I have been tagged by everyone and then some for the “Seven Random Things” meme. As I have already done not one but two bits-and-pieces sorts of meme, I’m going to take this one in a new direction. Because I am a neophyte, and because this blog is becoming more and more a learning space, I am abandoning the rules and the tagging, and instead am going to write seven questions for my readers. I hope you will post responses to any one or several of them either in comments, or if you are insanely inspired, in posts of your own.
1. For those of you working in early periods: So. How do you feel about the Past? What does it mean to you to encounter things that are old? Do you fall on a particular side of the irreparable-alterity/abiding-familiarity debate? Do you think that debate is nonsense? Especially if you work on something not obviously, blatantly political: how do you think about the political value of what you do? When did you first discover History? What drew you to it?
2. For those of you to whom work in archives and rare book / manuscript collections is central: recall your first experience of these spaces and these materials. What was it like? What did you learn? If, from where you stand now, you could communicate something to the You who first encountered these things, what would it be?
3. For those of you who are interested in performance, or who are yourselves performers: how do you relate performance to your academic lives? Has your thinking about performance shaped or changed the way you conceive of yourself as a scholar? There are obvious links between performance and teaching, but less talked about are the links between performance and participation in academic communities outside the classroom, and especially undiscussed is the relationship of the activity of performance to research and writing. Thoughts?
4. Who (or what) was the object of your first intellectual crush? Do you stand by that adoration today, or are you still trying to find a way to erase that moment from history?
5. Adjunct Whore gets an opt-out on this one, since I’ve already asked her, but for the rest of you: is there a famous text, school of thought, theory, that is extremely hip in or vital to your field, that you are Expected to Know, but that you, to your shame and/or puzzlement, haven’t read, don’t understand, are completely unimpressed with, or simply fear? Of course there is. What is it?
6. If you could change, radically change, one major thing about your field, what would it be, and why?
7. Tell me about your marginalia. (This sounds like a come-on, and I like it that way.) What do you write in books? If your notes were in an alphabet that I don’t read, what sort of shapes would I see framing the pages? Do you prefer symbolic diagrams (arrows, tick-marks, underlining, etc) or verbal notes? Would anyone who is not you understand them? Are they fully integrated with the text they limn, or could they stand alone?
Inquiring minds want to know. (Inquiring minds also want to procrastinate — help a girl out here.)
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December 5, 2007 at 10:58 pm
lurkfish
5. I still haven’t read all of the Fairie Queene.
December 5, 2007 at 11:41 pm
Hannah
3. I am generally unenthusiastic about the idea of being a performer. I attended drama lessons for years, but only in order to conquer crippling shyness. I am not, however, a performer in that I want to be up in front of other people, yet I perform my entire self and life most of the time, being one of those eminently capable people when it comes to splitting myself into sections and segments. Academia as a performance has me endlessly worried, and the idea of teaching terrified.
6. Pettily, I’d make it so that whenever I say what I’m doing people don’t say ‘Oh, so you study Shakespeare then.” Yes, I do. In a very minor way. I do not want to study Shakespeare beyond the required, I am happy to read him, I am even happy to teach him, I do not want to write about him.
7. Snarky little notes, endless double lines down the margin, random underlining, parentheses. All in handwriting that even I struggle to read. Verbal notes are far preferable, and they are inseparable, I suspect, from the text they’re interacting with.
December 6, 2007 at 5:08 am
shadowsgrey
So, I’m joining in the procrastination. Because that final next week isn’t that big of a deal. Or so I keep telling myself without being able to finish a sentence.
1. I’m a Systematic and Historical theology MA student. I suppose that means that ‘early’ is a relative term. There’s really only 2000 years for me to work with. (Since I’m not too up on the alterity/abiding-familiarity debate I’m going to skip it, rather than look like a loon.) I truly discovered history in my sophomore year of high school. I was 15, and I knew right then and there that I could study it till I got to be history. My teacher was fantastic, and knew what he taught. And he always threatened to demonstrate Inquisition style torture methods on my classmate. It was also the first time I had a class of less than 25 students. There were only 12 of us. I guess what drew me to it was the overarching need to know why and how things happened.
4. My first intellectual crush was my first theology prof at my SLAC. He was attractive enough, and I had to earn the right to be there. He challenged me more than anyone else ever has. He’s still a good friend and mentor and the first person I run things by when I need help. He still reads my papers like they were written for his class and he should take a red pen to them. I guess it no longer qualifies as a crush. It’s moved over to working friendship.
5. Oh, hip theory? The historical Jesus debate. I get it, I’ve read it, and flatly, I don’t give a rats ass. The things the people who started it are trying to accomplish are IMPOSSIBLE with the evidence that we have. So, mostly I’m unimpressed. That and Liberation Theology. Both of ‘em, just don’t get the appeal.
6. Could we have some more women please? Women studying for academic as opposed to pastoral degrees? And I’d like the men to stop looking at me like I’m a threat.
7. hmmm. Most of the time I underline, and there are stars next to REALLY important passages. Sometimes there are sticky notes or index cards wedged in with the book. They would be indecipherable alone.
I have thus enjoyed participating in the procrastination.
Have fun!
grey
December 6, 2007 at 3:54 pm
squadratomagico
Why you little minx! That’s sneaky!
I may answer some of these in my own space, but I wanted to share a couple of manuscript stories here. The thing I love about manuscripts is that they are so unpredictable — not at all like modern, perfected, tidied-up editions. There are all kinds of extra texts bursting out of these things: texts squeezed into the margins (I had a ms. once that copied out the entirety of a different text in the top and bottom margins of about 20 folios); partial texts on the binding covers; marginal notes and doodles. They almost seem… fecund, like they’re bursting out with more words and ink all the time.
Once, I opened a medieval ms. and the freaking blotting sand fell out! Lots of it, too, like a little sandstorm on my lectern. Some poor sod painstakingly copied that ms., only to have it ignored until 1994 or so… and then opened by an idolator, too.
Another time, the text I was working with suddenly broke off, and I found a little rubricated note: “I’ve lost one of the folios I was copying from. If you need this part of the text, go find another copy.” Then the transcription took up again in a totally different place. Towards the end, another note: “I found that folio I lost earlier. Here it is.”
Amazing — this scribe was speaking to me.
Sometimes I hate working with the palaeography, depending on the hand, but I love the hand-craftedness of these objects. You can see the animals’ fur follicles on the parchment. There are so many traces of human production and use.
Urrrgh… now I’m longing for an archive. Actually…. I need to do a spot of work in London. Perhaps in the spring.
December 6, 2007 at 4:39 pm
Nabil
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/12/04/carnegie
thought you might find that interesting.
December 6, 2007 at 4:50 pm
Fretful Porpentine
1) This is a totally fascinating question, and one that I should probably wait to answer until I have more time than I do right now.
2) N/A.
3) Hmm. I’m a dramatic lit person, but thinking about performance makes me feel inadequate, in a lot of ways — both in terms of teaching-as-performance and performance-as-subject-of-course.
And the performative aspects of job interviews freak me out, honestly.
On the other hand, I tend not to think about reading-and-writing as a performance at all — although I guess it is, particularly reading and writing online. I’m a little too old to be a digital native, but I’ve had a fairly active online life for more than ten years, and interestingly, I’m completely comfortable with the series of online masks that one tends to adopt. Huh. Maybe I like performance more than I realized.
4) My AP English teacher, who was fifty years old and married and had a cop mustache. I wrote him a long letter after the course was over to tell him what an awesome teacher he was, and I kind of wish I hadn’t done that, since I’m sure the fact that I had a crush was obvious in ways I didn’t intend it to be. I never did get in touch with him again, and I’m not sure what he’s doing now, except I believe he moved on to a private school a couple of years later. Maybe it’s a good thing I wrote that letter after all. I’m sure h.s. teachers don’t get too many signs of appreciation.
5) Oh, hell. Most of them, actually! I mean, I’m a Shakespearean who doesn’t know a whole lot about staging and has huge gaps in her historical knowledge of the period, not to mention the fact that I have trouble wrapping my head around theory in general unless it’s used in the service of a specific argument about a text.
6) There would be enough full-time, tenure-track jobs for everybody, and part-time faculty would be adequately compensated. (Actually, I suspect that if you made a law forcing the second part, the first would follow.)
7) I underline short passages that I want to note; longer passages get a vertical line in the margin. If I’m prepping for a class, written notes go in my teaching notebook, and when I’m writing an article or a conference paper, I generally type them into a computer file, but back when I was taking classes, they usually went in the margins, at the bottom of the page, or on the flyleaf. The books from my last couple of years of undergrad and my first years of grad school are very marked up indeed; the ones from earlier years less so, since it took me a while to get comfortable with the concept of writing in books.
December 6, 2007 at 4:53 pm
Dance
Drafting a post for #2, but this post will probably be long hidden before I finish it. Fun post, good title.
December 6, 2007 at 8:49 pm
neophyte
Dear everyone, you are completely lovely. These are so fabulous. Thank you for indulging me. (If you are reading this and you haven’t yet indulged me, by all means, do.)
Grey — Welcome! Do stick around. I look forward to learning more about what it means to be a theology student (as I begin for the first time to dabble, warily and probably blasphemously, in religious history).
Squadrato: I’ve never been called a minx! Or at least not lately. I take this as the highest of compliments. Your blotting-sand made me gasp aloud and grin with glee (and seething jealousy — what a moment). Funny, what you say about manuscripts is what I am coming to love about early printed books — they’re books, right? So they’re rational, normalizing, stable creatures. Wrong. Instability in a printed volume is such a delight, such a surprise. And the early readers of my current book-crush were clearly at least as nuts as I am — their marginal doodles are spectacular. I also love your disorganized scribe — what a treasure. And if you do make it over here, you know how to find me (I’m the one crying in the BL’s rare book room, apparently, as per most recent post).
FP: Cop mustache? Wow. And I wonder why that is, about early discomfort about writing in books — I was a fetishist as an adolescent, too. And then, when I was seventeen, I read Joyce’s “The Dead.” It was all over. Ink spilled everywhere, constantly. Though now it’s pencil, mostly… I’ve grown hesitant.
December 6, 2007 at 9:54 pm
hilaire
1. I work not on what I assume you are calling “early” periods. I work on late c19/early c20 stuff, though. So it is Past. I must say that this period feels like a comfortable ground for me…even though I was intrigued by pre-modern periods, and flirted with them, I always felt as if could.not.relate, fundamentally. Yeah, otherness. Of course, my assumption that the period I work on is somehow closer to me, is problematic. But still, at least it’s the modern episteme.
I wrote one of my best grad schol papers on the question of past as other. I’ve also published an article on relationships to history as fetishistic.
I wish I could say why I’ve always been so drawn to History, since I was young. (I mean, I wish I could say anything other than “I am a daddy’s girl, and my father was into history…”)
2. Work in archives isn’t *central*, perhaps, but I have done it. I love it. I love losing myself. I love how productive it makes me feel…much more productive than the other piece of my work, which is theory. Also, one of the museum libraries/archives I worked in for my PhD diss featured the loveliest people…I acknowledged them in my acknowledgements as providing me with the closest example of an ethical relationship in/with an institution. I am excited to go back to Paris in the spring, to continue working with the dears I met at a museum library/archive there this past Feb. We sleuthed together, the three of us, when I found something that wasn’t labeled, that none of us could identify. That sense of communal sleuthing was damn fun. I loved it. Figuring it out was hugely rewarding, too.
7. I never write in books. I take notes from books. In photocopied articles, my marginalia is boring and mostly consists of asterisks – and “DISC” (for discuss, obvy) if I’m teaching the articles.
Hmmm…you have made me want to post…! Thanks for the questions!
December 7, 2007 at 5:23 am
Sisyphus
1. I don’t do stuff that’s too “early,” but I definitely come down on the alterity side of the debate (I would probably love Hilare’s papers on the past as other and fetishized.) I hate teaching students and having them go “Oh, Shakespeare’s play is all about Love. And Love is so universal — we treat our loved ones _exactly_ the same way today as they did in Shakespeare’s time!” —- Blearhg!
2. I don’t do archival stuff, but for some reason I keep accessing “forgotten criticism” or history stuff (_weird_ historical stuff!) from the 20s and 30s, and reading that stuff is a trip, I tell you. Some of these “how-to guides” haven’t been checked out (or read) since shortly since they were published, so I have this sense of finding hidden treasure —- or rummaging through the junk-heaps outside a thrift store and going “whoah, cool!” So much of it sounds exactly like bad freshman writing — sweeping generalizations with no citations, books that actually begin with “since the beginning of time..” Yeah.
7. I’m boring — I just underline. Sometimes I put “stage directions” in the margins of my lecture or presentation material, though (to tie back to question 3).
I’m stealing Fretful’s Number 6, and drawing a blank on the others … mayhap I’ll return.
December 7, 2007 at 4:33 pm
Flavia
1. Ultimately, I come down on the side of familiarity, although certainly not abiding familiarity. I consider the past (or at least the particular past that I study) to be a different culture, sure, and one that requires great care and sensitivity to understand–but beneath all its different beliefs and assumptions about religion and government and so on, I do think human nature remains more or less the same, and recognizable despite its foreignness.
3. I don’t work on drama, nor have I been trained in performance studies, but I was introduced to the latter by my ex (who was so trained), and much of my work has to do with written self-performances. Over the past half-dozen years, then, I’ve been realizing the degree to which I’ve always regarded myself as a performed or constructed self, and this applies ESPECIALLY to my writing. The blog is an obvious but certainly not the only example; even my academic writing is a continual and conscious process of trying on voices, ideas, and attitudes: is this phrase what I really mean? Does it convey what I think and what my response to the text really is? Is this word an appropriate one–a humorous deflation or snide commentary on the subject matter or other critics?
My scholarly prose is exactly as considered and careful as my nonacademic prose, and equally as much about projecting a desired self. (My dissertation director once described my voice, not disapprovingly, as “eccentric.” I’ll take it.)
4. I don’t know. Are we talking about actual people we know/knew, or intellectual figures (whom one has only read or heard speak)? I never got sexual/romantic crushes on authority figures, but it’s true that two of my undergraduate professors are more responsible than anyone or anything else for the fact that I now work on the 17th C.–and they’re also more responsible than anyone else for my teaching/scholarly persona: both were young, smart, charming, enthusiastic, and inclined to colloquial or casual paraphrases or summaries of what they’d just said; their intelligence was dazzling, and yet they seemed like super-cool people, people I’d want to be friends with (if we were closer in age); I felt that, if this was what the scholarly life could be–making hilarious asides; referencing popular culture occaionally–it might be something I could do and be.
5. I’ve read exactly enough Foucault and a few essential New Historicist texts to get by. (I’m generally impatient with New Historicists–really good stuff has emerged from their work, but I disagree with much of their assumptions and methods.) And I have about a one-sentence understanding of most other critical schools. My knowledge of theory, in other words, is shockingly limited, and I’m embarrassed by this. I’ve bought a few readers this semester and plan to patch things up at least a little in the coming months.
7. My marginalia could not stand alone. For the most part, it’s funtional, and meant to be useful when I later skim or return to the work. So I’ll signpost (noting in the margin the topic or work being discussed, when it’s one I know I’ll have further reason to care about); some of it is my saying, “NO!!” or “bullshit” or stuff like that. Less frequently but occasionally I’ll argue with the author or present other examples or counterexamples to whatever he or she is saying, or relate his or her position to someone else’s. Mostly, I underline, and the really important passages I also mark with a vertical line in the margin (sometimes two, sometimes with an X in addition).
December 8, 2007 at 5:01 am
renaissance girl
Neo–I’ve been pathetically absent from blogging, but (as hilaire says) your questions and the ensuing discussion have made me want to play too. I’ll get on that.
December 8, 2007 at 7:22 pm
Kermit
#3: I’m a musician as well as an academic, and what’s struck me the most recently is the terrifically high ratio of preparatory, hidden, self-driven work to public, displayable work in both cases. Preferably, when you perform no one should be able to tell the hours of practice, drills, self-correction you put into that performance; a good musical performance should feel spontaneous to both yourself and your audience, not labored. And now as I’m drafting a chapter, I keep reminding myself that this is behind-the-scenes work: it’s work I have to do for myself, to get ready to present myself to others in a more polished way. I’m rehearsing an argument that I’ll later perform, if that makes sense.
December 8, 2007 at 9:38 pm
Susan
Great Questions…I’ll take a stab at a few.
1. I’m on the alterity side of the alterity/familiarity divide. Partly — in terms of material culture — I can’t believe that living in the way 17th c people did does not make a difference in all sorts of ways. And everything I know about how people act and think suggests very different assumptions from those I’m familiar with. So it’s different. As for politics: My work is fairly political, and I think all of it is. That is, what we say about the past, and how we say it, matters. It matters to pay attention to women or the poor; it matters if you analyze conflict; and it matters if you don’t do those things. The way we talk about how power works in the past — or pretend it’s not there — is certainly political. If, in the broadest sense, politics is about how we define terms, what we see as important, etc., everything has politics.
2. My first encounter with original sources was in an AP US history course in high school. I lived in NYC, so on Saturday mornings my friends and I would head to the 42nd St. library. I’ll never forget the day I ordered up a civil war pamphlet, and it was magic, crumbling 19th C paper and all. I was hooked. The first day I was in the archives doing dissertation research, I got the worst headache in the world and thought I’d never be able to finish my research. Now I find myself saying to people, “Oh, but that’s a lovely hand.”
5. I’ve never finished Butler’s Gender Trouble. And I’ve read less post-modernism than I should have.
6. I’d make my field less divided. We lose a lot because we all are in separate sub-fields.
7. I almost NEVER write in margins. My first year in college I tried working iwth a highligher, and ended up highlighting everything. I take notes.
December 9, 2007 at 12:49 pm
neophyte
I continue to love these responses.
Flavia, I want to know what you mean by “human nature.” And I’m impatient with the new historicism, too — how does it happen that a movement, or a school, or whatever, can give such wonderful tools to a field and simultaneously completely pervert it? (And how can such a large group of such smart people have so disastrously misread Foucault?) Nice to be entering that field just as we’re finally well clear of the nastiest bits.
Sis, I’m with you to a point — but I think there is an important distinction to be made between the necessary and productive process of historicizing a text like one of Shakespeare’s, and throwing up our hands and saying we’ll never understand these other cultures. The road from there to “why bother” is far too short.
I like Susan’s matter-of-factness about the material conditions of life — there’s some irreparable rupture there. On the other hand, historians can’t survive if they aren’t empathetic — and the more you learn, the more you can empathize. Oh, and Susan? If only I had been cool enough in high school to be going to the NYPL and calling up hundred-and-fifty-year-old pamphlets! I would have had a happier adolescence, I think, and an easier transition into college — but alas, such a thing would never have occurred to me. Worse, it would never have occurred to my teachers to suggest it to me.
I think I fall, for now, somewhere in the center on this, leaning toward alterity — I’m disturbed by both extremes. Part of what I love about historical work is the sense of being pulled in both directions — the warmth of recognition, and the disorienting effects of incomprehension. I like squadrato’s post on this for that reason — she emphasizes instability, rather than inaccessibility. That’s what I like, I think — standing on shaky ground, and the balancing acts that ensue.
Kermit — I love the way you’ve framed this. Drafting as rehearsal — I think this actually helps me think about writing in a more productive, (slightly) less anxious way. Thank you!
December 9, 2007 at 4:31 pm
Flavia
As I said in the comments over at Fretful’s, I really think this may be more a semantic matter than anything else: most of us responsible people see the past as BOTH foreign and familiar, and the issue may be how we choose to articulate the relationship between the two: is the past familiar *despite* (or beneath, or after) all the differences? Or is it foreign despite some recognizable bits?
And I agree with you that I wouldn’t be comfortable being too far toward either end of the spectrum.
December 9, 2007 at 4:56 pm
Dr. Virago
Neophyte – I don’t think I’ve commented here before, but I wanted to say that I’m so intrigued with your questions (and so out of things to blog on my own) that I’m going to work up a blog post in the next day or so in response to this. So thanks!
December 9, 2007 at 6:40 pm
neophyte
Yes, Flavia — and my fault for posing the binary to begin with. (That’s why there’s the “nonsense” option. A paltry compensation for reductive thinking.)
The discussion at Fretful’s also prompted me to think about this problem in terms of two different phenomena — how we think about texts, and how we think about the “Past” that produced them. It’s easy, in some ways, to grab an isolated Marvell poem, or whathaveyou, (a line from Twelfth Night, perhaps), and completely, viscerally understand it. It can be very right to do so. Then perhaps that understanding can be enriched by another, historicized reading. Or perhaps it will be completely turned on its head, and the discomfort or disorientation that emerges from such reversals, from such un-understandings, “un-knowings” as squadrato has it, can be enormously productive.
The reason I partnered this question with the one about politics is that I think that’s where it gets stickiest — queer studies, particularly, in the early modernist world are positively brimming over with problems and questions and difficulties in this regard. And part of the (lovely, I think) chaos is produced by the fact that there is no simple solution, no way to negotiate that divide. There is no queer work I’ve read that has dealt with this satisfactorily — and I kind of like that. I wish some of this work was more humble before such problems, but I love the feeling of un-anchoredness that comes out of reading it. And we know what political disasters came out of new historicist work, but now I begin to wonder how those disasters relate to certain studies’ attitudes about “the past” — not just the practice of history, not just speaking with the dead, but the dead themselves, the object of study. Curious.
Dr. Virago — welcome! I am very glad you’re here, and look forward to reading your thoughts.
December 12, 2007 at 8:48 pm
Cass
hmm, really interesting to see how fired up people have got about these questions. I’m not a historian, but here’s my take on 4 onwards…
4.
Come to think of it , my first Intellectual Crush was on the cleverest girl in my class when I was about nine. I wrote a story about going on a space journey with her, holding hands and crashing landing onto a planet where the atmosphere was made of paper. Juvenile post-modernism perhaps? It got published in the school magazine… we went on to star in the Wizard of Oz, I was the Lion and she was the Tinman..aww….
As an adolescent Seamus Heaney woke me up to language, to the sensual and visceral impact of language, especially language in Poetry (lucky to have such a gifted poet as native to my country and hence on all syllabi) …Ah, the first time Heaney’s poem Shore Woman, getting the texture of that language, and how material aspects of language can be used to convey atmosphere, knocked my socks right off.
I then developed a FULL ON Intellectual Crush on my English Teacher at Grammar School, who was a poet, and incredibly gentle, awkward, insightful. I wrote him really quite explicit crush poems and gave them to him with the thinly veiled excuse of asking for a critique of them. … Hideously brain-meltingly cringe-worthy to think back on now. And a bit weird. Aargh.
5.
I am a queer theorist and I haven’t read the History of Sexuality. In fact there are tons of queer theorists I know principally through activisty friends giving me a bastardised “wo this is like so cool” potted version of decades of sophisticated enquiry. Which is worrying. However, the feeling of the latent potential to those texts for me is thrilling… ‘intelligences brightened and unmannerly as crowbars…paving and pencilling their first causeways across the prescribed texts’(Seamus Heaney, From the Canton of Expectation)
6. more heterosexual people would be part of it.
7. I like the Heaney quote in relation to marginalia, too. My marginalia are anything from straightforward markers of a particular idea to (on poems especially) weirdy drawings laying a kind of imaginary acetate on top of the page, words as stars made into constellations of association , linked by lines; circles round interesting sounding, unknown words that need looked up; and (on critical theory) big bold rectangles around key concepts, tangential scribblings on margins, ‘!’ s, ‘?’ s, stars, occasionally clusters of stars or shooting stars if something is really cool. I liked what squadrato said about the fecundity to old manuscripts, the sense of something busting out from the text and I guess I feel the same way about marginalia—mine is not disciplined at all, it shows all the points at which neurones went off like fireworks, or it shows an understanding of the text growing across it, a secondary inspiration, tentative ivy to its grand oak.
December 16, 2007 at 8:24 pm
neophyte
Cass! I’m glad you’re here. (Yes, this blog is a place.)
In some ways I’m jealous of your #5. I got a lot of potted Foucault early in undergrad, and didn’t actually start reading him until my third year. I didn’t start reading Derrida in any quantity until halfway through my fourth year. But having had the potted version, when I got around to the texts, they were so much more alive, so much more fresh, so much more complicated and glowing — it was such a delight. You are welcome to my History of Sexuality any time you want.
Also, how did it escape me that you’re Irish? Shows what I know about accents. Yipes. I was in love with Heaney in high school, and somehow ended up leaving him behind — you’ve inspired me to go digging for his books while I’m home.
December 30, 2007 at 6:18 pm
Venturing to the Archives « Prone to Laughter
[...] to the Archives Neophyte asked people about their first experience with the archives. I was finishing a junior year study abroad in [...]