Sven Birkerts on literary blogging

This is a bit old, but I found it interesting. In late July, Sven Birkerts wrote this piece for the Boston Globe on the importance of reviewers as opposed to the growing trend of literary blogging. Predictably for someone who wrote The Gutenberg Elegies, Birkerts finds that we are losing something that makes us a culture as we turn to more dispersed communication models: a common experience. Literary criticism and book reviewing become, he thinks, similar to what Matthew Arnold identified as the best that's been thought and siad.

We've all seen this argument before, but it strikes me as germane given that our future employment more or less depends on our playing at least some role as arbitrators of what should be thought, said, and/or read.

Greenblatt goes digital

Thanks to Rick Rambuss for pointing out this Chronicle article on Stephen Greenblatt's use of technology in his class on "Travel and Transformation in the Early 17th Century."

From the Chronicle Wired blog

From the Chronicle's Wired blog:

October 22, 2007

Humanities Scholars Get Networked

The Social Science Research Network, an online clearinghouse for current research popular among social scientists, has created a Humanities Research Network along the same model.

The new network will cover three areas: philosophy, classics, and English and American literature. More disciplines will be added in the coming months.

Authors can upload abstracts or PDF files of working papers, or share published papers as long as they hold the copyright. There is no charge to upload a paper or, in most cases, to download one that is posted. Each author’s contact information appears along with the article so that readers can offer comments.

Scholars involved say that the network, known as the HRN, meets an urgent professional need.

“Most of us in the humanities have so little money to travel to conferences these days,” said Susan Sage Heinzelman, associate professor of English and women’s and gender studies at the University of Texas at Austin and director of the HRN’s English & American Literature Research Network. “We just don’t have the kind of ongoing interaction in our academic work that is available to our colleagues in the law school, the business school, et cetera.”—Jennifer Howard

Pipes and more

I've put up two posts on my blog about Yahoo! Pipes, an interesting visual tool for mashing together web content and then filtering it. In any case, one of the pipes I've designed takes several academic blogs and parses them for posts related to the academic job market. I'm cross posting because I know my blog hasn't yet developed a mass audience like that venerable organ, English @ Emory.

Enjoy.

ASA gossip

I was talking with an editor from NYU Press at the ASA conference this weekend, and he told me something interesting. The press is going to be starting a new series in nineteenth-century American literature that will be funded, in some part, by the Mellon Foundation. According to the editor, an announcement about this will be made at or around MLA this year. He said that Mellon is deeply worried about the effect that the contraction of publishing is having on literary studies, and this is one of the ways that they are trying to ameliorate the situation. Our conversation was cut off, so I didn't get the chance to ask whether Mellon was funding other such series in other fields at other presses. Regardless, this is a development worth paying attention to.

Updtate: Pat Cahill just passed on to me this link to a Chronicle article about the Mellon program, which definitely suggests that it will involve multiple fields.

Active verbs

According to the Joblist search engine, there's only one ad in English that uses the verb "liaise":

Emory U.

English, N-302 Callaway Ctr, Atlanta, GA 30322

http://www.english.emory.edu/

Director of Composition: Associate or Full Professor [1640] DIRECTOR OF COMPOSITION The Department of English seeks a dynamic and creative teacher/scholar for appointment as Associate or Full Professor who will teach graduate courses in composition pedagogy, supervise the teaching of English courses that fulfill College writing requirements, and liaise with the College Writing Center. The successful candidate will have a PhD and a distinguished research profile as well as demonstrated administrative excellence in the teaching of writing.

Need a bestseller?

Wired has the solution for you here. My upcoming title:

Community of Circuits: How Everyday Metrics Expose the Secrets of Humanity.

More advice

Tenured Radical gives some advice about job applications. (The comments are useful, too. However, there is a strange debate about whether to use letterhead. I say "strange" because using letterhead is so unquestionably the right thing to do.)

Speaker release form

Those who are involved in this year's iteration of TLC discussed podcasts and other audio recording today. If you want to get started on building our library of lectures from the English department and its guests, you can start to use this release form that Shannon just sent me.

Custerology reviewed

A review of our own Michael (A.) Elliott's newest was published in today's AJC. You can read it here.

NY Times on time to degree

Here.

Teaching philosophy

Discussion of teaching philosophy statements at Academic Cog.