Mentoring II

The first step in a mentoring relationship is to figure out what the expectations are on each side. What does the person being mentored expect from the mentor? How is the relationship going to work in concrete terms? How often will you meet? Does the person (I refuse to write "mentee") want you to read her work and offer commentary, or offer more general advice about navigating the profession? What are the goals, aside from the obvious, inevitable answer (getting tenure)?

The mentor needs to let the person know what to expect. For example, if I am a mentor to someone in a quite different specialty, I cannot offer specialized advice. Maybe I can read your stuff, but won't have time to read every article for style. Maybe I'll be there when you need me, but we don't talk formally every month. Some people consult their mentors about important decisions only, some want a daily rapport.

Mentoring

I've been assigned a junior faulty member to mentor. I won't be able to talk specifically about my work with this person on a public blog, but it should put to test my theories about producing scholarly writing. I know what works for me, but is my experience generalizable?

Mentoring is now an official deal: everyone has a mentor assigned to them. In the old days your mentor was just your PhD advisor or someone who took you under their wing informally. Now it's institutionalized, and that's probably a good thing.

Revival of Bemsha

I am bringing Bemsha Swing back to life, with a post a day. The difference between Stupid Motivational Tricks and Bemsha is that SMT will talk about the process of scholarly writing and BS will be the writing itself--inchoate fragments of my writing.

I'm going to do in Bemsha what I've been doing here: posting once a day at 1:00 a.m. and writing the posts in advance.

Mimetic Criticism

In my own field I often get irritated by a kind of mimetic criticism which consists in explaining the poet's work according to his or her own explicit poetics. Who wants to hear Wallace Stevens explicated in a kind of Stevensian idiolect? Or José Ángel Valente explained in terms of Valente's own theories? The author can essentially control his or her reception if sh/e develops a critical metalanguage and convinces critics to use it. The critical essay then will sound like a pastiche of the author's work. Boring.

This implies that criticism entails critical distance. You can be in sympathy with the author, but you can't be beholden to a scheme derived from the work itself. Otherwise, what good are you?

Reading outside Your Field

Here is a shocking story about an academic who hasn't read a scholarly book outside her specialty since 1995. You have to think laterally to have a decent scholarly base. Imagine if I'd never read a work of art history or musicology or anthropology or philosophy in 15 years! I hope I'm interpreting this story wrong, but I don't even see how you could even do your own research without consulting books outside your narrow specialty. How could that not lead to tunnel vision? Of course, someone working in that mode is likely to produce scholarship that isn't of interest to anyone else eitherm thus perpetuating the cycle.

While I don't exactly approve of such a lack of curiosity, I do have my own limits as well. I'm sure I could develop a long list of things I haven't been curious about in the past 15 years - even if I think of myself as someone who is extremely curious about a wide range of subjects.

My sense is that we are less interdisciplinary than we think we are, if such stories are at all typical. Certainly if I had read so narrowly I would never admit to it.

Practice of the Window

It's important to distinguish between Jonathan's theoretical "window" and what Tara Gray calls "big blocks of time". The former are openings in an otherwise structured writing schedule, while the latter are illusory expanses of time, always off in the future, when the things you aren't doing now will, you imagine, get done.

I work in highly structured periods of eight weeks at a time, grouped together before and after the fall break and before and after the Easter break. Those 32 weeks are really the basis of my productivity. But in January, June and August (July is normally vacation), I relax my planning and enjoy the freedom of not having very many pressing things to do. This does sometimes allow me to produce quite a lot of prose on certain projects, and this summer, just before going on vacation, and after coming back, I did manage to draft out a paper, letting it consume me during the course of whole days, sometimes nights as well.

But now I'm back on my schedule, working on the same paper one hour at a time, and it is this work, not the work done "in the window", that will make the paper publishable. So, keep the practical function of windows in mind. You don't want your house to be all windows. It's only in the context of a larger structure that a window serves a purpose.

Choosing a Topic

Choosing a really good research topic is crucially important. The topic itself determines the success of the project, in that if well-enough chosen, it will be something you can actually do, as well as being something that needs to be done. The trick is situating a topic between broad and narrow. A very specific topic can have broad implications, or simply be a narrow question that doesn't lead to anything else.

What have been my topics?

(1) The work of the most significant Spanish poet of the postwar period - Claudio Rodríguez- with an inadequate bibliography (at the time). Mine was the first book in English on Claudio Rodríguez. It still is the first book in English on him, in fact. It will always be that. With a single author project like this, you want to make sure it's not the 18th book on Virginia Woolf if it isn't super-original in approach.

(2) My second book was on linguistic self-consciousness, what we used to call metapoetry back in the day. It was a good topic because it was fashionable--but that also makes it a bad topic because it probably hasn't aged as well. A multi-author book, with some canonical authors. This is the book of mine owned by the most number of libraries. It had the first significant writing in English on Gamoneda, the greatest living Spanish poet.

(3) My third topic was masculinity and gay identity in Spanish poetry. I published a few articles on this topic but it never became a book. It was a good topic because there was all this great queer theory being done. It was a different sort of topic for me after the first two. The downside was that I never quite made it cohere as a book and have only five articles to show for it.

(4) My fourth research project of my career began with a negative response to the "poetry of experience" in Spain and tried to account for Spanish poetry between 1980-2000. It was good because it brought me some notoriety and fame in Spain, some friendships and some animosities. This is the work with which I've had the biggest impact. My only regret is that it takes attention away from other things I've done.

(5) My fifth topic was the presence of Lorca in US poetry. That was a really good topic, perfect for me personally. It allowed me to show off my chops in two poetic traditions. It was the gazillionth book on Lorca, but it was wholly original.

(6) My current project is What Lorca Knew. The drawback is that I haven't yet been able to define it in very simple terms. It's a good topic for me, but does anyone else have a reason to care? Is it too much a repetition of 2, 4, and 5? I'm going to take the attitude that the part will justify the whole. Even if it is never a book it should be 8 articles.

There are other aborted projects along the way. A book on Valente never took shape, though I've written five articles or book chapters on him.