The Long Eighteenth

Sorry to increase your NYC regrets, Dave, but I have to post an announcement about the New York premiere of Frances Burney’s The Witlings from May 18th to June 1st at the West End Theatre on the Upper West Side. More information is available at the Magis Theatre Company website.

I was glad to see many familiar faces at the NYU Writing Women symposium a few weeks ago. This upcoming May 9th, I’ll be hosting an event for the CUNY Graduate Center’s Eighteenth-Century Interdisciplinary Group and I hope to see you there.

Matt Williams, who recently defended his CUNY dissertation on eighteenth-century satire, will be giving a talk entitled “‘Subjects, Tales, Stories, and Characters of Invention, after the Manner of Lucian, who Copied from Varro’: Delarivier Manley, Menippean Satire, and the Rise of the Novel.”

We’ll gather at 2pm in the Eighteenth-Century Reading Room (C196.05) on the lower floor of the Mina Rees Library (365 Fifth Ave.), partake in refreshments, listen to Matt’s presentation, and enjoy plenty of discussion afterwards. Please email me at carrieshanafelt@gmail.com if you’d like to come, as I’ll need to give your name to the library security so they’ll be expecting you.

Tomorrow it all goes public (and we kind of expect it to crash at some point), and today there is a pretty nice feature in the Observer:

The Proceedings of the Old Bailey Online 1674-1834 is now the Proceedings of the Old Bailey and Central Criminal Court 1674-1913.

This doesn’t only mean that you can now search for 200,000 trials held at the Old Bailey over a period of 2 and a half centuries. The other new set of goodies of special interest to 18th-century scholars is the full text of (almost) every Ordinary of Newgate’s Account between 1690 and 1772 (in the next few months this should expand to a full archive of every known surviving Account from c.1674 onwards).

I’ve posted before about these grimly fascinating pamphlets. They’ve been used by a number of historians, including Andrea Mackenzie and Peter Linebaugh, but the surviving pamphlets have been scattered across a number of different libraries and archives. From now on they’ll be together in one fully searchable digital archive. Plus, I’m in the process of completing a database that links every convict mentioned in the Accounts to their trial, providing it has a surviving report (perhaps 3/4 of the links have already been made).

This should make for some interesting research possibilities. For example, historians often argue that women who successfully ‘pleaded their bellies’, ie had their death sentence postponed on grounds of being pregnant, usually escaped hanging. In fact, we say that in our own background section. But I’m not so sure. Through the process of cross-referencing trials and Ordinary’s Accounts, I’ve already discovered several women whose sentences were respited for pregnancy but subsequently carried out (eg in September 1695. So what I’ll be asking (once I’ve finished making the damned links) is: how many were executed and how many were permanently reprieved? Have we historians been getting it wrong? Answering those questions wasn’t impossible before now, but it would have been extremely difficult. And there will, no doubt, be many more possibilities like this.

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The other news, because I haven’t been plugging it enough and you’ve probably all forgotten, is that we’re holding a conference in July to celebrate the relaunch: The Metropolis on Trial, in the throbbing metropolis of… Milton Keynes. If you’d like to attend, registration is open and you can download a booking form at the website.

X-posted at EMN.

 (”Homo Bulla” (”man is a bubble”) image courtesy of the Nieuwen ieucht spiegel (1617))

While I’ve been grading papers and presiding over the slow death of my spring semester, dire predictions of cultural decline have been popping up all around me like sad, wilted flowers.  So let’s catch up on this week’s month’s Harvest of Hand-Wringing, shall we?

1.  The Bad News about English Studies.  Bill Deresiewicz  has published an essay about the decline of the English major and English studies generally.  To give us the bad news, Bill relies upon–you guessed it– the most recent MLA job list.  On this basis, Bill informs us that the “profession’s intellectual agenda is being set by teenagers.”  Well, no.  There aren’t many teenagers out there reading “ecocriticism” or working on “digital humanities projects,” whose mere existence Deresiewicz takes as an affront (damned computers!). 

My problem with these kinds of op-ed pieces (which are called “jeremiads” if they appear in print, and “pissing and moaning” if they appear on blogs), is trying to gauge the real seriousness of the argument and its claims.  To wit: is WD really trying to generalize about the state of the profession at this historical moment, across the country, from top to bottom of the academic hierarchy, on the basis of a single year’s job list and his own time at Yale?  In other words, what precisely does he know about current conditions of teaching and research in literature departments elsewhere, and how does he know it?  These are the kinds of questions I would put to someone who claimed to represent academic values like curiosity, thoroughness, and intellectual independence.  Similarly, I would expect to see much more analysis of the economics of academic work across the country, if I were to take this analysis more seriously as an account of the profession right now. 

More importantly, WD has left untouched what I consider to be the truly difficult problem of higher education its current, precarious state: what does it mean for college curricula, and higher education generally, to be “responsive” to the public, its needs, and its preferences, when so many different interests and constituencies are competing to “represent” the public and its demands?  Who gets to represent the public, and what constitutes a response, in those situations?  At the very least, WD all but ignores the administrative role in  constructing the supposed “preferences” of the public for lean, mean, and up-to-date faculty and curricula, whatever those terms might signify in individual institutions.  At the very least, administrators are the ones who sign the checks for hires and sign off on tenure decisions, and so their role should not be neglected. 

On the other hand, WD, as others have pointed out, does not appear to believe that other scholars and faculty could be sufficiently interested in topics like Equiano or Ecocriticism to develop their research and teaching interests along those lines.  This cavalier attitude towards others’ work seems to me to be a drastic, perhaps wilful, misrepresentation of the research and publications that scholars have been doing since the Theory boom petered out.  I also find it unlikely that during our own era of the Great Cutbacks at both universities and university presses, that the relative numbers of rote, reflexive versions of cultural studies or whatever would exceed the numbers of rote, reflexive books we had in the days of the standard 5-author literary monograph. 

Finally, to accuse others of “trendiness for the sake of trendiness,” as WD does, is simply to announce your lack of interest in their pursuits.  Though intended as a criticism, it’s equally an admission that you don’t know (or care) why they pursue their work in this manner.  Nonetheless, Derisiewicz deserves some credit for raising these issues, and for provoking the thoughtful responses from CR of Ads Without Products and Joseph Kugelmass of the Valve.  Now let’s see if he responds to them.

2.  Why people with tenure sometimes feel free to criticize its effects.  The difficulty of generalizing about academic life (see above) seems most evident when I find myself reading and disagreeing with scholars like “Claire B. Potter” (Tenured Radical) or Tim Burke (Easily Distracted) about issues like tenure, academic freedom, etc.  

Debates about tenure, however, do look different in the SLACs (small liberal arts colleges) as opposed to large public universities, because these tend to be places where hiring occurs less frequently, full-time labor covers much of the teaching, and bad university practices like adjunctification and exploitation of grad students are a moot point in those places.  (If I’m incorrect about this, please correct me.)  And of course, these kinds of schools offer their own challenges to faculty, but governance necessarily appears different under those conditions.

Nonetheless, Scott Jaschik’s Inside Higher Ed piece about tenure demonstrates just how stratified these debates about tenure have become.  The Tenured Radical’s objections to tenure seem plausible, as far as they go: tenure destroys job mobility, is ineffective in comparison with faculty unions, fosters unnecessary mystery and proceduralism around the tenure process, and creates (potential) sinecures for those who do not deserve them.  In fact, the most valuable observation in TRs postings involves the current opacity of the tenure process in most institutions, which often encourages unscrupulous faculty and administrators to manipulate the system. 

But I also think that TR has neglected the imbalances of power enforced by our (manipulated) job market when faculty face the current tenure process: from the perspective of the profession’s future, “job mobility” seems like a less drastic problem than the inability of newly-minted PhDs to get tenure-track jobs in the first place.  Moreover, the ability of candidates for tenure to manipulate the system is minimal, compared to the long-term players, including chairs, P&T committees, and of course administrators. 

It’s unclear to me, then, how an alternative system of corporate style performance reviews could do a better job of reducing the gamesmanship in assessing candidates, especially if the role of “peer review” is reduced for candidates’ departments.  So while I think there are plenty of problems with the existing system, the solution might reside in strengthening and elaborating the notion of peer review, rather than weakening it.  From my perspective, we need better, more transparent forms of peer review, not less.  Otherwise, we might as well go back to the days described by the MLA Task Force on Evaluating Scholarship, where Chairs essentially made the decisions by themselves.

Best,

DM

                           (the book proposal)

                                        (The book)

(Images courtesy of WSVR)

Kristine at Serendipities had an interesting thread a few weeks ago about Getting it Published, which discussed the single greatest source of anxiety for those who have managed to get tenure-track jobs: revising the diss into a book.  Practically speaking, this means learning how to transform something written for a 4-person committee into another something that an editor will want to publish within your probationary period.  I also spoke to a number of people at ASECS going through this process, and I’m wondering if others might have suggestions for those going through this stage of the academic career.  And, come to think of it, this advice might also help those still cycling through the post-doc and lecturer stage, as well.

I don’t feel that I have any great insights into this process, because my revision-process was so protracted, and resulted in the writing of a book independent of the diss, but I have watched my junior colleagues go through this, and I have tried to help them by reading their work along the way, so here are my observations:

• make the writing-process more concrete by making it part of the publishing process sooner rather than later.  In other words, try to start thinking about the proposal early on in the revising process, and think about what you would need to do to your manuscript to make it conform to your promises in the proposal.  This does NOT mean sending off a half-baked proposal right away, but that you revise with an eye to publication from the very beginning: looking at specific publishers to learn about their word-limits, series editors, citation forms, etc.
• the book proposal is a distinct genre with a distinct rhetoric that must be studied and practiced and adapted to circumstances, very much like the job-letter (remember those?) or the grant application (you will be doing a lot of these).  Look at other people’s successful examples, and try to understand the kinds of information that you must provide to your audience in order to close the deal.   As with the job letter, it’s also worth your time to show the drafts around to people whose opinions you trust, to feel confident that you’re communicating what you want to be communicating.
• finally, I think that the temptation is to do the writing and circulating of materials sequentially, so that you finish the revisions before thinking about where to submit the manuscript.  I think it’s probably better to assume that you’ll be doing both at the same time, since multiple revisions are a given with this kind of writing, and your time is limited.

 This advice may seem obvious, and is in fact hammered home to grad students every day of their miserable lives, but I thought it worth reiterating.  And I’d be interested in hearing about others’ experiences with this, since I”m in the middle of starting up a new manuscript myself.

UPDATE: Laura Runge, the Director of Graduate Studies in the English Department at the University of South Florida, has very generously passed on to us the presentation handout (and bibliography) she developed for her students at USF.

Runge’s handout goes into more detail than I did about the differences between book and dissertation, but the message seems similar to me: both audience and authorship are conceived differently for a book manuscript than in dissertations, largely because the scholar/author engages other scholars as peers rather than authorities; this new and independent relation to one’s scholarly community is announced in an argument that is more purposeful and rhetorically focused than student work. 

The dissertation is about developing your own thoughts in the presence of a more or less sympathetic audience.  The book is about changing other people’s minds, or moving the discussion of your topic into new and more productive areas.  To do this, the manuscript will have to be accessible enough for those not already persuaded of your approach to be reached by its arguments.  This is a very tall order, especially for those still on the market, or those swamped by the job they already have, but the key is knowing why one’s topic is important, and why others might find it important, too.

Best,

DM

Well, I’m back in Houston, it’s 85 degrees outside, and the fountain outside the English Department has just received a giant dose of Mr. Bubble, so that we can celebrate our final four weeks with a giant bubble bath.  Or maybe we should wash our cars in it.  In any case, the deadline for dropping courses was on Tuesday, and now we’re all playing for keeps through the final day of classes. 

The prospect of the next four weeks is enough to make me yearn for last week’s freezing rain, hail, and snow in Portland, the only place in the world where I would consider wearing one of those funny-looking balaclava hats.  But how are you supposed to sip your Sumatran free-trade latte (with triple nonfat soy froth) through one of those things?

Even without a funny knit cap, I did have a great time in Portland.  I felt reasonably OK with the final version of the paper I delivered on the first day, and even had Greg of Slawkenbergius’s Tale in my audience.  For that matter, I was able to see a paper and a panel chaired by the Lady Z, and enjoyed both very much.  I saw some panels and had a nice chat with Laura R., although the sushi at the restaurant did make her just a bit sleepy.

Nonetheless, I’m curious about other people’s impression of the meeting.  What were your highlights, your takeaways?  There were a ton of panels, I thought, on consciousness in one form or another, and quite a few on animal ethics and sentimentalism.  In general, there seemed to be loads and loads of panels on sentiment.  In those cases, I always think that representatives of each sentiment panel should get together and convene a higher committee on sentiment in the eighteenth century. 

I especially liked the Austen roundtable chaired by Bill Warner, with an epistolary contribution from Diedre Lynch that helped us make sense of it all.  I found less discussion of globalizing and post-colonial contexts than in other years, but Laura R’s cosmopolitan panel attacked those questions head-on, and made a connection between the contemporary political debates and the 18c discourses of the “citizen of world.” 

One of the things that struck me, though, was a contradiction that has crept into our most commonly taught courses: despite the sophisticated critical and historical models of scholarship we’ve developed for the novel, the novel survey course is becoming harder and harder to teach to undergrads, at least at institutions like mine.  At the excellent pedagogy panel chaired by Lisa Berglund, it was clear that our students will require smaller and fewer works if we are going to teach them about the other stuff that seems crucial to understanding eighteenth-century literature historically.  Like, say, chronology (knowing which author precedes another author, or why Oscar Wilde is not an 18c writer).  This kind of time-and-length constraint might make other genres, like poetry or drama, more inviting, but it might also scramble our sense of the 18c canon and its genres entirely.

In any case, these are a few of my thoughts, as I prepare to finish out my semester.  Any other impressions that you’d like to share?

UPDATE: Ellen Moody has provided her own impressions of ASECS 2008, here, here, and here.  If people come upon any other examples of ASECS blogging, let me know, and I’ll post it here.

Best,

DM