Writing in the Disciplines

I was Tweeting and needed to know the history of children’s literature in a hurry. Came up with this website.

If you read carefully, you will see that most (all?) of the literature I particularly like (that are not short poems) have been regarded by children as their own. Does that mean I’m a child at heart? I don’t know.

But I think that this history of children’s literature will give me some good places to speak to my Humanities students from, while adding to their information set in a way that may/will be useful to them.

Medieval Epics
children had to be content with adult works which held some interest for them
Beowulf, Song of Roland, El Cid
Medieval Romances
King Arthur and his knights of the Round Table [high middle ages: 12th-13th C]
Robin Hood
Fables and other tales
The Deeds of the Romans [late 13th C] collection of moral tales and fables; sources of plots for centuries]
animals stories have always been favorites of children
biblical stories; lives of saints; local legends

Roman-related:
While the Roman era was pre-medieval, there were some tweets pointing to interesting Roman-related issues.

Early Roman site found in Gloucestershire

Roman Era gold coin found in India. Head of Nero.

Isn’t it amazing how far afield Romans (and/or their money) went?

Roman burial ground found on land in Maryport

Aldborough Roman Site

Medieval Excavations in Ireland, especially at Tralee:
Abstract of Rose M. Cleary’s scholarly article, “Excavation of an early medieval settlement and other sites at Dromthacker, Tralee, Co. Kerry”

Medievalists.Net article on the same topic: Excavation of an early medieval settlement and other sites at Dromthacker, Tralee, Co. Kerry

Early Medieval Ireland: Archaeological Excavations 1903-2004, a PDF

Viking Age Headcoverings from Dublin, vol. 6, by Elizabeth Wincott Heckett

The Kerry Museum

Database of Irish excavation reports

Index to Kerry Archaeological and Historical Society Journals

Medieval Festivals:
700 Images from Abbey Medieval Festival in Australia

James Robertson’s photos of the fair at Ft. Tryon Park, NY, USA and at Sands Point Preserve, NY, USA

A source for finding fairs

Canterbury Cathedral:
Canterbury Cathedral Library Reopens from the BBC

Main website for Canterbury Cathedral

World Heritage article

Medieval and Christianity:
The Pagn Influence on Christian Art in Ireland is from the Journal for Undergraduate Research. It’s well written and has nice illustrations. Going to send it on to a friend who is taking students to Europe next summer on Christian art study.

It was tweeted from medievalists.net, but the original site had all the pretty pictures, so I just linked to it.

Wisdom Literature in Early Ireland, this is the original paper. The Medievalists.net publication of the same information.

Matters of Time: Manipulation of Memory in Early Irish Hagiography from Medievalists.net. At the original site, in a PDF without the pretty picture Medievalists.net added.

Questionable Content:
1066 in an Hour, available at the app store.

However, I have a question. If it’s an hour, why does it say 21.37 for time?

The whole History in an Hour website. They have iPad apps.

In my department one of the core curriculum courses is Humanities. Many English professors teach this as another literature course, but that is not my goal. I want to teach the art, architecture, dance, music, history, and literature of the world. I think my students are getting a solid introduction that they really need to the basics of the humanities.

One of the topics I am working on for next week is the Bayeux Tapestry. The fact that this is coming up is what really had me paying attention to a recent blog post.

Hwaet? wants to know all about the Bayeux Tapestry for a class s/he is going to be teaching and the commenters have left some interesting information and good resources.

I am sure my students would love the sexuality aspects of the tapestry and I may end up introducing that myself if I can find some good pictures to illustrate the points.

In the post, the author of Hwaet begins:

I know the basics at this point; history of the Norman conquest, not it isn’t really a tapestry but embroidery, Latin, only a few people named, very few women depicted, end of tapestry missing etc.

What is most interesting to me at this point are the borders. I have read so far that they depict Aesops fables, some other medieval folktales, sometimes seem to be related to the story, sometime not. May signify dissent of those who made tapestry and disagreed with the way this history was recorded etc. I have found several interesting sites, articles and mention of books. Any recommended resources, ones I should not miss?

“True innovation requires an interdisciplinary approach. We now have to start looking at the convergence of disciplines, and we need to be able to find ways to fund programs across disciplines,” said Babiuk.

This quote from Social Science Research Should Be at the Core of Innovation made me think of the Humanities course I am teaching this semester. It also made me think of interdisciplinarity in English in general.

Somehow I made the cognitive leap to Digital Humanities, a cross between social science quantitative research and computers, between archivist and creator. (I am not opposed to quantitative research. In fact, I quite like quantitative research. My dissertation, scheduled to be published next year, was quantitative research.)

Digital humanities and quantitative research reminded me of Dr. Skallerup’s post on being a digital humanities outsider.

There has been an explosion in interest in the digital humanities. Say what you will about the decline in traditional print media, but it still stands to reason that when the old Grey Lady, the New York Times, features something, it means it has hit the mainstream. And so it would seem that the digital humanities have hit the big time, such as it is. (And yes, I do see the irony in this).

The Art of Good Writing is a discussion of Stanley Fish’s new book, but it is more than that. It is also an articulation of a stance on writing.

Though never explicitly political, The Elements of Style is unmistakably a product of its time. Its calls for “vigour” and “toughness” in language, its analogy of sentences to smoothly functioning machines, its distrust of vernacular and foreign language phrases all conform to that disciplined, buttoned-down and most self-assured stretch of the American century from the armistice through the height of the cold war. A time before race riots, feminism and the collapse of the gold standard. It is a book full of sound advice addressed to a class of all-male Ivy-Leaguers wearing neckties and with neatly parted hair. This, of course, is part of its continuing appeal. It is spoken in the voice of unquestioned authority in a world where that no longer exists.

I was taught using Strunk & White. I never matched it with the literature we were reading, so perhaps I always saw the discussion of writing in brevity as a business proposition. (There is significant evidence for this. Until last summer I have always perceived of emails as internet memos rather than as a faster version of snail mail. Business writing seems to be my primary mode of thought for writing of all sorts.)

What the author says about other modes of writing, though, is particularly striking.

MLA

This was one of the early presentations I went to. I used paper and pen note taking for it, so I am transcribing this onto the blog.

Frank Gaughan of Hofstra University and Peter H. Khost of Stony Brook University (SUNY)

“brave new university” a la Jeffrey Williams

literaturing composition
This was a phrase they wanted to use to talk about their topic. I believe that they want to suggest that we should write in a more accessible manner. I am not sure that literature is really that much more accessible to the general public than academic writing.

James Sasnowski “ideal template” = book contract for tenure and promotion

English graduate students take 9.3 years to earn their PhD. Imagine that! I took longer, just under the 12 year wire. But I also had a tenure-track position, got married, and had two children in the middle.

Tenure-track positions are declining while graduating PhDs remains constant.

According to the 2006 Digest of Education between 2004 and 2006, there was a 101% increase in enrollment at colleges, while those earning a PhD in English went down 16%.

Reddings

Humanities is conflated with university itself, says Derrick Bach.

1911 NCTE-NEA split created two ghettos, literature and composition

Some responses to this:
ADP, CCCC coalitions, equity groups, individual scholars

People divide in what they talk about:
1. causes and blame
2. labor and curricular changes
3. unionization

We are all highly trained in research and rhetoric.

We need disciplinary collaboration. (Which is probably where the literaturing composition comes in.) The value of our field’s work being known requires awareness across the disciplines.

English profs intellectual life has become isolated from the public.
How do we determine a scholar’s relevance?
–a negative reputation becomes entrenched
–readership for scholarship is usually limited
During one of the presentations this panel discussed the difference between reading and use. Scholarship is not being read, but only used. I think I agree with that differentiation.

Here they made a reference to the university as popular culture such as discussed in Gerald Graff’s article from 2003. The art is from that article. It was created by Victor Juhasz.)

Simply “going public” (the present catchphrase and expectation) will not help repair the perception of our discipline. Simply writing in a more accessible manner or even with other people (as in service learning projects) does not show our relevance to the university in particular or the world in general.

Would people still publish if tenure and promotion did not rest on publications? (A Canadian study on the importance of publication for tenure and promotion.)

I think some people would still publish. In fact I think inertia might keep people publishing long past a t&p rationale, if it were eliminated from that. I know I see publications as a way of keeping score. How am I doing? I have a 40% acceptance rate. Or I have twenty publications. But I agree that a lot of people would quit publishing and a large number of even the paper journals (which still have more cachet than the e-journals) would disappear.

Robert Scholes, imagination and narrative writing, composing literature.
So we should move towards literature-ing composition.

Theoretical and pedagogical work would be more accessible.
It would be good to increase the visibility of composition theory and literacy practices.
Living through literature.
“transactional reading of the text”

Roland Barr “Reading happens when the reader looks up from the text.”

retro-allegorizing to take a work already written and show how it fits a new theory

Judith Ryan says that literature scholars buy texts that have larger audiences but write close readings of literature.

There is anxiety over disciplinary content, says David Downing.

exceed the demands of genre

Orpheus and Eurydice as metaphor.
Orpheus lost Eurydice because even his charm and rhetoric did not allow him a second chance. He was depending on his own voice, his own eyes, to know if she was there. He could have called to her and listened for her answer. He didn’t.
He never talks to Eurydice. Orpheus had a myopic conception of audience… limited to himself.
Eurydice, on the other hand, always spoke directly and intimately to her husband. You would expect her to speak here, if he had only bothered to talk to her.

A literature text offers readers the opportunity to engage with it outside the close reading experience.

This relates very specifically to Gregory Jusdanis’ work as presented in the Why Literature Matters panel.

I referenced this discussion two or three times in talking with scholars about their presentations. It seems that this is a very timely text. The topic seemed to come up again and again or be touched on or referenced many times at the MLA this time.

Mark Roche also spoke about the use of literature or text versus enjoyment. Again that seems to be a theme or at least a significant discussion going on.

Suzanne Nalbantian
Long Island U: CW Post Campus
“The Memory Process in Modernist Literature and NeuroScience”

This is a live blogging of the session.

This paper is based on a newly published interdisciplinary volume.

Over the past decade a major interdisciplinary movement has come into being. At the same time humanistic disciplines move towards neuroscience while scientists are looking for what does not appear in the experiment.
Neuroscience is important.

Cognitive literary criticism is growing.
Mine is neuro-cognitive, focus on authors, whose works enact …
Analyzing authors recognized as neuro-genius.
Literature as a laboratory of the mind.
Fresh insights into the studies of complex studies of literary works based on the idea that we are our brain.

19 original articles to create a dialogue between neuroscientists and humanities.
The Memory Process: Neuroscientific and Humanistic Perspectives

Physiological brain studies
Collaborate with scientific researchers
Works of various genres and their direct correlations with scientific memory theories.

Can help us understand memory as a creative process.

Phoenix metaphor: memories perenially re-creation
Many layers of memory.
Transcience of memory
Biological confirmation of the basic inaccuracy of memory.

In Faulkner’s Sound and Fury memories comprimised by present experience.

In human’s retrieval of memory may update. Retrieval can strengthen memory.
Anais Nin, House of Incest
“alleged incest”
Really? It’s not incest? Is the speaker saying it didn’t happen? Or is the fictionalization the issue? Why does she say alleged incest? Are we moving away from the acceptance of that, too? Did you notice no one says “alleged robbery” even when it may not have happened? What is the point of this?
Unsolicited memory retrieval…
Traumatic memory…
Chemical influences that govern reconsolidation.
A scientist shows that in dreams and off-line thinking their is a consolidation and strengthening of memories. Dreams create stronger memories and understanding of those memories. “The expressed non-conscious”

Borges discussed “pathology of memory” of male who fell from horse and re-experienced memories.

synthetic construction of memory
often depending on strength of connections between neurons in the brain
Language shapes memory at illuminated moments of poetic expression.

Barbara Tillman- musical memory
Music helps with long-term memory.
Music, episodic memory, and emotion are linked.
Neurorelationship of music and memory “The Dead” by James Joyce.

Unconscious implicit memory and conscious explicit memory always separated, but the new book’s articles all are linked.
Ex: Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse

Memory of emotion can move us without the invocation of that emotion. Unlacing boots reminds of grandmother, who untied his boots. Saw his grandmother in memory. Then felt bad about how he treated her, which was a weakening of his memories. Proust
Strong connection of selfhood and memory.
Connection is a given in literature.
Confirmed by multiple disciplines.
Lasting beliefs in link- films link this (science blog on amnesia in the movie)

Art transforms memory.
Brain transforms autobiographical facts in memory.
Writer may artistically recapture memory through imagination.
“I invent that which I remember.” (French guy, don’t know who.)

Attilio Favorini
U of Pittsburgh
“The Memory Scene in Twentieth-Century Drama” (original title)
“The Memory Scene of Samuel Beckett” (title on paper)

Two points:
Although writers have been drawing on dramatic metaphors, memory in drama has been basically ignored.
Correspondences between scientific ideas and theatrical metaphors has been ignored. memographers = folks who write about memory
Dramatic metaphors continue to serve in memory today.

“earliest memories are regular scenes worked out in plastic”
relationship on identity and memory -Sax
the person shows forth in a continual production of himself in response to eldopa

event memories

scripts to describe sequences that children learn from going to bed rituals

world can be bound into a scene… of events
Edelman’s concept of a scene requires a linkage. Memory scenes do not picture the past but order, bind, and present.

Scene better than image, not static. (my word)

Theater metaphor useful because requires manager, audience, etc.
Theatrical metaphor deployed by cognitive scientists significantly.

Dramatic presentations of memory have been forgotten.

How memory transforms and both transforms taken up by Edelman and Beckett.
How can the firing of neurons give rise to feelings, smells, etc. (Edelman)

Neurons that fire together, lie together.
We don’t remember things, we remember relations.
High order conscious makes it possible to relate a socially constructed self to the future, to deal with the not-there.

Samuel Beckett shows a keen interest in the corporeal aspect of memory, from his essay on Proust to last drama.

Habit is unconscious memory.

Act Without Words shows how memory mediates between primary and higher order consciousness.

Beckett’s intensely memorious Krapp’s Last Tape links alcoholism and loss of memory… recorded memory… skips a transitional tape. Makes a categorical break with the present.

The word scene or scenes tolls through the past.

For Edelman, the brain is constructive. Builds a coherent picture of what once was and could be.
Beckett’s view is the inverse. Fragments and disconnects one part of the brain from the other.

John Burt Foster
George Mason U
“Memories Re-membered in Modern Memoirs”

Referring to passages on handout.
Memoir’s very name relates closely to memory.
Focuses with special intensity on the author’s capacity to remember.
Fertile ground for recognizing/examining the episodic nature of memory.

Consider a variety of memoir passages.
Yeats, Nabokov, and McCarthy returned to memories again and again.
Striking insights into consistency and impact of other events.
Language in which written, conflicting testimony, confusion with imagination.

Yeats
left two accounts of his life
1915 private mss written personally in discouragement
1922 memoir for public when he was happy because Ireland had independence
Both versions quote word-for-word but the presentation of those words changes.
constraint of grief versus triumphant defiance

Nabokov
personal memoir as experiment in self-observation
scientific attempt to understand
rewriting in different language sharpened memory in 3 ways
1. reading page proofs
2. (repeated cueing) glasses became cigarette case
3. putting memory into words increases strength

translating them into Russian (the original language) “intense concentration, the neutral smudge might be forced to come into beautiful focus”
group memory within a family circle- It was his father’s memory. Nabokov was not there because he was not born.
Bearing witness to a visual experience that only gradually gets verbal processing.

Memory in present and as a record of the past.
Nabokov exploits the memory of his father to act as time travel.
Russia’s old style calendar, difficult to find the butterfly in the area.
Step by step build up noted in the father exemplifies the mnemonic experience that Nabokov used after they had to flee from Russia.
His mother, who loved to gather mushrooms there, also remembered.
He and his mother would play a memory game of walking along a remembered path.

Mary McCarthy, the failure of memory
failures usually come to light when published
Her siblings were able to come to her memory writing.
As a result, the book includes inter-chapters with the folks’ responses, her own response to them, and her own discussion.

“Tin Butterfly” published in The New Yorker
Children are orphaned by flu.
Aunt marries an evil man, Uncle Myers.
McCarthy re-read her sketch, which Nabokov did to help memory, actually caused her to doubt. She recontacted her brother to find out if he did tell her he saw her Uncle leave the butterfly at her plate. He said no. Did her teacher say that her uncle must have done it?

Specimens related here, selected based on their genuine interest with how memory works. Function as true literature and richly informative experiments in writing with and about memories.

Live Science’s “The Art of Diagnosis: Paintings Stand in for Patients” offers an interesting intersection of medicine and art.

Since I may, someday, be teaching a humanities course, and I love medicine in education, I thought I would bookmark this.

This technique was developed more than a decade ago at the medical school to help students become more skillful at diagnosing patients once they became doctors, according to Irwin Braverman, professor emeritus and senior research scientist in dermatology. About 16 other medical schools either are or have employed a similar form of observation training, and it is being developed at others, according to Braverman.

Medical schools teach future doctors to memorize patterns in order to recognize syndromes, which are collections of different signs and symptoms, Braverman said. With a rash, for example, students learn to look for two components: first, the distribution of the rash, and second, the morphology of the individual lesions in the rash. Those two characteristics together allow a doctor to make a diagnosis. However, visual analysis, like that honed by describing the paintings, becomes important when a rash doesn’t fit a pattern the doctor recognizes, he told LiveScience in an e-mail.

Hmmm… Visual rhetoric.

Or “No Academic Discussion is an End Unto Itself”

Teaching Writing in the Social Sciences

While I don’t teach it anymore, it was an adjunct gig for me and the university which housed and required the course has abandoned it, Writing in the Social Sciences was an important course for me. It was the first completely across the curriculum course I taught, though it was not the first cross-discipline course. (That was a freshman composition for Health Science Professionals.) It impacted my life enough that I thought it worth writing an article about and this was published in Currents in Teaching and Learning.

Because of my personal connection to the course, when browsing through the WAC Clearing House I was intrigued to find an article entitled Teaching Writing in the Social Sciences: A Comparison and Critique of Three Models.

You might find it fascinating too. The abstract says:

This article describes and evaluates three approaches to teaching writing in the social sciences, particularly psychology: an English department-based course for all social science majors; a team-teaching model that embeds writing in core courses in psychology; and a stand-alone course dedicated to teaching writing in psychology, often taken concurrently with other core courses. Using Beaufort’s (2007) five knowledge domains of expert writers as a lens through which we view each approach, we describe each model and appraise the success of each in providing what Ding (2008) and Collins, Brown, and Holum (1991) call a cognitive apprenticeship, i.e., an educational experience that makes the thinking and practices of a discipline visible and gives students tools and experiences to help them become insiders in a discourse community. Each of these approaches to teaching social science writing can provide some elements of a good cognitive apprenticeship, but the drawbacks to each make the goal of providing such an apprenticeship elusive because of the constant challenge of developing competent faculty, sustaining faculty commitment, and guaranteeing adequate department resources to support these efforts.

What is Beaufort’s model?

“Beaufort’s (2007) conceptual model of writing expertise, which postulates that proficient writers draw on five knowledge domains when composing: (1) knowledge of writing processes, (2) knowledge of rhetoric, (3) knowledge of subject matter, (4) knowledge of genre, and (5) knowledge of the discourse community they are operating in—a domain that encompasses the other four.”

Who is an expert?

The discussion of subject matter expertise was fascinating. I personally often feel as if I am faking it; I am a professor because I act like a professor and I will act like a professor until I become one. So this area really caught my attention. How does one become an expert? How is an expert created or recognized?

This is an interesting and simple question in some ways. Clearly an expert painter’s work is sold for high prices. An expert fiction author’s work makes the best seller list or is loved by the critics (depending on whether one is writing high or low literature). An expert journalist has a Pulitzer.

So what is an expert professor? In some ways, the term expert professor almost seems redundant. One cannot become a professor unless one is expert. But it is, perhaps, an expertise that is in writing papers that will be accepted by senior scholars, an expertise in doing the reading and research that are required to write something coherent and intelligent, an expertise in choosing a field in which one can–if not shine–at least prosper.

Genre knowledge is key.

This was a focus of my dissertation and is still a focus of my attention. Genre in all its many quirks and byways catches my attention.

Hansen and Adams’ discussion of genre, as social action (Miller) and as a study of the “textual dynamics of a discourse community” (Berkenkotter and Huckin 497), strongly reverberates with what I wrote in my dissertation. Both of those sources are ones I called on for my work.

How does this relate to me today?

I think Beaufort’s model of writing expertise might be an interesting approach to take with my MLA presentation “Avoiding Academic Rigor Mortis.” I will have to consider that.

I also think that the cognitive apprenticeship discussion may have something to say to my other MLA presentation, “Utilizing Scholarship to Improve Teaching.”

[C]ognitive apprenticeship is a “model of instruction that works to make thinking visible” (Collins, Brown, & Holum, 1991). Cognitive apprenticeships derive their characteristics from being embedded in a subculture, or discourse community, in which “most, if not all, members are participants in the target skills” (Collins, Brown, & Holum, 1991). The challenge in creating a cognitive apprenticeship is to “situate the abstract tasks of the school curriculum in contexts that make sense to students” and “deliberately bring the thinking to the surface, to make it visible” (Collins, Brown, & Holum, 1991).

In fact, the more I think of it, the more that conferences (which are the focus of the second paper) are a cognitive apprenticeship. Doesn’t that make perfect sense? Seriously. They are embedded in the discourse community. Members participate in the target skills and conferences situate the abstract tasks of writing and presenting, bringing–for example, pedagogy–to the surface and making the process of teaching and thinking about teaching visible.

Perhaps I want to look at my philosophical/rhetorical roots for how to present the information at MLA. Maybe I want to focus on genres, expert status, and the concept of attending conferences as a cognitive apprenticeship of its own.