The Two Page Problem Paper

by J J Cohen

[First read and comment upon these two excellent post by Karl, on his splendiferous Animals graduate seminar and on scarcity in the sagas]

Every semester I build into my undergraduate courses at least two short writing assignments that I call Problem Papers. These essays are brief for several reasons: so that I can quickly assess where my students' writing is early in the term; so that I can give them substantial feedback that encompasses the whole essay; so that the usual 2-3 pages of generalities and other dreck that most students need to purge from their systems before they get to the heart of their paper are eliminated (when the assignment is this short, a writer cannot just sit and type away; it needs to be planned); so that students feel tortured by having to contain their big ideas in small spaces, and come to realize that writing is a form of architecture; so that several of these papers can follow each other and each one will get a bit better (in an upper division class we do two in the space of a month; in a lower division class, three over five to six weeks); so that students are then prepared to write filler-free longer papers later in the term; so that argument over observation is foregrounded from the start.

I've had a great deal of success with these essays. They are also not an agony to grade. I'm sharing the rubric for the exercise below, and would welcome your feedback. I've been doing these for so long that I suspect I can't really see any part of the instructions that aren't lucid enough.

How to Write a Very Good Problem Paper 

A problem paper is a succinct essay that asks a question of a text and then resolves that question through a persuasive argument. The question identifies a problem, something that is clearly full of significance but not directly explained: Why is the whale in Moby Dick white? Why does the werewolf in Bisclavret bite the nose from his betraying wife so that she passes the deformity to her daughters? Why do weapons always fail Beowulf? Why should giants be the first inhabitants of Britain in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain? Why is a teardrop the mechanism through which Erkenwald accidentally baptizes the pagan cadaver? The argument proceeds by using evidence within the text to contextualize the problem and answer the question posed.

1.     Think small. Think interesting. Think enjoyable to argue.

2.     Ensure that you are finding a PROBLEM in the text rather than making an observation. Structure your paper as an articulation and resolution of the problem.  For example, it's not enough to assert that Beowulf and Grendel have many traits in common and that makes the world complicated; everyone knows that already.  What is valuable, though, is to formulate an argument that accounts for this intertwining.  What does the author accomplish in making monstrousness a shared category? Why might he do so?

3.     Always bear in mind that you are presenting a convincing ARGUMENT, not simply making remarks about things that are interesting.  The text should be used to supply evidence. Quote from it in moderation to back up your assertions. If it helps, think of your paper as a court case: you want to persuade your audience. Don't hide contradictory evidence -- react to it, show how your argument explains it.

4.     Remember that you have no more than two TYPED, DOUBLE SPACED pages to make your argument. Every word is precious. Omit anything that is too general, and say as much as possible with as few words as possible. A thesis sentence like "Chaucer employs many themes to make interesting points" says nothing at all. A sentence like "Chaucer embodies in the Wife of Bath the contradictory voices of perfect lover and perfect fiend" will make your reader want to know more.

5.     ANALYZE, DO NOT SUMMARIZE. If you are simply retelling the story, you are not writing a critical paper. Your reader knows the plot already and does not require a rehash.

6.     Keep a formal tone. Take your writing seriously. Proofread assiduously. What you have to say about the text is important, and will be graded seriously.

7.     Be brave. Take risks. As long as you are making a thoughtful, text-based argument and are attentive to the quality of your writing, it is difficult to go wrong. Exercise your intellect and imagination in this short essay. Grant yourself the luxury of having enough time to think your argument through, and build in time to revise.

Sagas and Scarcity: A first-time reader on the frontier

by KARL STEEL

Over the past few months, as a kind of preparation for NCS Iceland, and also just for fun, I've read, in translation, maybe 14 sagas (or 12 family sagas+ Harald's Saga and the Volsung Saga) and a fair chunk of the Poetic Edda. I've read all the great ones: Njal, Egil, Grettir, Laxdæla, and a swelling list of deeper cuts. Apart from Njal and the Poetic Edda, which I read in 1989 or 1990 (!), during a Freshman great books course, I'm coming to this material as an absolute novice, with no knowledge of the scholarship and virtually none, I'm sad to say, of the language.

Sagas can't be read by the bushel without a few notes. While I've long since given up on keeping one Thorstein separate from the others, I can still, as I did above, flag features particular to particular sagas. You might notice, for example, the "many prose metaphors, especially about weather" and "talking wounds, diagnosed with onions."

Talking wounds, in a sequence where someone ends up terribly wounded for showing insufficient compassion:

Then one of the Trondheim yeomen came into the barn as Thormond and the woman spoke together. He was curious to learn about the king's men. Many of them were sorely wounded, and from those wounds to the innards or the head issued that terrible sound that comes from such deep cuts to the flesh.

(103, Martin Regal trans., Penguin Comic Tales and Tales from Iceland)

There's a lot, maybe too much, to mention for a medievalist new to this material. There's nothing like this in the chivalric literature of England and France, whose knights, as most of us know, do nothing but eat, pray, love, and fight.

Just one thing, today, when I'm stewing with a virus on my couch: compared to texts from Western, continental Europe, Icelandic sagas describe a society that's just plain poor. Iceland is not resource rich, not in people, and not in goods. It seems cut off from the main trade routes of medieval Europe, with its trade being, primarily, cloth in exchange for Norwegian lumber. In Iceland, 60 men is an army; 15 men fighting is a battle worth memory; killings happen over what seem to be petty annoyances, or at least petty annoyances to us, the sleek and comfortable: beatings from porridge ladles, borrowed horses, insults--particularly sexual insults. Or fights are over resources: grazing land, decent grassland for making hay, and especially, meat from beached whales.

Also notable, and perhaps related to the poverty, is the lack of division of labor, perhaps notable to me only because I've been reading The German Ideology during my breaks (and, on this, "Division of labor only becomes truly such from the moment when a division of material and mental labor appears" (159, Marx Engels Reader: applicable here, or not?). Warriors are also poets are also farmers (expected to bail hay alongside their slaves) are also porridge cooks are also assassins (often minimally honoring the law when they wake up their victims just before they, uh, bury the hatchet) are also shepherds are also driftwood-gatherers are also craftsmen, able to repair a boat or smelt a silver sow as an insult or to measure the beams of a church to try to match a king's great architecture. A few, but not many, know how to make a weapon.

The generalized character extends to gender relations. Certainly, the sagas are as sexist as any medieval literature, and often worse. But it's impossible to imagine a woman in the sagas as retiring as Chrétien's Enide or as nervous and inept as Lady Bisclavret. If Enide were a Thordis, she would have denounced her husband before his men, and Eric would have stormed out in shame to fight and, probably, die; if Lady Bisclavret were an Aud, she'd have divorced her husband and had her 4 brothers track him down as a witch. In the sagas, so far as I know them, women goad their men into vengeance (as you know from reading, say, Volsung/Nibelungenlied: the precise opposite of the Melibean queen as intercessor!), often fight alongside them, join expeditions to the new world, and often make their own decisions about who to marry and, especially, who to divorce.

I might expect that frontier literature of any sort has the same features (those who know this stuff can chime in below), although the difference here, at least for Iceland, is that Iceland's only human "natives" were a few Irish monks who scattered (if they were lucky) when the Norse first showed up.

Animals and Ecology in the Middle Ages - A Spring 2014 Syllabus

Yayoi Kusama at David Zwirner

by KARL STEEL

Hi folks,

First, thanks to the guest post from Dorothy Kim, whose promotion of medieval twitter left your humble Brooklyn medievalist longing desperately for Chicago. Very much looking forward to after reports from the entire In the Middle Team, all of whom -- except for me! -- were in the thick of everything, if the evidence of Twitter may be believed.

In the meantime, here's the syllabus for the latest version of my medieval animals course (link to pdf here). I've taught courses on this theme two or three times at Brooklyn College, but never at the Grad Center (courses listed here). I've been able to make a lot of changes to the usual run of this: I'm a different scholar now (I think), and my Grad Center students will be, for the most part, PhD students, mostly possessing a base of familiarity with medieval texts and/or critical theory that I can't assume in my Brooklyn College students, regardless of their often very considerable smarts.

Some highlights for what follows:

• I'm taking a page from Cathy Davidson and including two (short) monographs on my syllabus, Cary Wolfe's Before the Law and Eugene Thacker's In the Dust of this Planet
• Using Google Docs, we're going to be keeping a "living bibliography" of additional readings, editable by all my students, and available publicly to the world 
• We're going to do the same with seminar minutes. I remember that Caroline Walker Bynum required seminar students to rotate in minutes-keeping duties; we'll do the same, but we'll post the minutes to Google Docs publicly.
• I'm looking forward to returning, at the end, to that workhorse of a medieval text, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and thinking it anew with what we've picked up along the way. 

Class starts on January 27th, so there's time for changes. Suggestions encouraged!

---

Animals and Ecology: The Middle Ages

ENGL 80700 [cross-listed with MSCP 80500]

CUNY Grad Center, Room 4433, Mondays 11:45-1:45

Karl Steel

Monday office hour 2:00-3:00 and by appointment

Office Phone: 212-817-8761

Email (best way to reach me): ksteel@brooklyn.cuny.edu

“For anyone who doubts that a horse is by its very nature better than wood, and that a human being is more excellent than a horse, should not even be called a human being.”

Anselm, Monologion

Oister: Listen then, but before we proceed in our discourse, you must promise me beforehand, that while I open (as you see) to speak, you will take care that those Roguy confounded Crabs shall not throw a stone between my two shells, which would hinder me from shutting 'em ever after.

Giovanni Gelli, La Circe

translated by Thom. Brown

“Animals and Ecology: The Middle Ages” will introduce students to the more recent strains of critical animal theory and ecocriticism and consider how this thought might respond to and be transformed by its encounter with medieval cultures. Critical animal theory exploded in interest a little more than a decade ago, primarily through the work of Cary Wolfe, and a critical canon was quickly established, centering largely on Derrida's The Animal that Therefore I am and a few other books, such as Giorgio Agamben's The Open.

With its bestiaries, its art that loved to represent animal/human/vegetable hybrids, its heraldry, hunting, and “household pigs,” and a literature more than happy to include talking animals, medieval studies has been particularly well suited to engage with these fields. Articles and, eventually, books began appearing in earnest over the least 7 or 8 years, although earlier cultural engagements with literal medieval animals date back at least 20 years ago to Joyce Salisbury's The Beast Within. We are therefore now well placed to consider what might be called, clumsily, the second wave of Medieval Critical Animal/Eco Studies.

We can readily identify how the dominant medieval intellectual traditions sought to establish human difference. It's easy to link Augustine to Aquinas to Descartes as the enemies of all animalkind. Many other medieval texts, however, concentrate not on cognition and the possession of a soul but on vulnerability, heterogeneous needs, and scales of time in which humans appear as just one more comprimised actor among others. Such texts often acknowledge the existence of subjectivities completely different from the more familiar lives, emotions, and needs of humans. With these texts, we will work over questions like the following: do animals have a particular claim on us, more than, say, plants? Which animals and why? How might swarms challenge an ethics based on individuals? How does renewed interest in nonhuman materialisms compel a rethinking of the usual arguments of critical animal studies?

Credit Options:

As with most English Program courses, you can register for ENGL 80700 for either 2.0 (graded P/F) or 4.0 credits (regular letter grade). If you are not an English Program student and are registered for 2.0 credits, confirm that your home program allows this, as some programs require that every course counting toward your required 60 credits of coursework receive a letter grade. Students taking the class for 2.0 credits will do all reading, participate in class discussions, do the in-class, oral presentations, and join others in writing the weekly summaries of class discussion. Students taking the course for 4.0 credits will do all this and also write a final seminar paper along with its preparatory assignments.

Students taking the course for 3.0 credits as MSCP 80500 will do all assignments for the class, but can write a final paper that is somewhat shorter (10-15 pages) than that required of students doing ENGL 80700 for 4.0 credits.

Learning Objectives:

By the end of the semester, students will be able to do:

• discuss, write about, and teach a wide range of medieval works;

• analyze a variety of historical and theoretical approaches to nonhuman animals and ecology, and incorporate such approaches into their own critical writing;
• consider how thinking about nonhuman animals and ecology in the contemporary world might be understood in ways both similar to and different from medieval understandings.

TEXTS and READING

You are encouraged to do some reading before the class begins. If you are not comfortable with Middle English, try to get comfortable. Harvard's METRO site is especially useful: http://metro.fas.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do. You might also familiarize yourself with some of the basics of critical animal studies. Read Derrida's “The Animal that Therefore I am” (available in a volume bearing the same title) and several chapters in my How to Make a Human: Animals and Violence in the Middle Ages: I recommend the Introduction, Chapter 3, and the Epilogue. It's available as a PDF here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/2kogaeb5a0egel5/Steel_2ndproof.pdf. You might also want to watch this video of my introduction to Critical Animal Studies: http://vimeo.com/56740190

We will also be generating a collaborative bibliography on critical animal studies, ecotheory, materialism, and, if possible, their relationship to medieval studies on Wikispaces here. Everyone in the class will be granted permission to edit it, and I will ask you to join me in regularly adding items.

Also, please obtain a copy of each of the following in some form. It's fine with me if you use Ebooks and PDFs on tablets or other larger touchscreen computers, but you'll want to mark key passages in advance of class discussion. Other course readings will be provided as PDFs or otherwise will be made available electronically.

Gerald of Wales, The History and Topography of Ireland, trans. John O'Meara [from the first recension] (New York: Penguin, 1983), ISBN 0140444238.

If you'd like to check the Latin, here is the text of the first recension, https://www.dropbox.com/s/zjy6ba9v8yg2l9u/gerald%20topographia%20hibernie%20first%20recension.pdf; for the second recension, https://archive.org/stream/giraldicambrensi05gira#page/n11/mode/2up; for a digitized, lavishly illustrated manuscript, see British Library, Royal MS 13 B VIII, 1r-34, http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/FullDisplay.aspx?ref=Royal_MS_13_b_viii

Chaucer, Geofffrey. Parliament of Fowles and House of Fame. I'll be using the Riverside Chaucer, which many of you might already own; otherwise, you can use the Dream Visions and Other Poems (ISBN 0393925889) published by Norton, ed. Kathryn Lynch. Whatever edition you use should have the text in Middle English. You'll also want the Prioress's Portrait from the General Prologue of The Canterbury Tales.

Henryson, Robert, The Complete Works, ed. David J. Parkinson (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2010). ISBN 9781580441391

The text is available for free online at

http://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/publication/parkinson-henryson-the-complete-works

If you are buying the book used, be careful to get this edition rather than the 1997 one by Kindrick. The 2010 Parkinson edition improves on Kindrick in several respects, perhaps most usefully, by providing a substantial introduction to reading Middle Scots and by glossing the text more thoroughly, making it easier for to read. If you'd like to see the 1570 edition like the one Parkinson used, go to EEBO (avail. in Grad Center Library Databases) and do a keyword search for “Henrisone.”

Thacker, Eugene. In the Dust of This Planet: Horror of Philosophy vol. 1. (Alresford, UK: Zero Books, 2011). ISBN 184694676X

The Saga of the Volsungs, trans. Jesse Byock (New York: Penguin, 2004). ISBN 0140447385.

I do not read Old Norse, but if you do, let us know. If you're buying a different translation, get one done first within your lifetime, as earlier translations often archaize the language, which is interesting for a history of medievalism, but perhaps less interesting for us. A not cheap facing page edition is available through here: http://aq-verlag.de/bibliotheca-germanica-series-nova/vol-3-volsunga-saga/

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Any edition is fine; a translation is fine, actually, if you're not comfortable with Middle English, but ideally you'll read it in Middle English.

Wolfe, Cary. Before the Law: Humans and Other Animals in a Biopolitical Frame (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), ISBN 0226922413.

January
Jan 27	General Approaches Genesis 1-3 John Lydgate, “The Fifftene Tokyns aforn the Doom” (https://archive.org/stream/minorpoemsofjohn00lydguoft#page/116/mode/2up) Souillac Column: http://www.flickr.com/photos/sharmanka/sets/72157626077568847/ “The Wolf Child of Hesse” (translation in Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Ethics and Objects, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (Washington, DC: Oliphaunt Books, 2012)) Exemplum 453, “Luporum more currit et ululat aliquis,” in An Alphabet of Tales, ed. Mary Macleod Banks, Vol II. (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1905) https://archive.org/stream/analphabettales01ligoog#page/n68/mode/2up
February
Feb 3	Theoretical Principles for Animal Studies Wolfe, Before the Law Short medieval hunting law translated here: http://www.inthemedievalmiddle.com/2012/06/forest-law-and-deers-lively-carcass.html Short medieval readings: “Melion,” http://www.liv.ac.uk/media/livacuk/cultures-languages-and-area-studies/liverpoolonline/Werwolf.pdf Chaucer's portrait of the Prioress from the General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales
Feb 10	Animal Communities/Talking Animals Chaucer, Parliament of Fowles and House of Fame Donna Haraway, When Species Meet, introduction
Feb 20 (Thurs)	Animals, Violence, and Sympathy Henryson, The Morall Fabillis Donna Haraway, When Species Meet, introduction (continue discussion)
Feb 24	Animals and Lineage Marie de France, “Guigemar,” “Yonec,” and “Bisclavret” (from the Lais) “Androcles and the Lion [and the Bear Mother],” in The Early English Versions of the Gesta Romanorum, ed. Sidney J. H. Herrtage (London: Trübner & Co., 1879), 327-331, https://archive.org/stream/earlyenglishver03herrgoog#page/n364/mode/2up Geoffrey of Auxerre, On the Apocalypse, Joseph Gibbons, trans., 139-57 [Melusine]; Alphabet of Tales #653 on the Prince of Crete, http://quod.lib.umich.edu/c/cme/AlphTales/1:657?rgn=div1;view=fulltext. Jeffrey J. Cohen, “The Werewolf's Indifference,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 34.1 (2012): 351-356. Susan Crane, “Wolf, Man, and Wolf-Man,” in Animal Encounters: Contacts and Concepts in Medieval Britain (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 42-68
March
March 3	Talking Back Testamentum Porcelli; “By a Forest as I gan fare” DIMEV 922, from Middle English Lyrics, ed. Maxwell S. Luria and Richard L. Hoffman (New York: Norton, 1974): 123-25; Middle English “Balaack and Balaam” from The Chester Plays; Thomas Brown translation of G. Gelli, Circe, Book 1 (On the Oyster and the Mole); “Complaint of the Birds to Luther against Wolfgang,” trans. in Preserved Smith, The Life and Letters of Martin Luther (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1911), 360-61 https://archive.org/stream/lifeandlettersm00smitgoog#page/n404/mode/2up; Margaret Cavendish, “The Hunting of the Hare,” http://xtf.lib.virginia.edu/xtf/view?docId=chadwyck_ep/uvaGenText/tei/chep_1.0848.xml;chunk.id=d165 ; Choose any three from Phaen/Ex 8.3 (2013), on “Animal and Food Ethics” http://www.phaenex.uwindsor.ca/ojs/leddy/index.php/phaenex/issue/current/showToc
March 10	The Manuscript Turn in Medieval Animal Studies John Lydgate, “Debate of the Horse, Goose, and Sheep.” Readings on “the manuscript turn” from Sarah Kay (Postmedieval 2.1 (2011): 13-32), Bruce Holsinger (“Uterine Vellum, A Florilegium,” http://burnablebooks.com/uterinevellum/), Elaine Treherne (Postmedieval 4.4 (2014): 465-78), and selections from Katie Walter, ed. Reading Skin in Medieval Literature and Culture (available through Palgrave Connect)
March 17	Other European Traditions The Saga of the Volsungs Geoffrey of Monmouth, Vita Merlini, selections, http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/eng/vm/vmeng.htm (from University of Illinois Studies in Language and Literature 10.3 (1925) Everyone: find a relevant or interesting scholarly article on your own and come in ready to talk about it and how it enriches this week's reading.
March 24	Theoretical Principles for Ecostudies Gerald of Wales, History and Topography of Ireland Serenella Iovino, “Steps to a Material Ecocriticism. The Recent Literature About the “New Materialisms” and Its Implications for Ecocritical Theory,” Ecozon@ 3.1 (2012): http://www.ecozona.eu/index.php/journal/issue/view/7/showToc Pick two from Postmedieval 4.1 “Ecomaterialism”
March 31	Into the Wild? The Anglo-Norman Voyage of St. Brendan, translation from Appendix 2, Jude S. Mackley, Northern World : The Legend of St Brendan : A Comparative Study of the Latin and Anglo-Norman Versions Jane Bennett, “A Vitalist Stopover on the Way to a New Materialism,” in Diana Coole and Samatha Frost, eds., New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 47-69 Pick two more from Postmedieval 4.1 “Ecomaterialism”
April
April 7	Settlement, Food, and The Origins of Culture Ruth Evans, “Gigantic Origins: An Annotated Translation of De Origine Gigantum,” Arthurian Literature 16 (1998): 197-211. Jean de Wavrin, Recueil des croniques et anchiennes istories de la Grant Bretaigne, in A Collection of the Chronicles and Ancient Histories of Great Britain, Now Called England, trans. William Hardy (London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, and Green, 1864), 1: 4-29, https://archive.org/stream/acollectionchro00hardgoog#page/n92/mode/2up Serpil Oppermann, “Material Ecocriticism and the Creativity of Storied Matter,” https://www.academia.edu/5330227/Material_Ecocriticism_and_the_Creativity_of_Storied_Matter to appear here: http://www.tijdschriftframe.nl/portfolio/item/frame-26-2-ecocriticism/ selections from Marx, The German Ideology on human/animal difference Due: One paragraph sketch of final project
SPRING BREAK
April 28	Death and Waste Middle English “Debate Between the Body and the Worms” Middle English Vision of Tundale http://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/text/foster-three-purgatory-poems-vision-of-tundale-introduction Eugene Thacker, In the Dust of this Planet
May
May 5	Plant Thought Two episodes from the Alexander Legend: Alexander and Dindimus and the “Tree Women” Alexander and Dindimus: Ranulf Higden and John Trevisa, Polychronicon, ed. Joseph Rawson Lumby (London: Longman & Co., 1865), 3:454-79 https://archive.org/stream/polychroniconran03higd#page/454/mode/2up Tree Women: read Peggy McCracken, “The Floral and the Human,” in Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Ethics and Objects, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (Washington, DC: Oliphaunt Books, 2012), 91–122 Dominic Pettman, “The Noble Cabbage [Review of Michael Marder’s Plant-Thinking],” Los Angeles Review of Books, July 28, 2013, https://lareviewofbooks.org/review/the-noble-cabbage-michael-marders-plant-thinking/ Due: Prospectus/Annotated Bibliography for Final Project
May 12	The Nonhuman in/with the Familiar Sir Gawain and the Green Knight Eileen A. Joy, “Weird Reading” in Speculations IV http://punctumbooks.com/titles/speculations-issue-iv/
May 19	Final Paper presentations Even if you're not writing a paper, please attend and give your colleagues your support.
May 26	Final Paper (15-20 pages) Due

#medievaltwitter

a guest post by Dorothy Kim [@dorothyk98]

MLA 2014 in subarctic Chicago is around the corner. Many articles have already discussed the rules and guidelines for tweeting this conference: http://convention.commons.mla.org/2013/12/03/virtual-mla-a-quick-guide-to-using-twitter-at-the-mla-convention/ and this https://chroniclevitae.com/news/242-conference-season-is-here-don-t-stink-at-twitter or this http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/ten-tips-for-tweeting-at-conferences/54281?cid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en. I will not rehash what these articles lay out, but medievalists should read these excellent pieces in order to understand what will happen at conferences in regards to twitter. Some basic things of note for medievalists: 

1. follow the #hashtag
2. the general rules these days are that people are going to tweet your conference presentation unless you announce you do not want it to be tweeted
3. attribute who is saying what
4. realize that live-tweeting a talk is your scholarly ally, not an enemy.

Finally, there are usually two types of conference tweeting: 1. summary or reporting what is being said or 2. being an active discussant/participant on twitter about the presentation. 

For a long time, tweeting the MLA particularly and conferences more generally was located in the world of digital humanities (DH) scholarship and in DH panels, conferences, and workshops. There have been a few dust-ups including #twittergate:  http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/10/02/scholars-debate-etiquette-live-tweeting-academic-conferences. Tweeting has moved out into other disciplines, but not as readily or as intensely as in the DH scholarly world. However, many of the standard rules and etiquette for live-tweeting conferences has developed from the twitter practices in DH. This post on #medievaltwitter is both a personal story about a medievalist tweeting, but also a rumination about why twitter should be one of the most comfortable digital platforms for medievalists.

Twitter Egg

I was forced to get a twitter account at a digital humanities and liberal arts colleges conference in Washington D.C. in April 2012. When I mean forced, I do mean forced. I was sitting between Kathryn Tomasek (Wheaton College) @KathrynTomasek and Rebecca Frost Davis @FrostDavis (St. Edward’s University). They both had iPads and other devices out ready to live-tweet a discussion about Library-IT-Faculty collaboration. I believe it was Rebecca who leaned over and said, “you’re tweeting along right”? I said: “Ummm, no. I don’t have a twitter account.” They were both shocked. At this point, I had been in and out of DHSI, DH conferences for liberal arts colleges, NITLE DH webinars, and TAPAS planning meetings with them for over a year and a half. It’s more or less expected if you are doing any kind of DH scholarship to have a twitter account. It is the major location of DH information, networking, and scholarly conversation. Rebecca opened up the twitter page on my computer and pretty much said, “you need to start.” This is how, where, and why my twitter self was born.

For months, I had maybe a dozen followers, several people at the DH and liberal arts college conference where I had originally lived-tweeted (and Rebecca and Kathryn had tagged and retweeted my tweets) and random IT college friends. My icon was an egg with a green background; I was an egg for a very long time.

My twitter account would come out for digital humanities conferences and talks. And because of this, the first set of rules and etiquette I learned about tweeting came from the DH world. Here, it is standard to live-tweet and to live-tweet heavily. Usually the #hashtag is already set up and often the entire twitter feed streams live on a AV screen for the rest of the audience to see as the speaker delivers his/her talk. This kind of live-tweeting creates simultaneously unfolding discussions and conversations that includes both people in the audience live-tweeting and others who can’t physically be present following, commenting, arguing, and asking questions over twitter.

It’s a frantic and heady thing to see a session being live-tweeted. The adrenaline is high; the comments are in live time and at high speed; and it always makes for a fantastic Q&A session. For the speakers, especially those who don’t realize this, if someone is live-tweeting your talk, s/he is concentrating intensely on what you are saying. The live-tweeters are usually heavily invested in what is unfolding in the session. I have participated in these kinds of live-tweeting sessions in which separate discussions are happening in response to what the speaker is saying—often with linked information and several lightning exchanges about key points. But usually, this has been at DH talks and not for talks in medieval studies.

#medievaltwitter

The peculiar thing is, DH-style, intense live-tweeting reminds me most of medieval commentary practice. As a manuscript specialist, I spend a lot of time looking, reading, transcribing, and thinking about the physical manuscript medium. I am obsessed with the marginal and interlinear glosses and commentary as I am with the main text in a manuscript. If the medieval manuscript is a recording medium that allows scholar now to see the conversations and connected marginal glosses of individual readers, then twitter is the digital medium that replicates this practice the most but with comments all the time and in real time for individual thinkers. And like the medieval manuscripts that many of us work with (though we clearly don’t put in our own marginal commentaries anymore), twitter also records our short, marginal thoughts. Twitter as a medium also allows us to archive and record these conversations (vis-à-vis storify, etc.). For all these reasons, I adore twitter. It also helps they didn’t sign their privacy over to the NSA.

At recent medieval conferences I have attended, there has been some unease about twitter and what it means that people are live-tweeting paper sessions and talks. Roopika Risam in discussing twitter at MLA writes: “As social media usage becomes a common feature at conferences, anxieties about authority, control, attribution, originality and privacy are likely to haunt the theory and practice of scholarly social media use for some time to come.” If this statement does not create déjà vu for most medieval scholars especially in relation to the scholarly discussion about the place of marginalia, runaway scribal commentary, and the invention of scribal versions, I don’t know what will. Roopika Risam’s statement particularly about the “anxieties about authority, control, attribution, originality and privacy” could be straight out of Michael Camille’s book Image on the Edge.

Most medievalists probably don’t realize that twitter, as a multimedia communication platform, functions like the space of marginalia in medieval manuscripts. Even twitter’s tone is reminiscent of the tone of medieval marginalia. Twitter’s tone and range can include very scripted and serious scholarly arguments similar in tone and purpose to what medievalists see in looking at the Glossa Ordinalia. “Pangur Bán”—the 9th c. Old Irish poem written by a scribe about his cat on the margins of the Reichenau Primer—has to be the first cat meme. I don’t think people would be surprised that a lot of #medievaltwitter is filled with images from the margins of manuscripts—often the most salacious, eye-browing raising, and naughty ones. How many times has the decorated, farting and pooping monkeys circulated on twitter in the last 6 months? Twitter is a space for encyclopedic information, new linked discoveries, intense scholarly arguments, and even politicized activism. Twitter can be radically serious in pushing against the “authority and control” of the state, the scholarly-industrial complex, and institutional power. It can also be playful, hysterically funny, irreverent, cute: an utter delight though often also still radically pushing against the “authority and control” of the powers-that-be. Medievalists know that marginalia is a vast field of interconnected worlds. It’s the space of records, lives, and also intense creativity. The beginning of English poetry, as seen in Caedmon’s hymn, began as a marginal note in several Latin Bede manuscripts. We’ve seen whole histories written on the margins of manuscripts—as the English Peterborough Chronicle demonstrates with the Anglo-Norman Li Rei de Engleterre written entirely in the margins of an early Middle English historiographic manuscript.

Beyond the scholarly communication uses of twitter—instant notices about jobs, internships, fellowships, new digital projects, manuscript images, and seriously delightful images of astonishing marginalia, etc.—twitter can be a highly politicized and often heated space. But as many medievalists who work on animal studies may have realized, the platform’s name and avatar should have clued us into what the space is about. For medievalists, twitter should be a familiar and comfortable medium. Medieval texts are obsessed with avian discourse as the space of radical political allegory and discussion. If you are on twitter, you have an avatar, a handle, and you “tweet.” The medium has dictated that you are in the allegorical space of a bird. You are part of a floating community that allows you—as we can see in Marie de France’s Fables, or Chaucer’s Parlement of Foules—to speak radical (and often uncomfortable) politicized, intellectual, and social truths.

Tweeting as a “medievalist, digital humanist, and feminist”

Today, my twitter feed is my most visible public social media space. My academia.edu page is very bare-bones; I don’t have my own separate website; I don’t blog (other than a guest post or two). However, I tweet, and I tweet regularly. I am not an egg anymore. I now usually have seasonal floral pictures as my avatar. I will probably take a picture of the arctic vortex tomorrow and change my twitter avatar as I head out for Chicago. Currently, I check my twitter feed while walking from my house to the bus stop and on the bus to and from campus in Ann Arbor. I check twitter if I am waiting in line, in the car but not driving, generally, in mundane places where I am waiting for something else. I tweet personally as a “medievalist, digital humanist, feminist,” but I also tweet separately as a scholarly society. As secretary for the Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship, I run the Society’s twitter feed @SocietyMedFem and Facebook group. And yes, we will be tweeting madly in our two sessions at MLA.

I usually am a documentary tweeter at medieval, Jewish studies, and other non-DH related talks and panels. In other words, I tend to summarize what’s going on at the conference mostly for friends and colleagues who can’t be there but really want to know what’s going on. They, in fact, wherever they are in the world, follow the feed of the conference live. I believe I did this mostly because it was pretty clear that tweeting was not a normal part of the procedures in my other fields. I thought, in these situations (with less participants), the most important thing is to record what’s going on for others who cannot be there but who want to know. We cannot all be at the conferences specifically that discuss our fields all the time. In addition, there are usually not enough on-the-ground tweeters to get into the more participatory tweeting practices seen at DH sessions and panels.

However, this time at MLA, I plan to live-tweet as a tweeting participant and enjoy being in the thick of twitter marginalia. This blog post is then my call to all medievalists out there to get a twitter account and become participant tweeters at this conference. Or for all medieval academic tweeters, follow the conference feeds and be a participatory tweeter in the sessions and talks. Let’s enjoy our discussions live and online. Let’s delight, frolic, and link our points for other medievalists who can’t be in subarctic Chicago with us. Let’s revel intellectually, politically, and socially in this very medieval of contemporary social media spaces.

So along with following the specific MLA-designated #hashtags for the sessions, go ahead and use #medievaltwitter so we can follow all the great conversations and participate in what’s going on in our field. Let’s create archivable medievalist marginalia and tweet our intellectual, social, and political truths for future generations.

On a last note: Don’t forget to send pictures to @MLAelevator or its archnemesis @MLAelevatorhulk. Yes, I was there when it was generated. And as medievalists, I think we would delight at the very marginalia-like antics of @MLAelevator. I promise to make sure the MLAelevator tumblr is also up and running.


Dorothy Kim (@dorothyk98)
Assistant Prof. of English at Vassar
Frankel Fellow at the University of Michigan

Prismatic Ecology now in print!

by J J Cohen

The FedEx truck dropped off my copy Friday, so now I know it's real. Prismatic Ecology: Ecotheory Beyond Green is out. Aesthetically it's just ... wow. And the essays in it are (take it from the editor) really something great. Here's what's included:

Foreword
Lawrence Buell
Introduction: Ecology’s Rainbow
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen
White
Bernd Herzogenrath
Red
Tobias Menely and Margaret Ronda
Maroon
Lowell Duckert
Pink
Robert McRuer
Orange
Julian Yates
Gold

Graham Harman
Chartreuse
Allan Stoekl
Greener
Vin Nardizzi
Beige
Will Stockton
Brown
Steve Mentz
Blue
Eileen Joy
Violet-Black
Stacy Alaimo
Ultraviolet
Ben Woodard
Grey
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen
Black
Levi R. Bryant
X-Ray
Timothy Morton
Onword. After Green Ecologies: Prismatic Visions
Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann

Emphasizing sustainability, balance, and the natural, green dominates our thinking about ecology like no other color. What about the catastrophic, the disruptive, the inaccessible, and the excessive? What of the ocean’s turbulence, the fecundity of excrement, the solitude of an iceberg, multihued contaminations? Prismatic Ecology moves beyond the accustomed green readings of ecotheory and maps a colorful world of ecological possibility.

In a series of linked essays that span place, time, and discipline, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen brings together writers who illustrate the vibrant worlds formed by colors. Organized by the structure of a prism, each chapter explores the coming into existence of nonanthropocentric ecologies. “Red” engages sites of animal violence, apocalyptic emergence, and activism; “Maroon” follows the aurora borealis to the far North and beholds in its shimmering alternative modes of world composition; “Chartreuse” is a meditation on postsustainability and possibility within sublime excess; “Grey” is the color of the undead; “Ultraviolet” is a potentially lethal force that opens vistas beyond humanly known nature.

Featuring established and emerging scholars from varying disciplines, this volume presents a collaborative imagining of what a more-than-green ecology offers. While highlighting critical approaches not yet common within ecotheory, the contributions remain diverse and cover a range of topics including materiality, the inhuman, and the agency of objects. By way of color, Cohen guides readers through a reflection of an essentially complex and disordered universe and demonstrates the spectrum as an unfinishable totality, always in excess of what a human perceives.

Read more about the book here! And please consider buying yourself a copy. It's a reasonable price for something with so much within. Only $20 on Amazon.

Peter Jackson, Epic Dwarves and Extraordinary Bodies

by J J Cohen

Steve Mentz has a great blog post (Just Get There: Hobbit 2 as Whitewater Epic) on the latest installment of the Hobbit trilogy. The piece is not only extraordinarily well written, it is hilarious. Read it! I want to reflect here a little on The Desolation of Smaug as (in Steve's apt words) "an epic whitewater serpent."

I knew what I was getting into when I signed up to go to the film, so I don't have any negativity about the thing -- yes, it is too long, too self-referential (return of the carrot eating man at the Prancing Pony!), too LotR part deux, too profligate in its gold, bad fan fiction, but, whatever. Steve notes that The Hobbit (the book) is not an epic and never aspired to be, and its dwarves are -- in Tolkien's own words -- "not heroes, but calculating folk with a great idea of the value of money." Indeed, Tolkien's narrative is classic anti-epic (small in scale, resolutely non-heroic, deeply ambivalent about war). So Steve asks a rather profound question of genre and the epic-addled Peter Jackson film:

But Peter Jackson and his machinery will not be denied, and Hobbit 2: Chiefest and Greatest of Calamities walks, quacks, and breathes fire like an epic. How does he do it? What can epic make of a furry-footed hero and his vertically-challenged if facially hirsute comrades?

His blog post does an excellent job of mapping the story's progress as a flow: the there-and-back-again circularity of The Hobbit (novel) yields to the rushing rivers (of water, of gold) in the film. Steve's observation "Everything flows: is Jackson’s real Muse Heraclitus?" is spot-on.

As I watched the film I contemplated a related question, wondering if a children's book of such small scale (emphasized in its small characters) really could become an epic -- and then I wondered why I should wonder that. Who gets to be included in an epic, and who must be left out, or left to the edges? Why can't dwarves -- the characters Steve calls the "vertically-challenged if facially hirsute comrades" -- be epic heroes? Why are dwarves always, even in the sagas and medieval works, always bit players, never protagonists or heroes?

The dwarves have a much expanded role in the film, much larger than in the book, where they often seem like so much background to Bilbo's fussiness and adventuring. We all know that hobbits are not epic-worthy; that's the point of hobbits. They are the humane, domestic, tea-loving and diminutive figures around and for whom action swirls. Epic demands vastness of scale: wizards! trolls! ents! elves! oliphaunts! and other tall creatures! It also demands passion -- so we get the Aragorn-Arwen romance, much played up in the LotR films. Gimli son of Glóin tries his best to be part of the film's epic action, but he is always a little ridiculous, some light-hearted defeat of epic expectations offered in order to support those expectations. Gimli can't run as quickly as Aragorn and Legolas when they are reduced to a threesome and has to be scooped onto a horse. In one particularly awful scene at Helm's Deep he is hurled by Aragorn (that's the bar game of dwarf tossing being invoked; it's supposed to be funny but...). Gimli's love for Galadriel embarrasses even him  -- and is cutely tame as well (he gets a single hair from her; she is impossible as love-object, and that's the point). Dwarves are not sexual: their short and non-handsome bodies bar them from desire. Aragon tells Éowyn in the extended version of Two Towers that dwarf women can't be discerned from the males because they also have beards. Dwarves are small guys and it is funny when they try to act big. Epic has small space for them -- unlike hobbits, who are beloved, the ones with the good hearts and the jolly reminders of embodied life; their quiet life in the Shire provides the reason Epic Guys do what they do).

Think of Tyrion "the Imp" Lannister, the dwarf from Game of Thrones: he is hypersexual, a trait that is supposed to be repulsive and attractive. He knows he is not supposed to be eligible for sexual attraction, and yet he keeps on desiring, to the horror of some and the delight of others. He's a violent schemer, a charismatic monster, a mini Richard III, and he's appropriately loved-hated for that. He is not a "mythic" dwarf, not a member of a race: he is the disabled body in a court full of beautiful if wicked people. His disability is what makes him a freak and extraordinary to be stared at (to use three of Rosemarie Garland Thomson's terms for the spectacular work of disability).

I bring up Tyrion, a "real" dwarf, because it struck me as I watched the Hobbit 2 that the film is in part a disability epic. That is, it tries to imagine epic within a non-normate field of vision, from a point of view that is not the traditional gaze of the camera/viewer. The film imagines the world that exists for people who are not Epically Tall elves, men and wizards without diminishing it, without making it cute, domestic, and precious like a hobbit hole and its gardens. A figure that is not tall is not out of place here, and is not made juvenile or naive. What happens when scale and point of view are forced to adjust, so that bodies supposed to be ridiculous and not overly martial and not at all sexual reveal themselves to be all those things? What of a world in which a dwarf can be battle-machine not in a way that offers whimsical contrast with an adept elf (Gimli and Legolas), but straightforwardly and without contrast (dwarves versus orcs during the epic whitewater fight through Mirkwood)? What of a world in which being a dwarf does not necessarily entail inhabiting a disfigured body (though admittedly, it does for many: facial prostheses are used for the majority of the dwarves)? What of a world that might even allow one dwarf to love his wife and little boy enough to carry a portrait of them (Glóin), another to be a doppelganger for Strider (Thorin), and a third to be so smoking hot that an elf maiden and legions of fans (23,800 on FB) fall in love with him (Kili)?

Maybe Jackson's inability not to epicalize The Hobbit has actually accomplished something extraordinary: a tale in which non-normate bodies need not be ridiculous, and an adjustment of epic's point of view. Perhaps the cinematic gaze here re-orients epic, away from the tall and conventionally beautiful people who are its usual eye candy, thereby making it a suitable genre for extraordinary bodies. Instead of the well-blazed trail of anti-epic, Jackson forces the genre to recenter its point of view.

Maybe.

Privilege, tenure, adjunctification and the decimated job market

by J J Cohen

Happy new year.

I'm transporting here from FB a public discussion and a sharing of the links about a recent and important conversation among Rebecca Schuman, Tenured Radical (Claire Potter) and many, many others over the miserable state of the job market, the adjunctification of the university, and the culpability of tenured faculty and the graduate programs in which they participate. If you are an academic at any point in your career (and even if you are not, honestly) you should be thinking about the issues that have been raised.

On FB I linked to this recent summary and analysis on the blog The Professor Is In. Karen Kelsky makes some essential points and the piece is well worth reading. I shared the link with this caveat though: I have some trouble with the analogy the post is built around, which simplifies how racism works in order to make a point about the denial that undergirds TT/NTT relations (racism is not only a structure of denial [if it were it would be eradicated through exposure of the facts]; it is also a structure of fantasy and perverse enjoyment, and thereby much more difficult to budge). Framing the issue through economic and social privilege works better than the blog's title invoking an equivalence with racism: the latter diminishes the lived effects of racism by rendering them metaphoric.* Kelsky's recommendations for what to do next seem right on the mark. She suggests that tenured faculty:

• Slash or halt graduate admissions
• Make job market training (both academic and non-academic) central to the curriculum
• Reduce time-to-degree of graduate programs
• See and include adjuncts in the running of the department-both formally and informally
• Tell the truth about the corporatized funding models in their universities that sustain their salaries and research funds by cutting other labor costs through the exploitation of adjuncts.

Essential food for thought on this first day of 2014.

_

*David Leonard made a similar point about the the injustice to actual enslaved peoples that equating adjuncting with "slave labor" enacts (though unfortunately his blog post comes across at some points as a defense of the status quo: it does not matter that some adjuncts choose their part-time schedules, and that a few are well paid).