Pretty much, if you want to do literary criticism and publish articles in that field, you can. You don't need a license; everyone is "self-appointed." People who don't want to - make excuses about why they can't. Time? Money? People who have non-academic jobs often pursue expensive and time-consuming hobbies, so it seems strange to say that an academic who is supposed to be doing 40% research does not have time to do much of any. The lifestyle of the professor at an R1 is pretty easy if you don't do research. You can make it hard for yourself, by undertaking many other non-research projects that are immensely time-consuming.
The biggest hurdle might be not having access to a good academic library.
Monday, January 31, 2011
Saturday, January 29, 2011
The Edited Collection
If you can throw together an edited collection, that's a good way of getting well-known, as long as it doesn't take away from your monographs and reviewed articles. If you were an unknown theorist and could become the editor of a book about some new hot theoretical trend in the 80s or 90s, you could get a reputation without having actually produced much theory of your own.
The problem with edited collections, I've heard, is having to work with a variety of authors with different attitudes toward prose-style and deadlines. The advantage is that you can have a book in your name without having to write the thing yourself. It's more cost-effective than editing a journal, where you do more work over a longer period of time, but don't have a book in your name no matter how long you've been the editor.
Editing more than one collection before you have a monograph is a mistake, according to the conventional view (with which I agree). The collection might be even more valuable to the field than your monograph is, but you need to show how you cultivate your own garden.
Edited collections are like any other book in that they can be excellent or not so excellent, but the difference is that they are likely to be less consistent in quality than monographs, especially if they are proceedings of an event (a conference or symposium) that haven't been individually refereed.
A tenure committee might count an edited collection as the equivalent of about 3 articles. 1/ 1/2 for the introduction, 1 1/2 for the editing. If the collection is super visible or influential, however, then that adds to its value. An edited collection on a single author or narrow subject is not likely to be influential. A book that appears to be a reference book might be visible, but does not quite seem as original. This judgment would depend on whether it was seen as a guide for undergraduates (unprestigious) or a book that introduces a new way of envisioning an entire field (prestigious).
The problem with edited collections, I've heard, is having to work with a variety of authors with different attitudes toward prose-style and deadlines. The advantage is that you can have a book in your name without having to write the thing yourself. It's more cost-effective than editing a journal, where you do more work over a longer period of time, but don't have a book in your name no matter how long you've been the editor.
Editing more than one collection before you have a monograph is a mistake, according to the conventional view (with which I agree). The collection might be even more valuable to the field than your monograph is, but you need to show how you cultivate your own garden.
Edited collections are like any other book in that they can be excellent or not so excellent, but the difference is that they are likely to be less consistent in quality than monographs, especially if they are proceedings of an event (a conference or symposium) that haven't been individually refereed.
A tenure committee might count an edited collection as the equivalent of about 3 articles. 1/ 1/2 for the introduction, 1 1/2 for the editing. If the collection is super visible or influential, however, then that adds to its value. An edited collection on a single author or narrow subject is not likely to be influential. A book that appears to be a reference book might be visible, but does not quite seem as original. This judgment would depend on whether it was seen as a guide for undergraduates (unprestigious) or a book that introduces a new way of envisioning an entire field (prestigious).
Friday, January 28, 2011
The Monograph as Standard
Conventional wisdom says you need the book for tenure at a research 1 university; that's the gold standard in certain humanities fields. (Two books for promotion to full professor.) Conventional wisdom also questions this standard, since publishers are cutting back on the number of monographs they put out.
If we move to a system de-emphasizing books, we will have to move toward an even greater reliance on peer-reviewed articles. This system is also problematic, because competition for the best journals might become even more intense. In the Humanities journals are not ranked as clearly, with clear consensus about #1, #2, #3. In some fields there are clear expectation that you need to publish a certain number of articles in the top 2 or 3 journals to get tenure. If we remove the monograph requirement, will we move to a model like this? Then any imperfections in the peer-review system would be exaggerated, because all it would take is for one of the three to be poorly managed to throw a wrench in the works.
My colleagues coming up for tenure have still been able to publish books. I've still been able to publish books. We could argue about just how difficult it is to publish a book before we would have to abandon the 1-book rule, but we are not necessarily there right now.
A book is not just an article x 5 or x 6. It is qualitatively different, requiring a larger conception of things and a more sustained effort. Some say articles can be just as influential, but then a book containing several previously published articles is even better, right? Books receive reviews; articles do not.
The argument that people who only write brilliant articles, and never books, write more brilliantly than those who write both, finds support in the work of a very few brilliant scholars, like the late John Kronik. It is hard to set that up as a model, though, because that is the exceptional case and not the norm. The most influential humanities scholars write books and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. If we say you can get tenure without a book, we are saying you aren't going to be all that influential.
If we move to a system de-emphasizing books, we will have to move toward an even greater reliance on peer-reviewed articles. This system is also problematic, because competition for the best journals might become even more intense. In the Humanities journals are not ranked as clearly, with clear consensus about #1, #2, #3. In some fields there are clear expectation that you need to publish a certain number of articles in the top 2 or 3 journals to get tenure. If we remove the monograph requirement, will we move to a model like this? Then any imperfections in the peer-review system would be exaggerated, because all it would take is for one of the three to be poorly managed to throw a wrench in the works.
My colleagues coming up for tenure have still been able to publish books. I've still been able to publish books. We could argue about just how difficult it is to publish a book before we would have to abandon the 1-book rule, but we are not necessarily there right now.
A book is not just an article x 5 or x 6. It is qualitatively different, requiring a larger conception of things and a more sustained effort. Some say articles can be just as influential, but then a book containing several previously published articles is even better, right? Books receive reviews; articles do not.
The argument that people who only write brilliant articles, and never books, write more brilliantly than those who write both, finds support in the work of a very few brilliant scholars, like the late John Kronik. It is hard to set that up as a model, though, because that is the exceptional case and not the norm. The most influential humanities scholars write books and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. If we say you can get tenure without a book, we are saying you aren't going to be all that influential.
Thursday, January 27, 2011
Prosaic Diction
To express a really distinctive, fresh idea, you need a really precise sense of what words mean. If you reach for a word and pull the wrong one off the shelf, your idea is likely to sound like everyone else's. Don't say pliant when you mean labile, in other words. When you fall back too often on pretentious but ill-used vocabulary, your reader will tune out, stop paying close attention.
Individuality, then, is not using words in new and unique ways, but using them in the way everyone else should, but doesn't. I knew a guy who wrote that, if a certain poet had not meant his poems to be read in order, he would have chosen a way "more innocuous" than Roman numerals to arrange them. But Roman numerals never hurt anyone. What this person meant to write is "less conspicuous."
Another scholar I knew would write the same kind of sentence to describe any poet, like "So-and-so uses poetic imagery to explore basic life issues." This is a parody, but I could give you real examples almost as bad. If you took away the name of the poet, you would have to say that the sentence is true of virtually any poet who every wrote.
Prose should be tactful, sensitive, responsive, astute, precise. Expression comes from precision.
Individuality, then, is not using words in new and unique ways, but using them in the way everyone else should, but doesn't. I knew a guy who wrote that, if a certain poet had not meant his poems to be read in order, he would have chosen a way "more innocuous" than Roman numerals to arrange them. But Roman numerals never hurt anyone. What this person meant to write is "less conspicuous."
Another scholar I knew would write the same kind of sentence to describe any poet, like "So-and-so uses poetic imagery to explore basic life issues." This is a parody, but I could give you real examples almost as bad. If you took away the name of the poet, you would have to say that the sentence is true of virtually any poet who every wrote.
Prose should be tactful, sensitive, responsive, astute, precise. Expression comes from precision.
Is Peer Review Oppressive? (II)
The more subtle argument is that scholars might tailor their work to make it more acceptable to the hypothetical peer reviewer, censoring themselves, or else choose less risky, less polemical stances and research programs. They might be afraid to take on established scholars in their fields. Peer review is oppressive, then, because it subjects younger scholars to a system in which they must conform to established opinion.
My first response is that this is not a problem with peer review per se, but with any kind of system for judging scholarship, as long as it's other, more senior scholars who are doing the evaluating.
Secondly, I think that young academics want to be conformist, more or less. They want to join a community of scholars. To do so they must exercise a certain tact, paying homage to the existing consensus, insofar as it is worthy of respect (even if possibly mistaken). The argument I pose above assumes that everyone wants to be a polemicist rather than to get ahead by jumping on the bandwagon. Is there anything wrong with scholarship being gregarious?
Now since I myself am a polemicist, sometimes going against received opinion, I have to say that some of my controversial work was accepted by very good journals. Hispanic Review wanted my two most argumentative articles, and not the five or six other ones I have sent them. So if scholars are afraid of being polemical, maybe they are mistaken about what the consequences will be.
Also, it seems to me that if you want to be polemical, you have to accept the consequences. You cannot argue against everyone else and then turn around and wonder why your view is not immediately welcomed. Ultimately, originality will be more valued than agreement. If someone writes a book to refute my views, as someone did, then I have to say that at least it's my ideas that are in dispute, not someone else's. It's hard to get upset about that.
The academy sometimes rewards originality and risk-taking, and sometimes rewards mere competence and conformity to received opinion. All of us are somewhat ambivalent about how much originality we really want, so that the same person who claims that peer review can stifle creativity might turn around and stifle someone's creativity in a peer review. Oppression, though, is the wrong concept to apply here. It's more a question of ambivalence, I think.
My first response is that this is not a problem with peer review per se, but with any kind of system for judging scholarship, as long as it's other, more senior scholars who are doing the evaluating.
Secondly, I think that young academics want to be conformist, more or less. They want to join a community of scholars. To do so they must exercise a certain tact, paying homage to the existing consensus, insofar as it is worthy of respect (even if possibly mistaken). The argument I pose above assumes that everyone wants to be a polemicist rather than to get ahead by jumping on the bandwagon. Is there anything wrong with scholarship being gregarious?
Now since I myself am a polemicist, sometimes going against received opinion, I have to say that some of my controversial work was accepted by very good journals. Hispanic Review wanted my two most argumentative articles, and not the five or six other ones I have sent them. So if scholars are afraid of being polemical, maybe they are mistaken about what the consequences will be.
Also, it seems to me that if you want to be polemical, you have to accept the consequences. You cannot argue against everyone else and then turn around and wonder why your view is not immediately welcomed. Ultimately, originality will be more valued than agreement. If someone writes a book to refute my views, as someone did, then I have to say that at least it's my ideas that are in dispute, not someone else's. It's hard to get upset about that.
The academy sometimes rewards originality and risk-taking, and sometimes rewards mere competence and conformity to received opinion. All of us are somewhat ambivalent about how much originality we really want, so that the same person who claims that peer review can stifle creativity might turn around and stifle someone's creativity in a peer review. Oppression, though, is the wrong concept to apply here. It's more a question of ambivalence, I think.
Wednesday, January 26, 2011
Is Peer Review Oppressive?
I hear people complain about peer review. Here is my perspective.
First, the complaints:
*It stifles creativity and innovation, because really innovative work might get rejected if it breaks with the consensus of the field. It promotes "group-think."
*Some peer reviewers are slow, nasty, or not very good readers.
*It is too competitive. Not everyone can get into the top journals.
Now, my experience. In the cases of journals that use peer reviews and give the reports to the authors, I have had only one reviewer in my entire career who was unfair in an arbitrary way. I disagreed with some opinions of reviewers, but that's just life. Not everyone is going to agree with me all the time; how boring would that be! I never felt I was penalized for being too innovative or original. I do consider myself to be original, and have had no problems publishing tons of articles.
Journals that reject articles without giving any substantive comments might be using peer review, but they are using it wrong. Hispanic Review used to just send your article back to you in 10 days, with no comment. I've been accepted and rejected by them throughout the years.
I've had articles accepted as is with no changes requested. This is also not a good use of peer review, because no matter how good an article might be, there is always something that can be improved. In some cases, these were invited submissions. If your work is half-way decent, you will get invitations, and most of those articles are accepted and count almost the same as refereed articles, if the journal is one that is normally refereed. That's another way of getting around the oppression, but at the cost of not having peer reviewers save you from yourself.
In my experience on the other side of the ledger, I am very fast, I try to give my best impartial judgment and avoid all ethical conflicts of interest. The hardest articles to review are those closest to one's own work, where you have a particular stake in one side of a debate. I have been told by particular authors and editors that my comments are useful in revision. I recommend a fair number of "revise and resubmits" and have seen quite a few articles successfully into print.
If an article really makes me see a canonical author in a new light, I am tremendously grateful.
Rejected articles are all unhappy in the same way, to cite Tolstoy in reverse. Excellent articles make you see something distinctive in the material they treat. They tell you why Machado is different from Jiménez. Bad articles are generically bad; they go through the motions of presenting information, but they don't have a strong thesis and a convincing argument. Prose is often an issue.
As a reader of excellent scholarly journals, peer review also works for me, in that well-edited journals are actually better than internet sites masquerading as journals that publish just about everything they get. I may not love or be interested in every article, but I can usually see why they were accepted.
So peer review works for me on all three sides of the process. (The fourth side I don't know about first-hand, because I am not the editor of a journal, but my spouse is, and she makes it work for her by choosing reviewers who do a good job. Most authors do not complain.) I could have had an article wrongly rejected, and I could have wrongly rejected an article, but I don't think that has happened in more than 5% of cases. I don't think I've every mistakenly accepted an article. I've never said to myself, "I shouldn't have accepted that one."
I don't know who these original scholars are who have been oppressed by peer review. Aren't the top scholars in my field influential because of their originality? I guess there could be scholarly geniuses languishing in obscurity who are even more original and just haven't been able to get their ideas out there.
No. I don't think so.
***
In my experience, scholars who work hard enough, even without being particularly brilliant or original, are able to get published. It might not be PMLA, but it will be a legit publication.
***
The notion that peer review stifles originality is curious, in that we don't really want complete originality, but work that pushes an existing debate in a new direction. The system rewards meaningful advances based on previous knowledge. I think, in fact, that the system is right to do so. But what do I know? I'm just a part of this system myself.
First, the complaints:
*It stifles creativity and innovation, because really innovative work might get rejected if it breaks with the consensus of the field. It promotes "group-think."
*Some peer reviewers are slow, nasty, or not very good readers.
*It is too competitive. Not everyone can get into the top journals.
Now, my experience. In the cases of journals that use peer reviews and give the reports to the authors, I have had only one reviewer in my entire career who was unfair in an arbitrary way. I disagreed with some opinions of reviewers, but that's just life. Not everyone is going to agree with me all the time; how boring would that be! I never felt I was penalized for being too innovative or original. I do consider myself to be original, and have had no problems publishing tons of articles.
Journals that reject articles without giving any substantive comments might be using peer review, but they are using it wrong. Hispanic Review used to just send your article back to you in 10 days, with no comment. I've been accepted and rejected by them throughout the years.
I've had articles accepted as is with no changes requested. This is also not a good use of peer review, because no matter how good an article might be, there is always something that can be improved. In some cases, these were invited submissions. If your work is half-way decent, you will get invitations, and most of those articles are accepted and count almost the same as refereed articles, if the journal is one that is normally refereed. That's another way of getting around the oppression, but at the cost of not having peer reviewers save you from yourself.
In my experience on the other side of the ledger, I am very fast, I try to give my best impartial judgment and avoid all ethical conflicts of interest. The hardest articles to review are those closest to one's own work, where you have a particular stake in one side of a debate. I have been told by particular authors and editors that my comments are useful in revision. I recommend a fair number of "revise and resubmits" and have seen quite a few articles successfully into print.
If an article really makes me see a canonical author in a new light, I am tremendously grateful.
Rejected articles are all unhappy in the same way, to cite Tolstoy in reverse. Excellent articles make you see something distinctive in the material they treat. They tell you why Machado is different from Jiménez. Bad articles are generically bad; they go through the motions of presenting information, but they don't have a strong thesis and a convincing argument. Prose is often an issue.
As a reader of excellent scholarly journals, peer review also works for me, in that well-edited journals are actually better than internet sites masquerading as journals that publish just about everything they get. I may not love or be interested in every article, but I can usually see why they were accepted.
So peer review works for me on all three sides of the process. (The fourth side I don't know about first-hand, because I am not the editor of a journal, but my spouse is, and she makes it work for her by choosing reviewers who do a good job. Most authors do not complain.) I could have had an article wrongly rejected, and I could have wrongly rejected an article, but I don't think that has happened in more than 5% of cases. I don't think I've every mistakenly accepted an article. I've never said to myself, "I shouldn't have accepted that one."
I don't know who these original scholars are who have been oppressed by peer review. Aren't the top scholars in my field influential because of their originality? I guess there could be scholarly geniuses languishing in obscurity who are even more original and just haven't been able to get their ideas out there.
No. I don't think so.
***
In my experience, scholars who work hard enough, even without being particularly brilliant or original, are able to get published. It might not be PMLA, but it will be a legit publication.
***
The notion that peer review stifles originality is curious, in that we don't really want complete originality, but work that pushes an existing debate in a new direction. The system rewards meaningful advances based on previous knowledge. I think, in fact, that the system is right to do so. But what do I know? I'm just a part of this system myself.
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
Writing: Levels of Understanding
The first level would consist of the avoidance of mechanical errors. Writing as the avoidance of mistakes in spelling, punctuation, and grammar. This low understanding of writing puts faith in simplistic rules, like avoiding the passive voice or not using wordy phrases like "the fact that." The first level is often devoted the shibboleths and zombie rules like split infinitives and sentence-adverbial "hopefully." Advice oriented toward this level of thinking is often misleading or mistaken. It is reactive and peevish. Since many bad writers overuse the passive, let's ban the passive voice! Since good writing tends to be concise, let's eliminate any unnecessary words! The Elements of Style is a good representative of this kind of thinking.
The second level would entail a more accurate understanding of language, distinguishing carefully between usage, register, and grammar. It would recognize that every good writer uses the passive when it is the best option. This level is oriented toward developing a serviceable style, clear and unobtrusive, rather than simply the avoidance of error. Joseph Williams or Claire Cooke are good writers to follow on this level.
A third level looks behind the surface of style and sees writing as the expression of views about the relation of writer to audience, language to reality. Now style is at the service of other values. Turner and Thomas address this in their book Clear and Simple as the Truth. This is a good book even for those who don't like the classic style that these two authors advocate, because it clarifies some basic issues.
The second level would entail a more accurate understanding of language, distinguishing carefully between usage, register, and grammar. It would recognize that every good writer uses the passive when it is the best option. This level is oriented toward developing a serviceable style, clear and unobtrusive, rather than simply the avoidance of error. Joseph Williams or Claire Cooke are good writers to follow on this level.
A third level looks behind the surface of style and sees writing as the expression of views about the relation of writer to audience, language to reality. Now style is at the service of other values. Turner and Thomas address this in their book Clear and Simple as the Truth. This is a good book even for those who don't like the classic style that these two authors advocate, because it clarifies some basic issues.
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