I got nothing more to say but this.  It seems to be coming a few months later than I expected, but it’s on the internets, so it must be real.  Right?

Today begins the second half of my summer.  I’d say that it began yesterday, except that that would mean that I’ve already missed a day of the second half, and I’m already in something of a panic this morning about the fact that the summer is already half over, and that significant chunks of the second half are going to need to be taken up with preparations for the fall semester.  Which leaves less than half of my summer to get some things done.

(And not to mention, of course, that I’ve got not one but two major trips still ahead of me this summer, which leaves even less time.  I will not hyperventilate.)

In any case, I’m about to hit the freeway, driving into the city for my first day at the internship of sorts that I’ve arranged with these folks.  By working with them, I’m hoping to get my multimedia skills updated to twenty-first century standards (as my last serious multimedia work ended last century) and to figure out what I need to know about structuring, designing, and producing a substantive digital narrative project.  My goal for what remains of this summer (…inhale…exhale…inhale…) is to sketch out the contours of my project, and to figure out what of it can be accomplished during the fall, such that I begin my spring semester leave ready to roll.

Speaking of rolling, the 10 awaits.  Happy second half, all.

There’s been a mighty lot of silence on my end here, and though I wish I could ascribe it to being terribly, terribly busy, that is simply not the case.  Continuing issues with the manuscript have left me feeling utterly stagnant, inspiration-free, and—while I hesitate to use the D-word, there’s undoubtedly a big chunk of that at work here, too.  In the face of mounting evidence that the project I spent the better part of the last eight years on may never see the light of day—or, may see it, but not in the form that I’m still pretty unreasonably cathected onto—I’ve been left completely stalled-out, unable to see why I should bother writing if I’m working in a field about which no one cares, least of all me.

Of course, as soon as I write all of that out, it begins to seem ridiculous, histrionic, self-dramatizing.  Honestly, if I were never to write (or publish) another piece of academic criticism again, it would hardly be a disaster.  The main issue is to figure out what I want to do, and then to decide how to go about it.

That I cannot figure out what I want to do—that nothing seems quite right, or quite possible—is the thing that keeps leading me to contemplate depression.  I want very much to resist the suggestion that something like that could be at the root of what’s bugging me right now, in part out of a sense of been-there-done-that (fairly big depression many years ago; several years of therapy; problem solved!), and in part because I want to believe that, since work got me into this mess, work can get me out of it.

I’m taking a little time off from attempting to write, as an experiment, and immersing myself in some reading, hoping that I’ll remember why I picked this field and why I thought I had something useful to say about it.  I may record some of the process here, if there’s something that I either feel is worth sharing or is something I’d like to remember.

Last month’s MLA-bashing controversy, which surfaced here, at Invisible Adjunct, and at Chun the Unavoidable (among other locations), quickly came to circle around the question of “difficulty,” and in particular whether the perceived abstruseness of contemporary literary theory and criticism are warranted.  Or, as John Holbo put it, “exactly when, and for what reasons, is literary criticism justified in being too hard for the average Chronicle of Higher Education journalist to read?”

This question has resurfaced for me in the last couple of days.  I’ve begun reading, for unrelated purposes, Michael Bérubé‘s Marginal Forces/Cultural Centers, and last night ran across the following passage, quoted from Barbara Herrnstein Smith’s 1988 MLA Presidential Address:

This is one reason, perhaps, why research in other fields—economics, genetics, physics, and so forth—can be, without complaint or criticism, difficult for members of the general public to understand or indeed totally incomprehensible to them, but not research in literary studies.  (I mentioned the sciences, of course, but the contrast holds as well for other humanities disciplines:  archaeology, classics, philosophy, etc.) The difference is that literary studies, and especially English, is, for many people—including, it seems, many journalists—not a discipline at all.  English is simply their own native language, which is understood by anyone who speaks, reads, and writes it; and the only thing that makes English professors special is that—being, perhaps, unable to do anything else—they have chosen to get paid full-time for doing what everybody else does part-time and could do full-time if they were not so busy holding down real jobs.

Not much has changed in 15 years, I’m afraid; questions about whether the “difficulty” of literary criticism is warranted seem to me still directly tied to questions about whether the field is warranted.  What I’m curious about now is how those convictions, that studying literature is not a “real job,” become internalized within the profession, both across the curriculum—such as the all-too-common experience of the social-scientist dean who refuses to understand why the English department matters, other than as a locus for the teaching of writing—and even within the discipline itself.  We’re an intensely self-questioning, self-doubting bunch; witness the periodic recurrence of articles asking (or suggesting responses when students ask) “why study English?” in venues such as Profession.

The issue seems to me to rest precisely in the “profession,” in the sense that what we as professors of literature do, both inside and outside the classroom, is a pursuit worthy of the investment of institutional time and resources, and thus a field whose difficulty, whose professionalization, is warranted.  As Bérubé points out, arguments against professionalization surface on both the political right and left, and both outside and within the field:

Antiprofessionalism may actually be almost a standard, permanent feature of our discipline:  not only because professionalism is considered ‘a threat to individual freedom, true merit, genuine authority’ (Fish 1985, 106) but also because literary professionals inhabit an institution formed in the culture of professionalism but unsure that its machinery for professional self-advancement is sufficiently balanced and justified by the services it provides to its clients, whoever these may be. (23-24)

Bérubé further cites Jonathan Culler’s Framing the Sign on the two models under which universities operate:  “The first makes the university the transmitter of a cultural heritage, gives it the ideological function of reproducing culture and the social order.  The second makes the university a site for the production of knowledge” (33).  Bérubé finally combines these two models within the notion of canon revision, suggesting that the academic study of literature is most important in “its revision of its cultural heritage…. By means of this revision, one might argue, the academy seeks both to ‘transmit’ and ‘produce’ knowledge, to be a cultural archive that takes an active role in the creation of its exhibits” (28). 

While this conclusion is absolutely apropos within the context of Bérubé’s argument (about Pynchon and Tolson and their respective places in the canon), it doesn’t finally satisfy my questions about the cultural anxieties that seem to surround “difficulty” and professionalization in literary studies.  It seems to me that certain fields—the hard sciences and many of the social sciences, in particular—are widely assumed to operate under the second of Culler’s models, and are given no grief for doing so.  Many of the humanities, however, and particularly departments of literature, are expected to operate under the first model, and what new knowledge such departments produce is assumed to be restricted to the discovery, preservation, and presentation of forgotten elements of that cultural heritage.  Why is the exploration of new ways of reading—also known as literary theory—seen as less significant, and more obfuscatory, than new things to read?  Is there a way out of this double-bind, in which the profession faces the failure to be taken seriously, on the one side, and ridicule for its difficulty, on the other?

This week, in The Literary Machine, we’re reading Ellen Ullman’s Close to the Machine, which has led me to think a bit about the course’s subtitle, “Writing in the Human/Computer Interface.” Originally, I imagined that interface functioning differently in the different types of texts we read—some traditional novels that contain representations of computers (in which case the novel and its representations become the interface), some more properly cybernetic fictions that appropriate systems principles to literary ends (in which systems theory becomes a sort of interface), some electronic fictions that use the computer itself as a mode of representation (in which the interface becomes, well, the interface).  So as I built the syllabus, I thought a lot about the varying ways that “interface” in my subtitle might be defined, and about the varying kinds of “writing” that might be done with respect to that interface.

But I didn’t think very much about my choice of preposition—“in.” Re-reading Ullman has, more than any other text we’ve read thus far this semester, highlighted for me the question of “in-ness” w/r/t the interface.  Crossing disciplinary and professional boundaries between computers and readers, between programming and the literary, between “end users” and code, Ullman has a very different relationship to the interface than do the other writers and theorists we’ve studied.  She is the means of translation from human purpose to machine commands; she is our means of understanding a technoverse that many of us can never inhabit.  Despite her rhetorical insistence on moving “close to” (and, by implication, away from) the machine, if an interface is something one can be “in,” Ullman is truly in it, rather than existing to one side or the other of it; one might even argue that she in fact is that interface.

This begs, for me, a question that Noah, my summer research assistant, raised as we were planning the course, and as he argued for Ullman’s inclusion on the syllabus:  where are the other such memoirs of technology?  If there is something about the first-person memoir of the programming life that allows the writer/programmer to find her way in, what other texts might similarly be imagined to inhabit the interface?

In a bizarre merger of the background materials of my last two posts, Jill Walker today directs our attention to William Gibson‘s thoughts on writing, “truth,” and accountability.

When did we all become such literalists that we would suggest that someone who hasn’t actually experienced the effects of amphetamines isn’t qualified to write about them?  Even in something that calls itself fiction?

Has the recent efflorescence of the memoir—so pervasive I’m not even going to bother linking to anything, because how would I narrow the field—had a hand in this demand for “truth” in writing?  If so, I wonder:  is the blog as a genre partially responsible for or a mere reflection of this apparent cultural predilection for the literal?

Okay, time to come clean.  I’m in (what I most sincerely hope to be) the end stages of writing a book that focuses on this question of obsolescence, particularly the anxieties that literary culture seems to exude any time it considers its relationship to newer media.  In this book—and believe me, the ironies of considering the obsolescence of the book in a book are not lost on me—I focus primarily on the novel’s relationship to television, though (as this site may suggest) my interests are slipping toward the relationship between traditional fiction and the new forms of writing developing on the net.

The thing I’m writing about right now, though, in the book’s conclusion, is the Franzen/Oprah dust-up.  It seems to me everyone’s got an opinion on this—Franzen’s burdened by an overdeveloped sense of his own talent; Oprah’s similarly guilty of overvaluing her culture-making power; Franzen’s a boor; Oprah’s a vacuum—but few seem to have paid much attention to the fundamental conflict at the heart of the matter.  Are the novel and television genuinely incompatible forms?  Is it impossible to consider oneself simultaneously a literary intellectual and a fan of the weekly set-em-up and knock-em-down sitcom?

I’ll confess:  I love television.  And I don’t just mean the highbrow Sopranos / Six Feet Under / {insert other self-consciously experimental program here} stuff, though those programs seem to wind up my favorites.

I mourned the passing of Homicide much as I would if I knew that David Foster Wallace had stopped writing and instead taken up bond sales.  Are those two loves so very incompatible?

One last note, while I’m on the subject:  While I’m infinitely grateful to HBO for rescuing Sunday evening from the pit of end-of-weekend depression, I beg that someone, similarly, somewhere, find a way to make Friday nights worthwhile again, for losers like me who are too often home with the machine for company.