The term “academic writing” is controversial, not least because it implies that academics have an odd and persnickety way of writing. In a blog post for The New Yorker, Joshua Rothman examines the genre, looking back on his time in grad school to argue that academic writing is a “fraught and mysterious thing.”
Neomysterativity
Notes From the First Year
“Jo Freeman, a feminist writer and activist who worked with Firestone from the beginning, said at the memorial, ‘When I think back on Shulie’s contribution to the movement, I think of her as a shooting star. She flashed brightly across the midnight sky, and then she disappeared.'” At The New Yorker, Susan Faludi writes on the legacy of Shulamith Firestone.
A Worthy Send-Off
Edmond Caldwell, a longtime Millions commenter and member of the golden age of lit blogging, has passed away. Caldwell was the founder of The Chagall Position and Contra James Wood. Read a tribute to Caldwell by his friends Boyd Nielson and Joseph G. Ramsey at Dispatches, here.
Gothic 101
Does your story have a ghost or monster? Does your heroine faint frequently? Then you might be in a Gothic novel. The Guardian has infographics on how tell if you’re in a Gothic novel.
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Confessing / Confiding
“I wanted to offer my students an alternative to the purely confessional mode. I wanted them to write about themselves without falling into a paralyzingly portentous tone. I wanted more humor in their work, more complexity, more detail, more balance—more good writing. I wanted fewer italicized passages, less use of the breathless present tense. I wanted no more tears in the workshop, no more embarrassing scenes.” Emily Fox Gordon writes about trauma narratives in the classroom, the trouble with writing as therapy, and the key differences between confessing and confiding in an essay for The American Scholar.
Notable Occupants
The Occupy Wall Street demonstrations attracted two notable literary figures this weekend. Author and activist Naomi Klein (The Shock Doctrine) addressed protestors. Here’s the longer, uncut version of her speech. On Sunday, Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek (Living in the End Times) gave an address as well.
Looking forward to reading this article to explore what seems a foreign land to me. I don’t have any personal experience with it, but from the stories I’ve heard about dissertations, to me it sounds nightmarish, especially the preliminary requirements of making sure you’ve read EVERYTHING ever written about your topic (e.g., Jane Austen’s elbow). I would fear a perpetual distraction that would lead me from Jane Austen’s elbow, to her lace sleeve, to a lace factory in Milan, to the current state of competition of Italian lace makers with China, to Chinese characters, thus to the art store to buy some new brushes and paint.
Thus goes the life of those who float along like tumbleweeds. Our ilk is best suited to (short) poetry as we lack the stern focus and iron spine of the academics. :)
Moe Murph
First Job Out Of School Working In Harvard School of Architecture Mailroom With 10th-Year PhD. in Irish Medieval Studies
Can’t resist. the 10th Year PhD in above message was a towering, broad woman with a shock of long, bright-read hair. She wore a purple cape, pinned with a Celtic medal pin that floated behind her as she strode the Yard to the architecture school.
She was in pitched battles with the Medieval Studies Department (who wanted her out if her paper wasn’t in that year), with her Advisor, and with the Administrator for the architecture school, where she ran the mailroom. She was a great pitcher of battles.
I don’t remember what she was writing about, could have been cloud patterns in Ulster or something, but I expected the difficulty may have been that Harvard, the department, and medieval Irish weather all refused to bend to her will. She told a great story about a professor who would stride into department events, sit down, and demand in a Falstaffian voice of the wait staff:
“Brrrriiinnnggggggg Me My Brie!”