Fair Matter

Feminism in Fashion Again?

By Katherine D. Harris

I'm teaching an Introduction to Literary Criticism this semester – well, I teach it every semester – and always at this point in our readings, the students breathe a sigh of relief to have finished their meanderings through Formalism, Structuralism, New Criticism, Post-Structuralism, Deconstruction, some Foucault, Barthes, Saussure, and even a little bit of the Russians. Now, we get into the identity politics and some fun with Freud before we launch into Anglo-American Feminist Studies where the conversations can't help but veer towards the political spectrum of critical theory, even in a literature course. Identifying phallic symbols always seems to crash that glass barrier, and they begin to see structures of power even in their daily lives. This year, though, the conversation has been particularly engaging, I think because of these recent satirical videos:

“Bic Pens for Women”

“Body Form Responds: The Truth”  

Inauguration

By Misun Dokko

Lately, Richard Blanco’s “One Today,” a poem written for and read during President Obama’s second inaugural ceremony, mingles with moments of my daily rushing and reflecting.  The passage of time from yawning dawn hours to the end of the workday frames the poem. Blanco suggests that the ordinariness of activities performed—negotiating traffic, preparing for commerce, doing a job, and going to school—can be a common point of reference for Americans. It is a conceit that appeals to me because there I am, during my own rushed and reflective commute, thinking about a poem that honors un-extraordinary moments in a daily routine such as a drive to work that invites introspection.

Dionne Brand and the Book as an Object

By Beth McCoy

Recently, I was fortunate to see Dionne Brand read from a work-in-progress titled The Versos of the Blue Clerk, or what is withheld. My notes say that Brand says that her “job” as a writer is to “to notice...and notice that you can notice” (Brand is such a marvelous reader of her own work that I noticed that rather than take further notes, I gave in to listening entirely).  

Some of the versos appear in Brick, but Brand said that it’s unlikely that all will be published as one work. Who, she wondered, will print a book with poems only on the left-hand page?

I became familiar with Brand because scholars cited so often A Map to the Door of No Return, a meditation on dispossession in the Atlantic Slave Trade’s wake and waking dream. This dream, Brand observes, produces in the African Diaspora “a set of stories which never come into being, never coalesce.” What, then, she wonders, “can be called organization let alone a schema” save the “persistence of the spectre of captivity”?

 A Map to the Door is also a meditation on books as objects that carry literature.

Ditching Dante

By Erick Kelemen

 

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita

mi ritrovai per una selva oscura,

ché la diritta via era smarrita.

 (In the middle of the journey of our life

I found myself in a dark forest,

For the straight path was lost.)

 

I’m having a terrible time re-reading Dante’s Inferno. I am in the middle of my life (knock wood) and I’ve known that lost feeling as well as anyone. So, this poem should speak to me even more than when I was younger. Years ago, when I taught it, it was among my favorites. Now, I want to consign it to the heap—not even to a purgatory for books I might one day return to.

Before, even where I did not agree with it, I could praise its artfulness and complexities. Now, I am unable to suspend my own moral code long enough to do so.

MOOC Me

by Katherine D. Harris

In January 2013, San Jose State University became widely criticized for the Provost's move to employ Udacity to teach MOOC-format for remedial math and statistics. (See “California to Give Web Courses a Big Trial," "California State U Will Experiment with Offering Credit for MOOCs," "Inequality in American Education Will Not Be Solved Online," "The MOOC Bubble: where do we go from here?")

The Provost, who is relatively new to our campus, has been moving forward with these ideas in order to reverse the deadly budget crisis that has affected our campus in particular. As one of the larger CSUs (with 30,000 students), we were being asked to take some of the largest budget cuts over the last 20 years. Those funds have never been restored, and the faculty are dwindling because of it. This latest move to employ Udacity seems to put our particular kind of students at risk – those students who crave face-to-face contact, those students who drop out at an alarming rate of 55%, those students who are often the first members in their families to attend college, those students who take six classes to avoid staying another semester.

On First Blush: Plato's Republic and Anger

By Beth McCoy

Lately, I’ve been reading Plato’s Republic. This is technically a re-reading even though my last reading was so long ago that this reading perhaps ought to be cast as the first. 

I’m reading the work in part because I’m writing a paper on Percival Everett’s very strange Zulus (1990), a book that rewrites Jean Toomer’s Cane, Frederick Douglass’s first autobiography, and Plato’s Allegory of the Cave.  (It also, I think, executes a truly mordant allusion to George H.W. Bush’s late-1980s invocations of a “thousand points of light.” )

I approach the Republic as a teacher of literature, not as a teacher of philosophy. And so I am struck by quite-literary things: the way, for instance, the entire dialogue is set in motion by slavery, namely the fact that Polemarchus sends his slave to ask Socrates and Glaucon to wait so that Polemarchus may catch up with them to chat. 

Book I draws me especially to Thrasymachus, the character who, when challenged by Socrates, learns eventually a truth about himself so uncomfortable that it makes him blush: having not considered the complexities and depths of his most cherished positions, his default response is defensive anger rather than further thought. I have been like Thrasymachus before. I am likely to be like him again. 

Students at the Core of Digital Humanities

By Katherine D. Harris

This week, as an interlude to my regular perambulations about screwing around, playfulness, productive failure, gaming, and doing the risky thing, I went on the road to give a talk at Austin College's Digital Humanities Colloquium about the ideas scattered across my FairMastter posts. In “It's Not About the Tools: Weaving Digital Humanities into Literature Courses,” I began with a definition of Digital Humanities, my definition of Digital Humanities. Only five years after the realization that I am a Digital Humanist, my definition has expanded and shrunk according to the needs of my students and my institution's mission statement.

Being a Digital Humanist doesn't necessarily involve having some sort of street cred in coding or programming. Instead, Digital Humanities is a broad umbrella that is full of shifting boundaries and disciplines. We do old school, traditional stuff like reading print texts in concert with new strategies for creating meaning and, eventually, scholarship. Lately, we have even felt significant backlash against the phrase and the movement. William Pannapacker's latest Chronicle article, “Stop Calling It 'Digital Humanities,'” makes some suggestions for handling the situation. But what's more interesting are the comments in this article – the overwhelming question is still:

What is digital humanities?

A big tent? The Digital Humanities

or a methodology? digital humanities?

A Note on the Type: Mourning and Electra

By Beth McCoy

I am among that first generation of academic computer users who used fonts for writerly deception and procrastination. In the late 1980s, toggling between the venerable (but compact) Times and the now-defunct Mac font New York could mean the difference between a paper on Charles Dickens’ Dombey and Son that barely scraped onto a thirteenth page and one that screeched from a dot-matrix printer in full fifteen-page glory. (In my defense, I never resorted to the “triple-space action” or random diagrams made famous by this Strong Bad Email.) 

Why Zombies?

By Beth McCoy

I just finished re-reading Colson Whitehead’s Zone One (2011). I read it the first time last summer while on a family trip. Actually “read” is the wrong verb. I devoured it. Getting through the book became a compulsion. I plowed through it with dread and excitement, its images trailing behind me in a haunting wake. I wasn’t good company.

The second time through was no different. In reading the novel again, I can attend more carefully to its magnificent structure, the way the novel’s tributary language of liquid--of blood, water, and capitalism--crests as the protagonist bearing the nickname “Mark Spitz” walks through this second Door of No Return. It is no accident that the novel’s three days unfold in the zone below Canal Street, the heart of the African slave trade in New York City.

Zone One is my first zombie text. It’s likely my last. The novel is stupendous, but I’m not a fan of the genre. Understanding the zombie as vodoun's "answer to being dead in law,” to borrow Joan Dayan’s words, I fail to understood the pop culture attraction. I have yet to attempt The Walking Dead, stayed away from Shaun of the Dead, watched not one George Romero movie.

Young Adult Lit: Trendy or Timeless?

By Cheryl Wilson

In a 2009 article for Publishers Weekly, “What They Don’t Know Won’t Hurt Them: Persuading
Adults to Read YA Literature,” librarian Carlisle Webber writes, “It’s time to get adults fully on the YA bandwagon and help them overcome their embarrassment.”  Webber contends that adult readers are either turned off by the idea of Young Adult Literature or embarrassed by their attraction to the genre. 

This situation is not unique to YA Lit.  Romance novels, chick lit, and gothic fantasy, among many others, are all genres that have remained “guilty pleasures”—stashed under beds or, more recently, disguised by the anonymous blank cover of an e-reader.  As publishers’ numbers and the success of books such as Fifty Shades of Grey demonstrate, however, the shadowy multitudes who read these genres outnumber the readers of much more “mainstream” fiction.

Does YA Lit deserve to be in this category of guilty pleasures, why is it there, and is the recent production of crossover books just a passing fad?  In the 1980s, young adult series such as The Babysitters Club or Homecoming were targeted to teen readers and had little crossover appeal for adults.  Enter Harry Potter.  The success of J. K. Rowling’s seven-book series (1997-2007) not only spawned a franchise but also encouraged adult readers to turn to the young adult section of their local bookstore or public library to see what they may have been missing.