When writing to a university president, try to be polite, but clear; as a colleague, you have an informed perspective to offer. — This sounds like a good rule and I would like to think I followed it this time. But administrative prose is not my forte. _________________ President David Naylor University of Toronto Simcoe Hall, room 206 27 King’s College Circle Toronto M5S 1A1 CANADA. Dear President Naylor: I was dismayed to hear of th...

From a recent Trib article reproduced in the Times, Didi Kirsten Tatlow, “Letter from China: In Search of a Modern Humanism in China,” NYT, May 13, 2010: I met Mr. Wang [Hui] after he returned to China. On a hot, gusty day as a sandstorm whirled through Beijing, he explained his new ideas. “A healthy society needs truthful voices,” he said. “And truthful voices come from truthful people.” China, he said, sorely lacks that. To solve its probl...

You've heard of animation (the illusion of motion produced by a rapid sequence of two-dimensional line images). You've heard of claymation (the illusion of motion produced by showing a rapid sequence of stop-motion photographs of plasticine figures). Now readers of Printculture have the opportunity to discover MLA-mation, the illusion of motion produced by rapidly running down the list of papers you've presented at a number of MLA meetings (in...

You don't have to be named Gotcha von Schadenfreude to enjoy this bit of applied philosophical research: according to a 2007 piece in the Chronicle of Higher Ed., ethics books are more likely to go missing from university libraries than books in other branches of philosophy, and the more recent and more specialized the book, the higher the probability that somebody has, er, taken it out on permanent loan. Irony? Hypocrisy? Don't forget, this ...

As the leaves appear on the trees, as the lawns turn green again, as the libraries glow with lamplight late into the night and exams approach, the New York Times publishes another article urging the reinvention of the American university. Deans and professors will print it out and make a mental note to reread it over the summer. Parents and trustees may come to graduation ceremonies clutching a copy and wanting to talk about it. It may sink in...

A couple of days ago, while surfing through the internet, I came across this very fine review of Angus Fletcher’s new book on environmental poetry. What a surprise it was for me, a big fan of his old, now standard work on allegory published in 1964. Somehow you tend to see standard works as lacking any relation to an actual author. Standard works become properties of disciplines or institutions, a type of acknowledgment that you imagine as s...

Pretending, for the occasion, to have a Central Committee, the journal Tel Quel sent a delegation to China in the spring of 1974. Spring 1974: the campaign “to critique Lin Biao and Confucius” was in full spate, and any pauses in the chorus of blame could be filled with the detestable names of Khruschev (revisionist!) and Liu Shaoqi (capitalist-roader!). Mao was still shuffling from palace to palace, Jiang Qing’s Four Model Revolutionary Opera...

For obvious reasons, films about academics catch my attention. The latest, “Examined Life,” by Astra Taylor, who also made “Zizek!”, opens in New York and I read two reviews and an interview with Taylor. I'm always curious about how academics are perceived, understood (or misunderstood), and talked about by those outside the profession, reading with a kind of wariness to see which of the usual tropes will get trotted ou...

(This was the Phi Beta Kappa address, Alpha chapter of Connecticut, December 2007.) I am delighted to welcome each one of you into this society and to give your parents one more opportunity to embarrass you in front of strangers by mentioning at inappropriate times this index of your scholarly success. As you know, ours is unusual among the Greek-letter organizations of this country. There is no Phi Beta Kappa clubhouse on campus, no special ...

Today we offer, in memory of the parties that erupted all over Paris upon Mitterrand's election in May 1981, an icon of sociality in the form of a Printculture Mount Rushmore. After the jump.

It's a special day when the Wall Street Journal has something nice to say about Yale. In this case, they say good things about Rick Levin-- who deserves them, in my opinion. But the framework in which the praise is uttered conforms to the WSJ's all-encompassing scenario: universities are competitors in a market. Yale is a brand that must struggle and prevail. The main items in their list of laurels are the fact that Yale's endowment has grown ...

This link is a little old, but ever-so-up-to-date. A year and a half ago, some of the top profs at NYU were asked what the big new trend in humanities were. A few said “neuroscience,” some said “globalism,” but by far the winner-- which wins partly because it encapsulates the former two and much else besides-- was “interdisciplinarity.” Don't just trust me. See for yourself, here. Oh yes, everybody has a go...

I’m not sure if “thanks” are in order, but a tip of the imaginary hat atop my dizzied noggin to E Hayot for passing along the link to the series of NY Times posts generated in response to Stanley Fish’s, well, let’s call it a review, of François Cusset’s French Theory. The postings were both utterly predictable and utterly horrifying: bile-filled rants, smug dismissals, friends-worse-than-enemies endorsements (it’s a harmless game!), Zen parab...

One of my longstanding dreams is to have a website on which people can post ideas for books, articles, or inventions under a Creative Commons license that allows for use with attribution. Obviously I'm not the first on the block to this idea. Creative Commons founder Lawrence Lessig's book, The Future of Ideas, is available for download via a CC license. The book is largely about the ways in which copyright stifles dissent and innovation; in ...

Somehow I missed the whole Science Fair thing as a child; my only experience of them was via American film and television shows, and I imagined them as a staple of an experience that I was glad not to have. Every other time I tried to make something for a class presentation a combination of not being a very driven student and a poor attention to detail led to embarrassment, as in the time I gave my geometry class presentation (this in ninth gr...

My well is dry this week. I'd been mulling over what I could write about, but no topic coalesced. I read the news but nothing elicits a strong enough reaction for me to put thought to paper, as it were. My main preoccupation these days is the new course I'm teaching with new students at a new school, or more precisely, a new kind of institution from the ones I've known up to now.

Struggling, like Brother Hayot, to find topic enough and time for this week’s post, I was delighted to find amazon recommending to me George Steiner’s newly published My Unwritten Books, an account of projects he never did get around to and why. A little less long in the tooth than Dr. Steiner, my own personal list would have to be in the mode of won’t-get-around-to rather than didn’t-get-around-to, but even there I got stuck. The problem was ...

Too much going on this week to manage something coherent; if you're in the mood I recommend reading the stuff everyone else is writing on the site, which keeps striking me as really good. 1. Big Love I gave up on Big Love this week. About halfway through an episode, I turned to my spouse, who'd already wandered into the kitchen, and said, “you know what? I'm done.” Ejected the DVD, put season 1's two remaining discs back in their N...

On the heels of two wildly successful openers on the state of graduate teaching, I conclude my series (and my stock of new ideas for 2008) with this, the third and final installment, which is to the series as the NY Giants' final drive was to the Super Bowl, minus to be sure the horse-faced leadership and the surprising reversal of fortune. (And for those of you who missed the game's most racist ad, see here.)

Last week I laid out some initial thoughts around the question of graduate teaching. J Lee and H Saussy both responded, and I'm going to begin this week by addressing some of the things they wrote, mainly as a way of getting myself started. First, J Lee asked if the point of graduate education in the humanities was actually to train future professors, since that isn't always the case elsewhere. That can of worms is particularly large, and part...

I've been having a minor crisis of confidence around my teaching lately. The problem is more or less this: I don't really know if we know what we're doing, especially when it comes to the kind of work we assign. The problem feels different (and simpler) in the undergraduate classroom than in the graduate one. I take the goal of undergraduate teaching to make students smarter, more capable of analytic thinking and expression, and more able to ...

Somehow it's easier to deal with long comments in this format for me, mainly because I can break things down into pieces. So. Babykong writes: Do you think there is a connection between what you are saying the the oft-heard idea that “there is nothing truly exciting going on” in literary and cultural criticism these days? I guess the first question would be: Do people still say that, or has the rise of the globalism thing, the science and lit...

In the comments BabyKong anticipates much of what I was going to say next, perhaps because, like his/her older sibling Donkey Kong (or perhaps, since I am not fully up-to-date on the Kong family tree, the nimbler Donkey Kong Jr.), he specializes in reacting to the moves of slightly over-adventursome Italian plumbers like myself. What follows is — with the exception of my explanation of why it's easier to write the 3000th article on Joyce...

It occurred to me the other day — and in fact I may have already bored one or two Printculture readers with this — that it would be useful to think about why so much academic work on contemporary material isn't very good. But perhaps the premises bear repeating: (1) a higher percentage of literary critical or cultural analysis of contemporary material — fiction, poetry, film, the culture in general — says, by my standards, completely predictab...

For the past four years I had a 5-minute drive to my office, before that, a 10-minute walk. Not since a summer job after freshman year have I had to commute on mass transit. Now, having moved to a new city in a new state and started a new job at which I’ve been working since mid-July, I commute about one hour by train each way to an urban campus. After the initial shock and fatigue of the early morning schedule and the rush hour crowds on the ...