February 2010

I have been playing around with an idea on Chicano literature in terms of storytelling and genre. So I was very interested when I saw this CFP:

Rupkatha journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities (ISSN 0975-2935) invites articles and book reviews on Aesthetics of New Literatures English for Volume 2, Number 2. The focus of the issue will be an exploration of the aesthetic (NOT political) aspects of particular authors, particular texts, trends, genres and/or tradition. We are also interested in articles that explain their relation/difference with British literary/linguistic traditions. Please find the broader areas for discussion below:
• English Writings in the Indian subcontinent
• Caribbean Literature
• African Literature in English
• Australian Literature
• Literature of New Zealand
• Chicano Writings
• Canadian Literature
• Literatures produced in English in other countries
Please note that we are open to the suggestion of inclusion of any topic relating to the theme.
For submission of critical writings, please send:
• Completed article (3000-5000 words)
• Abstract (100-200 words)
• 3 to 5 Keywords
• Brief/detailed CV

The problem is that the work is due on March 5th. I haven’t done more than jot notes on the idea. Could I pull it together and get it out there? It would be very useful to have the article in submission when I have the job interview.

Maybe I’ll work on it for the next two days and see how far I get.

Teaching online is an adventure.

I decided I wanted to teach online this semester in December. (Bad plan.) I had the training, but I hadn’t really played around with the software. Then the teaching session I was going to go to for two days was canceled. And I had plans for work (scholarship, research, conferences) for the break and didn’t have a lot of time to set up the class.

I did get two days of training, about a week before school was scheduled to start.

And I did get the course mostly set up by the first day.

This week, though, I discovered that on one quiz I put all the questions in one answer. So if they didn’t get 100%, they got a 0%. That wasn’t what I meant to do, so now I have to go grade those manually. (Which reminds me, I need to go see if there are other things I need to grade manually that I haven’t yet.)

Then I decided I should go through and look at what we are doing for the rest of the semester, since I really don’t remember. That is when I realized I didn’t finish the last two weeks of the class.

Oops. So I’ll be grading some forums, grading an essay, and writing the content for the last two weeks of class this weekend.

I write here about email etiquette, but I recently received an encouraging email. If we got emails like these all the time, we wouldn’t need to discuss email etiquette.

The nicest part (for reading anyway) said:

As a graduate instructor at the University of xx, I just wanted to send a quick note of thanks for your website. It has provided me with extensive information in teaching my courses at Uxx (first-year composition and technical writing), as well as in developing my own professional knowledge base and skill set (through CFPs, helpful hints, etc.).

It is always good to know that what is being done is useful to someone. I especially appreciate it when the someone is a teacher, since that was part of my goal with starting this website.

I am working on a proposal for MLA and I have been doing a lot of primary reading. I thought I would search for secondary articles and texts and found this:

Post-Apocalyptic Hoping: Octavia Butler’s Dystopian/Utopian Vision
Jim Miller
Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 25, No. 2 (Jul., 1998), pp. 336-360
(article consists of 25 pages)
Published by: SF-TH Inc
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4240705

I have read the first page and it is very interesting. I will have to come back to it and read it later.

The Chronicle has an interesting article on Adrian Johns. His 1998 book The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making sounds particularly interesting.

Also interesting was the Einstein-Johns argument.

Johns challenged some dominant lines of thought about book history, arguing against the idea that the printing press had swiftly brought about a “print culture” with unique traits, like fixed and stable editions of works.

His argument is leveled at one scholar in particular: Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, a pioneer in the field of the history of the book who is now an emerita professor of history at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. Eisenstein has long argued that the printing press essentially led to the Renaissance, by allowing the dissemination of knowledge and easy consistency of book editions that were not possible in what she calls “manuscript culture.”

But Johns argues that even after printing was established, stability was never guaranteed. Pirate editions of Hamlet, for instance, botched the play’s most famous line as, “To be or not to be, Aye, there’s the point.”

In fact, he argues, the printing press led to some new kinds of inconsistencies. New printers hoping to cash in on popular plays sent people to write down dialogue from performances for unauthorized print editions. He focuses on the stories of the people who started given printing practices rather than on the assumption that the technology forced them.

Einstein says he was wrong, but I know he was right. Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels changed a lot. Shakespeare’s works… We don’t even have a reasonable version of those. Many, many pirated versions came out with inconsistencies, after the printing press.

And there was textual consistency before the printing press. Sir John Mandeville’s Travels has several hundred extant manuscript copies. If we have several hundred now, imagine how many more there would have been at the time.

The interview has been rescheduled to March 9. This gives me two weeks to study and improve my Spanish.

La entrevista ha sido reprogramada al 9 de marzo. Esto me da dos semanas a estudiar y mejorar mi español.

I also have been reading and rereading novels. I read Cisnero’s The House on Mango Street and Denise Chavez’s A Taco Testimony.

También ha sido leído novelas. Leí La Casa en la Calle de Mango de Cisnero y Un Testimonio de Taco de Denise Chavez.

My husband had sent me a wonderful recipe for re-learning a language after years of disuse. One of the suggestions was to watch language films with English subtitles for fourteen hours in a week. So, since I don’t have any of those at home, I went searching.

I found this introduction to the Universal Studios 1931 Spanish-language Dracula. Now I have something fun to talk about in the interview and we’ll have an excuse to watch movies!

This morning I received a call at my home (about twenty minutes after I left) telling me that CC5 (or is it CC6?) wants to do a phone interview on Thursday. They called my cell phone at 12:40 and left the same message.

Since I was at work all day, I got the cell message first. I called immediately (2:50) and got no answer. I did leave a message. Then I called again at 3:20 and at 4. No one was there.

So I guess I will call again in the morning.

I am thrilled about the interview. I would like to know which position it is though. I applied for three at that school and (as far as I can tell) they are very different.

If it is position 1, most likely, they’ve had my stuff for 5 weeks. That’s actually moving pretty fast. If it is position 3, I’ll faint. Because they have only had my stuff for 5 days. Which means that it is for position 1. Which means I need to review the Mexican-American reading list.

One weird thing: They asked for an academic résumé. I gave them a CV. I hadn’t realized that. Oh well. I guess they liked it anyway.

Unfortunately I also said I could brush up on my Spanish skills, which I certainly could. I learn very fast and Rice has a course for this starting next month. But my skills are very rusty. I can… read comments on Facebook and that is about it right now. However, I do believe I could brush up before next fall and be able to teach a book that is in Spanish, if they wanted that.

Update: I think it is actually CC5. I work at CC1. I did work at CC2. I applied at CC3 and CC4. This is CC5. It’s just hard to read. Maybe I’ll call it CC6 anyway.

Transforming Rhetoric: Discovery and Change

Keynote Speaker:
Maureen Daly Goggin, Arizona State University
“The Legacy of Richard Young:
Embodying and Theorizing Rhetoric as Discovery and Change”

October 22-23, 2010
New Mexico State University
Las Cruces, New Mexico

Of particular interest are presentations that encourage audience participation and discussion, and contribute closely to the conference theme and to questions concerning aspects of the following:

Border rhetorics
New literacies
Critical pedagogy
Activist rhetoric
New media
Service learning
Cross-cultural rhetorics
Community literacy
Rhetoric of race
Digital, visual, and material rhetorics
Rhetoric and agency
The academy and civic engagement
Politics of writing instruction

Please submit:

A cover page that includes the title, speaker/s, address/es, email/s, and phone number/s, along with a brief 25-50 word description of your presentation.
4 copies of a one-page abstract (per speaker) prepared for blind review that describes the proposed talk and identifies the format for the presentation:
20 minute paper, which we will combine with similar proposals to form a 90 minute panel.
90 minute panel, limited to 3 speakers.

The CFP and the { 0 comments }