I have had another of those conversations with someone who likes teaching, in which I said I did not. But when I told her WHAT I was teaching she turned up her nose. “In my university we have other people to do that.” I thought, “Well, I rest my case.”
But my graduate student does teach the kind of course I am also teaching. Being a more liberated person than I, he says we do like teaching and that our problem is the current mode of production. If one really taught, one would not produce as many students, because one would want to show them how to do more things. This would increase time to degree. Thence our frustration – we cannot do what we know to be necessary.
“Getting rid of grammar in composition classes, getting rid of comprehensive examinations at the Ph.D. level, it is all part of the same thing: getting rid of the teaching tools that are known to actually teach things, so that more degrees can be produced more quickly,” said he.
He also said something yet more interesting: even “language people” hate language. The like its products: communication, works of art, but not language itself. This is why the scientific aspect of our field, i.e. the heart of any field, is excised from curricula: nobody wants to grasp its essence. Thus, writing trouble is seen as lack of ideas, when really it is lack of access to language, or unwillingness to actually face language itself. People are encouraged to “brainstorm” when really it is a question of following ideas out in words.
I am not saying it as eloquently now but it is worth thinking about. There is a key here to why I am in the funk I am in, a part of the double bind of the official belief that one is doing what one should do and wants to do, and the perception that really one is asked to do the opposite. So it is not that one is not interested in what one does, but that one does not get to do what one is interested in, and is yet expected to believe and say that one is doing that.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
So the problem is partly compartmentalisation?
By the way, there is a good article in the making, on the blog called I Cite. It goes towards explaining why employing the rhetoric of democracy is not the same as genuine political action.
The article looks great – I’ll read when I can.
Compartmentalization, not really. More like navigating sophistry.
I’m not there, so I can’t get a complete picture. Also, a bit distracted too, by the prospects of a looming deadline. This is a strange deadline I face. The person who solicited this article from me is from a university in Zimbabwe which has been closed down until further notice. So I have a deadline but that is about it. I have just emailed the person, but I also understand that electricity and Internet connections are sporadic in Zimbabwe these days. So I will keep working on this piece and then submit it, and if it doesn’t get published I will submit it elsewhere.
Yes, it’s a long explanation if you’re not in the U.S. academic industrial complex and in English-Spanish & Portuguese-Comp. Lit. all at once. Even then it’s a long conversation.
Write write write! Or, as we used to say, write on! 🙂 Regardless of whether the journal continues to exist!