Worldwise is a set of events sponsored by the ARHU department. Our next major event is going to be February 24th and it is going to be a set of presentations on ENERGY.

Check out the website for more details and send in a proposal!

http://www.worldwise.umd.edu/subpage_proposal.html

Maud Newton, literary femme fatale and all-around delight, blogs (and twitters! how progressive) from the 80th anniversary of the Oxford English Dictionary.

Biggest development?  The third edition of the 20-volume set of the Oxford English Dictionary will also be its last!  After publication of “the first comprehensive and up-to-date edition of the OED in one alphabetical sequence since the original edition of 1928″, the OED will (figuratively) close all 20 of its covers and move on to a bigger and brighter future as an internet-only text.

My prediction: the next groundbreaking dictionary to box up its dusty, leather cover in favor of a more hip internet form will be the Urban Dictionary.  Oh, wait…

Is the OED’s move to an exclusively electronic form good or bad?  Will this spell the end of civilization’s erudite ability to trace the exact diachronous history of a word?  Or simply the proletarianization of mankind’s intelligence?  You decide.

A recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education covered the story of a business professor facing federal charges for intercepting the e-mail of a student he was having an intimate relationship with for over eight months. The student is also pursuing a civil suit against both the professor and the university. The university has suspended the professor until the matter is settled. This incident reminded me of another article I read at the Dankprofessor’s Blog in which he cited an incredibly provocative essay by feminist bell hooks on erotic student/faculty relationships.

It was interesting to me that almost all of the comments in the Chronicle article were directly opposed to the thesis of bell hooks’ essay. The very first comment by Susan set the tone:

“Okay, boys—I know you will disagree, but here goes: a professor ( in a position of power) should not be copulating with their students. This behavior costs organizations many millions of dollars each year. Look where it leads one—now poor Stephan Gladuwacked is going to do a little time away from the public. All because he couldn’t control himself and discern right from wrong. Leave your students alone, already. Go find someone your own age and quit with the pedophilic tendencies.”

The last sentence struck me as quite out of tune with the situation. I don’t think that “pedophilic tendancies” is appropriate for a situation involving a 27 year old graduate student and a man in his early 30’s. That aside though, her argument is probably the one held by the majority and is not out of touch with the reality of the perils of such a situation. However, bell hooks keeps whispering in my ear with statements like:

“The vast majority of women who are heterosexual in this society are likely to be in intimate relations with men at some point in their lives who have greater status and power, however relative, given the nature of capitalism and patriarchy. Clearly, it is more important to learn ways to be “just” in situations where there is a power imbalance, rather than to assume that exploitation and abuse are the “natural” outcome of all such encounters.”

and:

“Some folks oppose faculty/student erotic bonding because they say it creates a climate of favoritism that can be deeply disruptive. In actuality, any intimate bonding between a professor and a student is a potential context for favoritism, whether or not that intimacy is erotic. Favoritism often surfaces in the classroom and has nothing to do with desire.”

Her argument is much more complex than what I can copy and paste here, so I recommend following the link and reading her entire essay. When you finish with that, I want to know. Do you think it is okay for a university to prohibit faculty/student relationships? Or, is it something that should be discouraged, encouraged, or ignored?

Following in the footsteps of most Interweb and print media outlets, I’ve decided that it’s only appropriate for us at On Purpose to post a quick in memoriam to the late David Foster Wallace.  I personally cannot speak too much for his writing, having only ever read one of his short stories, the beautifully entertaining “Little Expressionless Animals.”  It’s a behemoth of a “short” story.  It centers on a young, lesbian woman who is in the middle of a breakaway streak on Jeopardy (à la Ken Jennings).  David’s treatment of her sexuality, his sensitivity toward long-spun childhood traumas, and his on-point Alex Trebek cameo was just brilliant.  I can’t think of too many writers who could accomplish the same thing with such bravado and originality.

And what writer hasn’t spent his/her fair share of time staring at Infinite Jest as it mocks from the rosy-wooded shelves of Barnes & Noble.  That quaint puffy-clouded background.  The looming title.  Then one opens it up to find all 1104 pages of David staring back.  It’s easy to understand why he has garnered so much posthumous “genius” recognition.

But what is the relationship between this enigmatic persona, this “David Foster Wallace,” this man who in the last years of his life was racked by depression, and his writing?  Is it possible for a man with short stories such as “Death is Not the End” and “The Depressed Person” and “Suicide as a Sort of Present” to not be ill, in some way?  How much of David’s personal life was infused within his writing? (As a writer myself, I imagine a lot.)  Is his depression and subsequent suicide a by-product of his writing and the overwhelming expectations of his post-Infinite Jest fame?  (Perhaps.)  Is his writing something that stemmed from his depression, an outlet or a crutch? (Perhaps again.)

It’s impossible to ever know the workings of writers, let alone writers who are affected so strongly by depression.  There’s a natural inclination to point to his short story titles, to point to his interviews, to point to anything we can find and say, “See?  See? Look at how depressed he was.  How could we not see it coming?”

Unfortunately, the humanities are not quite so transparent.  It’s not a matter of connecting the dots from biography to text.  Sometimes all that we have is simply text.  From Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace:

It’s funny what you don’t recall. Our first home, in the suburb of Weston, which I barely remember–my eldest brother Orin says he can remember being in the home’s backyard with our mother in the early spring, helping the Moms till some sort of garden out of the cold yard. March or early April. The garden’s area was a rough rectangle laid out with Popsicle sticks and twine. Orin was removing rocks and hard clods from the Moms’s path as she worked the rented Rototiller, a wheelbarrow-shaped, gas-driven thing that roared and snorted and bucked and he remembers seemed to propel the Moms rather than vice versa, the Moms very tall and having to stoop painfully to hold on, her feet leaving drunken prints in the tilled earth. He remembers that in the middle of the tilling I came tear-assing out the door and into the backyard wearing some sort of fuzzy red Pooh-wear, crying, holding out something he said was really unpleasant-looking in my upturned palm. He says I was around five and crying and was vividly red in the cold spring air. I was saying something over and over; he couldn’t make it out until our mother saw me and shut down the tiller, ears ringing, and came over to what I was holding out. This turned out to have been a large patch of mold–Orin posits from some dark corner of the Weston home’s basement, which was warm from the furnace and flooded every spring. The patch itself he describes as horrific: darkly green, glossy, vaguely hirsute, speckled with parasitic fungal points of yellow, orange, red. Worse, they could see that the patch looked oddly incomplete, gnawed-on; and some of the nauseous stuff was smeared around my open mouth. `I ate this,’ was what I was saying. I held the patch out to the Moms, who had her contacts out for the dirty work, and at first, bending way down, saw only her crying child, hand out, proffering; and in that most maternal of reflexes she, who feared and loathed more than anything spoilage and filth, reached to take whatever her baby held out–as in how many used heavy Kleenex, spit-back candies, wads of chewed-out gum in how many theaters, airports, backseats, tournament lounges? O. stood there, he says, hefting a cold clod, playing with the Velcro on his puffy coat, watching as the Moms, bent way down to me, hand reaching, her lowering face with its presbyopic squint, suddenly stopped, froze, beginning to I.D. what it was I held out, countenancing evidence of oral contact with same. He remembers her face as past describing. Her outstretched hand, still Rototrembling, hung in the air before mine.

`I ate this,’ I said.

`Pardon me?’

On his blog, OnFiction, Keith Oatley of the University of Toronto posted an interesting article that compiles some research done on a prisoner rehabilitation program called Changing Lives Through Literature, sponsored by the University of Massachusetts.

This program is directly applicable to the recent fervor generated in academia that questions the uses of the humanities in the so-called “real world”. It is an alternate sentencing program that will convert an offender’s jail sentence to a period of probation as long as they attend a literature seminar. Changing Lives Through Literature is built on the assumption that there exists a “transformative nature of literature that works on everyone”.

As far as the results of the program are concerned, a comparison of the recidivism rate between participants and non-participants back up the effectiveness of bibleotherapy. A study by Susan T. Krumholz and G. Roger Jarjoura, published in the Journal of Offender Rehabilitation, found a reconviction rate of program participants to be 18.75%. This is compared to non-participants with similar background whose reconviction rate was 40%.

Although the positive effect of the program has been measured, it is still only speculation as to how much of that success can be contributed to the “transformative power of literature”. The testimonial of judges, instructors and probationers seem to give equal credit to strong mentorship by instructors, a sense of group belonging, and the power of literature as contributing factors to the programs success. A participating judge in the program, The Honorable Joseph Dever says that, “By reading great books and identifying with the characters in these books, for the first time in their lives, [probationers] begin to look at life objectively instead of subjectively”. While students do cite being engrossed and inspired by the literature, Lynn Lowell says that “The judge, probation officer, and teacher – all authority figures to us – they were all there for us – to listen to us, guide us, and direct us. It was their belief in the program and us that helped me deal with a lot of shame”. and that “This group was a connection. A bond with other women who all acted one way and felt totally another. I wasn’t alone”. (CLTL website, endorsements).

Do you believe that reading fiction can change someones life? Makes them better people? Or are other dynamics responsible for the success of bibleotherapy?

——–

“Combining Bibliotherapy and Positive Role Modeling as an Alternative to Incarceration”
Jarjoura, Roger. Krumholz, Susan. Journal of Offender Rehabilitation, Vol. 28 (1/2), 1998, Pp. 127-139. Copyright 1998 by The Haworth Press, Inc., Binghamton, NY.

The semester looms just around the corner as summer breathes its last gasps. I hope everyone has used this summer to fully recharge and are now ready to tackle yet another UMD school year. The English Undergraduate Association is poised and ready to have a great year and I just want to share a few quick links that can hook you right into the heartbeat of the EUA:

Join the EUA Facebook group

Keep track of EUA events/meetings with the EUA calender

If you are interested in being active or would just like some more information about what the group is about feel free to send an email to kstalder@gmail.com.

Also, please keep coming back to this blog for news and events pertaining to the UMCP Arts and Humanities as well as the most interesting dialogue that we can produce. We are going to do our best to update at least once per week.

Have a great last few days of summer!

Hello everyone, this is Kenton and it’s my first post on the blog. How exciting!

I was recently part of the first annual graduate student conference called Text and Techne: Literature, Language, and Culture and had an amazing time. I want to share my experiences in hopes that it might alleviate fears that anyone might have of submitting a paper to a panel and hopefully influence someone to submit to a panel they are interested in if the opportunity arises.

First off, my experience, was ultimately very fulfilling and worth all the work put into it. That being said, it was a *lot* of work and here are the sordid details…

When you submit a paper to a conference they don’t want the entire paper in the submission. What they want is an abstract (about 500 words) and a little bit of information about yourself. I didn’t have a paper that worked directly for the conference’s topic but I did know my area of interest was performance poetry and that I had a somewhat solid background of experience and research in that area. So I quickly constructed a very (very!) rough draft of a paper that I wanted to write that incorporated both the conference’s topic and some of the things that I was/am genuinely interested in researching. From this draft I made an abstract and submitted it. I then promptly forgot about it because I didn’t think that I would get accepted.

Almost a month later I found out that my proposal was accepted and I was simultaneously panic stricken and excited which is a very weird mix of feelings to have. Fortunately, in no time at all the excitement and panic faded and I was left with a much more familiar emotional companion, fear. Rebecca Wise and myself were the only two undergraduates out of sixteen panelists and I felt that I was in way over my head. Not only did I not even understand some of the titles of the papers that my fellow panelists had submitted but I only had a skeleton of a draft and had only begun to flesh it out.

Spring break was my savior. I spent hour after hour and day after day researching and writing. Every book the Library has on slam/performance poetry, orality, voice in poetry and anything else that looked helpful was checked out and I lived with those books for several weeks. I even emailed some of the authors of said books as well as some of my favorite poets asking several questions and I was pleasantly surprised at how kind and accommodating they were. Another resource I found really valuable was JSTOR’s dissertation data-base. There were only four dissertations on slam poetry but they really helped guide me in the right direction while providing a model for how an academic paper should look like.

Eventually my paper was put together and I was able to breathe a little easier knowing that I at least had something to say. Whether or not it was interesting was another question but I was confident that there was at least a kernel of something worth saying somewhere in my paper. It was then that I realized that no one was going to even read my paper. The only interface that anyone was going to have with my work was through my presentation. I hadn’t really thought of presenting it much when I was writing it and when I read my paper out loud I became acutely aware of just how short 15 minutes really is. The longest version of my paper was over 20 pages (something like 10k words) and took about 40 minutes to read, yikes!

Luckily there was a lot of effluence and finding things to cut was pretty easy… throw a dart at a pile of papers and delete away! This is where I made a huge mistake. Instead of cutting down the amount of arguments I was making I cut what I thought were unimportant supporting ideas and ended up with ten pages of sporadic ideas which Professor Macri very graciously offered to edit for me. Professor Macri gave me wonderful feedback and I was able to cut my presentation down to about five pages that demonstrated one main point. I added three minutes worth of audio clips to help give the audience a feel for what I was talking about and that was that!

I was tempted to feel like I had wasted a lot of energy by writing so much more than I needed but being over-prepared helped boost my confidence in the days approaching the event. Another bonus of overdoing it was that in the Q&A session afterwards I felt much more comfortable answering people’s questions. They were a lot of the same questions I had asked myself and attempted to answer in the larger version of my paper. I think that if I had just written the five pages and been content in the beginning with just making the one argument I would have had a much more difficult time of it and the panel wouldn’t have been half as rewarding.

On the day of the presentation the most stressful things ended up being the mundane ones. I hadn’t wore my Sunday best in a while and realized that morning that I didn’t have any nice shoes to wear. Cursing myself I put a coat of polish on my combat boots and decided to talk fast enough and loud enough that no one ever got a chance to look down! The trouble with that idea was that I had to sit in this uncomfortable wooden chair while the other panelists presented and my pants rode up to reveal laces and all. I resisted the urge to cross one leg over the other in an attempt to keep them as low profile as possible but I don’t think it helped much.

Anyways, the day was more or less successful and I had a great time. What did I gain from the experience? Well, maybe something to put somewhere on my grad school application, some networking opportunities and exactly 15 minutes of fame. But the most valuable thing that I got from the conference was a chance to think seriously in an academic manner about a subject I love and with that experience came the realization that it’s something I want to pursue. If you find yourself in a similar position I can’t think of any reasons not to submit a proposal!

Really?

So, as I mentioned I spent Tuesday running around Congressional office buildings asking people for money. Ok, so it was a little more dignified than that, but basically I joined a coalition of Marylanders in advocating to congressional aides for more funding for the National Endowment for the Humanities.

It  was pretty exhilirating to be part of the political process, although I did find a little weird asking so directly for money.

Check out the NEH’s website. What do you think of the programs being funded? Are there things you would be interested in seeing funded? Where do you think humanities scholarship is most in need? Do you think public funding leads to the politicization of intellectual life?

So, I’m spending the next few days lobbying Congress with the National Humanities Alliance. Wish me luck and expect an update!