Accidental Literary Scholar

Confessions of an Accidental Literary Scholar by Elif Batuman (in Chronicle)

On the difference between literary criticism discourse and that of creative writing workshop. Doesn’t use the terms, but sounds as if it is a matter of metonymy vs. metaphor: of creative writing talking process, but one that is metaphorized into fossil poetry.

Moreover, even if the literary-criticism discourse is no less susceptible than the creative-writing workshop to charges of self-sufficiency and hermeticism, it has one crucial advantage: its fundamentally collaborative premise. Each work of criticism is supposed to build upon the existing body of work, to increase the sum total of human understanding. It’s not like filling your house with more and more beautiful wicker baskets. It’s supposed to be cumulative—it believes in progress.

The creative-writing workshop, by contrast, seems to have a collaborative premise, and does indeed involve a collaborative process—but the signs of that process are systematically effaced from the finished product. Contemporary short stories contain virtually no reference to any interesting work being done in the field over the past 20, 50, or 100 years; instead, middle-class women keep struggling with kleptomania, deviant siblings keep going in and out of institutions, people continue to be upset by power outages and natural disasters, and rueful writerly types go on hesitating about things.

Mark Taylor: end the university

Chronicle piece on Mark Taylor.

references his op-ed: End the University

Kant, in his 1798 work “The Conflict of the Faculties,” wrote that universities should “handle the entire content of learning by mass production, so to speak, by a division of labor, so that for every branch of the sciences there would be a public teacher or professor appointed as its trustee.” Unfortunately this mass-production university model has led to separation where there ought to be collaboration and to ever-increasing specialization.

The division-of-labor model of separate departments is obsolete and must be replaced with a curriculum structured like a web or complex adaptive network. Responsible teaching and scholarship must become cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural.

Giving Emerson the Boot

Commentary in the Chronicle, January 18, 2010: Giving Emerson the Boot

“Emerson the imperial self, the egoist and aphorist; the man with two handles. It is time to stop teaching him.” That is the gist of it. Not much here beyond some familiar stereotypes–of the sort that make me think that the students of the authors of this piece might be better off not studying Emerson with them, possibly other authors as well.

Still, I notice how the problem and question of teaching Emerson enters into this. There is some use to thinking through this problem, and recognizing that it is one that seems particularly to plague Emerson. Is Melville or Moby Dick really that much simpler to teach? Or Walden? And yet there are books on approaches to teaching both, and nothing for Emerson.

I would use this piece, limited as it is, to suggest that what we miss in Emerson is the teaching; the way teaching and learning are problematized. That we need to think more about teaching Emerson, and teaching from Emerson. Think about what Emerson can teach us about teaching. Emerson’s teachings are not foregone conclusions, as the authors assume–and that is their problem. [text of the piece below]

And so it is interesting to find Emerson in a Chronicle commentary; but also to find that he is, at least by these lights, apparently not worthy of a good, thoughtful one.