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)."