hand, if you "withhold" the name of your college from someone else,
that reflects poorly on you--it implies that, on some level, you buy into the overblown mythos of Harvard and the presumption of Ivy League superiority. To fear the effects of the word "Harvard" is to take Harvard way too seriously. Once you understand that Harvard is just a college, and that getting into Harvard probably had more to do with your socioeconomic background and the luck of the draw. . . the cagey "college in Boston" response starts to sound very, very silly.
Now, if we're talking about recent college grads talking to other recent college grads--friends of friends at a party, new co-workers, whatever--and hiding the name of their alma mater, then I'd agree: it's douchey and patronizing to think that you're somehow protecting other people's self-esteem by not mentioning the name of a school you presume they didn't get into. But Anderson misunderstands the context in which most of this coyness occurs, or the kind of awkwardness that this evasiveness is meant to forestall. Most undergrads at fancy schools (like most PhDs) have had the experience of saying something neutral that mentions their educational background--only to receive some weird, sarcastic, and/or hostile response along the lines of, "Oooooh. Can I touch you?" or mock bows or genuflections. If that happens a few times (that is, if you get responses that assume you're bragging or are stuck-up just for answering a question truthfully) then you learn to avoid bringing it up if it's not strictly necessary.
Moreover, most people who are cagey about where they went to college know perfectly well that the rest of the world doesn't actually care where they went to school, even when it's asked as a direct question. Most people who ask the question are just making small talk and looking for a casual opportunity for connection. If all your aunt's friend from church really wants to know is whether you're an Oregon or Oregon State fan--or if you might have gone to the same school as her kid or her sister or her nephew--then saying you went to some far-away school with a fancy name changes the conversation she thought she were having.
Most of the time, when I said "back east," my interlocutors didn't ask "where?" They said, "oh wow, that's far." Or, "do you have family there, too?" Or "how do you like it? I hear it snows a lot." They were just making chit-chat, and I'd given them an answer that kept the conversation on that level. (And if they actually asked, "but what school?" I'd tell them.)
Reading Anderson's essay, though, made me realize that it's been a long time since I gave an evasive answer to a question about my educational background. Some of that is just pragmatic: I'm old enough that "where did you go to college?" is no longer the first (or second, or third) thing people ask. And I live in the East, and most of the people I meet are interested in higher education.
But most importantly: I'M A COLLEGE PROFESSOR. I HAVE A PH.D. If people are going to act weird about something in my educational history, it's my having a Ph.D. in English ("Oh, boy. So I guess I have to watch my grammar around you!")
Maybe the other thing that's changed is where I live and where I work. When someone in Cha-Cha City asks me what I do, and then asks me where I went to school, I'm pleased by both parts of the equation. I like my city and I like my job, and it's good for my neighbors to know that RU has highly-trained and well-credentialed faculty who are thrilled to be there. It reflects well on the community and the state university system. (And if they're the ones inclined to be snobbish--about where I teach, or about public colleges in general--then I'm happy enough to unsettle their presumptions.)
Thursday, May 29, 2014
Not magic
By now you've probably all read the NYT Magazine piece on the University of Texas's efforts to increase retention among their poorer and first-generation students--but if you haven't, go read it now. Although some of UT's strategies involve additional academic support (in the form of smaller section sizes, peer mentors, and access to tutoring), the most mind-blowing part of the article is the evidence that even incredibly small interventions can have statistically significant results.
Several slightly different studies, conducted at different colleges and universities, show that just 30 minutes, at the beginning of a student's college career, can be enough to keep at-risk students enrolled. In one series of studies, students were assigned to read letters from current upperclassmen that described their own feelings of not belonging in their freshman year--and then how they settled in and eventually realized that everyone feels that way. In another series of studies, students were assigned a short article that laid out the scientific evidence against a static theory of intelligence (i.e., arguing that practice is more important than initial aptitude). In both cases, the students were asked to read the essay and then summarize it in their own words, as if conveying it to another incoming student. Even without any follow-up or any further interventions, their drop-out rates plummeted--sometimes by more than 50%.
(Interestingly, there was no effect on students from more prosperous backgrounds. The theory is that although all students can suffer from feelings of not belonging--or can have their confidence shaken by an early academic failure--wealthier students are more likely to know or to hear from family members that this is normal and will pass. Students without that kind of support are in greater danger of assuming they really don't belong in college.)
What I love about this is that we're not talking about heroic interventions and we're not imagining teachers as magical saviors. These are students who are perfectly capable of succeeding but who benefit from a little more affirmation that they can succeed; they still have to bust ass and live through some self-doubt and some rough patches. I also like the fact that it validates what I've come to do in my own classes, which is to emphasize that everything I teach involves learned (and learnable) skills. I frequently say things like, "understanding poetry isn't magic" and "no one is born knowing how to write a literary-critical essay."
But here's the thing: I didn't develop this approach as a specific response to the RU student population; I started saying similar things when I was teaching students at my Ivy alma mater. Whether it's first-generation college students or tightly-wound overachievers, most students benefit from being told, explicitly, that a grade on an assignment is not a verdict on their overall performance, their potential, or their worth as a person--but just a measure of how close they are to mastering a single discrete task.
I do a little more of this now than I used to, but frankly, I wish someone had told me these things in college. I wasn't taught poetry well. I wasn't told what component skills went into writing an essay. And after a year or so I assumed I'd just found my level in the B+/A- range: that's just who I was and how smart I was, and it probably wasn't going to change.
The thing is, as a teacher, you never know who most needs a word of encouragement or affirmation. You don't know each student's background, you don't know their mental state. And if every little helps. . . well, it's easy enough to offer.
Several slightly different studies, conducted at different colleges and universities, show that just 30 minutes, at the beginning of a student's college career, can be enough to keep at-risk students enrolled. In one series of studies, students were assigned to read letters from current upperclassmen that described their own feelings of not belonging in their freshman year--and then how they settled in and eventually realized that everyone feels that way. In another series of studies, students were assigned a short article that laid out the scientific evidence against a static theory of intelligence (i.e., arguing that practice is more important than initial aptitude). In both cases, the students were asked to read the essay and then summarize it in their own words, as if conveying it to another incoming student. Even without any follow-up or any further interventions, their drop-out rates plummeted--sometimes by more than 50%.
(Interestingly, there was no effect on students from more prosperous backgrounds. The theory is that although all students can suffer from feelings of not belonging--or can have their confidence shaken by an early academic failure--wealthier students are more likely to know or to hear from family members that this is normal and will pass. Students without that kind of support are in greater danger of assuming they really don't belong in college.)
What I love about this is that we're not talking about heroic interventions and we're not imagining teachers as magical saviors. These are students who are perfectly capable of succeeding but who benefit from a little more affirmation that they can succeed; they still have to bust ass and live through some self-doubt and some rough patches. I also like the fact that it validates what I've come to do in my own classes, which is to emphasize that everything I teach involves learned (and learnable) skills. I frequently say things like, "understanding poetry isn't magic" and "no one is born knowing how to write a literary-critical essay."
But here's the thing: I didn't develop this approach as a specific response to the RU student population; I started saying similar things when I was teaching students at my Ivy alma mater. Whether it's first-generation college students or tightly-wound overachievers, most students benefit from being told, explicitly, that a grade on an assignment is not a verdict on their overall performance, their potential, or their worth as a person--but just a measure of how close they are to mastering a single discrete task.
I do a little more of this now than I used to, but frankly, I wish someone had told me these things in college. I wasn't taught poetry well. I wasn't told what component skills went into writing an essay. And after a year or so I assumed I'd just found my level in the B+/A- range: that's just who I was and how smart I was, and it probably wasn't going to change.
The thing is, as a teacher, you never know who most needs a word of encouragement or affirmation. You don't know each student's background, you don't know their mental state. And if every little helps. . . well, it's easy enough to offer.
Saturday, May 24, 2014
Ars longa, legere brevis*
With a couple of weeks of breathing room between deadlines, I've decided to turn my energies to the stack of academic books I purchased at conferences over the past year. They're all in my subfield, but none is urgently related to anything I'm working on, so this has the benefit of feeling both virtuous (hey, I'm working! This is totally work!) and a bit decadent (I'm reading for fun! I don't have to read any of this!). So far I've finished two of your basic 200-page monographs and started a third, and I'm partway through a 600-page brick of a book, which I decided to tackle a chapter a day. It's been lovely. Even more lovely is that many of these books are by friends or friendly acquaintances.
But the fact that I know some of these authors and that I just published my own book has made me reflect uncomfortably on how I read. As I've mentioned before, a lot of my scholarly reading these days gets done in a search-and-destroy, slash-and-burn kind of way: I power through a book in a day or two, extracting the gist and the ideas most useful for my own work, skimming the chapters on less-relevant topics, and then moving on to the next one. It's like bolting a meal rather than savoring it: it gets the job done, energy- and nutrition-wise, but it doesn't do the food or the cook justice.
That's not quite how I'm reading these books--there's no point in rushing through books I don't urgently need to read in the first place--but it would be incorrect to say that I'm reading them as slowly or as carefully as they deserve. I'm reading them moderately briskly, with time to linger over cool things here and there, but with the expectation that I'll be coming back to the best ones in the future and don't need to digest everything now.
That's true enough; a good book is a long-term resource, which is why I buy so many. But the fact that I spent ten years writing my own 200-page monograph nags at me when I buzz through someone else's over just a day or two. If if I needed anything to make me feel even more keenly the triviality, the disposabilty of my own work, it's how speedily I read someone else's.
------
* I know! The bad Latin, it burns.
But the fact that I know some of these authors and that I just published my own book has made me reflect uncomfortably on how I read. As I've mentioned before, a lot of my scholarly reading these days gets done in a search-and-destroy, slash-and-burn kind of way: I power through a book in a day or two, extracting the gist and the ideas most useful for my own work, skimming the chapters on less-relevant topics, and then moving on to the next one. It's like bolting a meal rather than savoring it: it gets the job done, energy- and nutrition-wise, but it doesn't do the food or the cook justice.
That's not quite how I'm reading these books--there's no point in rushing through books I don't urgently need to read in the first place--but it would be incorrect to say that I'm reading them as slowly or as carefully as they deserve. I'm reading them moderately briskly, with time to linger over cool things here and there, but with the expectation that I'll be coming back to the best ones in the future and don't need to digest everything now.
That's true enough; a good book is a long-term resource, which is why I buy so many. But the fact that I spent ten years writing my own 200-page monograph nags at me when I buzz through someone else's over just a day or two. If if I needed anything to make me feel even more keenly the triviality, the disposabilty of my own work, it's how speedily I read someone else's.
------
* I know! The bad Latin, it burns.
Monday, May 19, 2014
Pardoner syndrome
Academics and other high-achievers are familiar with "imposter syndrome": the conviction that one doesn't really deserve to be where one is (and sooner or later will be found out). A lot has been written about this phenomenon and its problems--and occasionally its unexpected upsides. Imposter syndrome may keep someone from fully recognizing her own strengths, acting authoritatively, or taking risks. On the other hand, it can sometimes act as a spur to excellence (inspiring her to become the person others believe she already is) or serve as a healthy check on arrogance.
I'm interested, though, in the more vicious sibling of imposter syndrome, which I call "pardoner syndrome." A long time ago, I had a professor whose reading of Chaucer's Pardoner stuck with me. The Pardoner, of course, is the guy who sells pardons--years off your time in purgatory--and other weird miracles associated with the religious relics he carries around with him. In the course of his prologue and tale, Chaucer's Pardoner tells all the other pilgrims what a stupendous charlatan he is and how he goes from town to town, fooling the rubes with his fake relics (pigs' bones instead of saints' bones; a magic mitten) and sermons that prick their guilty consciences until they fill his purse with gold.
It's a mesmerizing performance. Then, at the end of it all, the Pardoner invites his fellow pilgrims to come up and buy his pardons and kiss his relics. The outraged Host tells the Pardoner he's gonna make him kiss his relics (if you know what I mean!), and is only barely prevented from beating the Pardoner up.
A question readers often ask is, why the fuck does the Pardoner do this? Why, after letting his audience in on all his tricks, does he then treat them like just another bunch of dupes?
My Chaucer professor argued that the Pardoner is in the theological condition of despair--he knows the way to salvation but believes he's too wicked for God to forgive--and that although he's contemptuous of his listeners, his whole performance is one of self-loathing. On some level, he wants his audience to see through him. If he can fool them, great: he'll feel briefly superior and briefly better about himself (and he'll keep raking in the cash). But what he's actually looking for is someone to thrash his ass.
I'm not a Chaucerian so I don't know if this is an eccentric reading or a common one, but it strikes me as having real psychological truth behind it. If it's not what Chaucer intended with his character, it's still a recognizable phenomenon in the world. If an imposter complex involves, let's say, believing that you were an admissions mistake at your fancy college and fearing being found out, a pardoner complex involves repressing the full knowledge of that fear and transforming it into arrogance. So maybe you half-ass all your schoolwork and act like a dick to your peers and professors, as if daring them to call your bluff and fail you (as you secretly believe you deserve).
The pardoner is someone who half buys his own bullshit--and who desperately needs for others to buy it--but who's just barely holding things together. Rather than doing something to help compensate for his anxieties and insecurities, he decompensates by underpreparing, being a jerk, picking fights, as if to force his own worst outcome. We talk about criminals who "want" to get caught, for example, or certain emotionally abusive partners whose own self-loathing means they're both desperate for love and contemptuous of anyone who thinks they deserve it.
I'm not sure I've ever seen pardoner syndrome in action in the workplace, though I'm sure it exists. Actual frauds and con men are probably more often sociopaths than victims of pardoner syndrome (and from the outside it can be hard to tell the difference between pardoner syndrome and blazingly clueless overconfidence), but there must be people who, for example, go up for a promotion with an embarrassing lack of credentials, or give a major presentation before a client while woefully underprepared, who fall into the category of half-seeking their own comeuppance.
I'm interested, though, in the more vicious sibling of imposter syndrome, which I call "pardoner syndrome." A long time ago, I had a professor whose reading of Chaucer's Pardoner stuck with me. The Pardoner, of course, is the guy who sells pardons--years off your time in purgatory--and other weird miracles associated with the religious relics he carries around with him. In the course of his prologue and tale, Chaucer's Pardoner tells all the other pilgrims what a stupendous charlatan he is and how he goes from town to town, fooling the rubes with his fake relics (pigs' bones instead of saints' bones; a magic mitten) and sermons that prick their guilty consciences until they fill his purse with gold.
It's a mesmerizing performance. Then, at the end of it all, the Pardoner invites his fellow pilgrims to come up and buy his pardons and kiss his relics. The outraged Host tells the Pardoner he's gonna make him kiss his relics (if you know what I mean!), and is only barely prevented from beating the Pardoner up.
A question readers often ask is, why the fuck does the Pardoner do this? Why, after letting his audience in on all his tricks, does he then treat them like just another bunch of dupes?
My Chaucer professor argued that the Pardoner is in the theological condition of despair--he knows the way to salvation but believes he's too wicked for God to forgive--and that although he's contemptuous of his listeners, his whole performance is one of self-loathing. On some level, he wants his audience to see through him. If he can fool them, great: he'll feel briefly superior and briefly better about himself (and he'll keep raking in the cash). But what he's actually looking for is someone to thrash his ass.
I'm not a Chaucerian so I don't know if this is an eccentric reading or a common one, but it strikes me as having real psychological truth behind it. If it's not what Chaucer intended with his character, it's still a recognizable phenomenon in the world. If an imposter complex involves, let's say, believing that you were an admissions mistake at your fancy college and fearing being found out, a pardoner complex involves repressing the full knowledge of that fear and transforming it into arrogance. So maybe you half-ass all your schoolwork and act like a dick to your peers and professors, as if daring them to call your bluff and fail you (as you secretly believe you deserve).
The pardoner is someone who half buys his own bullshit--and who desperately needs for others to buy it--but who's just barely holding things together. Rather than doing something to help compensate for his anxieties and insecurities, he decompensates by underpreparing, being a jerk, picking fights, as if to force his own worst outcome. We talk about criminals who "want" to get caught, for example, or certain emotionally abusive partners whose own self-loathing means they're both desperate for love and contemptuous of anyone who thinks they deserve it.
I'm not sure I've ever seen pardoner syndrome in action in the workplace, though I'm sure it exists. Actual frauds and con men are probably more often sociopaths than victims of pardoner syndrome (and from the outside it can be hard to tell the difference between pardoner syndrome and blazingly clueless overconfidence), but there must be people who, for example, go up for a promotion with an embarrassing lack of credentials, or give a major presentation before a client while woefully underprepared, who fall into the category of half-seeking their own comeuppance.
Monday, May 12, 2014
Scrubbed
Many years ago I had a terrific student. It was my first semester of college teaching and I got attached. We remained friendly after the class ended, but we didn't keep in touch after she graduated.
One idle evening, several years later, I ran a web search on her. I found her instantly: a year or two earlier she'd made all the papers in the city in which she was then living--and the campus newspaper at the institution she was then attending--for a truly bizarre incident. I won't detail it except to say that if it even crossed your mind that someone might do this thing, it would be as a fraternity prank. A really stupid, totally illegal fraternity prank.
Anyway, the story was that she'd been heading home from a university reception when her one or two drinks interacted badly with some painkillers she was on for a sports injury, and she spontaneously did this wacko thing (of which she has no memory).
By the time I read the account, there had been a hearing at which she'd been sentenced to community service; luckily, no one had gotten hurt and there had been no property damage, and since she had a totally clean record and dozens of people had testified that her behavior was inconsistent with anything she'd ever done in her entire life, the judge was lenient. Still, it was All. Over. The. Internet.
Ouch! I thought, reading it, and quickly closed my browser. I was glad she'd gotten off lightly, but very sorry this was my first encounter with her later life. I still hoped she'd go on to great things, but for whatever reason it never occurred to me to Google her again.
Until today.
Thinking she was probably in the field for which she'd been working on a graduate degree, I plugged in her first and last name and the name of the school where the incident had occurred. I figured I'd turn up a workplace bio.
And. . . sure enough! A bio! The first link! I clicked on it and found a very thorough two-paragraph biography. I was happy that it suggested she was doing well.
But something about the bio seemed wrong--it didn't read like the kind of thing an employer would put up. I noticed the site was run by WordPress and figured it must be a personal blog, so I clicked "home." But that was it: there was only an "about" page. No blog. Then I looked closer at the URL: it was her first and last name plus the name of her graduate school (e.g., lucysmithvanderbilt.wordpress.com). Weird! Why would she identify herself that way? Then I went back to the full roster of Google hits and saw that there was a lucysmithvanderbilt.blogspot.com, a lucysmithvanderbilt.typepad.com, and on and on and on for a couple of pages of hits.
The bios vary slightly in their wording, so the casual observer might not immediately realize that they're serving the same purpose--that purpose being to hide, or at least help neutralize, the effect of all those older links about her, uh, youthful escapade.
I don't blame her for this; everyone deserves to be able to live down a bad decision or two. But it's still an eerie thing to encounter when looking for a real trace of a real person--dummy site after dummy site after dummy site.
One idle evening, several years later, I ran a web search on her. I found her instantly: a year or two earlier she'd made all the papers in the city in which she was then living--and the campus newspaper at the institution she was then attending--for a truly bizarre incident. I won't detail it except to say that if it even crossed your mind that someone might do this thing, it would be as a fraternity prank. A really stupid, totally illegal fraternity prank.
Anyway, the story was that she'd been heading home from a university reception when her one or two drinks interacted badly with some painkillers she was on for a sports injury, and she spontaneously did this wacko thing (of which she has no memory).
By the time I read the account, there had been a hearing at which she'd been sentenced to community service; luckily, no one had gotten hurt and there had been no property damage, and since she had a totally clean record and dozens of people had testified that her behavior was inconsistent with anything she'd ever done in her entire life, the judge was lenient. Still, it was All. Over. The. Internet.
Ouch! I thought, reading it, and quickly closed my browser. I was glad she'd gotten off lightly, but very sorry this was my first encounter with her later life. I still hoped she'd go on to great things, but for whatever reason it never occurred to me to Google her again.
Until today.
Thinking she was probably in the field for which she'd been working on a graduate degree, I plugged in her first and last name and the name of the school where the incident had occurred. I figured I'd turn up a workplace bio.
And. . . sure enough! A bio! The first link! I clicked on it and found a very thorough two-paragraph biography. I was happy that it suggested she was doing well.
But something about the bio seemed wrong--it didn't read like the kind of thing an employer would put up. I noticed the site was run by WordPress and figured it must be a personal blog, so I clicked "home." But that was it: there was only an "about" page. No blog. Then I looked closer at the URL: it was her first and last name plus the name of her graduate school (e.g., lucysmithvanderbilt.wordpress.com). Weird! Why would she identify herself that way? Then I went back to the full roster of Google hits and saw that there was a lucysmithvanderbilt.blogspot.com, a lucysmithvanderbilt.typepad.com, and on and on and on for a couple of pages of hits.
The bios vary slightly in their wording, so the casual observer might not immediately realize that they're serving the same purpose--that purpose being to hide, or at least help neutralize, the effect of all those older links about her, uh, youthful escapade.
I don't blame her for this; everyone deserves to be able to live down a bad decision or two. But it's still an eerie thing to encounter when looking for a real trace of a real person--dummy site after dummy site after dummy site.
Wednesday, May 07, 2014
Going My Way?
The parish that Cosimo and I have been attending in Punchline Rustbelt City feels like a bizarro throwback to the kind of American Catholicism I know only from books and movies. It's not the church itself, though it's a handsome structure with an interior reminiscent of a Gilded Age train station. (Google tells me this is because it's actually built from the pieces of a bunch of nineteenth-century banks and hotels.) Neither is it the congregation, though a big, multigenerational crowd packs the pews every Sunday.
No, it's the fact that there's a whole clubhouse of priests in the rectory. In addition to the white-haired sixty-something pastor (and the two permanent deacons), we have a goofy hipster priest in his early thirties and a jocky twentysomething seminarian. And they have a great rapport with each other and with the congregation. Remember Going My Way? It's like that, but with three Bing Crosbys: warm, personable guys who talk sports and dole out high-fives and fist-bumps to the kids.
(The original Father What-a-Waste)
Last week we were told that the two younger men had concluded their rotations and would be moving to new parishes. . . but that in a couple of months we'd be getting another newly-ordained priest, and another seminarian, and a third young priest from abroad. Oh, and an 18-year-old member of the congregation had just entered the seminary, so we should all pray for him.
Dudes, it's like it's 1950 up in here.
Except, actually, it's not, and thank goodness: the parish, like the neighborhood around it, is thoroughly integrated, including a number of interracial families. There are women and girls in the sanctuary. And though it's dressier than our home parish--it's easy to spot men in suits and the occasional be-hatted woman--people also show up in sweatshirts and sports jerseys. No one bats an eye either way.
If this is a glimpse of the future of the Church, I'm all for it. (Though for my next course, please, I'd love some female ordination.)
No, it's the fact that there's a whole clubhouse of priests in the rectory. In addition to the white-haired sixty-something pastor (and the two permanent deacons), we have a goofy hipster priest in his early thirties and a jocky twentysomething seminarian. And they have a great rapport with each other and with the congregation. Remember Going My Way? It's like that, but with three Bing Crosbys: warm, personable guys who talk sports and dole out high-fives and fist-bumps to the kids.
(The original Father What-a-Waste)
Last week we were told that the two younger men had concluded their rotations and would be moving to new parishes. . . but that in a couple of months we'd be getting another newly-ordained priest, and another seminarian, and a third young priest from abroad. Oh, and an 18-year-old member of the congregation had just entered the seminary, so we should all pray for him.
Dudes, it's like it's 1950 up in here.
Except, actually, it's not, and thank goodness: the parish, like the neighborhood around it, is thoroughly integrated, including a number of interracial families. There are women and girls in the sanctuary. And though it's dressier than our home parish--it's easy to spot men in suits and the occasional be-hatted woman--people also show up in sweatshirts and sports jerseys. No one bats an eye either way.
If this is a glimpse of the future of the Church, I'm all for it. (Though for my next course, please, I'd love some female ordination.)
Wednesday, April 30, 2014
The music says nothing to me about my life
Although my musical tastes are never cutting-edge, I'm even less adventurous when I'm working. I like to have music on in the background when I'm writing--but the key word is background: nothing that moves from loud to soft extremes; nothing too lyrically complicated; nothing that draws too much attention to itself. But it also has to be something that I genuinely enjoy. Because here's the thing: when I'm in the middle of a writing project, I can listen to the same three-to-five albums, by the same artist, for hours every day, for weeks straight. It's some combination of superstition, hypnotism, and OCD.
For at least the past five years, my standbys have been Bill Evans (better for fall and winter) and Stereolab (spring and summer). But this week something made me drag out my collection of Smiths CDs. The Smiths, you understand, were probably my favorite band from about the ages of 16 to 22. I rarely listen to them any more--but it turns out that although I used to have an intense emotional relationship to their music, it's now. . . backgroundish. I know every word and guitar riff so thoroughly that they give me pleasure without requiring much attention. (And as my college roommate--not a fan--pointed out long ago, there isn't really a lot of musical range there.)
And so, just like that, I've expanded my work-music repertory by 50%.
What do you listen to as you work--or do you?
For at least the past five years, my standbys have been Bill Evans (better for fall and winter) and Stereolab (spring and summer). But this week something made me drag out my collection of Smiths CDs. The Smiths, you understand, were probably my favorite band from about the ages of 16 to 22. I rarely listen to them any more--but it turns out that although I used to have an intense emotional relationship to their music, it's now. . . backgroundish. I know every word and guitar riff so thoroughly that they give me pleasure without requiring much attention. (And as my college roommate--not a fan--pointed out long ago, there isn't really a lot of musical range there.)
And so, just like that, I've expanded my work-music repertory by 50%.
What do you listen to as you work--or do you?
Tuesday, April 29, 2014
Enemies
Another week, another plagiarism scandal. This one is more complicated than most, but the part that interests me isn't the scandal itself--the plagiarism and the weird institutional response--but the story lurking behind those stories. Briefly: an external reviewer on a tenure case received, from an anonymous source, a long list of allegedly plagiarized passages from a book by the professor under review. He or she then conveyed this information to the in-house tenure review committee.
This is where the scandal begins, but if you want that part of the story, you can Google it. Because I went to grad school with one of the central figures, I'm not going to link, and for the purposes of this blog I'm agnostic about whether the plagiarism was inadvertent or deliberate and what punishment it may have merited. What I'm interested in is this anonymous correspondent, who managed to identify almost three dozen short passages lifted without attribution from numerous different sources. Moreover, since all the passages involve background material rather than substantive arguments, they would have been hard even for specialists to identify. The only people who would seem capable of having immediately recognized the material would be the authors themselves--but anyone who had discovered himself to have been plagiarized would have had no reason to remain anonymous: he could have contacted the author or her publisher. Indeed, that's what the average concerned reader would have done.
Instead, we have someone who wanted to remain anonymous; who had reason to think the book contained plagiarized material; and who was willing to spend whole days or weeks ferreting it out. Tracking down plagiarized material is an outrageous pain in the ass, even when it's a five-page undergraduate paper on Macbeth that borrows exclusively from internet sources. Tracking down plagiarism from printed material, across the breadth of a 200-page book? That's a whole 'nother ball of wax.
Whoever was willing to put in that kind of time--and to do the necessary sleuthing to identify at least one of the author's external reviewers (usually confidential information)--is a personal enemy. Whether it's a deserved or undeserved enemy, I can't say, but it's someone motivated by something more than the usual professional jealousies or resentments. It's someone fueled by rage.
Assuming the tipster is a professional enemy (rather than, say, an enraged ex-lover), it's a cautionary tale without a clear moral: obviously, one should not plagiarize, and obviously one should not make a habit of pissing people off in such a way that they become enemies. But it isn't the case that only assholes acquire enemies. Someone's capacity to attract enemies is sometimes only a function of being successful or high-profile or privileged in some way that garners envy and resentment. An enemy's fury may have very little to do with one's own behavior.
That said, there are ways to decrease the likelihood of making enemies. First, there's the obvious: don't be a jerk. Don't be nasty, don't use other people for your advancement, and avoid behavior that's unprofessional or that leaves other people cleaning up your messes. (And if that happens despite your good intentions, apologize!) But being friendly and gracious and interested in others--especially if you occupy a high perch in the profession--is also a generally smart move. And try to avoid feelings of rivalry or jealousy yourself, because sometimes your own competitiveness interpellates the other person as a rival.
Personally, I tend to assume that I'm not important enough for anyone to truly dislike--I mean, seriously! what do I have that's worth envying or resenting?--but I know that that's not true (there's at least one person foolish enough to say nasty things about me to our mutual friends), and that thinking that way is a species of the problem I discussed in this post, of only being oriented upward toward one's seniors and "betters," rather than thinking about how one treats or appears to those with less standing.
One can't eliminate the possibility of making enemies though no fault of one's own, and in rare instances enmity can actually help the profession: I have a friend (in a different discipline and at a different institution) who was so enraged by a colleague's bad behavior with students and faculty alike that she started poking around in his vita. In relatively short order she learned not only that he had never completed the PhD he claimed, but that he'd never even been enrolled in a PhD program. His asshattery earned him an enemy who successfully purged a fraud from the profession.
I try to squelch my own feelings of envy and rivalry, and I certainly don't hate anyone enough to do what this anonymous tipster did in the way he or she did it. Still, I can at least imagine a scenario in which I might act similarly. For me the offenses would have to be really outrageous, and they'd have to combine the personal with the professional. Let's say a junior professor whom I considered a major phony had also sexually harassed a friend of mine, and she eventually had a nervous breakdown and dropped out of the academy. If he was up for tenure and I knew enough about his work to know I could probably find proof of fraudulence? Yeah, I might do it. But that's a pretty high threshold: his merely being a fraud or merely being a shitty human being wouldn't be enough on its own.
I get outraged easily, but I'm not good at holding on to anger. If someone else has behaved badly--well, usually I'm content to wait for the whirlygig of time to do his thing.
------
Because this post is not about the specifics of the plagiarism case itself, please do not use the comments to weigh in on the plagiarist's behavior or the response of her university. Any such comments will get deleted.
This is where the scandal begins, but if you want that part of the story, you can Google it. Because I went to grad school with one of the central figures, I'm not going to link, and for the purposes of this blog I'm agnostic about whether the plagiarism was inadvertent or deliberate and what punishment it may have merited. What I'm interested in is this anonymous correspondent, who managed to identify almost three dozen short passages lifted without attribution from numerous different sources. Moreover, since all the passages involve background material rather than substantive arguments, they would have been hard even for specialists to identify. The only people who would seem capable of having immediately recognized the material would be the authors themselves--but anyone who had discovered himself to have been plagiarized would have had no reason to remain anonymous: he could have contacted the author or her publisher. Indeed, that's what the average concerned reader would have done.
Instead, we have someone who wanted to remain anonymous; who had reason to think the book contained plagiarized material; and who was willing to spend whole days or weeks ferreting it out. Tracking down plagiarized material is an outrageous pain in the ass, even when it's a five-page undergraduate paper on Macbeth that borrows exclusively from internet sources. Tracking down plagiarism from printed material, across the breadth of a 200-page book? That's a whole 'nother ball of wax.
Whoever was willing to put in that kind of time--and to do the necessary sleuthing to identify at least one of the author's external reviewers (usually confidential information)--is a personal enemy. Whether it's a deserved or undeserved enemy, I can't say, but it's someone motivated by something more than the usual professional jealousies or resentments. It's someone fueled by rage.
Assuming the tipster is a professional enemy (rather than, say, an enraged ex-lover), it's a cautionary tale without a clear moral: obviously, one should not plagiarize, and obviously one should not make a habit of pissing people off in such a way that they become enemies. But it isn't the case that only assholes acquire enemies. Someone's capacity to attract enemies is sometimes only a function of being successful or high-profile or privileged in some way that garners envy and resentment. An enemy's fury may have very little to do with one's own behavior.
That said, there are ways to decrease the likelihood of making enemies. First, there's the obvious: don't be a jerk. Don't be nasty, don't use other people for your advancement, and avoid behavior that's unprofessional or that leaves other people cleaning up your messes. (And if that happens despite your good intentions, apologize!) But being friendly and gracious and interested in others--especially if you occupy a high perch in the profession--is also a generally smart move. And try to avoid feelings of rivalry or jealousy yourself, because sometimes your own competitiveness interpellates the other person as a rival.
Personally, I tend to assume that I'm not important enough for anyone to truly dislike--I mean, seriously! what do I have that's worth envying or resenting?--but I know that that's not true (there's at least one person foolish enough to say nasty things about me to our mutual friends), and that thinking that way is a species of the problem I discussed in this post, of only being oriented upward toward one's seniors and "betters," rather than thinking about how one treats or appears to those with less standing.
One can't eliminate the possibility of making enemies though no fault of one's own, and in rare instances enmity can actually help the profession: I have a friend (in a different discipline and at a different institution) who was so enraged by a colleague's bad behavior with students and faculty alike that she started poking around in his vita. In relatively short order she learned not only that he had never completed the PhD he claimed, but that he'd never even been enrolled in a PhD program. His asshattery earned him an enemy who successfully purged a fraud from the profession.
I try to squelch my own feelings of envy and rivalry, and I certainly don't hate anyone enough to do what this anonymous tipster did in the way he or she did it. Still, I can at least imagine a scenario in which I might act similarly. For me the offenses would have to be really outrageous, and they'd have to combine the personal with the professional. Let's say a junior professor whom I considered a major phony had also sexually harassed a friend of mine, and she eventually had a nervous breakdown and dropped out of the academy. If he was up for tenure and I knew enough about his work to know I could probably find proof of fraudulence? Yeah, I might do it. But that's a pretty high threshold: his merely being a fraud or merely being a shitty human being wouldn't be enough on its own.
I get outraged easily, but I'm not good at holding on to anger. If someone else has behaved badly--well, usually I'm content to wait for the whirlygig of time to do his thing.
------
Because this post is not about the specifics of the plagiarism case itself, please do not use the comments to weigh in on the plagiarist's behavior or the response of her university. Any such comments will get deleted.
Friday, April 25, 2014
Best news I've had all week
Today I got an email from Sallie Mae telling me that one of my student loan payments has been reduced by $3.61 a month--bringing my monthly total to just $453.13!
But the really good news is that I've only got twelve years of repayment left.
But the really good news is that I've only got twelve years of repayment left.
Wednesday, April 23, 2014
Undertheorized
Louis Menand has an essay on Paul de Man, occasioned by the new de Man biography, in the March 24th issue of The New Yorker. It's a juicy overview of de Man's career that manages to disentangle the unsavory life from the literary and theoretical movements in which de Man participated; it's also a useful corrective to the dismissive and eye-rolling ways "literary theory" gets caricatured by journalists and nonspecialists.
Here are the article's first two paragraphs:
I've blogged about this before, but my own training in literary theory was pretty close to nonexistent. I did not take a theory course in college or grad school, and though I was assigned a small amount of theory among the secondary readings in a few of my graduate seminars, we barely discussed them. Theorists must have come up in class discussion from time to time, but no one held forth about Butler this or Foucault that. I had the nagging sense that I should know theory better, but it was like never having studied statistics: faintly embarrassing and probably something I should correct, but not anything I needed on a daily basis.
(When asked, I described my own theoretical approach as "close-reading, I guess" or "historicist, but not really New Historicist." I knew those weren't good answers, but when you work on religious prose, no one expects a better one.)
A couple of years after getting my Ph.D., I got serious about teaching myself theory. I read a lot over the course of several years, from general introductions and readers to articles and maybe a dozen book-length works. I wasn't prepared for what I discovered. First, my mind was blown. Like, daily. And I couldn't figure out how anything this urgent and interesting had gotten a reputation for irrelevance and impenetrability.
But second, and almost as surprisingly, I realized that I. . . kinda knew this stuff already. I was using much of it in my work. I hadn't had a name for what I was doing and I couldn't talk about it in detail or trace its conceptual lineage, but my methods and assumptions about how texts work (and the relationship between texts and their authors or between texts and their historical periods) were indebted to a number of very specific figures and movements. Presumably, this is because my own teachers were so deeply steeped in theory that they just hadn't bothered to talk about it.
On the one hand, it was a great relief to realize that "theory" wasn't some mysterious or alien field of knowledge. But I was pissed that no one had made explicit to me that what we'd been doing in the classroom all those years wasn't just reading stuff and talking about it more or less as people had done since the beginning of time. As Menand says, any way of reading a text that isn't totally naive--indeed, the very criteria for deciding which texts are worth reading in the first place--involves a theory of literature. And all such approaches have a history, and are indebted to their time and place and the values of their age.
I'm still not a particularly "theoretical" scholar, if by that you mean someone who can talk at length about the influence of this dude or that on her work. I would be reluctant to teach an intro theory course. But I teach bits and pieces of theory in many of my classes--and you'd better believe that I let my students know that the ways we think about and value works of art aren't any more static or timeless than the ways we think about or value human beings or the ways we organize our societies.
Here are the article's first two paragraphs:
The idea that there is literature, and then there is something that professors do with literature called "theory," is a little strange. To think about literature is to think theoretically. If you believe that literature is different from other kinds of writing. . . if you have ideas about what's relevant and what isn't for understanding it. . . and you have standards for judging whether it's great or not so great ([e.g.] a pleasing style or a displeasing politics), then you have a theory of literature. You can't make much sense of it without one.
It's the job of people in literature departments to think about these questions, to debate them, and to disseminate their views. This is not arid academicism. . . . [It's] part of an inquiry into the role of art in human life, the effort to figure out why we make this stuff, what it means, and why we care so much about it. If this is not the most important thing in the world to understand, it is certainly not the least.
I've blogged about this before, but my own training in literary theory was pretty close to nonexistent. I did not take a theory course in college or grad school, and though I was assigned a small amount of theory among the secondary readings in a few of my graduate seminars, we barely discussed them. Theorists must have come up in class discussion from time to time, but no one held forth about Butler this or Foucault that. I had the nagging sense that I should know theory better, but it was like never having studied statistics: faintly embarrassing and probably something I should correct, but not anything I needed on a daily basis.
(When asked, I described my own theoretical approach as "close-reading, I guess" or "historicist, but not really New Historicist." I knew those weren't good answers, but when you work on religious prose, no one expects a better one.)
A couple of years after getting my Ph.D., I got serious about teaching myself theory. I read a lot over the course of several years, from general introductions and readers to articles and maybe a dozen book-length works. I wasn't prepared for what I discovered. First, my mind was blown. Like, daily. And I couldn't figure out how anything this urgent and interesting had gotten a reputation for irrelevance and impenetrability.
But second, and almost as surprisingly, I realized that I. . . kinda knew this stuff already. I was using much of it in my work. I hadn't had a name for what I was doing and I couldn't talk about it in detail or trace its conceptual lineage, but my methods and assumptions about how texts work (and the relationship between texts and their authors or between texts and their historical periods) were indebted to a number of very specific figures and movements. Presumably, this is because my own teachers were so deeply steeped in theory that they just hadn't bothered to talk about it.
On the one hand, it was a great relief to realize that "theory" wasn't some mysterious or alien field of knowledge. But I was pissed that no one had made explicit to me that what we'd been doing in the classroom all those years wasn't just reading stuff and talking about it more or less as people had done since the beginning of time. As Menand says, any way of reading a text that isn't totally naive--indeed, the very criteria for deciding which texts are worth reading in the first place--involves a theory of literature. And all such approaches have a history, and are indebted to their time and place and the values of their age.
I'm still not a particularly "theoretical" scholar, if by that you mean someone who can talk at length about the influence of this dude or that on her work. I would be reluctant to teach an intro theory course. But I teach bits and pieces of theory in many of my classes--and you'd better believe that I let my students know that the ways we think about and value works of art aren't any more static or timeless than the ways we think about or value human beings or the ways we organize our societies.
Tuesday, April 15, 2014
Younger than that now
I'm just back from #shakeass14--my fourth and final conference of the term, which is at least two too many--and as usual I'm filled with many feelings. Though I still don't quite feel that SAA is "my" conference (not being a drama scholar and all), it's the one where I feel most in touch with my corner of the profession, for good and for ill.
That's not so much about the work being presented, but about the size and the nature of the conference and to some degree its timing: it happens in April, after all the job market gossip is out. Even with its recent growth, the conference remains small enough to fit in one hotel and large enough that it seems everyone I know is there. Most importantly, it's a conference that remains welcoming to very junior people and those on the margins of the profession; its seminar format, where works-in-progress are precirculated and everyone gives feedback to everyone (grad students to very senior scholars and vice-versa) is a large part of this. SAA is kind of like Twitter: it's not that there's no hierarchy (or no jackassery), but it creates a space for conversations and friendships that set age, rank, and status aside.
For that reason, I was disappointed that the official conference made some missteps; not only did the programming skew toward older participants, but there were a number of unprofessional, self-indulgent, and/or ungenerous statements made by senior people speaking publicly at various podiums (I witnessed two and heard about two others). That still amounts to only a small proportion of the conference, but it's not a good tone to set. One person is an anomaly. Multiple people getting prime airtime feels like an endorsement.
But if the tone of the conference struck me as less welcoming to The Yoots than it might have been, I myself spent more time with grad students or recent PhDs than I have since I was one myself. This wasn't, like, a project on my part; there just happened to be a critical mass of interesting younger people around--some of whom I'd met at previous conferences or on social media while others were the friends, acquaintances, or grad students of my friends. And they were at the bar and I was at the bar and whether any of us now remembers our conversations clearly, it was still a good time.
Hanging out with fun people is its own reward, but for anyone concerned about the larger profession, talking to grad students and recent PhDs should also feel essential. Our juniors aren't just our future, but our present: the kind of work they're doing is a good index of what the discipline values (and this is true whether they're writing "safe" dissertations or balls-to-the-wall dissertations), and the forms of professionalization and pedagogical training they receive are also worth our knowing and understanding if we hope to hire them. The knowledge-transfer needs to work both ways.
I genuinely believe that most mid-career types want to know, or at least are open to knowing, their juniors. Some don't make much of an effort and others don't know how (whenever I feel slighted, I ask myself: is it possible this person is just deeply socially inept? usually the answer is yes), which is why conferences that foster conversations across rank are so important. But of course, there are scholars, at all career stages, who think the only people worth meeting are those senior to them. And those people suck.
The thing is, the profession is hard on everyone these days. Anyone hired in the past couple of decades either has his own scars or has seen up close and personal those of some dear friends. If you've gone through a hazing process yourself, I don't see how it's possible not to relate to those behind you--and to want to make it easier on them where you can. But as the culture of hazing teaches us, there are those who, once they've made it, buy into its logic, cling to whatever limited status they've achieved, and demand even more obeisance from their juniors than was demanded of them.
Luckily, at the SAA there's an easy way to exorcize such people from one's conference experience: just go to the dance. Those obsessed with status are generally not to be found playing air guitar.
That's not so much about the work being presented, but about the size and the nature of the conference and to some degree its timing: it happens in April, after all the job market gossip is out. Even with its recent growth, the conference remains small enough to fit in one hotel and large enough that it seems everyone I know is there. Most importantly, it's a conference that remains welcoming to very junior people and those on the margins of the profession; its seminar format, where works-in-progress are precirculated and everyone gives feedback to everyone (grad students to very senior scholars and vice-versa) is a large part of this. SAA is kind of like Twitter: it's not that there's no hierarchy (or no jackassery), but it creates a space for conversations and friendships that set age, rank, and status aside.
For that reason, I was disappointed that the official conference made some missteps; not only did the programming skew toward older participants, but there were a number of unprofessional, self-indulgent, and/or ungenerous statements made by senior people speaking publicly at various podiums (I witnessed two and heard about two others). That still amounts to only a small proportion of the conference, but it's not a good tone to set. One person is an anomaly. Multiple people getting prime airtime feels like an endorsement.
But if the tone of the conference struck me as less welcoming to The Yoots than it might have been, I myself spent more time with grad students or recent PhDs than I have since I was one myself. This wasn't, like, a project on my part; there just happened to be a critical mass of interesting younger people around--some of whom I'd met at previous conferences or on social media while others were the friends, acquaintances, or grad students of my friends. And they were at the bar and I was at the bar and whether any of us now remembers our conversations clearly, it was still a good time.
Hanging out with fun people is its own reward, but for anyone concerned about the larger profession, talking to grad students and recent PhDs should also feel essential. Our juniors aren't just our future, but our present: the kind of work they're doing is a good index of what the discipline values (and this is true whether they're writing "safe" dissertations or balls-to-the-wall dissertations), and the forms of professionalization and pedagogical training they receive are also worth our knowing and understanding if we hope to hire them. The knowledge-transfer needs to work both ways.
I genuinely believe that most mid-career types want to know, or at least are open to knowing, their juniors. Some don't make much of an effort and others don't know how (whenever I feel slighted, I ask myself: is it possible this person is just deeply socially inept? usually the answer is yes), which is why conferences that foster conversations across rank are so important. But of course, there are scholars, at all career stages, who think the only people worth meeting are those senior to them. And those people suck.
The thing is, the profession is hard on everyone these days. Anyone hired in the past couple of decades either has his own scars or has seen up close and personal those of some dear friends. If you've gone through a hazing process yourself, I don't see how it's possible not to relate to those behind you--and to want to make it easier on them where you can. But as the culture of hazing teaches us, there are those who, once they've made it, buy into its logic, cling to whatever limited status they've achieved, and demand even more obeisance from their juniors than was demanded of them.
Luckily, at the SAA there's an easy way to exorcize such people from one's conference experience: just go to the dance. Those obsessed with status are generally not to be found playing air guitar.
Wednesday, April 09, 2014
Partner hiring, qu'est-ce que c'est?
Ever since this post, I've been planning on outlining what commenter TG referred to as "the doctrine and discipline of partner hiring." But though you'd think that after the successful resolution of my own two-body problem I'd have lots to say on the subject, the reality is that there's no single thing that we mean when we talk about partner hiring.
Consider, for example, these different scenarios:
All of those are situations that get described as "partner hiring," but they're quite different. Generally, when I talk about partner hiring, I mean situations where each partner ends up in a tenure-line job at the same institution--both because I presume that, all other things being equal, most couples would prefer that scenario, and because it's the filling or creating of TT lines that causes the most trouble and potential conflict.
However, even with that limitation, there are still so many variables that I'm not sure it's even possible to talk about "being in favor of" or "being opposed to" partner hiring in general.
Since I'm part of an academic couple and I know many others, I've always previously said that I support partner hiring. But when I say that, I'm taking as a given that both partners are accomplished and desirable hires, and more than competitive within the pool of other applicants (or relative to other recent hires); I'm also assuming that no one is forcing anything on a hiring department--that, if there wasn't a national search, there was at least a consensus that hiring the partner was a smart pick-up. That reflects the scenarios I know best: situations where both partners are on the tenure track at peer institutions, producing work basically equivalent in quantity and quality, but for whom finding jobs at the same place remains elusive.
Those who dislike the idea of partner hires often have a very different scenario in mind, sometimes equally born of unfortunate personal experience: a less-qualified partner gets hired, without full departmental consultation, sometimes as the result of one or two people throwing their weight around, and sometimes in ways that reinforce traditional power structures (senior man gets his 25-year-old girlfriend hired; straight people get privileged over queers; chair or dean makes an executive decision).
I'd venture to say that, phrased that way, almost of us are in favor of a good opportunity hire who's committed to the institution because it's where his or her partner works and against an underqualified hire that's forced upon a department--and if those distinctions are more than matters of perception, they come down partly to institutional type and culture. A less-healthy institution is more likely to do partner hiring badly (because the culture is an imperial one, or where certain kinds of people get valued more than others), and a more healthy one is more likely to do it well or at least in ways that don't piss other faculty off.
If I could propose a few general rules, though, these would be they:
None of this, however, makes actually attaining a partner hire any easier, and it's harder the earlier one is in one's career and the less leverage one has--I know virtually no one, for example, who upon being offered an entry-level tenure-track job was able to negotiate a second TT job for his or her partner. And none of this protects a department against disaster scenarios like a messy divorce.
The real problem, for everyone, is that partner hiring is no one thing, and it's hard to make a general rule or take other people's experiences as either a model or a warning.
*
Readers, what would you add to my list? Or do you have any advice either for those trying to solve the two-body problem or departments considering helping them?
Consider, for example, these different scenarios:
One partner, upon being offered an entry-level tenure-track job, negotiates a non-tenure track job for the other
Someone already in a TT job negotiates a non-TT job for his or her partner
One partner is already in a TT job and the department creates a TT line for his or her partner
Two partners apply and get hired for two TT jobs in the same department at the same time
Two partners get recruited and hired for two TT jobs together
One partner, upon being recruited for a senior position, is offered a second TT position for his or her partner.
One partner, already in a TT job, gets an outside offer, and makes a TT job for his or her partner a condition of staying
One partner is already in a TT job, the department runs a search for a TT position in the other partner's field, and that partner gets hired after a national search
One partner is already in a TT job, the department has an opening in the other partner's field, and hires the other partner without a national search
All of those are situations that get described as "partner hiring," but they're quite different. Generally, when I talk about partner hiring, I mean situations where each partner ends up in a tenure-line job at the same institution--both because I presume that, all other things being equal, most couples would prefer that scenario, and because it's the filling or creating of TT lines that causes the most trouble and potential conflict.
However, even with that limitation, there are still so many variables that I'm not sure it's even possible to talk about "being in favor of" or "being opposed to" partner hiring in general.
Since I'm part of an academic couple and I know many others, I've always previously said that I support partner hiring. But when I say that, I'm taking as a given that both partners are accomplished and desirable hires, and more than competitive within the pool of other applicants (or relative to other recent hires); I'm also assuming that no one is forcing anything on a hiring department--that, if there wasn't a national search, there was at least a consensus that hiring the partner was a smart pick-up. That reflects the scenarios I know best: situations where both partners are on the tenure track at peer institutions, producing work basically equivalent in quantity and quality, but for whom finding jobs at the same place remains elusive.
Those who dislike the idea of partner hires often have a very different scenario in mind, sometimes equally born of unfortunate personal experience: a less-qualified partner gets hired, without full departmental consultation, sometimes as the result of one or two people throwing their weight around, and sometimes in ways that reinforce traditional power structures (senior man gets his 25-year-old girlfriend hired; straight people get privileged over queers; chair or dean makes an executive decision).
I'd venture to say that, phrased that way, almost of us are in favor of a good opportunity hire who's committed to the institution because it's where his or her partner works and against an underqualified hire that's forced upon a department--and if those distinctions are more than matters of perception, they come down partly to institutional type and culture. A less-healthy institution is more likely to do partner hiring badly (because the culture is an imperial one, or where certain kinds of people get valued more than others), and a more healthy one is more likely to do it well or at least in ways that don't piss other faculty off.
If I could propose a few general rules, though, these would be they:
1. Any secondarily-hired partner should be competitive within the department's usual pool of applicants. It's foolish to say that he or she must be the most qualified person (since the idea that one can rank candidates in some absolute and objective way is usually a fiction), but he or she should do more than meet minima.
2. The decision to hire should be made in a way that has widespread departmental support, whatever that might mean in a given context.
3. If hiring a partner means creating a new line, it shouldn't compromise existing hiring goals (e.g., hiring another Americanist shouldn't mean foregoing the medievalist a department has been requesting for three years)
4. No preference should be given to straight couples over gay ones
5. After hiring, the partners are expected to function as independent agents, getting no preferential treatment and each doing his or her fair share of service. (The exception would be cases where two partners are hired to share one line.)
None of this, however, makes actually attaining a partner hire any easier, and it's harder the earlier one is in one's career and the less leverage one has--I know virtually no one, for example, who upon being offered an entry-level tenure-track job was able to negotiate a second TT job for his or her partner. And none of this protects a department against disaster scenarios like a messy divorce.
The real problem, for everyone, is that partner hiring is no one thing, and it's hard to make a general rule or take other people's experiences as either a model or a warning.
*
Readers, what would you add to my list? Or do you have any advice either for those trying to solve the two-body problem or departments considering helping them?
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