Author Archive for Talia

Metacritical Cinema

Published
by
Talia
on June 3, 2010
in Art
. 5 Comments

endtroducing.
Creative Commons License photo credit: dearsomeone

To unwind after a long day of interpreting literature in my dissertation, I like to watch movies about other people performing interpretations.

Probably the most famous “interpretation scene” takes place in Hamlet.  Depending on how the king reacts to his play The Mousetrap, Hamlet believes he will be able to determine whether the king killed his father.  (This scene also delivers the memorable line, “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.”  It’s the queen’s evaluation of the play, and still useful today if you want to tell someone to shut up in the most pretentious manner possible.)

Hollywood has maintained a surprising interest in textual interpretation as a plot device.  In the spirit of Lavelle Porter’s list of interesting academic movies, just out in the GC Advocate, here are my favorite movies that contain a crucial metacritical scene.

The Conversation (1974) Fall in love with Gene Hackman all over again as his divided loyalties affect the way he interprets a recorded conversation.  Also, be prepared to hear the sentence, “He’d kill us if he had the chance,” many many times.

Rashomon (1950)  Four people give their testimonies of a rape and murder they all witnessed, but everyone’s story is completely different.  There is no “text” per se, but this is the consummate movie about the ways a person’s subject-position determines perception and representation.

A Letter to Three Wives (1949)  Just as they are leaving for a weekend trip, three gal pals get a letter from their fourth girlfriend, who announces she’s run away with one of their husbands—but she doesn’t say which one.  What a meanie!  Each wife spends the rest of the weekend (and movie) interpreting the letter as an indictment of her ostensibly happy but secretly troubled marriage.

In the Loop (2008)  An entire war depends on the interpretation and managed circulation of a report called “PWIP-PIP,” written by a lowly assistant played by the still adorable Anna Chlumsky.  A climactic scene involves a political team’s feverishly deleting footnotes and changing verb tenses… just like the exciting moments in my life!

Kiss Me Deadly (1955)  One of the most noir-y noir characters ever, Mike Hammer, (Ralph Meeker) has to interpret the poem “Remember” by Christina Rossetti in order to understand a mysterious message from a dead hitchhiker.  Detective stories, of course, are always about interpretation in some way—but not usually about poetry interpretation.

Others I’m forgetting?

Dangerous(ly Misrepresented) Minds

Published
by
Talia
on May 3, 2010
in To Ponder and teaching
. 0 Comments

This American Life recently ran an interesting story about a memoir written by millionaire Steve Poizner.  The book recounts his volunteer half-year as a social studies teacher at Mount Pleasant High School in East San Jose, California.  Poizner’s portrait of a dilapidated, violent, underachieving school in a stinky, blighted low-income neighborhood stirred the indignation of members of the school community and district, who maintain that the school scores about average academically, has a low dropout rate, is not at all dangerous, and is located in a well-kept middle-class neighborhood.  In other words, Poizner lied, or to be more generous to him, made mistakes in his perceptions of the school.Class Dismissed
Creative Commons License photo credit: motionblur

Poizner’s motives for exaggerating Mount Pleasant’s struggles seem clear: he first ran for public office two months after leaving the school, and is currently a candidate for governor of California.  An excerpt from his memoir is posted on his campaign site.  But the story made me wonder: what biases and motives do we embed in our own representations of what happens in our classrooms?  Isn’t even the most humble, self-effacing teacher story from “the trenches” (as Poizner calls the high school classroom) a manipulation of power, since it only reveals the teacher’s angle?  When is it fair to turn our experiences in the classroom into a self-aggrandizing anecdote for a job interview, a cautionary tale for a blog post, or a punchline for our friends—and when is it a betrayal of our students’ confidence?

Academic-ish Magazines

Published
by
Talia
on April 8, 2010
in Scholarship
. 1 Comment

Reading scholarly journals is more of an acquired taste than a cherished pastime. Even the most devoted student of her field, I assume, doesn’t curl up by the fire with the latest issue of Critical Inquiry or devour the pages of PMLA late into the night. Marvi well - ماروي جو کوھIn part, this is because the journal contributor’s purpose is not to rope in the semi-interested, semi-informed reader. Rather, she must demonstrate her erudition. She must meticulously, tediously lower a very tiny bucket down a very deep well of very specific knowledge, only to draw up a tiny new droplet and deliver it to an already flooded field. Of course such deliberate pacing and careful scholarship delight me when the article relates directly to my specific research interests. But when a journal article discusses something other than the five topics I know a lot about, I often wish the well were a bit shallower, the lowering a little quicker, and the bucket a great deal larger.

That’s why I’ve come to love what I’ll call “academic-ish” periodicals. I subscribe to Cabinet, a quarterly arts and culture magazine full of gorgeous, colorful images and polished, thoughtful, jargon-free prose. The articles, which vary in length, feature the kind of geeky historical and literary subjects I want to know more about without being weighed down by extensive medicine chestcritical apparatuses. According to the magazine’s mission statement, Cabinet’s “hybrid sensibility merges the popular appeal of an arts periodical, the visually engaging style of a design magazine, and the in-depth exploration of a scholarly journal. Playful and serious, exuberant and committed, Cabinet‘s omnivorous appetite for understanding the world makes each of its issues a valuable sourcebook of ideas for a wide range of readers, from artists and designers to scientists and historians.” Agreed; I love its eclecticism and readability, for which it never seems to sacrifice depth.

I’ve also been regularly reading an online quarterly of what I can only term “scholarly journalism” called Common-Place. It features the research and ideas of historians, librarians, teachers, antiquarians, Biography of Thomas Jefferson (Third President 1801-1809)grad students, and other scholars of early U.S. culture; it also includes reviews, news, and first-person anecdotes. The tone is informed and serious but lively and engaging. In the magazine’s own words, it’s “a bit friendlier than a scholarly journal, a bit more scholarly than a popular magazine.” As a student of early American literature, I find it wonderful—both light and dense, accessible and thought-provoking.

I came upon both of these alt-academic magazines via recommendations from like-minded friends, so I’m actively soliciting more suggestions from you, gentle reader.

Et Tu, Simpsons?

Published
by
Talia
on March 3, 2010
in To Ponder
. 0 Comments

The most persistent psychological barrier to working on my dissertation is not the intimidating size of the project, or insecurities about its intellectual worth, or a lack of time to devote to it.  It’s not even my cac.ophony.org deadline.  What keeps me away from the library is the constant barrage of warnings about the doom that awaits the humanities Ph.D.  Articles that beg undergrads not to pursue useless advanced degrees arrive regularly in my inbox, forwarded sympathetically from the secure, salaried desk jobs of my smug friends outside academia.  Why, I wonder, should I spend my day squeezing one or two footnotes out of hours of reading?

Discouraged, I retreat to the most reliably mindless escapism I know of, a deeply trusted ally in the war against productivity: syndicated sitcoms.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whBrTOzj0Kw[/youtube]

Marge, how could you?

Let’s Coin Some Words Together: An Oblogatory Post

Published
by
Talia
on December 18, 2009
in Uncategorized
. 3 Comments

Each year, the Oxford American Dictionary names a neologism the “word of the year,” and this year it’s “unfriend,” a verb that means “to remove a friend from a social networking site.”  Pretty underwhelming.  I think we can do better.

Last week, Hyewon and David each wrote a post that registered some anxiety about the academic job market.  They reminded me that I need to jazz up my CV if I want to be among the mere 50% of the English Ph.D.s who receive a tenured professorship.  Unfortunately, I have no authentic edge over my brilliant competitors, so I have to stretch.  How about a new CV section, one that no one else will have?  “Neologisms Coined; or, My Personal Impact on the American Lexicon.”  Arranged chronologically, it will elaborate all the word inventions and new usages I have helped pioneer.

Rough Draft

2000: “seinfeld” [verb]: to interpret a real-life occurrence through the lens of the sitcom Seinfeld.  Often pejorative, meaning to analyze complex situations reductively in order to conform them to the plot-lines of a sitcom.  E.g. “This is the kind of situation that simply cannot be seinfelded.”

2006: “prebound” [verb]: to actively seek a new partner while still in a relationship; to delay a breakup until a rebound relationship is within view.  E.g. “I think Jeffrey and Tara will break up as soon as one of them finds someone new.  They’re both obviously prebounding.”

2009: “oblogation” [noun]: the obligation to contribute to a blog, often attached to a job or a casual agreement.  E.g. “The workload is light, except for a twice-a-week oblogation.” Or “I was excited to contribute to Antonio’s blog at first, but it’s become a burdensome oblogation.”

Well, that ought to impress the hiring committees, right?  There’s more work to be done with this inadequate language of ours, though.  Here’s a list of phenomena that still need words: when you introduce yourself to someone you’ve already met several times; when you realize halfway through telling a long story that you’re being rather dull; the weird but delightful way people act on an unseasonably warm winter day; etc.  Any suggestions?  Any words you’ve coined or repurposed?

And, how about a word for a blog post that’s gone on too long?

CUNY Sidesteps a Pedagogical False Dilemma

Published
by
Talia
on November 13, 2009
in Writing Instruction
. 5 Comments

Worried about the low literacy levels and poor writing skills of college graduates, composition professors have spent decades debating the question: Should college writing courses teach content (critical reading and in-class debates about social and cultural topics) or form (essay design, paragraph arrangement, and sentence-level syntax, grammar, and vocabulary)?

To my mind, they’re chasing a red herring.  Once we’re actually in the composition classroom, we inevitably combine form with content, regardless of our theoretical pedagogical standpoint.  Anti-content-ers like Stanley Fish pretend that content-rich composition courses rely on “the theory that if you chew over big ideas long enough, the ability to write about them will (mysteriously) follow.”  Of course, no one would base a curriculum on such an idiotic notion; rather, some instructors teach composition through thematic readings with the understanding that shared background knowledge will help students build more complex arguments; others use essays about “big ideas” as models students can emulate in their own writing.  Few anti-content teachers would deny the importance of building a knowledge base or following good writing models.  Conversely, even those pro-content composition instructors who strenuously declare, “I do NOT teach grammar,” ultimately are forced to attend to sentences in one way or another.

The Freshman Inquiry Writing Seminar at City College of New York, profiled this month in Inside Higher Education, has provided a curricular counterpart to my claim that writing courses always combine form with content.  The six-credit seminar links a content instructor from one of the disciplines with a writing instructor from the English department, often a Master’s or MFA student.  So, the students learn about a subject–examples include “Energy” and “Comic Books and Conflict”–and they learn how to write about that subject.  Form enriched by content, content supported by form.

Of course, I would prefer to see universities take the writing instruction side of such courses a little more seriously; as the article explains, the content instructor is often the “real” (full-time, tenured) professor and the writing instructor is a contingent laborer.  But that’s a topic for another blog post.

I Encourage Students to Torture Their Enemies!

Published
by
Talia
on October 21, 2009
in Pedagogy and Writing Instruction
. 1 Comment

Several semesters in a row, I taught Dante’s Inferno as part of a broad humanities survey.  In case you’re not familiar with the epic, the protagonist (also named Dante) travels through the Catholic hell and describes the excruciating torture experienced by the many sinners he sees there.

Standing at the Gates of Hell

Creative Commons License photo credit: country_boy_shane

My writing assignment asked students to analyze how the punishments match the sins committed.  It was so tedious.  I quickly realized I was sucking all the interest and fun out of an actually interesting and fun text.

So the next semester I made the writing assignment a bit more transgressive: “Have you ever told someone to ‘go to hell’ (or wanted to tell someone that)?  Describe the scenario.  What did the person do wrong?  Use quotes and interpretations of Dante’s Inferno to describe what their punishment would be and why.”  The assignment still met my pedagogical goals (to have the students think critically about the text and articulate connections between its parts), but the students’ answers were so much more engaged, and reading the essays was much less a chore for me.  Plus, as an accidental sort of value-added bonus, I think the assignment allowed the students to experience the cathartic, semi-therapeutic effects of imaginatively punishing people who’ve wronged them—an effect that Dante himself certainly relished in imagining his hell, which is littered with his personal enemies.

In later semesters I expanded this assignment to ask students to consign various historical and contemporary figures to the appropriate circles of Dante’s hell.  This added a component that I hadn’t originally considered, because it turned into a mini-lesson on both current events and notorious “sinners” from history.  It was also fun!

My only problem is, not every text I teach seems to lend itself to writing assignments that both achieve my goals (for them to become sharper critical thinkers and analytical writers) and engage students creatively.  Any ideas?  Anybody else trying to design these double-duty writing assignments?

Computers Invade the Writing Classroom

Published
by
Talia
on September 28, 2009
in Communication Intensive Courses (CICs), Pedagogy, Technology, Uncategorized, Writing Instruction and literature
. 6 Comments

Today I ran a writing workshop in a Great Works literature class, and I was surprised to find the class is held in a computer lab.

Classic Work Day - School

Creative Commons License photo credit: ·júbilo·haku·

Don’t get me wrong: I heart the web.  My students and I blog together and exchange links, and I’ve been a longtime Blackboard defender.  But computers in my actual classroom?  I’m not so sure.

For the first five to ten minutes of the class, as I introduced myself and gave an overview of our objectives for the day, I was interrupted by thirty deafening renditions of the little tonal song Microsoft has chosen to indicate “Windows is starting up!!”  Then, when I put the students into groups, the long, u-shaped computer tables forced them to sit in awkward rows, and I found it difficult to rove from group to group to answer questions.  By the end of the workshop, I could see that some students were dividing their attention between me and the screens in front of them.

Rather than simply conclude that computers don’t work in a discussion-based classroom, I’m seeking some suggestions for how to make them work.  How could we use computers to keep students focused on content, rather than making content compete with the computers?