I have now been identified as a conservative defender of a conservative canon because I said that:
1) being actively engaged in a field via research was different, and deeper, than being able to pinch-hit in it by covering an undergraduate couse in it;
2) researchers and specialists were resources for the university, not just for the department;
3) the early modern period is really important in the history of Europe and the Americas, and it would be good to have someone in the college, in some discipline, with a research agenda in it;
4) a Spanish department without such a person is lacking from every point of view, not just from a conservative, Cervantes-addicted one.
Having been called conservative I am expected to back off from these positions. But I think the conservative position – the postmoderno-fascist one, in fact – is the one that only cares about the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and calls everything else dusty and people interested in anything else canon-defenders.
I had always thought one hired in a field because of research – because having a scholar in that field was considered important. It appears that nowadays that one hires in a field only out of the necessity to cover certain courses. It also appears that the only reason those courses need to be covered is that it is traditional to do so, and not because they are important in any particular way.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
How sad that people think they have to make arguments about their preferences in such a damaging way: a way that damages their own longterm interests. Because in our globalized world it would be really easy for a neocon imperialist to come along and say “everyone speaks English anyway, let us just get rid of these timeconsuming, expensive foreign language requirements.” Really, degree of relevance arguments are so specious.
(I also have to laugh given that Quijote is one of the most subversive texts I have ever read.)
I could go on and on about this but I won’t hijack your post. I happen to teach a field not commonly thought to be relevant and no one ever lets me forget it. Sometimes I wonder why I was hired.
Yeah, history shmistory, who needs it?
Any help I can get to explain why thinking one should have an expert in something pre 19th century is not mere “canon-defending” and “conservatism” would be helpful.
Also: what I find curious about all of this is that my colleagues do not seem to value research. They keep saying don’t worry about earlier periods, you and others can teach them at the undergraduate level and we can define the graduate program as a modern-only program.
Even if it is terribly “conservative” of me to think that a modern-only graduate program is a ridiculous idea, am I *nuts* to think it would be important to have a SCHOLAR on hand in something pre 19th century, not just people who can TEACH it?
Anything I can say will be disjointed.
–Graduate students don’t need to read Cervantes or “Don Juan” with an expert? I mean, it’s not like all of Latin America was reading those texts for centuries or anything…as you said earlier, trying to figure out whether it was part of the West or not. But this is weak insofar as it’s kind of a “gotta read the KJV to understand Shakespeare” argument. If you don’t want to understand the later half of the pair, the earlier part isn’t important either.
–One reason that often speaks to people is the question of imperialism, i.e., the Siglo de Oro coincides with the peak of Spain’s overseas empire–and the field seems to be expanding to consider these possibilities. TSE this is the literature that the center tries to export to its diasporic populations on the periphery. Interesting in this sense the work of Sabine MacCormack who studies how humanist conventions cultivated in Spain influence early indigenous attempts to make sense of the colonization experience.
–But in general, I have found it a losing battle. At best you can argue that this field is the prehistory of something else that is really important. In my department, if it can’t immediately be related to race, nation, or gender (two thirds of which are problematic terms before 1600) or globalization, it’s a hard sell. I think all of those things are important, I just don’t think they are the only things. On a practical level, there are actually “too many” people in those fields in my department, insofar as they are always squabbling over the limited number of graduate students.
–weird to have a whole college without a premodernist, insofar as the premodern fields are really hot right now in history (Spain and its empires, Atlantic World, African diaspora, etc.). Definitely makes your university less trendy.
??
“Interesting in this sense the work of Sabine MacCormack who studies how humanist conventions cultivated in Spain influence early indigenous attempts to make sense of the colonization experience.”
This is the sort of thing. Plus the overseas empire. Early modern is *hot* and early modern people can do a lot … and as one colleague used to say, the Jesuits were a transnational organization, early globalization, etc. etc.: Spanish humanism is key in early Latin America and the debates back then inform the debates now. Etc.
You get much more bang for buck, about then and about now, with an early modern person than you do with a modernist specialized in a single European country.
The funniest argument I heard this morning was that a postmodernist from Spain would be a “generalist,” whereas an early modernist covering Spain and its overseas empire would be a “narrow specialist.”
Also, the idea that “they can write on any period they want, so long as they cover those earlier eras in their courses” is a recipe for publication disaster for an assistant professor. Why should they have to teach in one whole field and write in an entirely different one???
You said it. This whole idea of “cramming” people into patterns that aren’t organic to their work created a significant problem for me and a colleague of mine who didn’t see how their work fit into a paradigm a senior colleague was pushing and wanted to do a “group project” on. Lots of time was wasted in a situation when it was not affordable.
It is also *really* hard to cover early modern or medieval material if you are not a specialist, because the past really is a foreign country. I mean, when I teach the modern civ survey I at least have the experience of having lived in the 20th century, but everything about the distant past has to be learned. I had my Cervantes from a Golden Age specialist, and I have no idea how anyone who was not studying that field could ever have taught the text at the necessary level of sophistication.
Also teaching things you don’t know well and potentially don’t care that much about it crushing labor.
I suppose you could make a counter-charge of “ageism.” You would have to do it in a hugely superior, condescending tone, though, and one of the things that often bugs me about people who defend the canon is how condescending they can be.
Another field that is really hot at the moment in early modern is cartography. Sometimes that can be a good sell–but again, it would assume that your colleagues were aware of contemporary trends in the field.
Cartography, yes. Ageism charge won’t work, but Eurocentrism charge may. There are a bunch of people on this committee interested exclusively in modern literature and popular culture of various European countries. Their war is against those who defend stale 1965 style PhD reading lists. They conflate the importance of history in general with that, and they are *not* interested, from what I have been able to gather, in anything like contemporary indigenous movements, the essay, etc., etc., i.e. in anything non-arty or non-white.
1) Lots of time was wasted in a situation when it was not affordable.
2) It is also *really* hard to cover early modern or medieval material if you are not a specialist, because the past really is a foreign country.
I have had both of these problems here and it is a career disaster I do not want to visit upon anyone else. This position has been a revolving door for some time because of the way it and the people in it have been managed. We have these gen ed courses to teach also, which are out of field in their own way, so if you’ve got half your load in gen ed and the other half mostly in a field that isn’t yours, you’re pretty much screwed. Not to mention that if that’s what you are offering, it is very hard to hire someone who isn’t desperate.
The thing about this that MOST amazes me though is the disregard for research. What research expertise do you want to add to this college is my FIRST question when I think about fields in which to hire … but everyone else seems to think in terms of “covering traditional courses” and then “offering interesting courses in popular culture to attract students” and then publishing, I guess, just anything (?).
Except that’s the catch-22. You can’t publish “just anything.” As we well know.
You really have a situation where it is almost guaranteed the person will leave, it sounds like. That is an impossible professional situation. And: Hiring a premodernist is a bit like adopting a child from Ethiopia–they are better off if you get two, so they don’t feel quite so strange.
My sympathies, really. Tell them that students are really interested in the whole judio/cristiano/musulman convivencia issue; that trans-Atlantic studies are “it” right now, and early modernists who can talk about colonialism are hot, hot, hot! and that this is really relevant to what is going on in Spain right now! Just ask Aznar, who said “the moros never apologized for invading us” at Georgetown. Argh, Don’t get me started–I have to grade two sets of papers and a midterm.
Really weird. You know — and unrelated — what really disappoints me with this PhD writing process that I am undertaking is that nobody (none of the academics) seem willing to discuss my ideas with me so that I can determine their validity or not. I really would like to thrash out some of my thoughts against somebody else’s thoughts and perceptions. But this doesn’t happen. It’s always about form and never about content. But I am not interesting in developing form in my writing until I have come to terms with the content. And this leads to misunderstandings (possibly, in part, about whether I can write or not.)
What is bothersome is the implication that if one knows or studies a particular period, including becoming an expert it is advocating/promoting/embracing/accepting the ideologies of that period. I know the early to mid Victorian period pretty well as far as Literature; however, I do not advocate the values of that period. I see a need to read that period before moving to another period.
As a recent student, I can tell you what aggravated me so much and that is having professors who knew nothing but what they have decided to know. One such professor, women studies/LGBT could not tell you one detail about a book before Post Modernism. She asked me why I spent so much time on George Eliot and Virginia Woolf and Trollope. Well I have been noticing throughout the internet the same thing. I would say an internet tower (like an ivory tower) but that is not quite right. There is something so post-transcendence, but not really, but the pretenses of it being so that a foundation is never built, much less understood. I do not trust when I am talking to someone who only knows contemporary if they really understand the value of a current position and how that position has come to be. Even though contemporary literature tends to smack you over the head, it does not resonate in the same way as when an out-dated ideology was actually dictating people’s lives. For instance if I read a Dickens’s book about poverty, I absorb the seriousness of poverty. Recently I could not finish Tortilla Curtain because the “message” hit me over the head too severely. I must give you an example.
“Afterward, he tried to reduce it to abstract terms, an accident in a world of accidents, the collision of opposing forces—the bumper of his car and the frail scrambling hunched-over form of a dark little man with a wild look in his eye—but he wasn’t very successful. This wasn’t a statistic in an actuarial table tucked away in a drawer somewhere, this wasn’t random and impersonal. It had happened to him, Delaney Mossbacker, of 32 Pinon Dr, Arroyo Blanco Estates, a liberal humanist with an unblemished driving record and a freshly waxed Japanese car with personalized plates, and it shook him to the core. Everywhere he turned he saw those red-flecked eyes, the rictus of the mouth, the rotten teeth and incongruous shock of gray in the heavy black brush of the mustache—they infested his dreams…..”
…..blah blah……
“One minute he was winding his way up the canyon with a backseat full of newspapers, mayonnaise jars and Diet Coke cans for the recycler…….”
Give me a fucking break.
Oh but the Chicago Tribune says “A compelling story of myopic misunderstanding and mutual tragedy.”
In order for me to know that this is a myopic view I will have to know other views, why would one be considered myopic, what was it like before, where does it look like its heading, etc, etc.
Joanna – I’ve told them these things and they say that this is part of my conservative adulation of a traditional canon.
Jennifer – I know, that is one of the really weird things. Starting at the dissertation, in my experience, content is no longer of interest, only form, and you’re on your own until you start making your in-field friends elsewhere whom you see at occasional conferences.
Servetus – They are or were supposed to get one in History, as well. Supposedly. It’s a whole weird mindset and I could say more except suddenly I feel I shouldn’t – these candidates are hip graduate students and what if one of them is reading this??? Uh-oh.
Kitty – I agree utterly. Again, I could say more but I am wondering if I should make this post private: what if some smart job candidate blogger is already reading and has figured out where I am and I’m scaring them away…?
P.S. Tortilla Flats passage – that isn’t great writing, not very subtle, not very nuanced, etc. etc. ….
Say less. No one’s feelings will be hurt.
And yes on assumptions about how studying something means you espouse its values. In my experience this criticism comes from people who study things that they heavily identify with. So they don’t see how you can study something that you wouldn’t identify with personally, unless it’s the exact reverse (i.e., no one assumes that people who study Nazism are Nazis). It’s like they don’t think people can really be take critical stances toward their studies–maybe because their own stances are not fully critical?
Sorry–and on Tortilla Curtain, I never saw reviews, I bought it in a train station for lack of anything else, and I assumed that Boyle was trying to be ironic. I took it as a send up of the crunchy character, not as a mutual tragedy.
“It’s like they don’t think people can really be take critical stances toward their studies–maybe because their own stances are not fully critical?”
I think this is it. I have so many examples related to that. On the one hand, there is the idea that you have to have a certain national identity to reliably study that country. (And be a fish to study marine biology – and a ghost from the 17th century to study Shakespeare?) On the other hand, the idea that anyone from a certain country should be able to teach or study anything about that country, whether or not they have the academic background for this. I always think, are these fields not respectable? Should one not, on the one hand, assume that they require expertise, and on the other, assume that that expertise is something which can be acquired (as opposed to being an instinct of some sort)?
Should one not, on the one hand, assume that they require expertise, and on the other, assume that that expertise is something which can be acquired (as opposed to being an instinct of some sort)?
I think that it is both!
For example, I think that a lot of Pattison’s errors are cultural rather than malicious. They also appear to be quite conservative whilst on the surface appearing to be wanting to go in the opposite direction. For instance he quotes and misreads Marx as if Marx were cautioning people to conform to the status quo.
Part of the quote says, “[A writer’s] life is part of the life of his time; no matter whether he is conscious of this, approves or disapproves.”
From this, Pattison then goes on to suggest that Marechera was in the wrong for being “at odds with his environment”. But of course Marx and Lenin and the whole socialist project were “at odds” with their environments. Thus was and is the socialist project.
So, there is the level of lack of political theory expertise in Pattison’s writing. But there is also the error that Pattison makes in positing a “primordial self” that he thought Marechera was in search of. It is much more likely, in my opinion, that if Marechera was in search of a different kind of self from the one he had then he was in search of his collectivist self: A collectivist self is not nearly as mystical as a primordial self, since it is something he would have actual experience of, by virtue of being African.
Oooh, that Pattison sounds like my Whitemen! It’s common set of errors. And also: so much of your Marechera discussion so closely parallels my Vallejo discussion that I am constantly struck and re-struck. I had given up on that project because the Pattisons of the world would not believe me. However that was when I was more obedient than I am now, and I didn’t push through to the non-Pattisons.
Related to your dissertation isolation: it occurs to me that it is at this stage that they start with the workplace harrassment and bullying, and the dissertation isolation is its earliest manifestation.
School, when it is good, is the friendly face of the ISA, and can be radical and radicalizing as well … or cozily liberal humanist. Once you become a dissertator you are catapulted into the market as a competitor for these professors and other researchers and they react by doing the bullying and isolation game. At least this is my insight for this hour on that matter.
I have had this insight because I also have had another: I’m getting more bullying and harrassment at this very moment than I admit, realize, or am conscious of. The PTSD I spoke of in an earlier post may not even be quite or only that: it could be just me choking down anger and shock at the way a certain whiteman and his minion act on the daily.
I am informed by persons at mega-universities in more progressive states that there, this behavior would be actionable, no question. It isn’t here, because we are still in the mid 19th century in town and the mid 18th out in the country, but it is still to be resisted: something the slaves would have rebelled about, done workplace sabotage about, run away about, negotiated about.
NO, I don’t think I am being bullied or harrassed. I’m too much in the public eye. You know, one of the reasons I did that Secular Party stint was to demonstrate to those who had an interest in it, that I was not at all afraid to be in the public eye, or to take anything into the public eye.
Or to put the situation in another way, I am a little too strong willed and thick-skinned to know if I am being bullied. In any case, I do not feel that I am…
Anyway, here is the real cause of a lot of my (now very mild) PTSD!
I’m not suggesting you are being bullied/harassed!
I only mean – I think the dissertation isolation is the first stage of the professor weirdness (and this ‘think’ isn’t a ‘know’ – it’s a speculative theory for today)!
The PTSD I spoke of in an earlier post may not even be quite or only that: it could be just me choking down anger and shock at the way a certain whiteman and his minion act on the daily.
I’m sorry to hear this. Western Australia is also, compared to the rest of the country, redneck territory in a lot of ways. I have learned to see every encounter at an official level as something akin to facing a potential opponent in the ring. Keep your guards up, look for openings and when you get the chance, see how you can counterattack.
I’m not suggesting you are being bullied/harassed!
I only mean – I think the dissertation isolation is the first stage of the professor weirdness (and this ‘think’ isn’t a ‘know’ – it’s a speculative theory for today)!
Yeah, I’m sure you’re right. But my skin is thick, thick, thick.
Yes. And things got noticeably worse today … !!! I’m stuck dealing with it, which is why I am not writing more; I’ve read your changing hue text before and it is good and it resonates.
Well take care. I really do think that the boxing metaphor is more than a metaphor. That is why I often prioritise my physical sparring training, because compared to the intensity of that, everything else seems to glance off.