April 15, 2004
With flying colors
It went splendidly, and now I plan to take the weekend very seriously OFF. But hooray! Hurrah! Calloo! Callay! Et cetera.
April 09, 2004
Fandom note
A brief history of British SF fandom, by Rob Hansen.
April 08, 2004
The actual topics
Now that it is a mere week (less about five hours) until my exam, I have my actual list of topics in hand. These are fairly different from the ones I thought up, and frankly much better. (One might even say that they're fun.) I'm copying them in below, so that I can refer to them whenever the fancy strikes me, and so that you, dear readers, can see what I'm working on. I expect to be wandering in my fields of rumination until the eve of the exam myself, so I'll see you then.
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1. Discuss how the study of language interacts with inquiries into strata, categories, genre, division, and categorizations of literature in the modern period. Examples include high vs. low, "modern" vs. "popular," innovative vs. standard, literary vs. everyday, but do not feel constrained by this illustrative list.
2. Discuss the phenomenon sometimes referred to as "levels of narration" or "narrative embedding." What sorts of texts illustrate this phenomenon, and what sorts of theories are currently available for representing this sort of thing? Is this a purely literary phenomenon, or does it have deeper roots in language, culture, or general cognition?
3. Choose one of the following theoretical constructs: frame, image-schema, construction, mental space, recursion, joint attention, presupposition. Discuss with specific examples the sorts of phenomena linguists and other ccognitive scientist use these constructs to model and explain. Where possible be sure to consider competing theories of the same phenomena. Show how these constructs might be profitably applied either to the analysis of primary texts, or to theoretical issues in the critical or cultural theory more generally, or both. Alternatively, you could explain why these constructs are inherently uninteresting [to], or otherwise prone to be treated as suspect by, literary and cultural critics and theorists.
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April 06, 2004
Generalization and Folly in Popular Cult Crit
This is a cautionary tale. I love to read the cultural criticism of earlier eras -- notice the examples I've cited here in the past couple of weeks -- but it's far too easy, in some cases, to assume that the authors' observations are sound. (George Orwell, I'm looking at your boys' weeklies and you!)
Wanting real-life people to behave like your favorite stereotype of their socio-economic class (cf. D.H. Lawrence's fruitless international search for a peasantry sufficiently in possession of the "vital life-throb") is hardly a defunct pastime: see this wonderful critique of the "facts" reported in David Brooks' infuriating article "One Nation, Slightly Divisible," which appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in December of 2001.
This is the piece where he purports to compare the prevailing culture of the "Red" Franklin County in Pennsylvania and the "Blue" Montgomery County, where I happen to live. I knew it was rife with overgeneralizations, glib telling details that don't tell the whole story, and mistaking the part for the whole in ways that seem uniformly motivated by the assumptions of the author's worldview, but I didn't realize just how thoroughly false it was until I read this Philadelphia Magazine article. It's a corker! (via Crooked Timber)
PS. The comments of that Crooked Timber article also have some interesting stuff to say about sprawl in my hometown of Pittsburgh.
April 02, 2004
On stock examples and the Labov question
Lots of people I've talked to have suggested that a good thing to do before the exam itself is to generate a list of the kinds of things you think people will want you to provide examples of (novels that represent the thread of traditional realism running through the twentieth century, places where tropes borrowed from "lowbrow" literature show up in "highbrow" literature, and so on) and think up a useful set of pithy examples in response.
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This seems intelligent; it's good advice not only for exams but for academic life in general -- certainly one likes to have a useful stock of good illustrative examples ready at hand for any kind of discussion. I'm finding that it seems almost unseemly, though, to record any such list here, especially because I know members of my committee read this site (hi, everyone). Pithy examples don't seem so pithy when you've seen the list of pith. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain! But for anyone who reads this site to see an example of what One Person Does to prepare for her exams, it would be rather unfair to leave it out. So suffice to say I am thinking about such things, even if I'm not doing it in full public view.
Part two: I keep thinking about the first of my suggested topics (this is the one about the viability of connecting sociolinguistic findings about the sources of various kinds of persistent, "sticky" language innovations to genre or other formal innovations in literature). It's such a seductive idea, so sexy and also so dangerous. On the one hand, it's dangerous from the linguist's point of view because a study along those lines would be too easy to do sloppily, in exactly the way that literary studies traditionally uses, or abuses, linguistic research -- it's hard to even imagine what would be a methodologically and philosophically sound approach.
And if you just take Labov's observations as a jumping off point, a flag suggesting that the place where people look for the sources of innovation is maybe all back-to-front, is that really treating the research appropriately on its own terms, or is it just exactly the kind of shallow scholarly "interdisciplinary" grazing literary studies is (in)famous for? And what kind of research methods would be appropriate for the study that did take those findings as their starting point? If they would have to be something wildly different from the methods of the responsible sociolinguist -- and it's hard to see how they could avoid it -- does that undermine the possibility that the two kinds of research could have anything meaningful to say to one another?
Aping the methods of another discipline is a minefield of its own, with something of an embarrassing history in literary studies. (Not that it's always a mistake, but it does seem like a place where it's important to Tread Lightly.) And from everyone's point of view, the kind of parallelism I hint at in my topic/question is dangerous because it's reductive, or at least it would be if you did it wrong, and it might well be even if you did it right. I don't know -- the upshot is that I'm feeling that it's not a good topic to choose for my presentation because I'm so torn and, more importantly, so skeptical, but it is something I'd like to talk about with some of my committee members later, in a context where they're not explicitly supposed to be examining my knowledge and confidence.
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April 01, 2004
All work and all play makes me a cheerful grad student
Two weeks left! This morning has been enlivened by some reading aloud of choice bits of At Swim-Two-Birds (on my list, I will observe, though it's hard to claim that anything so entertaining can be called work, as such), each while the other completes his or her morning routine. It is an excellent book for the purpose, being so lively and deranged. Just now I have been reading some of the conversation between the pooka MacPhellimey and the Good Fairy ("My correct name is Good Fairy, said the Good Fairy. I am a good fairy.") and putting on a misbegotten Irish accent and generally getting the day off to a fine start.
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I also cornered S. as he was doing his email and rattled off a paragraph or so about the genre of The Secret Agent and another about an article about the symbiotic relationship between detective fiction and aesthetic modernism, which he sat through very politely. The closer I get to the exam day, the more of a terrible bore I become, I'm afraid. Soon I will be entirely unfit for normal conversation, as everything becomes an opportunity to spout off something to do with my reading. So beware, anyone who might encounter me in real life for the next couple of weeks.
Finally: Look here, it's another exam log. Elizabeth Tsukahara is preparing for her Ph.D. comprehensive exams in English at The University of Iowa. I look forward to reading it. Byt he way, I thoroughly recommend this process to anyone doing this kind of preparation; I've found it very helpful myself, not only as a spur to organize and articulate my thoughts -- which it certainly has been -- but also as a convenient repository for those thoughts for later reference. I think I'll be wanting to refer back to this log well after my exams are over.
Speaking of which, I'm wondering what would be the best approach to organizing the site once the exams are over and I want to continue this log as a prospectus log and dissertation log. Should I keep this site intact and make a new, similarly organized section of stuttercut for dissertating, or change my headings and sidebar to reflect the changes in my focus? Suggestions from the peanut gallery are more than welcome.
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March 31, 2004
While I'm at it...
Orwell on Eliot on Kipling:
Mr. Eliot describes Kipling’s metrical work as 'verse' and not 'poetry', but adds that it is 'great verse', and further qualifies this by saying that a writer can only be described as a 'great verse-writer' if there is some of his work 'of which we cannot say whether it is verse or poetry'. Apparently Kipling was a versifier who occasionally wrote poems, in which case it was a pity that Mr. Eliot did not specify these poems by name.
The trouble is that whenever an aesthetic judgement on Kipling’s work seems to be called for, Mr. Eliot is too much on the defensive to be able to speak plainly. What he does not say, and what I think one ought to start by saying in any discussion of Kipling, is that most of Kipling’s verse is so horribly vulgar that it gives one the same sensation as one gets from watching a third-rate music-hall performer recite 'The Pigtail of Wu Fang Fu' with the purple limelight on his face, and yet there is much of it that is capable of giving pleasure to people who know what poetry means. At his worst, and also his most vital, in poems like 'Gunga Din' or 'Danny Deever', Kipling is almost a shameful pleasure, like the taste for cheap sweets that some people secretly carry into middle life. But even with his best passages one has the same sense of being seduced by something spurious, and yet unquestionably seduced.
