The Job Market: a few chunks of advice

This is the first opportunity I have had to really add anything here since our “reconstitution.”  Not for lack of things to muse upon!!  But as it is late September, the JIL has just released the first job list of the season, I thought I might toss a few things learned on both sides of the job hunt table. 

First, it is hard, and it is frustrating, to have to shape each and every job application to the school/job you are applying for.  But let me tell you: I’ve chaired a half dozen search committees in the last two years, and the last thing I want is to read a boilerplate application that doesn’t tell me anything about what you the applicant can do for my program.   Ninety per cent of the applications received are people who are just as qualified as you are.  And ninety per cent of those also sent in boiler plates.  The applicants that get looked at first are those who took the time to talk about what they want and can do for our program.  If the ad says we want X and you have X tell us how you fit!  If there is no reason for you to stand out of the pile, you won’t.

Second, if you are not qualified for the job, please don’t apply.  Yes, once in a great while, someone will get lucky.  But honestly, if you do not have the qualifications for the position, you are simply wasting your time and money as well as the search committee’s.  Your application will end up on the waste pile. 

Third, many state schools now have online applications.  FILL THESE OUT COMPLETELY!  Yes, you have to restate information that is in your letter and on your CV and so on.  But the state schools’ HR departments may not even forward your materials due to an incomplete application.  And if they do, the application is a key piece in your arsenal.  The application is on top of your materials.  We look at it first.  The application will tell us whether or not we should continue to read the rest of your materials.  So, after you’ve written the letters, the CV, the philosophy, etc etc, do fill out the repetitious, annoying, seemingly waste of time, application.  It could be the difference between and interview and the dust bin.

Fourth, PROOF READ!  It should go without saying, but an ungrammatical sentence in your application materials stands out.  Some committees won’t care; some will.  But look at it this way: when a committee is deciding whom to interview, why give them an excuse not to include you in their top list of potential interviewees?

Fifth, one of the counter intuitive things that I learned while on the market was that especially in the state public institution arena, the search committee is not the final say.  Sure, the search committee does all the work, and most of the evaluating when you are on a campus visit.  But the administration has a say in many cases, so you have to sell yourself to the administrators too; that part of the interview is not simply a formality.  In my university’s case, the administration has final say, and the administration makes the offer.  Usually the administration will go along with the search committee’s recommendation, but they don’t have to.  So you must sell yourself that direction as well. 

Sixth, know the market.  Look, one of the things that grad school does is force us to specialize.  In fact, the academy helps all think that we’re landing jobs in a Tier 1 school and will only teach Old English, or only teach Chaucer.  But the majority of jobs out there require more breadth than that.  The majority of jobs require a “medievalist” and quite frankly and rather unfairly are interested in Middle English, and even at that, interested in Chaucer.  Helpful if you have some linguistics in there.  That’s just an English example, but the situation is no different in other fields as far as I can tell. The point is that most jobs are going to require teaching outside of your dissertation area and area of specialization.  So the more teaching in areas outside your comfort zone you have, the better.  In fact, there are all sorts of reasons that being an adjunct sucks, but honestly a year or two adjuncting and building up your teaching experience in as many areas as you can.  Of course, you should also be publishing and so on….publish as broadly as you can.

Seventh, NETWORK!  Not enough graduate students take this seriously enough.  Network, network, network.  Personal connections can make a huge difference in every stage of the job hunt process.  If I’ve met you, I’m more likely to suggest or even argue for an interview for you.  Network, network, network.  

Eighth, and this is not easy to admit, but make sure the people from whom you have requested letters send them.  Look, I never would have thought that a faculty job takes as much time as it does, but I have few spare moments in the day.  Your letter too often will slip down the list of priorities as course prep, demands by the administration, other students, etc all demand my time.  So while I intend to send the letter on time, I might not have gotten to it yet, or might even have forgotten.  It is vital that you keep pestering.  And you might want to do something to make it easier, like using Interfolio.  Also ASK EARLY.  If you can start asking in fact in July, you have a much better chance of timely letters of recommendation reaching the desired destination on time.  

Ninth, do not get depressed or lose hope.  Just know that the competition is fierce, too much of it is dumb luck, and the best thing you can do for your job search is realize that you will be better off to spend some time as a post-doc, visiting scholar, or adjunct, before you are able to land that TT job.  This is not a bad thing.  This is good career building and networking.  So keep the faith, keep hope, and keep applying.

Tenth, when interviewing, have some good, not obvious but perceptive, questions about the school, student body, or department ready.  A natural part of the interview is for the committee to tell you things about the school, often times things that you can get from researching the school (and I should have to tell you to do that!!).  So when it comes time to ask "do you have any questions for us", have some!  And do not ask the search committee about pay, and that sort of thing.  Ask about what they see as your role in the dept, ask about their five year plan, ask about the intellectual life of the community, etc,  Develop a set of good questions that they are not likely to tell you in the normal run of conversation so that you have something to ask at that moment...and having something at that moment is always better than "gee, you answered all my questions."

Best of luck to all on the market this year!

Larry Swain

When Is a Product of Research Ready for Public Release?

By now, many readers will probably be aware of the debate surrounding the recent release of the American Historical Society's Statement on Policies Regarding the Embargoing of Completed History PhD Dissertations. The discussion has gained quite a bit of attention on social media (particularly Twitter) under the tag #AHAgate, and there has been an eruption of responses--including the AHA's own Q & A. Tim McCormick has taken the initiative to crowd-source a curated, online collection of the discussion via the newly launched Open History project (click through to those sites for a summary, with relevant links to many responses). At first, I had little to contribute to the already strong debate, but the more I read and thought about it, the more I wondered how much of this is actually a debate. Much of my reading has been strong criticism of the AHA, with only a few responses seeking a balance to the debate.

My central issue with the debate so far is that many critics of the AHA seem to be approaching the question of open access to dissertations as if these PhD theses are finished, published products. But dissertations are not publications, and they are not, themselves, the end results of research and scholarly work. If consensus is forming (at least in some circles) that academic research should (pedagogically, financially, ethically, etc.) be available to the public--as in the sciences--then we should also consider that this assumption regards what happens to published results, not drafts of research in progress. After all, scientists do not publish data openly as soon as they have lab results; they work to frame that data into reports. So, as my title suggests, I want to pose the question: When is a product of research ready for public release? I argue that the point of publication (public-ation, making public) is the point at which we need to ask the question of making that research available via open access, and that notion can drastically affect the questions we ask about the public release of dissertations.

In my own response to the AHA and the debate so far, I find myself on the fence, but not from indecision. Here, in brief, are my opinions on just some issues already raised:
Do I fundamentally agree with the AHA? Yes... and No. I am sympathetic (to varying degrees) to aspects of their statement and criticisms of it.
Do we need more studies and facts (not anecdotes) about dissertations, open access, and publications before making assumptions and recommendations? Yes.
Do attitudes and assumptions about hiring, tenuring, adjuncts, and other systemic issues in academia need reform? Yes.
Do assumptions about publication need to change? Yes.
Are authors' rights worth defending? Yes.
Should graduate students have release rights over their own dissertation work? Yes.
Is open access important? Yes.
Should end results of publicly funded research be openly accessible? Yes.

That last question and response is where I want to focus. First, some caveats.

Of the responses to the AHA's recommendations, my thoughts resonated especially with those of Michael J. Altman, on why he embargoed his dissertation. I certainly support open access, sharing research, extending academia into the public sphere, bringing the public sphere into academia--whatever metaphors for such interaction we can muster, though whatever means we can imagine. I especially think this is important for scholars working from public funding (such as at state schools, which I'm keenly aware of since I'm a graduate student at one). I have written about my issues with publishing on this blog before; I maintain my own curated profile for my publications on Academia.edu to make my work freely available (when allowed by publishers--I also learned the hard way to be more careful with whom I publish in the future); and I have long viewed blogging as part of this endeavor. Yet, for all of my support for scholarly openness in its many possibilities, I am aware of my place in an academic setting that still must change radically before the issues are resolved. I also acknowledge that this awareness does not free me from an ethical responsibility to seek that change, or to work to contribute my own efforts to shifting the status quo.

So I return to my initial question. As I am in the process of writing my dissertation, I am all too aware that it is a draft of something that I will only be comfortable releasing into the public after much more work. I have already gone through several distinct drafts of various chapters in consultation with my advisors and some friends. I know that I will write and revise these chapters several more times before they're ready for public life--and some of those drafts will be after my defense, as I work to turn this project into a book. That may be several years. Will it take 6 beyond my PhD? More? Less? (Will academic publishing shift so dramatically in that time that it will not be a physical book but a digital publication of some sort? Could it be both?) In some sense, regarding open access, perhaps the time table is inconsequential, because until it is ready for publication, this project is in a liminal state.

I think there is a good analogue if we think about scholarly production beyond dissertations and books. For example, what about articles? I have many research documents currently in liminal states on my computer hard drive--seminar papers, conference papers, various side projects--that I have never released to the public because they were not ready for publication of any sort. Should those be openly accessible just because they are some type of result of my (publicly funded) research? I certainly hope not, since some of these research avenues are half-baked, and I may never return to them. I have chosen to publish articles that I felt were ready; in those cases, I made my research results available via my Academia.edu profile. Or, to take another, more recent means of publication--perhaps closer to the notion of electronic theses--what about digital projects? Over the last several months, I have been working on a digital project, and I recently began writing about that process on a development blog. Of course, I have, in one sense, published some of my notes and research up to this point; but I have kept other aspects of this work in files on my computer, not ready for release until the project is further underway. With this digital project, I have wondered at what point I will release my work. Will I publish the project as a final, fully formed product, or will I release it in stages? I expect it to be a year or more before some of the products of this research are released.

I have also thought about my dissertation in similar ways. Will I publish one or two articles from my dissertation before publishing it as a book? At what point is my research ready for publication? When will I make my work public? Some scholars may choose to publish in different ways, at different points, via either traditional means or new means of digital dissemination; and that is fine, since authors' rights should be pre-eminent. Yet I think that these questions raise new ways of thinking about dissertations and open access. In writing this post, perhaps I have asked more questions than I have made any specific claims. I do hope that these questions point to one more issue that will be considered among the mass of discussion already happening.

Call for Papers: Society for the Study of Anglo-Saxon Homiletics at Kalamazoo 2014

Society for the Study of Anglo-Saxon Homiletics at the 49th International Congress on Medieval Studies
Western Michigan University (Kalamazoo, MI)
May 8-11, 2014

New Methods in Anglo-Saxon Homiletics

For over ten years at Kalamazoo, the Society for the Study of Anglo-Saxon Homiletics (previously organized by Aaron J Kleist) has thrived in its aims to promote scholarship related to the sources, practices, appropriations, and early studies of Anglo-Saxon homilies. The Society recently experienced a three-year hiatus from Kalamazoo, but scholars have continued to support the possibility of future sessions by the Society. This session seeks to renew the presence of the Society at Kalamazoo, as well as vibrant scholarship and collaborative thinking about new directions for the field. Over the years, the Society has fostered a wide range of interests and methodologies both old and new: for example, source studies, Anglo-Saxon theologies, rhetoric and style, linguistics and philology, the interplay of Christian and pagan practices, paleography and codicology, afterlives of Anglo-Saxon homilies, translation theories, gender studies, and digital initiatives. This session provides a welcome forum for continued discussion of such issues of central importance to Anglo-Saxon studies, especially focused on new avenues of study in the field of homiletics.

Please send abstracts of no more than 500 words with a completed Participant Information Form (available at http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/congress/submissions/index.html) to Brandon Hawk (brandon.hawk@uconn.edu) by September 15, 2013.

Abstracts not accepted for this session will be forwarded to the Congress Committee for consideration in general sessions.

Call for Papers: The Exegetical Turn (Kalamazoo 2014)

Killing a heretic, killing a dragon.
BL Harley 2886

Biblical verses were never "naked" in the early Middle Ages. They were clothed in the heavy garments of tradition & weighed down with the burden of commentary. We have the tendency to see an 11th-century monastic chronicler cite Jeremiah and think "Jeremiah," when we shoul dbe thinking, with the author & intended reader, "Hrabanus," "Haimo," "Paschasius," and "Jerome." We tend to forget that men of the early Middle Ages, and the 10th and 11th centuries especially, encountered the Bible through Carolingian and Patristic commentaries. 

This session will therefore seek to see what precisely we may have missed, to reconsider historical, literary, and/ or artistic artifacts from the Middle Ages in light of the exegetical tradition in which they were created. Then, in turn, this session will allow us to ask if this new understanding of how these objects were created and received fundamentally change how we understand the European Middle Ages itself.     

Session sponsored by Virginia Tech Medieval & Early Modern Studies.

Proposals, with Participant Information Form, should be emailed as PDFs to Prof. Matthew Gabriele by September 15, 2013.

Upcoming BABEL Panel, Kzoo 2014

Good news everyone! What began as a light-hearted exchange on Twitter about conference session names, but then turned into a more serious discussion, is now a reality. The BABEL Working Group is sponsoring my proposed panel on punctuation. This will be a Roundtable, with up to 7 participants. See below:

Title: #;()@?":--*! 

Session Description:

Imagine you live in a world filled with symbols, inscrutable marks, and confusing scribbles. No, you’re not in a literary thriller – this is our world. Punctuation marks infiltrate and inform our everyday experiences, but they have their own histories as well. They structure, relate, balance, and invoke; they collide, confuse, limit, and terminate. This roundtable takes punctuation and other typographical marks as the starting point for eclectic and inventive readings/meditations on Medieval Studies. We invite short presentations on any modern or archaic characters, on the ubiquitous and the niche, and on the intelligible and the cryptic. As Keith Houston writes on his website, Shady Characters, “These shady characters, these typographic raconteurs hiding in plain sight, [are] too good to miss.”

Inquiries and abstracts can be sent to me at rick.godden@gmail.com

Conferences and the Medievalist Community

One of the new things we've been trying on this blog is Facebook integration (shorter: we have a Facebook page), following the lead of places like In the Middle. Anyway, I posted something on my personal Facebook page on Sunday 6/16, referring to a number of complaints I saw about entitlement and the process of selecting sessions at Kalamazoo. We can talk about that if people like but, to my mind, the conversation got really interesting.  Essentially, one person suggested that the new Medieval Studies conference at SLU would pick up disgruntled attendees of Kalamazoo. That prompted my response below.

I then asked (after some more discussion) if I could bring that discussion public and the feedback was positive, so here it is. I don't want to use other peoples words without permission, so I'll try to summarize and then offer some thoughts.

One person keyed on my use of "need" and rightly questioned by what standard we'd judge that. Others chimed in to say that we do indeed need multiple conferences because of the disciplinary and temporal diversity in our field, but perhaps as supplementary to existing conferences. This could be modeled on the MLA, which has 1 main conference but then respected regional conferences as well (and I know the American Academy of Religion and American Sociological Association also operate on this model). Further complicating this, however, it was pointed out that even with this larger/ smaller conference structure around 1 organization, there are numerous other groups that host conferences that might be of interest -- the AHA, MESA, the 3/4 (not sure SLU is among the big 3 yet, even if it might be someday) medieval conferences, above, not to mention any independent conferences that might appear in any given year.

And that's kind of my point. As medievalists, we don't have "our" conference. And why can't we? What we have now is this:

• Medieval Academy -- used to be old, stodgy, and patriarchal, though that's better -- but not fixed -- now (or maybe I'm just older). Now not trusted because of the stuff with the former Executive Directors, though I think both sides overplayed their hands and didn't come off looking all that well. 
• Kalamazoo -- big conference, established. Democratic in culture in that rank/ prestige seem to matter much less here than anywhere else. Can be overwhelming to newbies sometimes. Has gained a reputation for a distinct "literary" bent to its program. This year, some have complained about the selection of panels and how they didn't get what they "deserve." The location is difficult to get to and it occurs at a difficult time for a lot of academics who aren't quite done with their semesters.
• Leeds -- big conference, established. Has gained a reputation for a distinct "historical" bent to its program. Expensive. New venue in the city center could be good or bad. Relatively democratic in culture. A bit insular, in that this seems to be "the" medieval conference that UK academics attend every year. This can be good or bad -- good if you know people, alienating if you don't.
• SLU -- new (this is its 1st year). Remains to be seen what it is and what'll become of it.

So what to do? Can one of these serve? Should one of these serve?

I don't have a good answer to this but I want to see what more people have to say about it. Let me, however, close with a few observations.

1. Let me observe that there's only 1 "big" European medieval conference, whereas there's 2/3 in the US. 
2. Let me observe too that many of the complaints/ issues about specific conferences have a disciplinary tinge to them -- they don't like this or that because of what's there, which isn't the "right kind" of medieval stuff they're interested in. Too literary or too historical...
3. Finally, let me observe that this is a particular issue to me as we observe travel budgets becoming increasingly meager. I've always been willing to dip into my own personal income to go to conferences and have been fortunate enough to be able to do so, but I know that that's not a common thing. Grad students, assistant professors, adjuncts, etc. don't have that luxury. Wouldn't it be nice to have 1 large conference somewhere that everyone, across discipline and specialization, could meet to collaborate? Is that a pipe dream?

Now on Facebook!

Dear readers, I bring news of our expansion: Modern Medieval now has a Facebook page. As of writing this post, we currently have 98 likes for our page, which is a great start, and we look forward to more. In the spirit of continuing to grow this community, we would be delighted if you would join our conversation there. Our hope is that this page will serve as a place of conversation about this blog and related topics, since, as our header says, "The Middle Ages still have something to say."

Hanging out at Kalamazoo

It has taken me about a week, but I am nearly recovered from a whirlwind tour through St. Louis, then Kalamazoo, and then some marathon grading. At least, I am recovered enough to gather some brief reflections on the most recent Medieval Congress. This was only my third Kalamazoo, yet in some ways it feels like I've been going forever, and in others, it all still seems vexingly new and overwhelming. After going to the New Chaucer Society in Portland, I was most struck by the various threads the conference organizers had created, giving a sense of several continuing conversations and mini-conferences. At Kalamazoo, however, any sense of unity must be user-generated. There are, to be sure, clusters of related panels, but because there are so many medievalists coming from so many disciplinary backgrounds, it can be difficult to find any sense of cohesion over several caffeine-fueled days. I do not offer this comparative observation as a criticism. Rather, it can be exhilarating to feel so lost sometimes.

So, how exactly did I choose what panels to go to? Usually, I find myself going to the panels most closely related to the work that I'm doing at the moment, but this time around I found myself exploring new areas, returning to old critical haunts, and attending sessions that were self reflective about the field and our position in it.

As luck would have it, I managed to attend several marvelous panels, including an excellent session on the "Versions of Piers Plowman" with Lawrence Warner, Stephen Shepherd, and Kathryn Kerby-Fulton. These papers revisited questions concerning manuscript illuminations, the binary or tension between scribe and author, and the role of early editors in determining what we now see as the different versions of the text. I cannot possibly do justice to the very specific positions and claims each speaker gave during their talk, but it was one of the more stimulating sessions I attended during the whole weekend. It also reminded me that I need to return to Langland. St. Erkenwald remains the text I am most fascinated by, but no other text challenges me as Piers Plowman does.

I also attended a panel called "The Prosthetic Impulse in the Middle Ages: Metaphor, Materiality, and the Promise of the (Post)human." This was one of those panels where I truly wished that all the papers were circulated ahead of time, not because the speakers were in any way lacking (in fact, they all gave quite engaging talks), but because there's so much to think about that I felt somewhat overwhelmed. Also, this was one of the first panels I attended that engaged with Disability Studies, and it was an intriguing introduction, especially for the ways that the panelists and the respondent considered the intersections with DS and the posthuman. Agatha Hansen's paper addressed a literal prosthetic hand in the Life of Saint Melor, while M. W. Bychowski and Craig Dionne considered the viability of the prosthetic as metaphor, especially in terms of narrative.

I was part of a Roundtable on the subject of "Productive Anachronism? The Promise and Peril of Historical Analogy in the Study of Medieval Culture," organized by Jonathan Newman and Anna Wilson. Although our session was at slotted for 7:30 PM, we had a surprisingly good turnout and a great discussion during the Q&A. I was also particularly pleased with how wide-ranging our papers and our discussion ended up being – Alex Mueller, Roland Betancourt, and Anna Wilson considered the role of anachronism in both our scholarship and in the subjects that we study, while I, Robin Wharton, and Alison Valk tackled the question of anachronism from a pedagogical angle. Despite the fact that there was a seeming split in our panel between pedagogy and scholarship, it was also clear that we were dealing with the same questions: How do we make sense of the past and present together? What can be gained by being more upfront about the ways in which we read the past through the present and vice versa?

The two Babel panels that I attended, one called "Thriving" and one called "Blunder," also featured a similar split, but this time it was between offering theoretical and contemplative readings of medieval texts versus discussions of the field in terms of professional life. For example, the "Blunder" session included an excellent paper by Mary Kate Hurley on "Blundering at the End in Beowulf" while Nancy M. Thompson and Maggie Williams spliced together lines from publishing rejection letters in a presentation called "Speculations." The highlight, though, was Asa Mittman and Shyama Rajendran presenting on the website "Fumblr," especially Asa's booming voice as he delightedly, and somewhat perversely, read out some of the submitted fumbles and failures. Everyone should check out the Fumblr website, and you should submit something. We all have something we could submit. Right? It's not just me?

The Congress has been over for about a week and a half now, but what still really sticks with me is the paper given by Patricia Ingham for the "Thriving" roundtable. Her paper, titled "Living and Thriving," is a discussion about finding her own place in Medieval Studies. I was moved by the paper, but I was really captivated by how it was delivered – she was not able to make it to Kalamazoo so the organizers arranged to have her teleconference in through a Google hangout. The video feed did sputter in places, and the whole panel ended up getting book ended by her paper since she had to finish up her final paragraph at the very end after some technical difficulties were smoothed out, but overall it was a fascinating experiment. And, I would say that using Google hangout was more or less a success here. Because conference travel can be so difficult for me (flying in a power wheelchair is frankly a major pain in the ass), I have thought at times about asking whether I could arrange something like what Patricia Ingham did. NCS Iceland comes to mind. And while I'm not too concerned (yet) about some dark future where conferences cease to exist and we all give our papers through video conferencing, there is something definitely lost through this use of technology. We all got to enjoy and be stimulated by her paper, but with the exception of her being "present" for the panel, she missed out on what makes these events so worthwhile: seeing everyone. We travel from distant places not so much to hear papers that we can easily read in the privacy of our own homes or offices, but we do all decide to come together precisely to be together, to engage in conversations, to ask questions, and to congregate at Bell's for some delicious beer.

I left Kalamazoo with some new thoughts about the intersections between our professional lives and our personal lives, between our scholarship and our teaching, and I continue to be captivated by the new ways we keep finding to engage with one another.

Anachronism as Responsible Pedagogy

I am finally back from a lovely and stimulating Kalamazoo. It was great to meet so many people, and to hear some excellent papers. 

I've posted here my contribution to the panel on "Productive Anachronism" organized by Jonathan Newman and Anna Wilson. It was excellent, and dare I say, productive. Our conversation considered the connections between our work as scholars and our work as teachers. Also, see here for Robin Wharton's (one of my fellow presenters) essay. I had hoped to clean this up and include notes, but like many of us (tell me I'm not alone!), I am returning to a mountain of grading. I plan on expanding this, actually, into a slightly longer piece. So, watch this space.

Anachronism as Responsible Pedagogy

Let me begin this short paper with an analogy—not a historical one, but hopefully a productive one nonetheless. In China Mieville’s The City and the City, citizens of Beszel live in a city that somehow shares space with another city: Ul Qoma. (It is never made clear if this is an alternate reality or if the situation is purely psychological bifurcation.) Citizens in one city can physically see citizens from the other, but because of some exceptional political mechanisms and long-standing social taboos, a Besz citizen must unsee a neighbor from Ul Qoma and vice versa. Typical spatial logic is broken up in the world Mieville creates, and so the two cities are interwoven as opposed to occupying discrete areas.  The result is that your neighbor just a few feet from your elbow might be in another city, and thus unseeable.  Mieville’s notion of unseeing has resonance with many contemporary concerns regarding how communities are created and maintained (including how some are excluded), but perhaps because I heard Carolyn Dinshaw’s excellent talk “All Kinds of Time” at NCS Portland during the time I was reading this book, I have also come to think that this idea neatly describes a dilemma of responsible historicism and interpretation. Apprehending the distant (and even the near) past creates an epistemological problem, for we want to understand the past in its own terms without imposing presentist biases. But, to apprehend the distant past without acknowledging that we see through other time periods and temporalities is to essentially unsee those times. In this short paper, I take the position that anachronism, as well as historical analogy, is not only a productive and responsible way to approach the past, but it is also perhaps the most intellectually honest way as well.  Specifically, I want to advocate that we encourage anachronism in the classroom, not just in discussion (this, it seems to me, is almost inevitable), but also in the written works and projects we assign.

            In my own experience in the classroom, my students often want to make anachronistic or analogous connections during discussion. Something we read reminds them of a movie or tv show or book, and when they start to make their point, it is always with embarrassment and self-consciousness. Sometimes they are just embarrassed to admit their viewing habits to me, but I am increasingly convinced that they feel like it is simply taboo to bring in their own life-worlds as a part of our analysis. Acknowledging that they come from a specific point of view would, they feel, shatter the claim to objectivity, which for them is the ideal they ought to reach for. What I repeatedly remind them of during the semester, however, is that objectivity in their writing is mostly a rhetorical fiction. Lee Patterson, in his Negotiating the Past, discusses the fault lines in any claim to objectivity in historical scholarship, observing: “Moreover, it must ignore the correlative fact that the objects with which the human sciences deal can never be wholly other from the interpreting self over against which they stand; on the contrary, they are themselves constituted by means of the very subjectivity that characterizes the interpreter.  Rather than a dangerous intruder that must not be allowed to contaminate the procedures of historical research, subjectivity is in fact the condition of all understanding: if texts are to be understood at all they must be capable of being taken up into consciousness and rendered part of the subject.” I quite love the term “dangerous intruder,” incidentally. The phrase truly captures how my students often react to the idea of using “I” in their essays. To do so, they have invariably been taught, is to allow a dangerous interloper, their own subjectivity (demeaningly cast as “mere opinion”) to run rampant through otherwise objective literary analyses. Even if they don’t acknowledge the “I” that is writing, I tell them, it’s there. We might as well embrace it.

            We cannot, then, separate so easily the interpreting-“I” from the object it surveys. This entwining of subject and object creates, as Dipesh Chakrabarty describes in Provincializing Europe, a sense of temporal heterogeneity, causing, at once, the subject analyzing to be out of sync with the present moment and the object analyzed to be contemporaneous. Chakrabarty writes “One could argue, for instance, that the writing of medieval history for Europe depends on this assumed contemporaneity of the medieval, or what is the same thing, the noncontemporaneity of the present with itself.  The medieval in Europe is often strongly associated with the supernatural and the magical.  But what makes the historicizing of it possible is the fact that its basic characteristics are not completely foreign to us as moderns.” He goes on to argue that for history to have any meaning for our own life-worlds, we must, in addition to historicizing, also think through anachronism, treating the past as contemporaneous rather than remote and distant.

With this in mind, I would like to now turn to how I have seen anachronism and analogy work in my own classes. When I wrote the abstract for this short paper, however, I suggested that I would share the fruits of my encouraging my students to embrace anachronism. Upon sitting down to write this, though, I realized that what I really want to talk about is they pushed me to think about the productive value of anachronism.

In the first instance, I offered a creative option as an assignment and let my students write a short scene that would occur within one of the narrative gaps of the text. One particular student decided to write about Caliban in the Tempest, and reimagined Caliban as a blogger. When I first assigned this creative option, I expected that everyone would write in the spirit of, shall we say, historical fiction. The student decided instead to move Caliban forward into the future. As a way to express his rage and his fondness for cursing, she gave him a laptop and a Wi-Fi connection. He impotently raged against Prospero, and it never was clear whether or not poor Caliban had any sort of readership. I thought that I was innovating by allowing a critical/creative assignment in my class, but my student challenged me to rethink the sort of creative work I was really after. In her imagining of Caliban’s blog, she helped me to see how modern a figure he might be, even if his modernity was undercut by his evident wildness. Caliban may exist as someone outside of time, a wild man figure, but he is also of the moment, painfully contemporary. For example, he may represent the latest spoils of colonialist exploration. The Tempest is a text imbricated with all sorts of time, and my student only heightened its sense of anachronism. In going back to her essay to write this paper, I also discovered a detail I had forgotten. As a component of the assignment I asked students to write what I call metacommentary, that is a self-reflective discussion of the choices they made as writers. In going back, I discovered that she was partly inspired by the role of social media in the Egyptian revolution. My student wanted to restore Caliban’s voice, just as the internet gave voice to the Egyptian people.

In my second example, another student of mine wrote her essay through the lens of a contemporary event. This time the text was Marie de France’s Bisclavret, which I have taught a few times. During discussion, most students initially feel a sense of revulsion against the lady. "How could she betray her husband just for a slight lycanthropic problem?" The lordly werewolf was the clear hero, and his one-time lady was a clear villain. No one seems particularly concerned at first with how the lady is tortured and punished. After pursuing such a reading for a while, I then pose the following question: "is there any way to read the lady as a victim?" After a few blank stares, they start to take to this new subject. They realize that the lay opens with a description of ferocious werewolves, and that this might be the only knowledge of the beast that the lady would have, and so the lady might be justifiable in her decision to escape her husband at any cost. At some point in this discussion, I state that although we could not necessarily read the text as a strict parable of domestic violence, the parallels should at least give us pause. In response to this, my student decided to explore this idea even further, reading the text in light of Congress's failure to authorize The Violence against Women Act. In her analysis, she was sensitive to historical readings of the place and power of women during the Middle Ages, and she did significant research on this subject. But in closing her essay, she sought to make a broader point, that Marie's text can serve as a reminder and as a warning about the fragile power structures that women still find themselves enmeshed in.

Now, in closing this essay, I want to return to the short quote I offered from Chakrabarty—immediately following it is a parenthetical that reads “(which is not to deny the historical changes that separate the two).” Taking the past as in some ways contemporaneous does not erase the efforts of historicism, which tries to understand the past in its own context. We need to do this work, and we need to encourage our students to do so as well, but we cannot easily claim that we can purge the present from our thinking. We cannot unsee other times when we view the past. Anachronism does not deny the difference between past and present, but it makes interpretation possible, and it bridges the gap between different times while also preserving and highlighting the distance between them, a distance that can only be crossed through subjective and creative apprehension. And, after attending postmedieval’s session today on Thriving, I am also reminded that anachronism can make this work joyful as well. Thank you.

MAA 2013

This past weekend, I attended my first meeting of the Medieval Academy of America, and had a great time at it. There were many good papers, good conversations, all with new friends as well as old. While I would love to write a full review of the conference, I find myself back to routine and crunched with the last weeks of the semester looming ahead of me. But I did tweet at various times throughout the conference, and constructed a story of these tweets over on Storify. I share it here, so that you may have a sense of my experience, at least in fits and bursts.

Here is my story (to read it chronologically, scroll to the bottom and follow it back to the top):