Month: December 2005

Holi-daze

When Annette, who generally mocks me for keeping a blog, says to me “jeez, when are you going to update your unofficial blog?” I guess it is time for me to post.

Sorry for the delay, but it’s been a busy and yet fun time around here, holidays-wise lately. Just to provide a few “need to know” info-bits about how we’ve been celebrating in the Krause-Wannamaker household:

  • We set up the tree mentioned in the previous post, sang a few songs, moved on with the rest of our lives.
  • Annette spent probably too much time wrestling with the lights on the tree (which didn’t work at first, somewhat to my amusement).
  • We went to see a production of Pinocchio at EMU last weekend. I was trying to find something on the web that linked to it, but with little luck. This doesn’t surprise me because it seems like a kind of badly promoted production. But it was a very entertaining show, told in the “panto” tradition (at least as it is practiced in the UK). It’s coming up this coming weekend, and I’d highly recommend it if you have a chance to see it.
  • We went to the Michigan Theater and saw It’s a Wonderful Life on the big screen. Lots of fun, and interesting for several different reasons. First off, it’s nice to see It’s a Wonderful Life “commercial free,” and Annette and I both were pretty sure that we saw things in the big screen version that we haven’t seen since the lat time we bothered to rent the movie. Second, there’s something to be said for the “big screen” aspect of it all. I could go on and on about this, but it’s just cool to see movies that were made to be watched in a movie theater in a movie theater.
  • I made my Grandma Krause’s Pepper Nuts. But that’s a different post….

The "Future" of English? Depends on what you mean by "English," if you ask me…

There’s a piece in Inside Higher Ed: by Margaret Soltan called “No Field, No Future,” where she argues, basically, that English as a field is collapsing for a variety of different reasons, most of which have to do with the problems of critical theory. Personally, I have a kind of morbid fascination with arguments that claim the “end” of my field– well, sort of my field, as I’ll get to a moment. So I really wanted to like this piece. Alas, I didn’t.

First, I think it is mainly a rehashing of the same old argument about how, as the result of critical theory that no one really understands, English departments have lost their way. I have some sympathy with this argument– but just some, and more important, I’ve heard it many times before.

Second and more important, Soltan doesn’t mean “English;” she means “Literature.” Now, while I realize that in many English departments, English is the same thing as “Literature” (in the essay and in the comments that follow it on the Inside Higher Ed site, the idea of studying English at a “prestigious school” crops up again and again), but this is certainly not the case in many (maybe most?) other English departments. As I’ve mentioned before, my own department is called “English Language and Literature,” which for me is a useful way of saying that our department includes literature, but includes a whole bunch of other stuff: linguistics, English education (by far our biggest undergraduate program), journalism, public relations (I know those last two are kind of unusual in an English department, but Journalism has been in EMU’s English department since the early 1900s), creative writing, technical/professional writing, and composition and rhetoric.

These last two fields/disciplines/whatever– technical and professional writing and composition and rhetoric– are intriguing omissions from an article that is supposedly about the lack of a future for the “field” of “English.”

Why did she do this?

Is Soltan unaware of the fact that composition and rhetoric exists as a “field” usually within English departments? Possibly, but given that there are at least 50 PhD programs in Composition and Rhetoric right now (not to mention probably another 100 MA programs) and that nearly every English department in the country teaches a significant amount of first year writing, this seems unlikely.

Or is she saying, in a very indirect way, that English = Literature and ONLY Literature, and the fact that that is changing (and has been changing for, I dunno, 40 years) is a bad thing? I think so, but I’m not sure. In any event, if what she’s really saying is “Literature is a field that has no future,” well, she might have a point.

Where's Steve?

Don’t worry, my millions of loyal readers: I’ve just been busy with one thing or another, a lot of it having to do with school of course, but also a lot of it having to do with “life.”

I’ll post something more or less useful soon. In the mean-time, I’m:

  • Addressing various issues with student issues (various end of the semester crises), last minute meetings, Christmas parties, etc.; and
  • I’m pleased that I am not getting ready to go to MLA.