Presidential Demeanor

Some great observations about the Obamas' visit to London, and what Europe's response to the way the President and First Lady carried themselves suggests about USA-EU relations.

This essay will be useful when teaching students about class (in)visibility (Obama shaking the police officer's hand a 10 Downing Street) and Bourdieu's concept of habitus.

"The other thing that she [Mrs. Obama] rose above was Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip: Honey, we shrunk the royal family. If ever we needed a totemic image of the merits of a republic over a monarchy, this was it."

"The truth is that the French have never really got over being dumped at the altar of the “special relationship.” It should have been them. It was after all, the French who gave you the Statue of Liberty and the keys to the Bastille and who think Jerry Lewis is funny. What did the English ever give you? Muffins and a burnt White House."

Joking aside, it's true: the French are unfairly dumped on in the US. I suspect it has a lot to do with military-related issues, e.g. De Gaulle pulling France out of NATO's military (but not political) structure and evicting NATO forces from the country. So, I'll want to supplement this essay with reading about economics and social mobility. Given many Americans' proclivity for ill-informed patriotism, students need to know that it's more likely for a person born poor to move out of poverty in France than it is in the US. 

But as this piece to suggests, America should feel proud about their First Family. 

(Now, if only the Obama administration would listen to Paul Krugman...)

HUIN305: Week 10

Hello all:

Just a reminder that HUIN305 will be meeting tomorrow, Wednesday March 4, at 10:15.

A number of you are preparing literature reviews and/or annotated bibliographies. Please send these and any and all new material that you have concerning the progress you're making on your projects out by this evening.

I'd like tomorrow's session to run like a true graduate seminar, i.e. with everyone providing comments on and constructive criticism about each other's projects.

For that to happen, you'll need to get your documents circulating in time for everyone to read them. In your email you might include questions or ideas that you'd like us to take up during the meeting. If there are materials to download from the course "My Space" that can't be send as attachments, let us know.

Also, I encourage you to familiarize yourself with the Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory (HASTAC) website and group. Take a look at some of the project descriptions posted on the site; they might provide useful models or inspiration. As you write your proposals and eventually your research, you might think of this scholarly community, and/or some of the digital humanities sub-groups affiliated with the site, as one of your target audiences. In fact, you might be interested in joining the organization and, once your practical project is nearly compete, posting information about it there.

I suspect the HASTAC network would be pleased to have more members from outside North America, and through the forum you might just make some valuable professional contacts.

Finally, please bring an extra hard copy of your paper for me to keep.

See you in the a.m.

Studs Terkel, 1912-2008

I'd see Studs around the city periodically, out and about at events when he was well into his 90s. He was a progressive force for good and until pretty recently it seemed like he would live forever. Studs was a true patriot, populist, and a genuine journalist, someone who believed in America's egalitarian promise enough to listen, thoughtfully, to everyone - including those who are down and out. It's a shame Studs will miss Obama's victory, since he worked so tirelessly during his 96 years to keep hope alive in America. You won't be forgotten, Studs, especially not in your beloved Chicago.

French Theory in America

TOPICS IN LITERATURE, CRITICISM & THEORY:
FRENCH THEORY IN AMERICA

Aim:
From the late sixties to the end of the twentieth century, a disparate group of French intellectuals greatly influenced Anglo-American arts and culture. Once imported to and disseminated in US universities, philosophical ideas and writing by figures such as Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari came to exert tremendous force both inside and out of the American academy. Rather quickly, a diverse and radical body of thinking was codified, first as intellectual movements (e.g., structuralism, deconstruction, poststructuralism) and eventually as simply “French theory.”

This course studies the reception of French theory in the US. Our aim will be to understand why and how it became such an integral part of American culture, shaping academic disciplines (especially literary theory, cultural studies, and media studies), sociocultural trends (e.g., identity politics, new historicism), and artistic practices (minimalism, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry, surfiction).

In assessing French theory’s American influence, we will consider how it has been interpreted differently in the US and France, trace iterations of significant concepts (différance, discipline, abjection, simulation, minor literature, etc.), and evaluate the inflection of these concepts by US-based literary scholars (e.g., Edward Said, Judith Butler, Stanley Fish, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Walter Benn Michaels, J Hillis Miller, Gayatri Spivak, Fredric Jameson) and writers (Charles Bernstein, Raymond Federman, Shelley Jackson, Lynne Tillman, Gerald Vizenor, David Foster Wallace, Curtis White). Not least, we will speculate about theory’s relevance to twenty-first-century praxes.

Teaching Method: Short lecture followed by moderated seminar discussions and weekly presentations by seminar participants.

Requirements: One class presentation (5 pages), annotated bibliography (10–12 secondary sources), research paper (12–16 pages).

Reading List:
Cusset, Francois. French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States. Trans. Jeff Fort. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 2008.

Deleuze, Gilles. Essays Critical and Clinical. Trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1997.

Derrida, Jacques. Limited Inc. Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1988.

Foucault, Michel. The Foucault Reader. Ed. Paul Rainbow. New York: Pantheon, 1984.

Harari, Josué, ed. Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1979.

Leitch, Vincent, eds. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. New York: Norton, 2001.

An Old School Professor Asks Students to Think

The Thinker is an inspiring profile of a philosopher at Auburn University who has resisted the imperative to instrumentalize higher education, which is undermining humanities departments and cheapening the value of college degrees. A true practitioner of the liberal arts, Professor Jolley challenges his students, first-year undergraduates included, to think through difficult philosophical problems with him. In the process, his best students learn to do philosophy, which they come to appreciate and understand as a way of living, curiously, in the world, rather than just another subject to be mastered on the way to a degree.

1500 characters max. how many hours revising?

Reading & writing are migrating to digitally networked environments; literature & literary studies must not be left behind. How are scholars & writers creating a sustainable literary presence within noisy, image-dominated media ecologies? My 3-part project analyzes & participates in the literary field’s evolution within an emerging, collaborative, network culture.

Editorial: ebr (www.ElectronicBookReview.com), a literary journal & networked database, hosts critical exchanges between distributed scholarly & artistic communities interested in digital writing & publishing, interface design, & cultural critique. I coordinate clusters, assign essays, & edit peer-to-peer-reviewed articles. Goals: keep conversations current, moderate debates, & solicit innovative scholarship.

Archival: Contribute to Archive-It, a curatorial experiment designed to preserve & disseminate the 1st generation of e-lit. On the Electronic Literature Organization’s international research team, I select works, write evaluations, & develop an e-lit lexicon. Over time, these efforts will provide a profile of the emergent e-lit field & scholarly tools for studying it.

Critical: Applying my editorial & archival expertise, I examine how changing communication systems affect world-literary formations (literary networks & innovative fictions) in the network society. Connect affective & ideological redistributions of the sensible to sense-making techniques in digital and printed networked narratives.

Seeking Satiric Sublimation

Is Jon Stewart the most trusted man in America? Personally, I'd have to vote for Bill Moyers or Studs Terkel, because they're better listeners during interviews. But then, of course, there's Stephen Colbert, who liberates the truth so it may soar like an American eagle!

As an avid reader addicted to dozens of online journals and newspapers, despite being disgusted by the onslaught of lies, propaganda and stupidity reported (and too often uncritically repeated) there, I think I'd fit in perfectly at the "Daily Show."

The day begins with a morning meeting where material harvested from 15 TiVos and even more newspapers, magazines and Web sites is reviewed. That meeting, Mr. Stewart said, “would be very unpleasant for most people to watch: it’s really a gathering of curmudgeons expressing frustration and upset, and the rest of the day is spent trying to mask or repress that through whatever creative devices we can find.”

Could I get away with running a media studies course based on this model? Finding a humanities department that could afford 15 TiVos would be hard, but still...

Original Intent

Patriarchy and Pathology

Last night at dinner I asked Ira how one might productively analyze the Joseph Fritzl case in terms of systemic, rather than subjective, violence. (Yes, we do have dinner conversations like this. Whaddya expect? We're both PhDs in literature.) Ira's response: begin by looking at the way the Austrian State's patriarchal biases effectively enabled Fritzl to commit his crimes. The State, for instance, repeatedly ignored his daughter's attempts to run away from home, even though her father had a record as a sex offender. Ira's hypothesis is corroborated by "Joseph Fritzl's fictive forebears," a TLS essay, the gist of which is this: Symptomological analyses of Austrian literature, including Freud's case studies, suggest a systemic sociocultural tendency to indulge abusive patriarchs while disregarding patriarchy's victims, primarily women and children.

Will the minnestoa review Survive?

Marc Bosquet reports on his blog and at The Chronicle of Higher Education that the minnesota review's days may be numbered due to budget cuts that"quality managers" at Carnegie Mellon Univeristy want to impose on the journal.

It would be a shame if the minnesota review closed shop. (Full disclosure: The mr has published my work.) Could Williams move to another university and take the minnesota review with him? Many public U's are hurting financially right now, it's true, but surely there's a shrewd dean somewhere who can recognize that hiring Williams and funding the mr would be a great opportunity to increase their English department's profile - for a reasonable price.

It's great that Jameson, Felski, Berube, Menand, etc. went to bat for the mr, but maybe it's time to call in Stanley Fish. As a specialist in contract law and the former head of Duke UP, I would think that Stan the Man could - and probably would - negotiate a sweet deal for the mr and Jeffrey Williams. In fact, if Fish was still the Dean of LAS at UIC, I'd ask him myself if it would be possible to bring the mr to UIC's English Department. It already hosts two fine critical journals, ebr and Mediations. Why not one more?

Part of the problem is that editorial work is not properly valued in academia. Editorial work is absolutely necessary for the publish-or-perish model to survive, but the time-intensive labor (too much of which is effectively outsourced) required to put out a quality publication is invisible, and editing is treated more like service than research, which is a serious mistake. Faculty and grad students need to make it clear that the editorial infrastructure needs to be maintained in order for the system to function.

Open Humanities Press

With the current economic recession likely to result in budget cuts for cash-strapped university presses, the appearance of the Open Humanities Press could not come at a better time. More ventures like the OHP will be needed if the current "crisis" in academic publishing is to be resolved in a manner that doesn't pressure scholars to conform to the profit-driven dictates of the market. The OHP's Editorial Advisory Board is impressive, and the cultural capital these scholars have earned should help to legitimize digital-publishing initiatives in the eyes of those academics and administrators inclined to value printed monographs more than digitally produced texts.

Unfazed

After Identity, Politics

Thank you Lorrie Moore for rejecting the Clintonistas' sentimental appeals for female votes by reminding us of the Clintons' conservative political record and thank you even more for stating what no male educator dares to say in a public forum:

The children who are suffering [most] in this country, who are having trouble in school, and for whom the murder and suicide rates and economic dropout rates are high, are boys — especially boys of color, for whom the whole educational system, starting in kindergarten, often feels a form of exile, a system designed by and for white girls.

Pre-election discussions should be about material issues (rising inequality, a rotting infrastructure, health care, the cost of war, etc.) not about sentimental symbolic issues (role models). It's the 21st century people -- time to move beyond the identity politics that have paralyzed the American left.

Merry Pranksters

Anarchism antifamily? The Target manager obviously doesn't know the Traverses.

Somebody tell these merry pranksters to shopdrop some Pynchon (Vineland and Against the Day) in Aisle 3, pronto. Make sure the books are prominently placed, please. Ideally, they'll be obstructing Oprah's mag. (Glad she's endorsing Obama, but I'm still sick of seeing her bloated ego everywhere.)

At the Movies

Forget Integrity, In Politics It's Craftiness That Counts

Stanley Fish proffers a bit of sage advice, courtesy of Machiavelli and Hobbes, to US presidential candidates and the voters who will elect one of them: Craftiness -- the ability to adapt one's actions to best negotiate tumultuous real-world conditions whist giving the public appearance of consistency -- not personal integrity, better qualifies one to assume a leadership role. The so-called character test that the MSM applies to political candidates, who are ostensibly judged according to their personal integrity, won't necessarily yield the strongest leader. In fact, Fish argues, it may disqualify them from holding office:

Integrity — the quality of standing up for the same values in every situation no matter whom you’re speaking to — is probably not a qualification for navigating the treacherous and ever-shifting waters of domestic and international diplomacy. Morals strongly held may preclude the flexibility and compromise so essential to political negotiation. And if character were really everything, candidates would be judged by their relationships with family and friends (Abraham Lincoln, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton might not fare too well if that were the measure) rather than by their ability first to recognize, and then to deal with, the many problems facing the nation.

Fish is correct to emphasize flexibility over fixity when it comes to the diplomatic skills required of an effective leader. He is right, too, to reject the appeals to "character," particularly when it's assessed by the politician's private relationships. Clinton's marital infidelities and Reagan's familial conflicts are, or should be, irrelevant to voters because they don't affect the American public one whit; what ultimately matters is the president's ability to shape public policy making.

(On this count I find both Clinton and Reagan lacking.)

Fish's lesson: In short, craft before integrity, but have sufficient craft to produce integrity’s image.

Okay, craftiness is crucial, yes, but I would add that an ideal political candidate, while being flexible in terms of negotiating diplomatic solutions, should maintain a fidelity to the cause that he or she represents. I'd like to see a candidate who would remain committed to combating material inequality and poverty, but would be crafty enough to weather the predictable neoliberal attacks on those who dare to suggest that the state, as a body constituted by and for the people, has a responsibility to provide for society's least fortunate.

The problem with Fish's Machiavellian model of leadership is that it perpetuates a debilitating ethos of selfish individualism in which politicians seek, above all else, to perpetuate their reign, rather than striving to build a better society. This selfish individualistic ethos, of course, is one of the motors of capitalism, which explains why none of the "serious" candidates (in the estimation of the MSM) dare to propose the economic reforms that would overturn the neoliberal policies that have concentrated wealth in the hands of a privileged few.

One final question: Is the current Administration craftier than their bumbling figurehead, who, of course, has always sold himself as a man of integrity, would lead us to believe? That is, what if their ultimate agenda was not the neoconservative dream of establishing US hegemony in the Middle East but rather to promote the personal interests of a select group of insiders who have benefited from the instability in Iraq and the Middle East, the rising oil prices, the weakened dollar, etc.?

Freeloading

In Rainbows is Radiohead's best record in years, though it's their only release I've not bought. I feel slightly guilty about my gratis download, as the band's pay-what-you-want, online-distribution experiment deserves support. One would like to see musicians be able to sell recordings "directly" to listeners and eliminate, as much as possible, the record companies that, historically, have deprived so many artists of royalties for their labor.

Regretfully, living hand to mouth precludes any purchases that aren't absolute necessities. (I'm sure Radiohead, as class-conscious Oxford lads, have read their Jude and would understand.) Even if I had "disposable" income, it would go first to books I want to read that aren't absolutely vital for my research. But when I finally land that tenure-track job I've promised to buy tickets to see Radiohead live. I take it on faith that neither securing a job nor securing Radiohead tix is a pipe dream, however horrendous the queue for both might be.

Paul Chan: Mixing Materialism and Activism

I met Paul Chan a few years ago in NYC when I was working for the Electronic Literature Organization and he was a finalist for one of the two awards. Paul impressed me with his dynamism, and I wish I could get back to the States to attend his production of Waiting for Godot.

From a literary perspective, the move from producing morphing e-texts to staging Beckett in a New Orleans neighborhood left for dead makes complete sense. In both instances, there's a savvy literalism at work. A literalism that doesn't function, as some critics have argued, by nihilistically destroying meaning; rather, this literalism insists that although we ordinarily overlook meaning's material supports,it's senseless, and ultimately impossible, to remain always blind to the ecosystems in which meanings are enacted.


As I argue in "Senseless Resistances," the manuscript on which I'm presently working, the material resistances in the composition and the systems with which it comes into contact impede communication, generate affect, and catalyze the cognitive work required to bring the composition to life as a significant entity.

To those who would claim that such a materialist approach to literature and art is formalist, I would agree. To those who would claim that formalist approaches are inherently apolitical, I'd point to Beckett's involvement in the French Resistance or Chan's antiwar activism. Chan makes a distinction between politics (collaborative and goal specific) and art (individually produced, resistant to instrumentalized uses) that is worth retaining, if only to remind us that our lives are multi-faceted and engaging in one activity doesn't preclude another.


On a side note: Glad to see Paul rockin' the Nebraska cap, particularly after my beloved Huskers experienced such an awful football season. (The University of Nebraska Press continues to release quality books in literary studies, e.g., Nicholas Spencer's After Utopia and Marco Abel's Violent Affect, both of whom are
faculty members in UNL's English Department. If only they'd publish them in paperback.)

Puncturing the Pinhead Pundits (Who Promote Faux Patriotism)

Bill Maher mocks the ostentatious display of patriotic symbols on the grounds that these accessories simply provide cover to faux patriots, people eager to give the illusion that they're supporting the country, the troops, the military, etc. but who would prefer not to make an actual sacrifice.

Kudos to Maher for his spirited defense of Barack Obama's explanation for not wearing an American flag lapel pin (the pins have become a "substitute for true patriotism") and for calling the mainstream media, including ABC's Claire Shipman, for its blantant hypocrisy and for manufacturing faux news events. The punditocracy promotes the notion that political candidates should be judged according to nebulous and subjective criteria such as "authenticity" and "character" and candidates who don't spout the predictable platitudes the pundits and their handlers want to hear are quickly deemed "unelectable."

Thanks to Jim for e-mailing me this article. On the one hand, I'm glad to get some breathing room here in Sweden from the moronic press coverage of the US presidential race. The vacuousness of the discourse is especially apparent when you're outside looking in to the fishbowl. On the other hand, I'm fascinated by the techniques used to depoliticize the public sphere by diverting attention away from real problems that the government leaders need to confront, e.g., the rotting infrastructure, the health-care crisis, the declining standard of living, the rising debt, etc. And these are just a few of the domestic issues.

Ralph Ellison's Endless Revisions

Ralph Ellison's failure to publish a finished follow-up novel to Invisible Man during his lifetime has baffled critics and scholars of American literature. While a posthumous text, larger than Juneteenth, is imminent, the scholars who edited Ellison's volumes of writing into the forthcoming book to be published by the Modern Library suggest that Ellison's embrace of word-processing technology led Ellison to revise, repeatedly, already well-crafted sentences. Anyone fascinated as I am about how how technologies, particular the digital computer, alter the way we think and write will want to read The Invisible Manuscript, which contains something of a cautionary tale about writing with word-processing software: Computers make it easier to rework your writing, yes. But avoid the temptation to revise pepetually. Writers, particularly those with perfectionist tendencies, can get lost in syntactic detail and lose track of the larger project.