Van Gogh's Peasant Shoes

If anyone is interested, I came across this article which can provide some more context for Jameson's discussion (pp. 6-8) on Van Gogh's famous painting. I happened to see the painting in Amsterdam last year, but at the time perhaps undervalued (read: couldn't comprehend) the psychological questions that these dirty shoes raise. Enjoy!

Ghosts, Cowboys

Hiya, classmates--

I've chosen to work with a short story called "Ghosts, Cowboys," the first piece included in Claire Vaye Watkins' debut collection of short fiction, Battleborn.  In a review of the text, Antonya Nelson (for The New York Times) writes that this particular story

can be read as a literary fractal of the book over all.  The historical sits comfortably alongside the contemporary, and the factual nicely supplements the fictional.  With this beginning, Watkins sets the terms for the reader's experience of the book, establishing the recurrent concerns of the collection:  storytelling and myth-busting, knowing the past and surviving the present.

The events of "Ghosts, Cowboys" appear to have actually happened (or so says a shallow Wikipedia dip), so the author insists that the reader ask, "Why fictionalize?"  The story works in the manner of a core sample:  examine an isolated piece of real estate and plunge deep into its concentrated substance.  The target spot is Reno; the unearthed substance is its legendary inhabitants and their legacy of infamy.  Claire Watkins, author as well as narrator, understands that "the story" is "too much," yet she perseveres nonetheless to try to tell it true.

"The Return" to Dunnet Landing

Hello all, 

The primary text I've chosen to focus on this quarter is Sarah Orne Jewett’s 1896 novel, The Country of the Pointed Firs. I've selected this text specifically because, unlike many late 19^th-century American novels, I don't love it. When I first read it as an undergraduate, I found it easy to dismiss the text’s quietly subversive tone. It just doesn't have the pizazz of some of the rollicking urban novels written by Jewett's contemporaries. After rereading the novel for the second time, I can better appreciate the subtle arguments woven into the text and the controlled beauty of her prose, but I still find it difficult to define my feelings about this unique and important work. 

As Jewett writes, "The process of falling in love at first sight is as final as it is swift in such a case, but the growth of true friendship may be a lifelong affair" (5). I'm hoping to eventually become better friends with this work, at least. 

The following portion of Alison Easton’s introduction to the 1995 Penguin edition gives a brief overview of the changing critical reception of Jewett’s work and its place within the “local-color” genre.

“The scale of the changes and their speed – a mere half-century – left many Americans dislocated and bewildered. Contemporary novels by Dreiser, Norris and Crane, such as Sister Carrie, The Octopus and Maggie, address these disturbing new conditions directly. Yet the best work of Jewett, pushed until fairly recently into a backwater reserved for nineteenth-century women writers and stigmatized as ‘local color literature’, also speaks to and for her times and challenges their vision of modernity with stories which seek to connect past with the present and a continuing, though different future. The Country of the Pointed Firs is neither a quaint literary survival of an earlier New England culture nostalgically re-created as some lost domain, nor is it testimony of a moribund and marginalized world. Jewett wants to relate New England to the rest of America, not simply set them in opposition. In subtle ways she takes up and challenges the view prevailing among the new urban middle-class who believed New England to be in irrecoverable decline, and who as a result cultivated highly romanticized collective memories of an old-fashioned participatory democracy and a lost world of neighborly small townships amid farming country” (Easton viii-ix).

For a bit more context you can visit the Sarah Orne Jewett Text Project here.

I can’t wait to see everyone and get started on dissecting this interesting piece!

-Sarah

And the winner is:

Hi everyone!

For my text for this quarter's discussion, I have chosen "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" by "The Pearl" poet.

While The New York Times provides a full review of a recent prose translation of this poem, the following excerpt from that article captures what I believe is the magic of this very, very old text:

“Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” is one of the eerie, exuberant joys of Middle English poetry. The poem was created in the latter part of the 14th century by an unknown author who probably hailed from the West Midlands of England. He knew the spoken dialect of the rugged country between north Staffordshire and south Lancashire. 

The geography of the poem puts it a world away from cosmopolitan London. The sole surviving copy of the manuscript, now kept securely in the British Library, was recorded by a scribe and bound up with three other poems probably by the same creator (“Pearl,” “Patience” and “Cleanness”). Thus the author is generally known as the Gawain or Pearl poet. He was a contemporary of Chaucer and a master of our mongrel English tongue.

“Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” is a medieval romance (it inherits a body of Arthurian legends that had circulated in England for a couple of centuries) but also an outlandish ghost story, a gripping morality tale and a weird thriller. It is a sexual teaser that keeps you on the edge of your seat. It’s easy to imagine huddling around the fire to listen to it...

In Defense of the Humanities PhD

This was just posted to the Google+ community associated with a UC Humanities Research Initiative I'm running (about the humanities and work). Interesting.

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/09/in-defense-of-the-humanities-phd-its-no-crazier-than-becoming-a-journalist/279863/

Hi Everyone,

So, the text I have chosen to work with in our class this quarter is Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.  I do not consider myself a Victorianist nor am I particularly attached to the novella, but I appreciate how it seems to be infinitely interpretable both in criticism and in adaptation.  Here's a Guardian article briefly discussing Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde's interpretive history.

However, for my actual blurb, I'd like to include a quote (although really the whole article is interesting) from CSO Online which is essentially an online magazine about information security and risk. This particular article discusses online personalities and how the internet provides a way for people to lead double lives (one that they use in real life and one that they use as an online profile). What I find interesting about the article is that  more than just discussing a potential problem, the author then gives a brief sermon on how one should behave properly on the internet so that one doesn't fall into the temptation of doing what Jekyll did to his own personality.

"Can online identities really be kept private to pursue online indulgence?" . . . "People often go out of their way to hide online acts from the ones they love and lie to those who love them."

"Does being principled only mean not violating your own ethical bottom line? What if your ethical bottom line allows sending inappropriate pictures of little children? Are my principles merely reflections of federal or state law or company policy? Is that the best we can do?

More important than these objections is the fact that there is actually a better way: Surf your values. Connect your offline values and convictions with your online world. Practice virtual integrity. This means real transparency and accountability for online actions. Yes, we can still have fun and be anonymous on the Internet. But we must be wary of using browser controls, proxy servers, other privacy tools and online anonymity to feed a conscienceless shadow self or we will suffer a similar fate to that of Dr. Jekyll"

While I do not appreciate the article's moralizing tone or the rather simplistic interpretation of Dr. Jekyll, considering that one of the major forums for this class is an online blog, perhaps it's something we should all think about. If no actual class time existed during which we could all congregate in each other's physical presence, what would stop anyone here from presenting the persona he/she wants everyone to see, rather than who he/she actually is?

-Lee

.

Crayon enlargements of life.

Hello everyone!

I would like to spend this semester working with Zora Neale Hurston's 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God.

A few quick searches show that there exists a huge body of writing on her and her work.

Here is a concise summary of the novel from the official Zora Neale Hurston website:

With haunting sympathy and piercing immediacy, Their Eyes Were Watching God tells the story of Janie Crawford's evolving selfhood through three marriages. Light-skinned, long-haired, dreamy as a child, Janie grows up expecting better treatment than she gets until she meets Tea Cake, a younger man who engages her heart and spirit in equal measure and gives her the chance to enjoy life without being a man's mule or adornment. Though Jaine's story does not end happily, it does draw to a satisfying conclusion. Janie is one black woman who doesn't have to live lost in sorrow, bitterness, fear, or foolish romantic dreams, instead Janie proclaims that she has done "two things everbody's got tuh do fuh theyselves. They got tuh go tuh God, and they got tuh find out about livin' fuh theyselves."

The critical thread that I am currently most interested in following can be summed up in an excerpt from Henry Louis Gates' afterword to the novel, "Zora Neale Hurston: 'A Negro Way of Saying'":

Part of Hurston's received heritage -- and perhaps the paramount received notion that links the novel of manners in the Harlem renaissance, the social realism of the thirties, and the cultural nationalism of the Black Arts movement

--

was the idea that racism had reduced black people to mere ciphers, to beings who only react to an omnipresent racial oppression, whose culture is "deprived" where different, and whose psyches are in the main "pathological." Albert Murray, the writer and social critic, calls this "the Social Science Fiction Monster." Socialists, separatists, and civil rights advocates alike have been devoured by this beast.

Hurston thought this idea degrading, its propagation a trap, and railed against it. It was, she said, upheld by "The sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a dirty deal." Unlike Hughes and Wright, Hurston choose deliberately to ignore this "false picture that distorted..." Freedom, she wrote in Moses, Man of the Mountain, "was something internal....The man himself must make his own emancipation." And she declared her first novel a manifesto against the "arrogance" of whites assuming that "black lives are only defensive reactions to white actions." Her strategy was not calculated to please. (189)

Gates, Henry Louis. Afterword. Their Eyes Were Watching God: A Novel. By Zora Neale Hurston. 1937. San Bernadino: The Borgo Press, 1990. Print.

I look forward to meeting you all come Wednesday!


 

PhD Placement Data

Many of you asked about this during recruitment, and an article in the Chronicle this morning had me thinking I might provide you with an update about what we're doing.

Here's the article: https://chronicle.com/article/Do-You-Know-Where-Your-PhDs/141777/

which is a spin off from the Chronicle's PhD Placement Project: https://chronicle.com/blogs/phd/

So far as I know, there's nothing done Davis wide or even HARCS wide to track PhD placement. When I started doing placement a few years back, I began generating annual reports for the department chair. This data, as I probably told you during recruitment, is thin and one would be a fool to draw conclusions from it. In a given year only like 10 people go on the market, and that's hardly a meaningful sample even over 4-5 years. So, when one year we placed 80% of our grads, that was awesome, but in the grand scheme of things, meaningless. When we have a 20 year arc to consult, maybe that will start to be statistically significant.

This summer, Levada (and I helped a little) generated a spreadsheet that contains all sorts of data from the application process (GRE scores, etc.) through to placement outcomes. We are hoping to have a grad researcher in the winter help us track down some of the students from more than 5 years ago whose outcomes we don't know.

I'm going to be asking the department graduate committee (and I'll probably want to consult the faculty too) in the spring about how to use this information as we gather it. How to disseminate it among the grads themselves is obviously a big question. We don't want to disseminate misleading information (see the meaningful stats question above), and we also don't want to disseminate privileged information (like GRE scores, etc.).

Ghetto Nerd at the End of the World

After some thought and an inspiring talk with our very own Bryan, I have decided to use Junot Díaz's The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) as my primary source. Aside from winning the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award, I think the novel is fantastical, poignant, and the prose is top-notch. Professor Díaz teaches creative writing at MIT and edits the Boston Review. 

For some general information on the novel, read the wiki, which is informative and detailed. 

A more "academic" review from Salon can be found here. The following is a brief excerpt from Kelts's review:

"The plot interweaves period chapters set in Santo Domingo with those in New Jersey and New York as if hoping to diagnose Oscar’s addiction to love and Yunior’s encroaching self-loathing via personal and political histories. Accounts of betrayals, beatings, tortures and other manifold perversions of humanity darken Dominican narratives filled with beautiful and strong women seeking love, and proud men crushed by their perceived failure to navigate a ruinous social system."

Areopagitica and the limbs of truth

I've chosen as this quarter's primary text John Milton's Areopagitica, his 1644 defense of free speech and critique of restrictive censorship laws. More about the context available here.

The blurb below is from Thomas Fulton's 2004 article "Areopagitica and the Roots of Liberal Epistemology" (English Literary Renaissance 34.1 (2004): 42-82).

"During the Civil War and Commonwealth period, England experienced a "legitimation crisis"--to use Habermas' term--in which warring factions sought to give their convictions legitimacy. New methods for making rational claims developed as a consequence. Skinner observes in Liberty before Liberalism that the vocabulary of the state of nature and Milton's use of it was "wholly foreign to Roman and Renaissance texts." This exception points to an important change in the formulation of political arguments in the 1640s and afterwards.... The new methodology focused on finding irreducible laws of human nature, often in "state of nature" models, instead of using previously established authorities. These self-consciously innovative writers use something close to Cartesian standards to gauge the accuracy of moral and political claims, but they are also interested in something quite different. Their theories of human understanding focus not on the accuracy of truth claims, but on the process by which humans obtain knowledge (48)."

All art is quite useless.

The primary text I’ve chosen to work with this quarter is Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, known outside of English departments as a disturbing image in the Art Institute of Chicago and an allusively metaphoric descriptor for everything from microbes to stock options. 

This blurb comes from the chapter “Monsters of Self-Destruction” in Barbara T. Gates’s Victorian Suicide: Mad Crimes and Sad Histories:

Like Tennyson's fictional Camelot, Wilde's portrait of fin de siècle England is of a land reeling back to the beasts, but with no hope for a second coming of a King Arthur to save it. The fantasy of Dorian Gray's portrait is not a Faustian story of a hero giving up life for knowledge, but a black fairy tale in which a spoiled boy gets his one wish — endless youthfulness and sensuality — and becomes a suicide because he cannot handle its implications. Wilde may have deserved the harsh criticism of his contemporaries, but like other Victorian creators of fictions and fantasies about monstrous selves who will to die, he discerned something deeply disturbing about his own culture. His Hallward, Dickens's Nell, Le Fanu's Jennings, Stevenson's Dr, Jekyll, and Tennyson's Balan all had "a little shadow that went along with them." That shadow was a dark, distorted other self, "a hideous hunchback," to use Matthew Arnold's paraphrase of Dr. Posey, "seated on [their] shoulders and which it was the main business of [their] lives to hate and oppose." (Arnold, 481) Often that subversive hunchback was beckoning them on toward death.

Alice

I think that I'll be using Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland as my primary work for the quarter.

The blurb here is from Common Sense Media, a site that helps parents decide whether a book or show is appropriate for their children. Consequently, the review gives a super brief overview of the book's plot but also judges what age children, if any, should be reading it.

Don't Let Me Be Lonely

Hopefully I'm going about this in the right way, but I've decided to use Claudia Rankine's Don't Let Me Be Lonely as my "primary work" for our class.  The book's subtitle reads: "An American Lyric."

Here's an article/review from BR on the book.  The reviewer has a hard time getting off the ground at first, but it gets better.

An excerpt from the book:

I don't usually talk to strangers, but it's four o'clock and I can't get a cab. I need a cab because I have packages, but it's four o'clock and all the cabs are off duty. They are making a shift change. At the bus stop I say, It's hard to get a cab now. The woman standing next to me glances over without turning her head. She faces the street where cab after cab drives by with it's lights off. She says, as if to anyone, It's hard to live now."

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The ENL200 syllabus is now on SmartSite as a pdf, and I've also reproduced it below.

Note: I still need to finish uploading all the readings, but they should be complete shortly. Except, that is, for the piece of manuscript we're going to read that is still being written. That's right: we'll be reading some brand new thought.

ENL 200 Fall 2013

Introduction to Graduate Studies in English 

M 3:10-6:00 120 Voorhies CRN 22565 

John Marx Office: 216 Voorhies

jmarx@ucdavis.edu Hours: M 1-3, by appt.

This seminar introduces Ph.D. students to graduate study in English A) by focusing on methods and methodological debates in literary study and B) by considering the state of “English” as an expert discipline. The aim of this course is to prepare new students for advanced work in the field and to orient them in the profession. We will do this by, for example, considering the close analysis of literary texts, examining how literary critics make their arguments, and asking about the status of the “literary” in the English department. You can expect to read, discuss, and write about works that exemplify and/or question important research methods and debates in literary studies.

Discussing and Writing

To succeed in this course, you will need to satisfactorily accomplish the following:

1. Read the assigned essays and participate in class discussion, which will be divided unevenly and unpredictably each week among A. rollicking discussion of the week’s reading, B. non-awkward discussion about the week’s writing, and C. exciting and informative chat with special guests.

2. Execute in adventurously expert fashion the class writing assignments, which in differing ways will require that you write weekly on the course blog (http://enl200f2013.blogspot.com). Some of your writing will be solo material that uses the scholarship we discuss on Mondays to say something smart and counter-intuitive about your self-selected primary work. Some of your writing will be collaborative, and you’ll just have to wait to hear about how that’s going to go. Throughout, your goal will be to put the scholarship we’re reading and your primary work in dialog. Do not think of one as explaining the other; allow both to argue, contest, debate. 

3. By Sunday (that is, the day before class) write a non-troll-like comment on (at least) TWO of the previous week’s posts by other people in the class. With any luck, you’ll find yourself wanting to do this anyway. In a perfect world, the blog for this class will be a lively and interesting venue that will make other grad students jealous. 

Required Readings: 

(All of these materials [which were recommended for you by the English Department faculty] are or will soon be available on the SmartSite session created for this course.)

Patterson, Lee. “Introduction.” Chaucer and the Subject of History. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1991. 3-46.

Dillon, Elizabeth Maddock. “The Secret History of the Early American Novel.” Novel 40.1-2 (2006): 77-103.

Best, Stephen. “On Failing to Make the Past Present.” MLQ 73.3 (2012): 453-74. 

Jameson, Fredric. “The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.” Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991. 1-54. 

Derrida, Jacques. “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.” Writing and Difference. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1980. 278-95.

Colebrook, Clare, “The Context of Humanism.” New Literary History. 42: 4 (2011): 701-18. 

Mbembe, Achille. “Necropolitics.” Public Culture 15.1 (2003): 11-40. 

Foucault, Michel. “The Mesh of Power.” Viewpoint Magazine 2012. http://viewpointmag.com/2012/09/12/the-mesh-of-power/

Moretti, Franco. “A Tale of Two Cities.” Atlas of the European Novel, 1800-1900. New York: Verso, 1998. 79-140.

Adam Smyth, “‘Shreds of holinesse’: George Herbert, Little Gidding, and Cutting Up Texts in Early Modern England.” English Literary Renaissance  42.3 (2012): 452-81. 

Schneider, Rebecca. “Forward - By way of other directions.” Performing Remains: Art and war in times of theatrical reenactment. New York: Routledge, 2011. 1-31. 

Anderson, Benedict. “Census, Map, Museum.” Imagined Communities. Rev. Ed. New York: Verso, 1983. 163-85.

Raley, Rita. “Datavalence and Countervalence.” Raw Data is an Oxymoron. Cambridge: MIT P, 2013. 121-46. 

Flusser, Vilém. “Line and Surface.” Writings. Ed. Andreas Ströhl. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2002. 21-34. 

Scholes, Robert. “The English Apparatus.” Textual Power. New Haven: Yale UP, 1985. 1-17. 

Liu, Alan. “The Meaning of the Digital Humanities.” PMLA 128.2 (2013): 409-23. 

Kates, Joshua. “Against the Period.” differences 25.2 (2012): 136-64. 

Kindley, Evan. “Big Criticism.” Critical Inquiry 38.4 (2011): 71-95.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography.” Selected Subaltern Studies. Ed Guha, Ranajit and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. New York: Oxford UP, 1988. 3-32.

Armstrong, Nancy. “Gender Must Be Defended.” The South Atlantic Quarterly 111.3 (2012): 529-47.

Milian, Claudia. “Introduction: The Copiousness of Latin.” Latining America. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2013. 1-24.  

Goyal, Yogita. "Of Lost Boys and Slaves Next Door: Modern Slavery and the Transnational Reinvention of Form.” Unpublished manuscript, 2013.

Chen, Mel. “Toxic Animacies, Inanimate Affections.” GLQ 17.2-3 (2011): 265-86.

Latour, Bruno. “Networks, Societies, Spheres.” Keynote. INTERNATIONAL SEMINAR ON NETWORK THEORY. 19th February 2010. Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, Los Angeles. 1-18.

Spillers, Hortense. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics 17.2 (1987): 64-81.

Nealon, Christopher. “Affect, performativity, and actually existing poetry.” Textual Practice 25.2 (2011): 263–80.

Tompkins, Kyla Wazana. “‘She Made the Table a Snare to Them’: Sylvester Graham’s Imperial Dietetics.” Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the 19th Century. New York: New York University Press, 2012. 53-88. 

Justice, Steven. “Did the Middle Ages Believe in their Miracles?” Representations 103.1 (2008): 1-29. 

Greenblatt, Stephen. “Invisible Bullets.” 1981. Political Shakespeare. Eds. Dollimore, Jonathan, et al. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1985. 18-47.

Class Schedule:_________________________________________________________________________

Monday, September 30 Histories

Patterson, “Introduction” 

Dillon, “Secret History”

Best, “Failing”

Jameson, “Postmodernism”

_________________________________________________________________________________

Monday, 7 October Theories

Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play”

Colebrook, “Context”

Mbembe, “Necropolitics”

Latour, ““Networks, Societies, Spheres”

Special Feature: How to do Humanities Research at UC Davis 

with Roberto Delgadillo and Daniel Goldstein, Humanities Librarians

_________________________________________________________________________________

Monday, 14 October No Class

_________________________________________________________________________________

Monday, 21 October Forms

Moretti, “A Tale of Two Cities”

Smyth, “‘Shreds’”

Nealon, “Affect, Performativity, Poetry”

Anderson, “Census, Map, Museum”

Special Feature: The UC Davis PhD in English and You

with John Marx, Grad Adviser

_________________________________________________________________________________

Monday, 28 October Media

Raley, “Datavalence and Countervalence”

Flusser, “Line and Surface”  

Schneider, Forward

Scholes, “The English Apparatus”

Special Feature: English and Writing and Rhetoric

with Carl Whithaus, Director, University Writing Program

_________________________________________________________________________________

Monday, 4 November Institutions

Liu, “Meaning of Digital Humanities”

Kates, “Against the Period”

Kindley, “Big Criticism”

Foucault, “The Mesh of Power”

Special Feature: The Humanities Institute (and maybe a bit of Alt Ac)

with Molly McCarthy, Associate Director, Davis Humanities Institute

_________________________________________________________________________________

Monday, 11 November Veterans Day Holiday

_________________________________________________________________________________

Monday, 18 November Populations

Spivak, “Subaltern Studies”

Armstrong, “Gender Must Be Defended”

Milian, “Introduction”

Goyal, “Modern Slavery” 

                                                                                    

Special Feature: I Wish I Knew Then What I Know Now About Prelims and Quals

with recent survivors of the PhD exams

_________________________________________________________________________________

Monday, 25 November Relationships

Chen, “Toxic Animacies”

Justice, “Middle Ages Miracles”

Spillers, “Mama’s Baby”

Tompkins, “Graham’s Dietetics”

Special Feature: I Wish I Knew Then What I Know Now About THE MARKET

with the Job Placement Team, Gina Bloom and Colin Milburn

_________________________________________________________________________________

Monday, 2 December

Special Feature: Your Future Revealed

_________________________________________________________________________________

Please get up to speed with the MOOC hype

If you're not yet, here's your update: http://pandodaily.com/2013/09/13/moocs-and-the-gartner-hype-cycle-a-very-slow-tsunami/

You're going to have to worry about this. Me too. I won't be retired in ten years.....

This is getting a good deal of play on the internets. What do you think? Helpful or intimidating? I guess those aren't mutually exclusive....

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/09/16/columbia-professor-raises-some-eyebrows-his-frank-approach-would-be-doctoral

Dear Students,

I started a blog roll (look to the right and you'll see it). I have reserved admin powers for myself, which I think means I'm the only one who can do things like add new academic blogs to said blog roll. BUT: you should send me links. Regardless of discipline, what academic blogs out there do you find interesting?

JM