Correction

I recently went through an experience best described as a "correction." After doing very well in making progress on writing my Lorca book (2) I came up against a few months in which I did very little. Now I am back on track with a plan to complete it by June or July.

My next two projects will be

a) a theoretical but pragmatic book on verse translation

b) a book on Spanish prosody

I plan to take the rest of 2014 off from active writing in order to let my ideas develop just through readings and thought, then begin either (a) or (b) in 2015.

The correction is like a stock market correction, where prices go down in order to bring things into focus. My therapist gave me this metaphor. It's a setback or relapse that might have a strategic importance in the long run. It might even be a good thing though I've suffered quite a bit in other ways during those months.

Anxiety

Maybe the reason I object to anxiety as a trope in cultural studies is because I suffer from an anxiety disorder which can be extreme at some moments. I suffer from GAD, or General Anxiety Disorder. The treatment I am doing now say that you shouldn't struggle against anxiety, or manage it, but accept it with compassion toward yourself. I am in the early stages of this, but the idea is that the main problem is trying to control or eliminate anxiety rather than accepting as a normal part of life. This attempt to control could work in the short term but creates a feedback loop that ends up making you a slave to your fear of the fear itself. Instead, you have to meditate and do other mindfulness techniques so you can accept your feelings as what they are.

But anxiety in cultural studies is about things people don't like. So, instead of saying people don't like the loss of social and cultural distinctions, you say they are anxious about it. Maybe so, but the claim seems larger, more mysterious that way, but how do you prove an anxiety (as opposed to simply something that bothers you or you don't like)? It's a kind of psychoanalysis of culture, but where the problem might be evident and on the surface rather than concealed.

I guess there are cultural "anxieties" and fears too. What I object to is the almost automatic and somewhat thoughtless recourse to this trope.

The Broad Question and the Narrow Question

I told my undergraduate students two days ago that to do research you need to have a research question you are trying to answer.

But aren't there really always two questions? One is a relatively narrow question, like how do translators approach the work of songs, when their aim is to produce a version that can be sung? To narrow it down more, you'd have to have a corpus of materials to work with. It can't just be songs and translators in general!

Then there are broader questions that you are trying to get at through the posing of a narrower question. Those are really what you are after, right? Because the answer to a narrow question could be trivial, and provoke a "so what?" response.

But just try investigating a broad question without narrowing down the specific ways in which you are approaching it. You won't really have a leg to stand on. It won't be delimited enough.

So what is really at stake is the ability to work on those two levels at once, drawing significant conclusions from the answers to more narrowly posed questions.

So the two questions really collapse back down into one. Take my very large question posed yesterday: how does the response to mass culture in the academic field cultural studies relate to the response to mass culture in postmodern writers and artists? It is too broad unless we specify how we are defining these two movements, but its implications and significance are clear in any case.

I should have cited my inspiration, which was a Facebook post by Robert Archambeau saying that he had a hard time teaching Bourdieu's Distinction anymore because students no longer had that hi / lo split as part of their experience. That made me think that both cultural studies and postmodernism (in the narrow sense of postmodernism as melange of pop and high culture) are responding to a paradigm that has ceased to be. I think that needs to be part of a chapter I am completing this month on the unsettling of cultural hierarchies.

Stunningly Obvious

Here's stunningly obvious connection to explore: postmodernism and cultural studies as two movements in response to mass culture. One arising out of Raymond Williams's Marxism, the other out of Frank O'Hara and pop art. You could say Frank O'Hara meets the late Stuart Hall. The hi / lo cultural divide gets bridged in different but parallel ways in the postwar period, by an academic movement and by an artistic one.

The best ideas are often very obvious and true ones. If someone has done this already that's good. If not, you can use it as your dissertation topic.

You're welcome.

Dealbreakers: the department's perspective

We have just done some campus visits and this article does not ring true in the least. I realize it's supposed to be a semi-humorous caricature, but, really, the notion that people are losing out on jobs because of trivial sartorial missteps is really not true in the least. If that were true, then nobody would get a job at all. I'm sure I've done badly on campus visits. On one, at the height of my depressive years (or the low point, maybe), I found myself unable to speak Spanish coherently. I've also done well on visits and not gotten the job, because Teresa Vilarós and Brad Epps got the job instead. They are very job-worthy people, better suited to those departments than I was. Here are the real dealbreakers:

1) You aren't interested in the job. Did you ask a lot of detailed questions about what it was like to work with out students? Are you interested in us, our research? Can you answer the question, why do you want to come?

2) You are the wrong kind of candidate for the position. I would not fit in well at a SLAC, and my one campus visit to such a place was pleasant, but I doubt I would been the best person for them. Someone excellent in a SLAC might not do well in an R1. A very nice guy we interviewed once, gave a job talk that from which I didn't learn a single thing, but that would have been great for undergraduates.

3) You don't speak the language well enough, for a foreign language dept.

4) You are not interesting and dynamic.

5) Your research talk was good enough, but someone else's was simply better. Here it is not a "dealbreaker," but simply that someone else is smarter and more engaging.

6) Rebecca Schuman dismisses the concern that you have to work with the person for many years, but come on. It is not just a matter of the few hours a week when you are face to face, but having wonderful colleagues, as I do, is wonderful, and having bad colleagues, as I did at Ohio State, is hell. I'm sure my colleagues wish, too, that I were as wonderful as they are. She also says that academics hate each other anyway. That may be true, but why start with that assumption? In one case I am familiar with, where someone was known to be a problem, and was hired anyway at the senior level (initials MM), the person was a problem and did best to tear the dept. apart.

7) You seem to have no clue about teaching.

Politeness

Politeness in refereeing favor requests.

Literary Critic

One thing I've noticed in campus visit talks and dissertations lately is the use of identifying tag phrases like "As literary critic Marjorie Perloff has argued..." Why do people do this? Is this being taught explicitly to grad students? It is highly annoying. If you are quoting people in your own field (literary / cultural studies) you don't need to identify them with a tag. You can reserve those phrases if you really need to identify the person. Say, you are quoting an economist in literary studies, or the identifying information is relevant or interesting in some way. Otherwise it is pure Dan Brown.

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