Author Archives: Steve

Literature and the World

This project at The Valve sounds like an interesting series to follow. I don’t know Franco Moretti’s work, but I find the subject interesting.

Given events over the last few months at Tunxis, I find myself growing more and more concerned about literary studies or, more to the context, English Departments, the study of literature being one part of the work. I recall a class discussion when I was a student. A colleague of mine asked the professor if he could write about a particular author. The prof said no because the student wouldn’t be able to find any scholarship on the subject because the author under question was too new. I found this response–now and at the time–rediculous and naive.

But to the point. I’ve never really been interested in the Canon as a thing to take all that seriously, but the professors where I went to school did. The student who had an interest couldn’t pursue it, therefore in the context of the course. Perhaps he would have generated some scholarship if given the chance. But he didn’t have the chance. I can understand a foundational series of studies that introduce students to a tradition–these are the kinds of courses I teach. But what is the breadth of the tradition? Numerous authors, thinkers, and prophets influenced human experience and expression and they should be read. Chaucer, for example. But I have no problem using Bacon in British Lit since his ideas form a trail and a surface that had an impact and form an important topology of questions that keep coming up.

What I’ve seen are potential faculty coming out of English Departments with a Canonical view of the landscape: what I call the English Geek. But landscapes change. If a student wants to focus on Chaucer, that’s fine by me, but what’s the reason to do it? What about the definition of a landscape or “not” defining it at all? Why isn’t Michael Joyce and the “other Joyce” a part of the breadth of experience in upper division courses or in graduate school? What is the breadth of experiencial space in the English Department that can go beyond “culture studies” or “theory”? (I never understood the use of this term in either Composition, literature, or literary criticism.)

I think studies in the English Area should be intensely interdsciplinary. I don’t know if this is part of Moretti’s program–I aim to find out. Conceptually, it should invite digital cameras, scripting, science, religion, and anything else that’s part of the human lifeworld into its metabolism and be flexible enough to grow its boundaries or, to lift a term from physics, its degrees of freedom.

New England Life In Winter

Ah, ground freeze. Our older dog, Arrow, must live long enough for the ground to soften up. The other way would get us in trouble. We could amble to the Farmington River and give her the Scyld treatment.

. . . Many a treasure
fetched from far was freighted with him.
No ship have I known so nobly dight
with weapons of war and weeds of battle,
with breastplate and blade: on his bosom lay
a heaped hoard that hence should go
far o’er the flood with him floating away.

New Years

And so the illusion of a new year presses on with a kind of weird madness, as usual. The year as we have it is a cycle: January meets January as the sun and earth play their natural parts. Can there be a new January? Do you want to remember last year’s January? There’s this from last year’s Jan 2 2005 post

Well it’s now 2005 and counting. Not much to say about the new year, except to wish those stricken by tsunami well in the recovery, survival, and rebuild. What horrors on the beaches.

Susan at Spinning is writing about narrative as she gears up for fiction writing. I’d suggest not to worry about short or long story, but rather about story and how it manifests. In fiction we’ll be dealing with shorter forms to start because we can manage a lot of them in a semester. Each story will demand what it demands. But I winder if as she writes them she sees the whole circle? Do I when I compose a story? Sure, a vague sense of what the story might look like at resolution.

What about the novel Suttree and Edson’s short Dinner Time as examples of story? One is long, the other short. Different shapes, but story nonetheless. But how they both drill into memory.

John Timmons announces the IF course for the Summer, too. Teaching at Tunxis is itself a lesson in timewarp.

Now it’s 2006 and counting and I’m half-way through Krauss’ Hiding in the Mirror and rewriting a section of Sandoval, extending a path where the link structure now just seems odd in the novel, such that I ask: “Why did I join these text spaces in the first place?” Better: “What was the thinking here?”

Weblogs and Teaching

This weblog has been running for two years and its seen a few permutations. I think it’s an excellent thing, the weblog. With the weblog comes the habit of writing and reading in this space, making links, reading off into the hyperzones of the web. This habit is important. It seems to me that people choose to take part and are doing so, and this habit or virtue can quickly become a necessity. Writing and reading.

But this habit is also the weblog’s greatest weakness as a teaching tool. When I introduced my wife to the weblog after buying her a laptop happy with wifi, she quickly took up the habit and now reads them regularly. The habit, however, can’t be forced, and the inclination to open people to the possibilities won’t necessarily lead to anything profitable if the habit conflicts with others.

bbpress and tags

Excellently put by Jim Revillini

there’s no doubt about that – tagging is a novel approach to information organization. it’s one of the best systems that the web has adopted and until something better comes along, information systems should make use of it.

. . .

vista’s structure is rigid and hermetically sealed in a proprietary JSP/java applet world. it will die once enough educators rally around the fact that you can’t teach every single course the same way online. the membranes of structure need to be breathable and stretchy – in technology terms: extensible.

vista HAS NO METHOD for organizing ideas. you are right, you could create a better education environment with bbpress and a little training. i think mediawiki might even be a more suitable learning environment, although i’m not sure if there is a tagging extension for it yet. if not, it’s GOT to be in the works.

Grades

Tis the season for grade complaints. A complaint can come in many forms, but they never come as self-complaint.

Student A might say: “Sorry about the C+. Next time I’ll really bear down on the course goals, take better notes, really study the journal criteria, and put my nose to the grindstone.”

If we must provide signs, institutions like a range of marks. + signs and – signs. In my area, pluses and minuses can create lots of confusion. If a C+, then why not a B-. Then why not just fudge it up a little more for whatever reason? On the other hand, we could always take a C+ and crank it down a little more to a C. A C+ generally means that a student has met the course goals to some satisfaction. They’ve demonstrated enough knowledge of the material to signal that grasp of a majority of the material but still need lots of work on the substance of the content. In general, a person demonstrates that they understand the concept of prosody or have grasped Shakespeare. They can articulate what happens in a play, but their knowledge of the details is inconsistent and their writing may reflect that. It’s more complicated than this. What’s more complicated is the POV students have vs the POV of the professor not just about the interpretation of a grade but also its meaning.

Grades are neat statistics, but the concepts a student may take from a course are more important in the long run. Other than to limit conversations to the structure of an essay and the elements of poetry I think are significant to thinking about it, I know of no other way of getting away from the borishness of grade discussions.

Narrative and Science

I’m reading yet another history of twentieth century science and will be moving on to Krauss in the next phase. While there’s a little more on real collaboration, such as that between Einstein and the mathematician Marcel Grossman, and clearer linkages between Einstein and later developments in physics and detector technology, the narrative seems common. We begin with relativity, move through background radiation, and end with string theory, which over the past couple of years I’ve come to find a little tiresome. General audience writing about string theory tends to be repetative, regardless of its merits or competition as a unifier for gravity and quantum theory: quantum gravity.

I’m interested in the collaborative element to all this and how hard people work in the pursuit of verification. It’s intriguing that lots of people, Kip Thorne, for example, took a Sagan quandary and went to work on it, and it promoted more interesting questions about blackholes, which relied on questions asked, at another point in the hypertext, by Hawking.

So, what comes next? I’m not interested in time travel or what will happen if we’re struck by an asteroid or even in other life in the universe. It has to do with pick-ups. Joey picks up a rock and finds a scorpion resting under it. He stands up, feeling that cold zero in the bone of Emily Dickinson fame (even though he’s never read her). He looks up and sees the approaching asteroid cross before the sun, perhaps a minute away from impact. He kneels and carefully fits the stone back into its dimple, as if it had never been disturbed.