More Good News

While I have been quiet on the issue of my Mom's health, at this point I feel comfortable divulging a bit without giving too many specifics. For a range of variously mysterious reasons, she's been in hospital for most of February. A few things were starting to make sense, but nothing remotely comprehensive.

Last August, when her health issues ramped up some, my father had asked the GI specialist about the possibility of exploratory surgery, to which the response was "We don't do that anymore." Well, today, working on a hunch that frankly my mother wasn't particularly optimistic about, the local surgeon did a laproscopy that revealed three different major anomalies, at least two of which were almost certainly major sources of her symptoms.

While I guess we'll need to see how recovery goes, the odds seem good that not only were a few major issues identified, but that they were remedied during surgery. I'm just beginning to process what that may mean even as I post this, but the short answer is that it's positive news, maybe transformatively positive news.

Narrative Conference

Anyone going to the Narrative Conference in May? Let me know by gmailing me at delightandinstruct. Maybe we can meet up and get some barbecue.

A Bit of Good News

Those currently or recently on the job market almost certainly know that however common it was or wasn't in some mythical golden age, the pre-tenure sabbatical is an uncommon beast indeed. On every on-campus interview I went on, questions about pre-tenure leave was met with a rueful, but dismissive, "no." BRU was no different. Sabbatical came at 7-year intervals and no sooner.

So imagine my surprise when our department announced today that starting next year (when I become eligible) pre-tenure faculty are eligible for a two-course release, which on a 3/2 effectively translates to a one-semester leave. Now, because I owe the deparment a course because of London Tour's cancellation this year, I will have to teach it next spring, but that's it: a spring with a once-a-week course and a trip to London in the middle. Score!

Essay Writing for Jesus

I often assign a paper during the Romanticism segment of the survey course that has students thinking about notions of the sublime. They read excerpts of Kant and Burke, and in class we look at these notions in Shelley, Blake, and Wordsworth. This is hardly an innovative concept in the pedagogy of Romanticism, but I find it works pretty well for a period in which I've done very little advanced reading.

For this assignment specifically, I get a lot of students who reference both the language of, and often the fact of, their personal relationship with their lord and savior Jesus Christ.

I can't help but roll my eyes when Blake and his visionary cosmology, or Wordsworth and his "semi-atheism," or heaven forfend, the outspoken atheist Shelley, are revealed to be Christians along the line Joel Osteen and Jerry Falwell.

Now I know that my own personal history with Christianity (my folks are evangelicals, and until about 18, I was too) conditions this response, but I am hardly closed off to the possibility of my students' faith. I just hate it when their papers become a venue for their personal witness.

Three papers in a row this evening found references to poets' beliefs that were both counter to all evidence in their biographies, to what was discussed in class, and which are completely ahistorical: the kind of personal teddy-bear god that has inf(l)ected a lot of popular American religious discourse--especially for teens. I learned that when Wordsworth speaks about nature in Tintern Abbey, he really means "Jesus," that the Tyger solves the problem of evil because it shows us that all of creation is part of God's Work, God's Plan and God's Love. The third paper references the author's desire to find "the presence of God in Blake's writing," but then finally acknowledges that this isn't an appropriate strategy. I'm not entirely sure why the author felt the need to signpost a rejected interpretive strategy, but I wish more students understood this.

I understand that many students with an evangelical upbringing will naturally transpose the ineffable and infinite of the sublime into the vocabulary of "my god is an awesome god," and I tend to understand this issue a bit more, often with a simple comment like "take care not to transpose your 21st century beliefs onto 200-year-old texts." But the papers where students spend the whole essay arguing that a poem about nature is really about Jesus? They unnerve me.

Are they witnessing to me? Do they believe that they are taking a stand? Are they so deeply immersed in a kind of totalizing theology that they can imagine no other way through which to view experience?

So I've got to write end comments on these papers, and since all three invoke a literalist Christian God, but take different tacks in doing so, I can't even cop-and-paste a response for their end comments.

Bringing Speakers to Campus

Some years ago, when I was interviewing at a small state school (SSS) in a college-rich area, I asked how much contact these faculty (on a 4/4, naturally, and often looking to "publish up") had with more established scholars at bigger, more prestigious schools in some cases less than 15 miles away. The answer? None. This was disheartening, and one of the many reasons I turned down that tenure track job in a year when no other TT job presented itself.

After the ASTR conference last November, I started talking to one of the other seminar participants, who is located within reasonable driving distance from BRU, about us somehow taking advantage of that proximity of both intellectual interests and physical campuses. After two+years here, I've made few of those connections I had hoped to find at SSS, despite being in an area where such connections are at least a possibility.

I had noticed that at both my grad institution, and a BRU, some of those things were happening, but always at the senior faculty level, and often only with endowed chairs who had a pool of money to bring in.

Well, with the new courses I'm teaching in the fall, my new ASTR friend would be a phenomenal supplement to my pedagogy, and could bring in a richer sense of particular discourses on particular texts than I could. So I'm looking for ways to bring him to campus, a process that is just beginning, and I'd be really interested to hear other people's ideas on.

But more generally, I think this is an idea that we need to be considering more persistently. I am always concerned when I hear "ivory tower" epithets, and their implications that universities are not connected to the real world. These epithets feel truer when I realize that universities and departments aren't often very good at making connections with each other, let alone with the real world.

And yet the guest lecture format seems to be a low-risk, low-cost win-win for everyone involved. When speakers are comparatively local, costs can be kept very low, especially if faculty are willing to swap talks or think more creatively about logistics. Both parties benefit: the speaker, especially younger scholars, benefit with lines for annual reports, with chances to work out new scholarship with somewhat lower stakes, with networking connections forged and reinforced. And of course the hosts benefit, too, with an influx of new ideas, the opportunities for publicity that an incoming speaker brings, and of course the same networking possibilities.

But often these kinds of connections are reserved for established scholars whose work is well-known, even famous. But what if we work toward establishing these exchanges, these networks for recently-tenured, untenured, and off-the-tenure-track faculty, and even advanced graduate students? Establishing these connections with each other can only enrich the profession, the campus, and the individuals involved.

So how do we do it?

Well, it starts with talking about it at all. Although I know that Flavia, Dr. Crazy, Dr. Virago, Nels, Chuck Tryon, or JBJ are very strong contributors in their fields, and that grad students like Sisyphus or Acephalous are becoming, I haven't, until now, thought about trying to bring them to my campus. But why not? Dr. V completely changed the way I taught medieval drama, and I'm using an essay by Nels in my grad class this semester. We can meet-up at conferences. Let's meet-up at each other's campuses. Let's talk in each other's classes. Let's make turn some of the potential offered by the connections of the academic blogosophere into on-site connections on our campuses and in our classrooms.

Who are you going to tag first?

Slim Pickins at D&I

I've been posting lightly here lately, and reading fairly lightly too. Even after culling a few spaces that I rarely read from my bloglines subscriptions, I'm often 150-200 posts behind at any given time. This is not because I don't love you, because I do, really I do.

But it's been hard lately:

• hard because I want to post about my mom, but can't post about my mom out of respect for her privacy and my desire to keep this space primarily professional. For the record, things aren't dire, but they sure ain't great on that line of conversation.
• hard because the two committees I've been on lately have been very consuming, and not always productive of useful things to say at any given time.
  
• hard because I've been trying to edit and write and revise with all of this supposed free time I imagined myself having and which I do not have. Which means that said editing and writing and revising is way behind schedule. At minimum, I have to have 15 pages written for a plenary in three weeks. I have not yet begun to draft.
  
• hard because instead of maintaining my weight as I had hoped, I'm slowly gaining a bit back. And May is still far away.
  
• hard because even when the teaching is good, as it is now, it's time consuming. And I just collected a batch of papers today. yippee!

So, y'know, someday, I'll be back to posting 2, 3 times a week, with thoughtful posts like a response to JBJ's important and useful thoughts about assessment. In the meantime, if anyone has A) ideas about how to teach Dave Eggers's A Heartbreaking Work, or b) specific ideas for organizing a 200-level contemporary literature class or c) time to write my plenary talk, or d) a cure for undiagnosable auto-immune connective tissue diseases and the gastrointestinal side effects....I'm all ears.

Fall Schedule

Just got my fall schedule, the first semester of my 3/3 year--the heaviest teaching load of my thus-far cushy career. The bad news: three preps, all new. The good news: all awesome classes!