The Little Professor

Textual and Material Culture in the Temple of Academe: A Proposal for the 520th Meeting of the MLA, 2413

PANEL OVERVIEW.  Archaeologists excavating a long-buried physical campus in upstate NY discovered an Office in what they termed a "miraculous" state of preservation.  They were particularly excited by the number of paper artifacts in the room, apparently in their original locations.  The Desk proved to be of especial interest:

This panel draws on cutting-edge methodology in supramodern materio-textual studies to analyze the possible ramifications of this find for our understanding of academic ritual in the Late Postmodern period (granting, of course, that in recent debates over periodization, scholars have proposed that this era should be called Presupramodern, or perhaps -Postmodern, as opposed to +Postmodern).  The panelists seek to undermine recent arguments that Offices were merely locations in which one could find academics, as opposed to sites of ritual contestation and spiritual identity formation.  We believe that this panel will raise important questions for the further study of Late Postmodern Academic culture as it relates to the production of new literary spatiotemporalities (see J. St. Joking, Thinking in the Box: "Writing" in the Age of Gravity). 

PAPER #1: "Piles upon Piles: Stacking Papers in Late Postmodern Offices" [R. U. Sure, West Moon Crater University]

I argue that Desks were uniquely productive spaces for Academic ritual subject-formation, involving as they did myriad opportunities for the creative disposition of materio-textual goods.  Drawing on the recent theoretical interventions of W. Ayout There (How to Do Things with Material Texts) and Paul Eesestop (The Paper Men), I demonstrate the links between paper arrangement and recently-discovered ritual incantations ("Do the assigned reading!" "Study for the exam!") that hint at the tensions between the liturgical aspects of Academic spiritual life and more spontaneous modes of self-expression.  In particular, I show that we must pay careful attention to this Desk's manipulation of vertical as well as horizontal space, especially the deliberate balancing of high and low stacks. 

PAPER #2: "'I'm so blue': Parsing Bluebook Culture" [Knott Reely, Intergalactic Jupiter University--Eye Branch]

This paper calls into question previous theories about the nature of Bluebooks, which have been found repeatedly in Academic Offices.  According to the Null-Belowzero Hypothesis, first adumbrated in How Blue Was My Valet and Other Academic Mysteries, Bluebooks were ritual offerings from Students to Academics, possibly sacrifices intended to facilitate good luck.  More recently, Goode Idea has argued that Bluebooks were Student intellectual autobiographies, collected by Academics as testimonials to the power of their teaching.  I, however, show that current advances in supramodern materio-textual studies conclusively demonstrate that the "writing" found in Bluebooks was an exercise in spiritual discipline required of Students by all Academics.  By "writing," Students dynamically reconstituted their frequently-oppositional subjectivities in the more complex, yet possibly more hegemonic literary structures associated with Academic thought-production, and therefore elevated themselves to a spiritual plane now commonly associated with Type Three energy beings.  Academics therefore kept such Bluebooks on hand as potent signifiers of Student transcendence. 

PAPER #3: Booking It: A New Theory of Assigned Reading [Lou Minous, graduate student, Halley's University]

Is there any concept so mysterious to the supramodern mind as "assigned reading"? In our post-pedagogical and post-textual era, the function of "assigned reading" seems beyond baffling.  Why would anyone undertake such an activity? What spiritual purpose might it serve? Building on the recent studies of the late O. H. Deere (e.g., Do It Or Else! Why the Ancient Ones Believe in Rules), I use the presence of Books on this Desk to investigate the performative aspects of ritual reading in Late Postmodern Academic culture, emphasizing the transformative potentialities of reading for both Student and Academic practitioners.  Paradoxically, archival research on newly-discovered caches of electronic communications suggests that "assigned reading" may have had its most powerful effect on Academic spiritual development when Students did not do it.  It is my contention that the various testimonials to unread "assigned reading" left by Academics, some of which achieve a remarkable rhetorical force and vitality unequalled in other fields of Academic prose, demonstrate that meditating on this phenomenon led Academics to formulate new modes of Being and, perhaps, Higher Thought. 

 

 

Finalizing

One of the more logical things to do while giving one final exam is to grade another final exam.  Efficiency, use of time, and all that.  This proceeding does, however, have certain dangers.  The instructor must refrain from shaking her fist at the heavens, grimacing, laughing, and/or any other overt expressions of disapproval.  It is also advisable to be what you could call professional.  During one final exam  of my innocent undergraduate years, I found myself watching the instructor while I briefly rested my overworked right hand.  A student had finished up early, so he took the exam, flipped it open, and started marking it.  After the first couple of pages, he stopped marking it, flipped all the way to the end to see if the student had finished, and then wrote a grade inside the bluebook cover.  (Bear in mind that I was still just resting my hand; he wasn't exactly devoting hours to the exercise, or even minutes.)  At that moment, it occurred to me that I could spend the rest of the exam expounding on Star Trek: The Next Generation instead of poetry, and still get a good grade.  I didn't, but it was tempting. 

For people who do enjoy using books for weight-lifting

The print version of Robert Elsmere will be out at the end of this month.  Only 670 pages!

In which I post somewhere else

My exceptionally deep thoughts (ahem) about Felix Gilman are here. 

For those who would prefer not to use books for weight-lifting

It would appear that Robert Elsmere may have manifested itself on Kindle. 

Robert Elsmere update

For all of you eagerly awaiting the new edition of Robert Elsmere (bated breath optional), it's finally been finished & should be available fairly soon. 

Thrill of the Chaste: The Allure of Amish Romance Novels

"The Amish romance novel," like, say, "Jewish conversion fiction," is one of those genres that strikes the uninitiated as hopelessly esoteric ("surely there can be only a few of those things")  but, in fact, attracts a wide-ranging audience, especially amongst evangelical Christians.  A subgenre of the inspirational romance, studied recently by Lynn Neal, Amish romance novels potentially reveal much about the fruitful intersections between supposedly "religious" and "secular" cultural domains.  In its approach to these novels, Valerie Weaver-Zercher's Thrill of the Chaste: The Allure of Amish Romance Novels (Johns Hopkins, 2013) is an avowed descendant of Janice Radway's Reading the Romance, a study which yokes critical analysis of romance conventions to the empirical study of reading practices--who reads the romance? How do romance readers evaluate and use these books? To what extent do they embrace or resist romance narratives? Given the subject matter, Weaver-Zercher takes things a step further: how do the Amish (of whatever affiliation) respond to these novels, given that the authors frequently have a somewhat tenuous relationship at best to Amish communities?

As Weaver-Zercher explains, the Amish novel has always existed in a problematic relationship to other narratives of American Christian culture, not least because--at least historically--many evangelicals have not believed and still do not believe that the Amish have a saving faith (although, she notes, this is changing).  In practice, this means that Amish romance novels, especially ones published in the early years of the genre, have a strong conversionist bent, as the romantic lead (or leads) transitions from a "rule-bound" to "Jesus-filled" (119) faith, from justification by good works to sola fide,  from "repressive Amishness" to "liberating evangelicalism" (118), and so on.  Those of you who have been reading my blog for the past decade or so should recognize this narrative trajectory, as it also characterizes 19th-c. conversion fiction.  (Is there anything that can't be squashed into a "works/faith" dichotomy?)  However, Weaver-Zercher posits that even in novels that don't figure the Amish as unchristian (or un-evangelical, anyway), Amish culture and belief offers what she calls a "transport" to an idyllic, faith-filled, organic location, defined by its freedom from the demands of our over-technologized  and over-sexed "hypermodernity."    Although Weaver-Zercher is at pains to acknowledge that this strategy may have some spiritual positives for evangelical readers, she also warns that it obscures the realities of Amish life (in particular, she notes, the strong commitment to pacifism [222-24]), inadvertently transforms the Amish into historical remnants rather than a living people (134), and, frequently, "risks disregarding the cultural integrity, complicated history, and sometimes recondite spirituality of the people at the center of the books" (218).    In particular, the habit of relegating the Amish to "history," to a kind of figurative pre-modernity nestled within contemporary culture, resonates both with Johannes Fabian's famous analysis of anthropological rhetoric and, again, with traditional conversionist and/or supersessionist narratives, in which one religion (Judaism, Catholicism) is summarily consigned to the past so that another (Christianity, Protestantism) can claim sole access to the fullness of divine truth.

Weaver-Zercher's analysis of how these books are produced, marketed, and received can sometimes feel a little ad hoc, especially when it comes to the question of reception; this is a by-product of her sometimes folksy tone, which on occasion makes it seem as though she is rustling up readers over the dinner table.  As she notes, the success of this subgenre makes it typical of the ultra-commercial quality of American religion (with its endless supply of inspirational gimcracks, cards, books, music, and what-have-you), and she points to the importance of social media in constructing author-reader relations and, of course, upping sales (92-96).    One of the results, she argues, is that "[f]ictional accounts of Amish life slice it into serving sizes such that readers can consume the tasty parts--Amish Christmases and midwives and brides and quilts--without needing to digest the ecclesial authority, pacifist orientation, or communal practices that stick in a modern craw" (101). Amish romances thus form part of a religious bricolage, in which readers appropriate the least challenging aspects of the Other's practices and incorporate them with an entirely different (and perhaps dissonant) lifestyle.  (The fondness of some Christians for the Kabbalah Centre is a similar case in point.)  This appropriative strategy underlines Weaver-Zercher's finding that, in general, readers find a "replica of themselves and their own ecclesial journey" (118) when reading these novels; the novels are written for those already sure of evangelicalism's rightness.  Actual Amish readers are not as harsh on these novels as one might expect: Weaver-Zercher catalogs reactions that range, in effect, from "yikes, no" to laughter to outright enjoyment, although she also concedes that there's no hard statistical data about these readers (184). Still, Weaver-Zercher, working with transactional theory, reiterates the important point that religious fiction can generate complex and resistant responses from readers; the didactic mode does not foreclose alternative or unintended appropriative meanings, no matter how hard it may try.

For those of us who hang out with nineteenth-century religious fiction, this book offers a number of helpful strategies and reminders.  First, like F. Elizabeth Gray, Lynn Neal, and others, Weaver-Zercher points out that what look like aesthetic flaws from one POV may, in fact, be a productive part of a work's spiritual or missionary project on the other (74).  Second, she reminds us that didacticism does not, in fact, produce a lockstep readership: readers of religious fiction are just as likely to resist and rewrite as they are to agree wholeheartedly with the author's position.  Third, her reminder that religious publishing is a business like any other does call us to investigate how and why certain types of religious fiction became popular (or not) at specific moments in nineteenth-century culture, and how such fiction was produced and distributed; in particular, the American habit of pirating everything in sight needs to be taken into account when we think about transatlantic influences, as well as the importance of translation when it comes to the development of Catholic fiction.  (It would be interesting to know, for example, just how much "Anglo-American" Catholic fiction was really French.)   And fourth, there's room for more archival research on readers responding to and interacting with non-anonymous religious novelists.  Did they send fan mail? Did they ask for spiritual guidance? Did they make pilgrimages to authors' homes?

Student commentary

I'm teaching Rupert Brooke's "The Soldier" today (a reliable sign that semester's end is nigh), and am once again reminded of how an English exchange student I had about three years ago reacted to the poem.

We were talking about "The Soldier"'s Wordsworthian evocation of nature's beauties and spiritual effects--not least  of how the poem defines England strictly in terms of the pastoral.  By this point, the student was rolling her eyes a bit, but when we got to the apparently perpetual "suns of home," not to mention all those flowers and non-freezing rivers, she could no longer restrain herself.  Was England really this spring-like all the time?

"Like hell it is," she grumbled.

Everyone burst out laughing. 

In which I briefly ponder spam filters, among other things

At times, my university's spam filter is, shall we say, over-efficient.  Student e-mails have, on more than one occasion, been consigned to Circle Nine of the spam inferno, never to be seen again.  One colleague reported that an interesting request for a collaboration was similarly dispatched to the chilly depths. However, this is quite possibly the first time that the spam filter has ever trapped university e-mails--from the bookstore, no less.  I'm impressed, for some value of "what on earth...?"

Speaking of filters, as some of you may have noticed as my Twitter feed scrolls by, I have actually finished copyediting Robert Elsmere.  I now need to find something productive to do with my time, although I suspect that Notre Dame will soon fill the void by sending me page proofs and requesting an index for Book Two.  (Come to think of it, they're probably going to do that while I'm vacationing.  Figures.)

Meanwhile, on an entirely unrelated note, I'll have an essay in this seminar over at Crooked Timber. 

 

Book Two, now on Amazon

Book Two (officially known as Victorian Reformations: Historical Fiction and Religious Controversy, 1820-1900) is now available for preorder on Amazon.  It's scheduled for release on Nov. 30, 2013. You know you want it, right? It's even affordable!