Is Being a Professor Non-Stressful Job?

Maybe.

First of all, this is an article written by someone who has never worked in academia. The stress varies quite a bit. Are we talking about at PI in a science lab who is also teaching courses and supervising a large staff? An assistant professor at a SLAC with a baby at home? There is no such thing as a typical professor.

The idea of summers and winter breaks off would be a nice one, but that is prime research real estate. We are not elementary school teachers.

The idea of leaving one's work in the office is also somewhat unrealistic. The office is one's brain, and it is very hard to turn that off.

The article shows no conception of academic politics, which makes the job very stressful. Not in my case, fortunately, but for many, many people.

There is one, and only one grain of truth in this article. The autonomy of being a professor makes it a great job. Being able to determine the course of one's own research. In some cases, a very wide latitude in course content as well. For me, but not for everyone.

So, yes, for me, middle-aged white full professor at research institution surrounded by very nice colleagues, the job is non-stressful. I am ambitious so I do more than I have to do to earn my salary. I am working for reputation outside my university more than for the salary itself. This added work is not stress-inducing, because it stems from my autonomy. We know that the three key ingredients for happiness are relatedness, competence, and autonomy. Academia can score high in the second two (not always) and in the 1st if you are extremely lucky.

I view the number of hours worked as somewhat of a distraction. I could work more hours and get less done. I happen to be faster at any given task than most people. If I were also efficient about the small stuff, I could work even less.

Elegy

As I was working on a chapter, it suddenly occurred to me that elegy was going to be key to my project. The difference between Valente's elegies and those of Lorca. About two minutes later, Enrique Morente started to sing "Alma ausente," a portion of Lorca's "Llanto por Ignacio Sánchez Mejías," out of my stereo. I am listening to the songs from my ipod in alphabetical order, and I am on the letter a.

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Modernism is not about form over content, but about the collapsing of the distinction. Mimetic language, with a naive theory of representation, no longer works. The unified subject collapses, and language, too, is fractured. Yet Lorca's elegy is a rather traditional one in its tropes.

“LA INDULGENCIA MAL ENTENDIDA ES LA MUERTE DE LA INTELIGENCIA”

That is the motto of a journal I review for often. In other words, the wrong way of being "nice" (a faulty understanding of generosity or indulgence) is the enemy of intelligence. You have to crack down hard on stupidity.

L'enfer, c'est l'écriture des autres

I swear, reviewing articles is a fool's errand. Having to read articles with a very naive hermeneutical position, after having refined my own so much in the past month, can be tortuous.

I have revised Jean-Paul Sartre's aphorism, "hell is other people" to say that hell is other people's writing. Not the best position for a professor to take, I understand!

Beckett vs. Juan Ramón

I kind of hate Juan Ramón Jiménez. I know he is very very good and all, in the way that all the critics describe and I could too if I were to explain all that, but I hate him. Compare "El nombre conseguido de los nombres" with Beckett's "fail better." These are two late modernisms, one conceived of as a struggle you will never win, the other as a battle you've already won definitively. Beckett and Vallejo and Lorca are in one category; Juan Ramón Jiménez in the other. Or so I'd like to argue. It may be a kind of caricature. I don't really care because I cannot read Jiménez without that caricature being shoved in my face.

So that explains a lot. You could react against the aestheticism of Juan Ramón and look really good if you were politically engaged. Or you could write really bad "essentialist" poetry like Juan Ramón's, but worse, and sound very acceptable, because that is sort of normal cursi-sounding Spanish poetry. So JRJ was the model for everyone. What was missing from the Machado / Jiménez dialectic was the poetry of fractured subjectivity, like that of Vallejo, Lorca, or Beckett.

Since November...

Since the end of November, really, I have written a 20 page introduction, finished the chapter on the duende (chapter 2), and done substantial work on Chapter 3, on Lorca's influence on postwar poetry. Really, that's more work than the rest of the sabbatical combined.

I have also looked at the Lorca and postmodern / late modern repetition chapter. It is coming along nicely. (4).

Chapter 5 will be on Lorca and queer theory. Chapter 6, on Lorca and the agenda for Lorca studies. Then I will be done. It is easy to imagine being done right after finishing something major.

Then I will decide whether to live on Tennessee or Michigan St.

More Theory Lecture Notes! Yipee! (approaches to literature)

So we've established that the central question of literary theory is "how do we understand one another?"

What are theoretical "approaches"? Barthes conceived of them as metalanguages. In other words, an approach is a language, a set of terms, that explains another language, that of literature itself. Now I think many people are tired of approaches or readings that take a theory and apply it to a text, but that is one still prevalent way of thinking about theory, and useful as a kind of shorthand for what we do.

By taking an approach and applying it, you are doing criticism but not yet doing theory. Doing theory is considering the conditions of understanding and the validity of those particular metalanguages. A critique of psychoanalysis, for example, in its hermeneutical limits, would be doing theory, but not a psychoanalytic application to a particular text.

The approach chosen has to do with several questions. Ideological approaches have to do with the question of "who gets to decide what the interpretive framework is?" Where does the authority come from? Then, from there, making judgments about the text from a particular ideological slant.

Hermeneutic approaches have to do with the metaconditions of understanding itself.

Approaches to language or form have to do with the specificity of literary language itself.

Here's the thing: all approaches have to have all these dimensions. There is always someone deciding about power and authority, there is always some determination of what makes understanding possible, and there is always, one hopes, some engagement with what makes literature literary. Of course, some criticism might seem to be ideological strip-mining or formalist wanking, but all these dimensions are present all the time, whether explicitly or implicitly. For example, an ideological critique is always based on some theory of representation and literary language. Is the ideological charge of a text conscious or unconscious; is it presented literally or through allegory? Etc...