The Darker Side of the Discipline

by J J Cohen

At once exhausting and invigorating, ICMS 44 (AKA the Zoo) offered bracing panels, enjoyable discussions, the transformation of germinal inklings into projects, indulgence and libation, crises, epiphanies, and a dance. I can't reduce the fullness of those days to a pithy post, but I will share some highlights this week. I typically emphasize the affirmative, and eventually I will do so here at ITM ... but first I want to share something heavier, the weight of which has been upon me for some time.

Though Kalamazoo remains for me in the main a cheerful place, I was reminded repeatedly this year of the profession's dark edge. The BABEL panel on ethics and seriousness, for example, touched upon anonymity's lures, especially in reader's reports to which no name is signed. Stephanie Trigg and Tom Prendergast observed that this absence of attachment enables the dissemination of words that no one would ever send into the world under their own signature. Few scholars would be proud to own the cruelty, pettiness, and the boundary enforcement that can so easily be unleashed in that form. As Susan Morrison observed, since they arrive without a knowable sender such reports can seem the Judgment of the Field. Attachment to a specific scholar has a salubrious diminishing effect.

The worst choice in the face of such a blow would be to change one's scholarship to satisfy this unknown master -- and I say that with such confidence because, had I chosen that path in the past, few of the projects I have undertaken would have come to completion. I have therefore always found myself conflicted about peer review. I know that blind review is the gold standard of knowledge imprimaturing, yet I have seen repeatedly the succumbing to a temptation to basest instincts that the severing of words from person enables. My own philosophy is to abstain from the process as much as I am able. I inform presses and journals to ensure that their origin in JJC is attached to the reader's comments I compose, so that this ownership can be passed to the author. I share with those for whom I examine tenure materials that I am one of the outside evaluators, typically with a reminder of why I think the work they are undertaking is important.

My difficulty with unnecessary cruelty -- with the license some self-grant to be inhumane, mistaking such action as a good -- is even more acute when it comes to how the field treats its most vulnerable members.

I spend as much time as I can at Kalamazoo with graduate students and with those young in the profession. They are, after all, the most important people who attend any conference: they are undertaking the work that will give the field its future. This year I was constantly reminded of the ways in which the profession can eat its young, subjecting them to useless hierarchy (often for the sake of keeping in place a structure of authority that was inherited from disciplinary forebears), or can make them believe that "getting ahead" demands conformity over openness. When senior scholars punish those younger in the discipline by ignoring them; by making demeaning remarks about work that is unfamiliar methodologically rather than engaging in a conversation about what is at stake in such projects; by informing them that they are arrogant or incoherent or unimportant because they are in fact challenging extant modes of being a scholar; by demanding that they conform to preset critical parameters without articulating why this need be so; by failing to recognize the personal investment that scholars have in their work and the devastation a withering comment can engender (no matter how amusing it may seem to disseminate such seeming bons mots) well, such is the discipline at its worst.

Don't get me wrong: if you cannot with enthusiasm challenge someone to bring their project beyond its assumed ambit, if you cannot urge them to think through with you an issue or a theme or a problem, if you feel you cannot do anything but pat on the back and say all is well, then you have drawn a limit that will circumscribe both you and your interlocutors. But if you can listen with an open mind to the articulation of possibilities and approaches that are not preknown and inherently comfortable, if you can own up to your words and acknowledge the power they have upon those who receive them, if you can discern that the pleasurable agony of writing and teaching is not detachable from the pleasures and the agonies of a specific life, if you can imagine a world in which scholarship is an inherently collaborative and unfailingly dialogic enterprise ... well, then, in such a utopia the risk of entering the discipline might cease to be despair.

(written for two people who will know when this letter arrives, and written for anyone for whom the chord of this post resounds)

Things Accomplished at Kalamazoo (So Far)

by J J Cohen

• the greeting of friends, companions, colleagues
• the imbibing of libation
• the ingestion of aliment
• the browsing of tomes
• taunting and mockery
• affirmation and affection
• the renewing of bonds
• the celebrating of enduring bonds
• the fêting of Bonnie Wheeler
• the flight from Morpheus
• the disinfecting of the Tiny Shriner
• scheming that should lead to a special issue of postmedievial on New Critical Modes
• some reflection upon what conferences ideally accomplish
  

Kzoo Snapshot

by J J Cohen

Tiny stayed out so late last night at the BABEL party that I "accidentally" locked him out of our room. I found him this morning passed out with his eyes open, suspended upon the door knob.

He had a funky smell.

Kzoo Here I Come

by J J Cohen

As soon as the Tiny Shriner finishes packing his collection of thirty-three miniature plastic fezzes, I am on my way. This year -- for the first time -- I am taking graduate students with me. We'll fly to Detroit together, and then drive the rest of the way to the Zoo.

By the way, did I mention that Monster Theory: Reading Culture turns thirteen this year? They grow up so quickly, those "Seven Theses." MEARCSTAPA has even put together a panel to mark the occasion:

"Monster Culture (Seven Theses)": A Roundtable
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen's now paradigmatic manifesto on the importance of studying monsters and the monstrous, both generally in all time periods and cultures as well as in strictly medieval contexts, has influenced and inspired countless students exposed to his text in undergraduate courses, and likewise a great many working scholars and the studies they have produced since its publication in 1996. As an inaugural event for MEARCSTAPA, we seek in this roundtable to re-familiarize ourselves with the critical issues of the text, but also to evaluate, reconsider, and extend these theses for future consideration and deployment in subsequent studies. Founding members of MEARCSTAPA will share their interpretations and experiences of the text in research and teaching.

Session #366: Monster Culture: Seven Theses (Roundtable)
Friday, May 8th @ 3:30 pm [Bernhard 211]
Monsters: The Experimental Association for the Research of Cryptozoology through Scholarly Theory and Practical Application (MEARCSTAPA), Sponsor
Asa Simon Mittman (California State University-Chico), Organizer
Larissa Tracy (Longwood University), Presider

• Mary Kate Hurley (Columbia University)
• Karma de Gruy (Emory University)
• Stuart Kane (Stonehill College)
• Jeff Massey (Molloy College)
• Derek Newman-Stille (Trent University)
• Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (George Washington University)

See you there!

Dear Friends, You Are Invited: Yet Another Engagement With Vicarious Causation

by EILEEN JOY

Dear ITM Readers:

if you find yourself somewhere in Michigan over the next few days, consider yourself invited to the BABEL Working Group's annual Kalamazoo after-party:

Thursday, May 7th @ Cityscape
9:00 pm to 1:00 am
125 S. Kalamazoo Mall, 2nd Floor
Music by Karl the Angry Medievalist

Coming Very Soon: The Post-Historical Middle Ages

by J J Cohen

To be released on 5/26/09 by Palgrave, The Post-Historical Middle Ages is an important addition to the burgeoning New Middle Ages series. I've blogged about this book frequently in the past here at ITM.

From the Palgrave Macmillan website:

This collection of original essays repositions medieval literary studies after an era of historicism. Analyzing the legacy of Marxist and materialist theory on medieval literary criticism, the collection offers new ways of reading texts historically. Drawing upon aesthetic, ethical, and cultural vantage points and methods, these essays demonstrate that a variety of approaches and theories are “historical” and can change what it means to historicize medieval literature. By defining our post-historical moment in medieval English literary studies in terms of new possibilities, this collection will have broad appeal to those interested in the English Middle Ages, history, culture, and reading itself.

Praise

“A superb collection of fearless essays. About its potential impact, one could say that it anatomizes the present field of medieval literary studies and points in the direction the field should go in the future—except that the volume as a whole so fully explodes the concept of a unitary present and a single direction in which any field ‘progresses.’ Suffice it to say, then, that the challenges posed by these smart essays are not ones that any historically minded literary critic can easily shrug off—like the past itself, which has its ways of living with us.”—Carolyn Dinshaw, Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis and English, New York University

“Seeking neither to bury nor to praise historicism, this vital collection instead provokes much-needed discussion about the oftentimes tacit commitments of the historicist modes of inquiry that have dominated medieval literary studies for well over two decades. A curiosity cabinet of medievalisms, the individual contributions—while espousing a variety of critical allegiances—all scrutinize what is at stake in the stories we tell about the past as well as our own desires to have the past speak to our current selves. Multiple questions come under examination here: What is the allure of the alterity of the medieval and what are its possible consequences? From whence issues the hegemony of historicism? Can materialism exist independently of historicism? In answering these questions and posing many more, the distinguished contributions assembled by Federico and Scala will have broad appeal for both those new to the medieval field as well as seasoned scholars.”—Kellie Robertson, Associate Professor of English, University of Wisconsin, Madison

“An extraordinarily elegant, lucid, and important collection. These essays demonstrate the rigors of an historical method that they also seek to reach beyond, and the brilliance of its editing makes this a real conversation. Many of these essays are important contributions to historical scholarship, and all demonstrate a canny awareness of the investment of and in “history.” Its great irony is that it may come to constitute a determinative moment in scholarly history—the post-Post-Historical Middle Ages—but also the end of attempts to shape medieval studies to fit constricted disciplinary ways of writing and effacing history, especially in cultural studies.”--D. Vance Smith, Director, Medieval Studies, Princeton University

Table of Contents

Introduction--Sylvia Federico and Elizabeth Scala * Amorous Dispossessions: Knowledge, Desire, and the Poet’s Dead Body--Patricia Clare Ingham * Time Out of Memory--Jeffrey J. Cohen * Historicism after Historicism--Maura Nolan * (Dis)Continuity: The History of Dreaming--Aranye Fradenburg * Recovering the Middle Ages?--Thomas Prendergast and Stephanie Trigg * Naked Chaucer--George Edmondson * Biography After Historicism--Daniel Birkholz * The Gender of Historicism--Elizabeth Scala * From Clio to JHMuse©: Literacy and the Muse Of Digitalia--R. Allen Shoaf

The Tiny Shriner Goes to Kalamazoo

by J J Cohen

The space on my office tchoke shelf ordinarily occupied by the Befezzed One is vacant. Examine the photograph at left and you'll see how forlorn the Lascivious Antelope has become. No one lingers to play with the mini boomerang, or the tiny tea plate imprinted with the Queen Mum's head. No one rolls the Ganesha Disc of Doom around the shelf. The gargoyles are melancholic in their solitiude, while the champagne-stained mug that Tiny uses as his jacuzzi stands so empty that its utter vacancy has become a kind of black hole of existential gravity.

This disappearance from his perch surveying Pennsylavnia Avenue can mean only one thing: the Shriner has left the building. Like thousands of medievalists from around the globe, Tiny is headed to Kalamazoo.

If you can't come this year, don't worry: the Shrinester has informed me that he is going to be sending constant tweets of his whereabouts and observations. If you are on Twitter, follow him. If you aren't, you can subscribe to his Twitter account's RSS feed, or you can read his musings in the box we added to the righthand side of the blog, or you can patiently await our posting of his musings here at ITM as a blog post.

Safe travels to those headed to Michigan. See you soon!

Jews, Jews and More Medieval Jews

by J J Cohen

Well there is this:

Though possible for 'Jew' to function as a synonym for 'heretic', Jews were usually seen as temporally other to Christians. Yet Ashkenazic Jewish communities cohabitated with urban Christians, becoming a community intimately involved in deliberation over belief. This paper examines what happens in the lived spaces between Christians and Jews, where there existed a potential for amity as well as complexity within hostility. The Jews of medieval England are so troubling to Christian orthodoxy, I will argue, for their very modernity.

And then there is this:

Much scholarship on the Jews of York tends, like medieval writings on Jews in general, to assume that they inhabited a culturally separate (and therefore religiously pure) space, as well as a kind of living past. Such temporal separation and cultural segregation seems unlikely, given what we can glimpse of Christian-Jewish contiguity, even in texts known for their antisemitism. Spurred by contemporary Jewish youth movements that argue that the Jewish future cannot be predetermined from its revered past, and taking into account recent scholarship on medieval Jewish hybridity, this essay argues that the determinative power of the massacre in 1190 can obscure a more complicated narrative of convivencia and coinhabitation.

Two portions of the same project, it will be a minor miracle if I can stop utilizing labor avoidance mechanisms long enough to get some work done on them.

Postcolonial Medieval Studies and Art History

by J J Cohen

Congratulations to Eva Frojmovic of the University of Leeds for the Arts and Humanities Research Council funding of her project "Postcolonising the Medieval Image." Many good things will come of this project, including sessions at Leeds and Kalamazoo, and a postgraduate study day, and many publications.

Here is the portion of the proposal I found most intriguing:

During the last 30 years, postcolonial theory has transformed literary and film studies, yet in the last decade, only a few medievalist historians and literary scholars have used postcolonial thought, while almost no medievalist art historians have engaged with postcolonial theory. Why should this neglect matter? For two (related) reasons: first, the canon of medieval art has become fossilised through remaining defined by now outmoded methods; secondly, methodological separatism is leading to a split within the art historical community, with many medievalists isolated from their modernist colleagues. Exceptions aside, the study of medieval art and visualities has remained eurocentric in its canon and old-fashioned in its approach. The main tools are still stylistic and iconographic analysis, and the pursuit of "historical context". "Influence" is still a key concept, and tends to leave intact the old assumptions that artistic ideas have origins in self-contained cultural formations. These models in turn perpetuate the exclusion of "marginal" or "minority" subjects from the canon and help reinforce borders around Europe. Certain ideas are then "owned" by certain cultures, and anyone making use of them is an "imitator" - an essentially chauvinistic model. With the petrification of the canon and the entrenchment of methods, no methodological breakthroughs can be made, and medieval art historians struggle to communicate with their modernist counterparts. Moreover, medieval art is in danger of losing relevance and losing its place in the imagination of students and the public if it is seen as having meaning only within the past.

Many of these statements are true about medievalists in general: historicism continues to be our communal and dominant mode of analysis. But why, do you think, art historians (Michael Camille aside) have been reluctant or slow to embrace the methodologies that their colleagues in literature and history have found to be so energizing?

Swine Flu at GW

by J J Cohen

Ten minutes after receiving a request from a faculty member to administer her final exam electronically to avoid gathering students into a disease spreading classroom, I received an electronic alert from the GW Powers That Be announcing that two freshmen had been diagnosed with probable "H1N1 influenza" (AKA swine flu). They were, the note declares, "treated with Relenza after exhibiting flu symptoms and were given private rooms in a residence hall for their comfort and to limit exposure to other students."

Well I am happy that their comfort was foremost, otherwise I am sure they would have been herded to a sanitized containment facility and fed hospital food by people in hazmat suits. Maybe even deportation to a Swine Flu Colony. Next step: all people with swine flu will have to wear surgical masks shaped like pig snouts to publicly mark them as contaminated and to ensure they are shunned.

I am beginning to wonder if the university will close down before I administer my own final exam on May 11. My son's middle school was swarming with local media yesterday when it was announced that an asymptomatic student had been told to remain home: his father works for the World Bank and caught H1N1 influenza while in Mexico. This same family has another student at another local school, and the mother is a teacher at a third county school. Another nearby school has been shut down indefinitely because a student there did catch the flu. Meanwhile the family of the federal agent who got H1N1 while in Mexico has to make declarations like "We've got nothing to be ashamed of ... We didn't get anyone else at school sick." Would they need to be ashamed if they had? From leprosy to AIDS to swine flu: even in 2009 a disease can carry a moral taint into the bodies it infects.

What "Myths of Britain" Was Really About

by J J Cohen

This semester I am teaching what has become my favorite course in my rotation, Myths of Britain. A possible gateway to the major as well as a popular way to fill humanities and writing requirements for non-literary types, the course is founded upon a principle of slow readings of a small number of texts. I like to think of the class as one in which students who have grown up multitasking can catch their breath and linger over some especially rich medieval and early modern works. Texting, Facebooking, Twitter and the like have their place, but participation in these frenetic activities can obscure the pleasures of close reading, of being with texts so complex that they can withhold their rewards from those who do not yield them sufficient time.

I offered the complete syllabus in January. As you'll recall, the spirit of the course was summarized as follows:

Much great English literature turns out not to be so English after all: the action of the epic Beowulf unfolds in Scandinavia; King Arthur was a Welsh king before he was an English monarch; Shakespeare's Tempest takes place on an island in the Mediterranean, but the play is also about the colonization of the New World. "Myths of Britain" looks at the early island within a transnational frame. We explore literature as both art and a way to imagine social and individual identities. Students will enjoy works like Seamus Heaney's version of Beowulf; various versions of the Arthurian myths; the lais of Marie de France; and two plays by Shakespeare.

And it was in that spirit that I thought I was speaking with the class's ninety students over the course's twelve weeks. Yesterday's review session therefore surprised me. My three amazing and wonderful TAs were leading the class. They asked the students to call out the themes of the course. The snapshot (above) is the collected data on our white board. Do you see the words "transnational" or even "English" and "British" there? Anything about geography? Nooooo. But chivalry and class were shouted. Monstrosity broke into the hall. Love, too, as well as love's brother, fraternal love. The word that surprised me most, though, was futurity. The course was not especially forward-looking; in fact, just the opposite. But once that theme was offered I realized that we have spent months tracing the possible futures of the British Isles ... and in a way, through our constant focus on the inexhaustability of the imagination, the possible futures of we ourselves might embrace.

Post Tenure Depression, or A Goal Once Attained Recedes Anew

by J J Cohen

Dr. Virago has an interesting post about post-tenure blues. As the comment thread reveals, she is not the only academic to be surprised by an enduring melancholy that can take hold after what is supposed to be the happiest news of a scholar's life.

There is, I admit, a certain let-down to tenure: you work your butt off in graduate school hoping to get a tenure track job. Should you be fortunate enough to secure one, you then labor even harder so that you can retain the position indefinitely. A judgment descends from the heavens, and if you are again fortunate (most people who make it this far are), then you learn that you are done, you got it, it all worked out. Suddenly the rest of your career stretches before you, this time without the compulsion to constant, frantic work and without the lingering anxiety that you will be shown to the door. Without your friend Mr. Fret as your constant companion -- you know, that buddy who sits next to you every time you attempt to relax, the one who keeps reminding you that you need to be in the archive with your codices rather than Twittering, Facebooking, eating peanuts, and doing laundry -- well, without Mr. Fret giving you your contant dose of agitation, life becomes quite lonely. In a way, there is nothing worse than achieving your goals, because then you have .... what?

Then you have the chance to figure out of what your future will actually consist. Life as a tenured professor has less anxiety built into the job than life as an assistant professor, but other than that it isn't all that different. The absence of a profound change can be disconcerting: is this it? Is this all I get? Do I really just keep teaching the same courses and cavorting with the same colleagues and publishing on my topics of expertise until I am swallowed by the awaiting grave, several decades hence?

Yes.

And no. A bout of post-tenure depression forced me to decide what work I was committed to doing, to explore what kind of colleague I could best be, to discover that many of the walls I though separated me from what I wanted to do were mostly of my own imagining. My son Alex came into the world at tenure time and changed everything (I admit that we waited to have a kid until everything I could do for tenure was in place: there was no parental leave at my institution in the 1990s). I threw myself into composing Medieval Identity Machines. I don't want to glorify the process because the funk I toppled into sucked. But good things came from that period, in the end. Which is a long way of saying to Dr. Virago, you will get through it, and see that life on the other side of tenure offers something most jobs do not: the freedom to wander an unpredetermined future. What could be better than that?

My Son, Who Does NOT Resemble Harry Potter

by J J Cohen

A common misobservation offered about my soon-to-be twelve year old is that he resembles a certain Hogwarts wizard in training played by Daniel Radcliffe. Alex will with vigor correct anyone who states that such a resemblance exists. Usually I will say something in return like "Keep that anger in check or your lightning bolt scar will throb!" My paternal jesting does nothing to alleviate his contempt for Rowling-inspired comparisons.

A low point of this Potteresque haunting occurred on Grand Cayman a few years ago, when two elderly women were sitting in a gift shop conversing in patois. They were pointing at Alex and giggling. We could understand nothing of what they said to each other except for the words "Arry Potter."

So I was quite surprised this morning when for Spirit Day at School (theme: dress as your favorite film character) Alex descended from his bedroom lair with wand in hand and scar on forehead. Petrificus totalus! and other bad Latin to anyone who doesn't discern a certain proclivity for wizarding within him, after all.

Methods of Labor Avoidance

by J J Cohen

Here are the things at which I've worked today rather than compose my keynote for Leeds:

• walked Katherine to school via a circuitous route
• took a run in the rain
• checked email repeatedly
• sent comic messages to college colleagues about commencement
• alliterated (see preceding item)
  
• updated the English Department blog with a spiffy picture of T Shirt Tuesday
• Twittered inanities
• FaceBooked
• did laundry
• ate a second bowl of cereal
• annoyed the dog
• annoyed the lizard
  
• annoyed myself
• took the Tiny Shriner out of my computer bag to bring to Kalamazoo
• did more laundry
• feared I was running out of ways to avoid composing a talk in which I reveal that I know nothing about anything, but suddenly remembered that I could blog something at ITM
  
• hit the PUBLISH button for this post
• went finally to work?
  

Two discarded questions from the final exam I put together today

by J J Cohen

Inspired by the examinations that Karl has posted at ITM, like this one, I am introducing a fill in the blank section to this year's final for "Myths of Britain." The three TAs and I brainstormed appropriate questions this morning. In the discard pile are two I suggested:

1. What color was the Green Knight? ____________
2. If the Green Knight’s parents were not green, then what colors were they likely to have been? (assume verdant dermal pigmentation is a nonrecessive trait) _____________