Move along, now.

The snake is eating its tail. I originally wanted to put Chen in dialogue with Bryan’s October 19th post, “Dead Text, Living Text.” I was going to draw some pithy connections between Colebrook and Chen, then transition into problematizing some matters of semantics -- question whether the text need be “‘dead’ in and of itself” if we might instead place it along some spectrum of Chen’s animacy, etc. Maybe remind us all of the couch image since that was rather funny and it lightens the mood a bit etc. Nice clean little blog post to wrap up the quarter and let me get back to my very messy seminar papers.

Unfortunately Bryan has beat me to it (you can’t just respond to your own post, Bryan! That was not in the prompt!) and furthermore he has opened up a can of worms (you can’t talk about how a text makes you feel, Bryan! Save all this empathy and compassion for creative writing™) so stark and scary and honest that I think I need to start digging in the dirt, too.

The reason I don’t like writing these posts about my primary text anymore (sorry John, Janie, Tea Cake) is that there is something about performing this exercise again and again (and again) that sets off that muttering, mumbling little voice about the work of writing about literature.

I’ve heard a thing or two about monotony, about stakes. Everyone in my family does that sort of endlessly repetitive labor that could prompt an existential crisis if they weren’t already so damn tired. Punching holes in course readers until computers learn to do it faster, better. Picking up heavy boxes and putting them down somewhere else. Job-not-a-career-sort-of-work. Your-labor-doesn’t-define-you-sort-of-work. Pack-up-for-the-day-go-home-and-hug-your-kids sort of work. My parents do it. Lots of people do it.

But academia is supposed to be different, right? (This is really a question). There is supposed to be something intrinsically different about knowledge production as opposed to bound course reader production or picking up heavy shit production. When I write up another nice tidy little blog post about Their Eyes Were Watching God and deconstruction I am ostensibly doing labor that is in some sense meant to be outside the production/consumption machine. I’m adding to a body of knowledge. I am contributing to a discourse. One day I will enter the classroom and facilitate the development of critical thinking.

So what is this ruddy work of teasing out arguments about literature? When I finish a seminar paper, am I practicing a craft or just producing my worth? Is it too unprofessional to say that what I find enjoyable about writing papers is the illicit, biased, subjective, creative work of taking someone else’s text and making it speak a certain way? To think alongside an author, but ultimately aim to make a “creative” work of my own, a text with some literary chops of its own?

I want to support the union. I want to understand how TAs are underpaid and adjuncts are wrenched into a broken machine like some underhanded duct tape repair job. But I’m getting paid more right now than my parents ever have to do I-don’t-even-know-what. Am I a producer, a consumer, or a fraud?

So this isn’t really about Janie or Tea Cake or Chen, Colebrook, or Bryan. I just want to know if other people are struggling with the same questions. If nobody is going to read our dissertations, why bother writing them? If the importance of reading literature has something to do with bettering ourselves as people -- getting students to think for themselves, develop empathy, carry that empathy and compassion and search for that disorienting heartfull sort of feeling that reading truly good books gives us -- then why don’t we drop the pretense and focus on teaching? (This is also really a question).