Prosaic

Dr. Crazy suggests that what separates blogging from academic writing is, in part, the reader's desire:

Because there is that immediate response, and you know that the response has nothing to do with academic hierarchies but rather with the fact that people are interested enough to read, not because they must read your blog for work but because they feel like reading it - whether because it makes them laugh, makes them think, or makes them feel whatever.

Academic bloggers certainly attract a readership well outside their field of study; after all, I find that economists, physicists, sociologists, computer scientists, and biologists wander over here, even though I rarely (never?) say anything applicable to any of those fields.  If I had simply stuck to writing thrilling and chilling prose about novelist X from the Religious Tract Society, my existence would have remained a blank to most (all?) of my readers.  People might even believe that I'm an English professor, not a historian.  In any event, it's true that blogging generates a different kind of public "footprint" than one's academic prose, sometimes with bizarre (startling?) results.  Presumably, my most recently published article will appeal to that segment of the academic population deeply fascinated by Victorian women writers who specialized in religious fiction--or, more charitably, Victorian women writers who wrote religious fiction, or Victorian writers of religious fiction, or (at a stretch?) maybe Victorian women writers.  But I wonder how many of those readers overlap with this blog's audience.*

My own reading habits, though, don't quite answer to Dr. Crazy's plaint:

When was the last time any of you had time to pick up a journal article or a book with an unfamiliar author just because it seemed interesting? When was the last time any of you checked something scholarly out of the library when you didn't need to look at it for your own research? When was the last time you read a book that you were using for your own work cover-to-cover?

This week, as it happens--not only is The Antichrist's Lewd Hat not immediately relevant to my research, except insofar as it relates to Reformation and post-Reformation issues (and even so, my interest in the Reformation really only extends to what nineteenth-century writers thought about it), but also I read all 715 pages of it.**   I think, though, that my definition of "work" may be a little broader.  When I read scholarly books, I ask myself at least three questions: Does this help me understand problem X in project Y? Does this help me pose useful new questions about problem X more generally? Does this help me clarify my own approach to scholarly writing?  A lot of immediately "irrelevant" scholarship actually speaks to question #3.  A writer may teach me something about method, suggest a new way of working with evidence, address problems with archival research, and the like.  Of course, I don't always "learn" what I'm intended to learn--the year I spent working for an academic journal taught me that excessively jargonified prose is just really, really dull, which is why my book doesn't quite*** read like my thesis.    But I try to operate on the assumption that the field of "relevance" might be far wider than it looks.  Who knew that reading books on the history of textual editing might teach you something about changing attitudes to historical research? That being said, I think my reading habits speak to the speed at which I read, and not to my skills as a researcher, although the Jewish guilt thing may also play a part.  ("I started this book--I must finish it. Think how badly the author would feel if s/he knew I was stopping halfway!") 

It's true that American academics tend to be more formal (stuffier?) than their current British counterparts, all stereotypes aside, although the current trend in British academic prose--rapid shifts from the formal to the informal register, occasional slanginess, offhanded walloping of other scholars--may be its own "form" instead of something truly "personal."  I've been known to make tart comments about a writer under discussion--"What we notice here, apart from that really dreadful last line..."****--which a very few people have interpreted as being "dismissive."  I prefer "honest"; I write about people who are genuinely interesting for historical reasons, and see no reason to pretend that they are somehow aesthetically equivalent to Dickens or Eliot.   

*--Of course, determining my actual readership is well-nigh impossible, since I only know a) who comments and b) who links, aside from c) those who have told me in other venues, "I read your blog."  Maybe the Shadow knows.  I suspect that questions of audience are slightly different in my case than for an anonymous blogger. 

**--And let me tell you: lugging that book on my daily walks around the village was seriously hard on the shoulders.  Not quite as dangerous to life and limb as the various Norton anthologies, but still.

***--I don't think that I managed to de-dissertate my style entirely, and to my eye there's a difference between the chapters left somewhat as-is and the massively revised chapters, but at least I managed to eliminate "gynohistoriographical" from the introduction.  ("That's an...interesting term," one of my former undergraduate instructors gently observed.) 

****--"No clarion save the lark, no sanguine flood,/Save verdant veins of vegetable blood" (Eaton Stannard Barrett, Woman [1810]).  "Vegetable blood"?! Huh? What? I'd like to report that Barrett, who also wrote satires on contemporary fiction, was trying to be funny, but, alas, there's no evidence to support that claim. 

Comments

[Josh]

I totally don't recognize Dr. Crazy's implied assumptions. First, there are more than a couple of people outside The Profession who read articles in academic journals on topics that interest them (feminism, Henry James, what have you). Second, I, who don't read at a Bursteinian pace by any means, can say that I last read a book relevant to my work all the way through during, um, the first two weeks of July. Third, I last looked up an academic article not relevant to "my work" about fourteen hours ago: I looked at the Project Muse journals to see whether there were any good articles on Bleak House that I hadn't yet read. I didn't anticipate using them in my work on 1950s U.S. literature and culture, but thought that I might find good analyses of a favorite book by its fellow-enthusiasts to be invigorating. Fourth, I was never taught to "become fluent in clunkery," and hope never to need to: don't they have an editor at PMLA who translates energetic prose into clunkese for scholars who don't do that themselves?

That said, Dr. Crazy's bit on things "I know I must read in order not to seem like an idiot in front of others" really hit home. I spend perhaps too much time concerned to avoid ending up in a position where I have to fake it or nod knowingly ("Ah yes, Jerome McGann.").

[Camicao]

I guess I'm not as Jewish as you... if the book is not directly related to my own research and I don't like it, it gets put down immediately! It makes me feel guilty, but not enough to keep on reading!

[DavidE]

Well, I have no interest whatsoever in Victorian women writers of religious fiction, but I love this blog and find myself reading nearly every post. I suspect Prof B's academic writing is more readable than the average too--though I have not had the pleasure.

It's hard to believe that it's been 65 years since Orwell wrote his essay "Politics and the English Language." But I can't help thinking most academic, political and bureaucratic writing isn't meant to be read--just catalogued. Thank goodness there is someone like Little Professor who feels there is merit in clarity, brevity and the well-turned phrase.

[Miss KJH B A Hons 2 1 Govt Soc University of Essex 1989]

I live in Supported Housing and noted on my travels the existence of the Independent Scholars Associa
tion.http://www.ncis.org/index.htm

I view the promotion of independent Scholarship as innimical to the continued success of academia;because without free thinking (which is rewarded in any field) academia cannot move forward to pioneer new vistas and search out new territory,
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