Gay Dorm Suicide

If you read around in old letters, biographies and memoirs, it really does not take long before you run across just such a story. Young gay man, frustrated and then humiliated in a dormitory, commits suicide rather than confront his torment.

Read around in old college records and you will find any number of such stories in nineteenth century America. This is not a new phenomena, it is not a recent occurence. It goes back as far as there have been dormitories and boys living together.

You can read Bridehead Revisited for the happier, more luxurious version, or you can read the story of Washington Roebling, who helped build the Brooklyn Bridge. When as a young man at Rensselaer College, Roebling had a particularly passionate friend, whose affections he did not share. The friend took an overdose from a chemistry lab, and the nineteenth century quietly let the story disappear, except for Roebling who remembered him in his memoirs as a drinking old man. The young boy who died out of love was a regular tale in old college days. It shows up in novels and short stories, famous ones and those that have been forgotten, but for a few graduate students. The tragedy of confused and scared young students trying out their sexuality, an ancient experiment.

Now the sad young man who has jumped to his death appears on the cover of the New York Times--that is really the most significant change--that the tale is not hushed up by deans and councillors. Instead it becomes a cause in its own right.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/01/nyregion/01suicide.html?hp

International Translation Day

Susan Bernofsky, a most excellent scholar and translator of modern German literature, points out that today is International Translation Day, --on the feast of St. Jerome--an early Church translator of the Bible.

Here are a bunch of events in Germany

http://www.literaturuebersetzer.de/pages/veranstaltungen-archiv/veranst-iut10.htm

ProZ the online translator exchange is holding a virtual conference today

http://www.proz.com/translation3

If you are interested in getting work as a translator or want to talk to other translators about tricky formulations in a whole host of languages, ProZ is an excellent resource

Like candy

Professors sneaking into student facilities, --sounds a little questionable, but, no, we are talking about rooms filled with high tech equipment. I am sitting here comfortably in a computer lab, 20 pretty Macs available in air conditioned solitude. Not a soul to be found in this newly renovated room on a Friday afternoon. So instead of sweating in my 1930s office, I can sneak down a flight of stairs and work in cool, quiet air conditioned comfort, where the students are not but the equipment waits for them patiently.

How often do we professors piggy-back on undergraduate facilities? How often do I feel that the library is just there for me and a handful of foreign graduate students, because on a weekend I can walk through the chilly, dark stacks researching to my heart's content. And, trust me, I can check books out from the library like no one else. They have to cut me off at 200, then I finagle and maneuver to cross the limit with interlibrary loan books--they are on a separate list.

These student facilities are superb, and as a humanities professor I appreciate having the opportunity to use fancy machines whenever the undergrads are out at play.

Baroque Rome

Andreas Gryphius

Als Er aus Rom geschidn

ADe! Begriff der Welt! Stadt der nichts gleich gewesen /

Vnd nichts zu gleichen ist / in der man alles siht

Was zwischen Ost und West / und Nord und Suden blüht.

Was die Natur erdacht / was je ein Mensch gelesen.

Du / derer Aschen man nur nicht vorhin mit Bäsen

Auff einen Hauffen kährt / in der man sich bemüht

Zu suchen wo dein Grauß / (fliht trüben Jahre! Fliht / )

Bist nach dem Fall erhöht / nach langem Ach / genäsen.

Ihr Wunder der Gemäld' / ihr Kirchen und Palläst /

Ob den die Kunst erstarr't / du starck bewehrte Fest /

Du herrlichs Vatican, dem man nichts gleich kan bauen:

Ihr Bücher / Gärten / Grüfft; ihr Bilder / Nadeln / Stein /

Ihr / die diß und noch mehr schliß't in die Sinnen ein /

Fahrt wol! Man kan euch nicht satt mit zwey Augen schauen.

What a wonderful poem. Rome the city that is a compendium of things, which the poet divides between nature and books. What you can find anywhere else, is here. Rome is a city of trade, filled with people and commodities from what the poet considers to be the entire world. He hints at the reputation for the illicit in Rome when he mentions that you can encounter everything written in books there too. But it is not the city that is a text, rather whatever a person ever read appears there. As if the city brings to life what one reads about elsewhere—a feeling Goethe had a century later as well. Rome is the fantasmagoria of imagination in material existence.

He repeatedly mentions that he cannot compare Rome to any other place. This is not just the poet expressing the inexpressible, making his point about the superlative character of Rome by stating that he cannot make is point. Gryphius is also using a medieval trope reserved for the Holy Land. Walther von der Vogelweide declares the Holy Land incomparable, impossible to compare to any other place—but tellingly the medieval poets do not rave about all the marvelous things in Palestine, rather they are motivated by the presence of Christ having once walked there. The Holy Land is not described in medieval literature, it is declared sacred and thus incomparable.

Gryphius picks up on this line, applies it to Rome, which is after all sacred and the site of pilgrimages, but he lists the palaces, churches and works of art amassed in there—the Vatican library as well. The text above was lifted from the German Projekt Gutenberg, fittingly enough

Rome fills the senses, particularly sight. The city is a spectacle of which one can never see enough—again an ancient trope—St. Augustine warned long before against the visual distractions of the coliseum games, almost as if the Christian's soul would be pulled out by the sight of so many marvelous, shocking things. Gryphius is still enraptured as he departs, and not particularly concerned for his soul, either. We are left at the end with the poet’s taking his leave, even as he laments that he cannot see enough.

German Jobs

The MLA job market actually looks more solid this year in German. There are many more stable positions--tenure track--in colleges, fewer jobs in big research universities, and of course a few choice positions. My impression is that institutions with a classic Liberal Arts curriculum and endowments are hiring German professors, while state-funded institutions are holding back. In past years, you could guess which positions would be retracted before the season was over. This year's offerings do not look shaky.

Bookstores and Libraries

Man hat Mühe, sich eine Stadt als vollkommen wohleingerichtet vorzustellen, wenn gelehrte und ungeIehrte Einwohner und Fremde zum Unterricht und zu ihrer Ergötzung die erforderlichen Bücher alter und neuer Zeiten darinnen nicht zu Kauf oder zur Anleihe erhalten können.

Johann Peter Willibrand 1775 Grundriß einer schönen Stadt

Writing Excess

The curse of minimalism and the free market is that so very often students deliver their homework just in time with only the most basic answers. They often write just what an assignment requires, rather than going beyond the bare bones expectations to show what additional knowledge they have. There are many reasons for this minimalist habit. and yes, of course, we can’t forget sloth and laziness. There are a great number of tasks I finish too late and just barely, but there is also a general pervasive cultural sense nowadays that when it comes to intellectual questions—too much is something to avoid. Write clearly about one idea—a simplicity that makes simple. My professor in grad school, Sander Gilman, would often point out that if you set a minimum, it quickly becomes the maximum. If you lay out a basic administrative standard, most people will perform only up to that requirement, rather than exceeding it.

When writing, why give just one explanation, when you can come up with eight?

There is a point where the drive for efficiency turns into laziness, where having completed only what is required, does not result in more high quality work in other subjects, but instead just a great empty lull.

In a different cultural moment, in a different historical period, we would strive to overwhelm a question with answers. We would layer one possible explanation on top of another, give theories that blend into each other, cite book after book rather than just the one canonical work that everyone has read. The love of the esoteric, the curiosity to explore trivial and unknown subjects has been wiped out by the demand that intellectuals produce efficiently and often.

Michel Foucault once called his relentless research into the buried manuscripts, documents, Berichte and diaries of sexuality and madness a “feverish laziness.”—an ironic phrase for such a prolific scholar. His style of baroque distraction requires loads of free research time, patience, a personal secretary (he had one), extra years where no major books appear, and a general sense that the minimal answer is unsatisfactory. It also includes an academic will to power to smother a research question, to upend the familiar by shoving forgotten and irrelevant information to the fore. It means giving far more information than anyone ever expected.

So this is the paradox: ordinary students can give back the answer on the test that comes from the textbook, extra ordinary students write much more, but to do so they have to get lost in other books--i.e. waste time doing more than the class requires. Similarly, regular academics can crank out articles for the c.v., but let's have more lunatics who waste their time reading irrelevant tomes.

The continued importance of Content

There are of course many reasons why faculty and administration don’t feel comfortable sitting next to each other in the same room. But we'll leave most of those aside to focus on a basic difference. No matter how theoretical and abstract a professor’s work may be, it always involves a distinct commitment to a specific content. There is a subject area, a set of texts, or data, a problem with many thorny questions to solve. Something tangible that motivates and inspires, students in the class, researchers in the lab, writers at the keyboard.

What is troublesome about administrative operation, and indeed most management techniques generally, is their disengagement from the specific content of the work they are managing. Just as many successful store managers don’t really have to care about the product they are selling beyond the basic ability to interact with customers, so too administrators do not need to know the specifics of faculty research. They rely on general formulas to determine the success or failure of that research, but these formulas leave unaddressed the specific material questions that the research addresses. Whether you write on the history of medieval cities in Tuscany or methane gas abatement in coal mining facilities you are judged by general indicators, such as student enrollment, number of publications, placement of students, that have no direct connection to the actual subject matter of your research.

From the administrative perspective, it is important to evaluative criteria that reach across difference departments and colleges so that the many apples and oranges within a university can be compared. From the faculty perspective these general categories often have an implicit bias towards one type of research over another, even as they make no explicit attempt to judge the qualitative material of research.

Without directly addressing the long history of critiques made against the rational organization of knowledge and culture, we could jump to one key early debate in this to compare Kant’s architectonic organization of knowledge into a system in which the philosopher places individual sciences in relation to each other, in order to evaluate both how complete their claim to knowledge is and to judge whether these sciences set together into a whole serve the ethical needs of humanity, and Hegel’s historical account of how the material substance of knowledge and art both enables and restricts the expression of ideas.

Hegel argued that Kant’s formal organization of the basic preconditions of knowledge or beauty failed to account for the physical, hands-on, material substance that underlies any expression of thought. This debate between Kant and Hegel has implications for every discipline in the university. So for example, you could ask: Does architecture consist in a schematic plan drawn on paper or a computer screen, or is it the space created out of light, air, and the stone, wood, glass or steel as it has been shaped into a unity?

In general, most academic knowledge is created from an engagement with materials—data, texts, objects. Kant, even at his most formal remove, knew that science requires empirical data in order to develop reliable results. He added though, that the scientist sometimes did not have the full picture of what his research meant, and it was the job of the architectonic philosopher to bring the many strands of knowledge together into a coherent whole.

I hope all the administrators out there reading this blog appreciate the comparison to a Kantian/Socratic philosopher.

Alas, as it turns out, of course, the criteria in a university are more economic, than Kantian, even if they share a similar formal apparatus.

Tenure improves teaching, for those who have it

In reading this very eloquent account of how tenure helps professors become better, more expansive teachers http://jdeanicite.typepad.com/i_cite/2010/08/tenure-and-teaching.html

I was struck with how few faculty actually have the opportunities described in this piece.

Tenure allows teachers, first of all, to read far beyond their specialization and to thereby develop complex connections between historical periods and texts. Only with tenure does it feel safe to devote the long stretches of time it takes to read and understand Hegel or Descartes in detail. When you are struggling to justify yourself every other semester to the administrative apparatus, you would never dare take up the challenge of a new field. I could never have explored Renaissance architecture before having tenure. Only when you believe you have the time, can you stop and think.

But this ability to calmly ponder is become more and more an exclusive luxury. Far too many colleagues are worried about their next review to undertake a new research project that might not generate an article for a year or three. Even with tenure, I constantly feel the pressure of "What have you done lately?" It is far more oppressive for the rest of academia than it is for us senior fellows. You need quite a thick skin, or the protective haze of professorial forgetfulness, to shield yourself from the many intrusions on your research.

That having been said, check out the "I cite" link above.

Resistance is futile

Resistance is futile but not for the usual reasons. The old Marxist model saw avant-garde culture as the last holdout against an all consuming culture industry. Back then it seemed that talent scouts were about searching for the newest art in order to incorporate it into mainstream entertainment. Now there is no such tension. Avoiding appropriation is easy, no one in Hollywood is paying attention anyway. Political critiques of entertainment are shrugged off as irrelevant, queer readings are welcomed.

What does this mean for academic criticism? While it once seemed surprising to apply the critical tools of academic commentary to popular entertainment, this sort of cultural studies hardly seems challenging anymore. It is so easy to make a critical political reading of a contemporary film that even the most ardent old school leftist must suspect something. The culture industry does not worry that critics will unveil the neo-liberal message implicit in children's cartoons. The screenwriters worked hard to put it there, they're flattered some professor noticed.

Increasingly the purpose of cultural criticism is to show that art today can have political importance and that once upon a time it did have a social charge. History is the last refuge of criticism. "No one worries about the avant-garde anymore. But they used to seem explosive." Criticism needs to show how art could be radical, shocking, inspiring. We don't need to only use the language of the avant-garde either. This newest historicism seeks to explain the tensions in earlier historical periods, in order to make clear that it could be so once more. Romanticism was once revolutionary, in fact "revolution" used to be revolutionary--the very word has been tamed.

Academic criticism followed the path of the avant-garde in the 1970s by adopting increasingly complex and arcane procedures which separated it from ordinary culture. This specialization was less an attempt to legitimate theory by giving it a jargon than it was an attempt to insist on an academic version of aesthetic autonomy through the use of experimental writing techniques.

In the end, autonomy has brought with it dismissal and ignorance. "You can keep your autonomy" has been the attitude of such institutional voices as the New York Times. That academic writing is dismissed by the Times and so many other mainstream outlets is partially the result of the theory movement's disdain for compromised writing, its insistence on a purity of language even as it demonstrated its impossibility. The age of theory is over not just because that entire generation has died, but also because the shock value of highly complex thought has worn off. Couple that with a political culture that celebrates populist ignorance of history, grammar and logic, then you have the current gulf between the university and the rest of society. So the trick is to write sophisticated commentaries in a new manner.

Culture is no longer ideology

Thesis One: Contemporary culture, wherever it might be hiding, is no longer providing emotional and ideological support for the elite that dominate the United States' political order. The ruling classes can carry on just fine without symbolic references that establish their superior position in society. Philanthropy is at most an activity between the wealthy, but it no longer serves as a compensation for the wealthy to show that they are willing to share. There is no need for such displays anymore.

Culture is an outdated habit, a hobby for those who cannot afford it, a collection of practices by fragmented groups, but certainly no longer monolithic.

Popular entertainment likewise feels little need for cultural legitimation. It operates on its own history without looking more than a generation back into the past.

Translating Globalizations

Once upon a time foreign language departments were small monadic re-creations of the homeland. If you walked down the hall of a French department, everyone spoke French. As a matter of course, you switched into the language as you entered the office space of the department. German departments did the same, they held department meetings in German, they hung around the mail room speaking German, classes were of course in German. If you saw each other in the supermarket, you spoke German. This had the great advantage of giving students the opportunity to practice their language skills, it also intimidated the younger folks and sealed the department culture off, creating an unusual cohesion inside the department that was distinct from the rest of the university.

Now the situation is quite changed. Foreign language departments can not carry on isolated in their own cultures. Translation, not of literary classics, but of basic cultural assumptions is constantly required. We are compelled as foreign language teachers to mediate between the US and other cultures, and not just the language we teach, but it seems increasingly that Europe as a whole has become a strange place to Americans, and so an Italian professor might easily have a wider function than representing just his or her own culture.

Germans have been making this transition for a while. When I teach German history, it really becomes a course in the formation of Europe from the Roman Empire onward. This has a lot to do with being a"good German," that post Nazi, old-Nato ethos of showing that Germans will in future work cooperatively with other Europeans, rather than taking over their countries.

Now, though, it also has this extra charge of explaining the post-Communist unification of Europe as well. There are many different varieties of globalization, and increasingly foreign language departments are required to translate one globalization into another. How do the European interconnections translate into the American mode of making global links? Obviously there are profound differences. The US model is driven enormously by military interventions whereas the European is more mercantile, more deliberative.