Marginally Medieval, More Medieval and Most Medieval

It just occurred to me that in my complete preoccupation with a chapter on Orosius in my dissertation (of which you shall all hear more soon), I have not yet had occasion to point your browsers and minds to a few things.

First, the Marginally Medieval:
Readers might remember that I was involved in the Graduate Translation Conference at Columbia this Spring. I'm pleased to report that the Keynote Conversation between US Poet Laureate Charles Simic and Professor Michael Scammell is now available online as a podcast. It was a fascinating event, one I'd highly recommend listening to. And as though Simic and Scammell aren't reason enough to listen, you can hear me ask a question at the end of the recording!

And now, getting a little More Medieval:
Way back in January, I mentioned that I was writing an essay for the Old English Newsletter on blogging and academia. You can now read the article in its entirety at OEN.org.

Finally -- for the Most Medieval of my Miscellaneous Notes today:
On a whim, I decided to propose a special session for the 2008 Kalamazoo Conference. If you turn to page 27 of the 2009 call for Papers for the Western Michigan University International Medieval Congress, you'll find a session called "Beyond Geography: New Work on the Old English Orosius." I hope to find other folks interested in this crazy text, so if you know anyone working on the Orosius, send them my way! If you've ever even had a vague interest in writing on it -- consider this your big chance!

Now, you should go and read the REAL medieval content, by Jeffrey on the Franklyn's Tale and Eileen on Guthlac and gender.

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Old English, New Media: or, Friday Night Meta-Blogging

As everyone knows, blogging isn't really academic blogging unless somewhere along the line, you start "meta-blogging": indulging in that art of writing blog posts which theorize about blogging. Recently, I was asked to write an essay for the Old English Newsletter about blogging and Old English -- more specifically, perhaps, about what is to be gained through academic blogging. Although the essay itself has not yet been published, I wanted to post a bit of it on ITM and Old English in New York -- both to get some reactions, as well as to share what has kept me away from blogging so often in the past few weeks.

Of course, we all know that this particular issue has been done -- some might argue to near-death -- on the blogs. However, I do think I managed to get somewhere when it came to defining my blog-work in terms non-bloggers or those new to the blogosphere might understand. Of course, the usual suspects were among my early inspirations -- Scott Eric Kaufmann, Adam Kotsko, and Joseph Kugelmass are all cited in the portion I'm copying here...however, I also am indebted to posts by Doctor Virago, Bitch, PhD, and of course, the usual suspects here at ITM (Eileen, Jeffrey and Karl). I may still have time for revisions -- but even if I don't, I look forward to hearing from you, dear readers, on things I could nuance, clarify, change or get rid of entirely. Also: my apologies to DTK, who had not yet begun his series of guest posts here at ITM when I wrote this (and so doesn't yet appear in the litany of guest and co-bloggers on ITM that I list in footnote 8).

Excerpt from Old English, New Media: Blogging Beowulf
[The essay from which this excerpt comes begins with a consideration of my own beginnings in the blog world, along with questions of pseudo- and anonymity, before segueing into the conversation that took place, both at Inside Higher Ed and The Valve, between Kotsko, Kaufmann, and Kugelmass. I begin here with the consideration of Kaufmann's article on academic blogging.]

Scott Eric Kaufmann, on the other hand, sees a brighter future for the prospect of blogging in the academy. Maintaining a fairly high readership with his blog Acephalous has given Kaufmann a certain visibility within the scholarly community, but the real pay-off is in the experience he has had not only as an academic but as an academic author, because blogging has given him the experience of learning “what it’s like to write in a way most academics never have: namely, for an audience.” [1] Furthermore, he poses a particularly challenging question to specialists: “Why not write for people who don’t already [know] how you think about everything? Why not force yourself to articulate your points in such a way that strangers could come to know your thought as intimately as your friends from grad school do?” [2]

Kaufmann’s questions here are ones I routinely pose to my first year writing students, encouraging them away from what the Rhetoric and Composition specialists call “writer-based prose” and toward the far easier to engage “reader-based prose.” It is a fine line to walk; what academic blogs can do, however, is allow all of us an opportunity to write for the non-specialist, to attempt to make complex arguments without being obscure. In responding to both of these authors, Joseph Kugelmass makes the point (one I hope will be well taken) that blogs allow an interface between the academy and the “public” in a way more traditional scholarly outlets such as journals, edited collections and books seldom do. Moreover, he claims that “[h]umanistic blogs are one way of restoring the connection between scholarly tradition and the new plenitude of culture.” [3] In short, they allow the humanities to be accessed by their subject – humans.

Kugelmass concludes his meditation on the use of blogging in the formation of academic communities with a possibility many might be familiar with: the idea (though not explicitly stated) of the workshop. Conversations on a blog, he suggests, might function as “stepping-stones to mainstream work: ironing the kinks out of a journal article, gathering sources for a dissertation, drafting a keynote address or the chapter of a book.” [4] Blogging, then, allows a lower-stakes audience for a work-in-progress, and thus allows for the author to take risks he or she might not otherwise take, and benefit from readers’ comments and responses. In line with Kaufmann, he highlights the development of the author in the writing of a blog, arguing that “the opportunity exists to turn blogging into something more than an interstitial occupation, for the lonely times, and the idle times. It can be the practice, as vital in scholarship as in friendship among equals, of discovering a voice.” [5] The idea of a practice inherent in blogging – a practice which should be highlighted as a process rather than a product – is key, for Kugelmass and for many academic bloggers (myself included), in the formation of “voice.” [6]

I would argue that the idea of developing academic “voice” is what makes academic blogging so valuable in general. In May of 2007, after numerous conversations with colleagues at Kalamazoo about the possible ramifications (positive and negative) of letting go of my pseudonym, Old English in New York’s “Anhaga” was relieved of her duties of authorship, and I “claimed my voice.” [7] In the time since, I have used the blog as a forum for promoting the activities of the Anglo-Saxon Studies Colloquium, as well as posting interesting calls for papers and descriptions of conferences in the New York area. After having been a frequent commenter on the medieval group blog In the Middle (founded by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen in 2006), I was asked in August 2007 to join the collaborative project there as the resident graduate student blogger. [8] In the Middle, and the community that has formed around it, is a forum in which I share my own ideas and projects, to be certain. However, and perhaps more importantly to the development of my academic voice, it has allowed me to be an active commenter and interlocutor for the work of other academics.

Through Old English in New York and now In the Middle, I have found a community of scholars with similar interests, who want to provoke and participate in discussions about the work we do. I would suggest that a part of what is gained in the blogging community is not simply a chance to think aloud on one’s own topics, but to be affected by each others’ work. Even when topics range outside our own areas of expertise, we can still comment usefully and intelligently on each others’ ideas. Moreover, I have found that the ideas and questions raised on the blogs linger with me, and hold a purchase on my imagination which can only enlarge my breadth as a scholar. This kind of interaction often encourages imaginative juxtapositions in what I call a “Forsterian” scholarship, drawing on the epigraph to the E.M. Forster novel Howards End. Our work is to “only connect”: to connect ideas, people, cultures and texts in a network that might, in the end, be best described not only as human but also as humane:

[W]ithout conversation, especially among those who seek, not to tear down your ideas, but to help you make them better and more theoretically rigorous, I really don't believe there is much traction for really good work to develop its highest potential, or else whatever ‘victory’ you do achieve with your work is, again, kind of lonely, maybe even empty. [9]

Here, Eileen Joy picks up on my Forsterian theme, suggesting that scholarly work at its very best is always a process of collaboration. Blogs are becoming a fruitful way for us, as scholars seeking to create a community of thinkers, to reach out across the distances that separate us to form a kind of “global classroom” in which we can all benefit from each others’ expertise early on in projects that can be made more astute through the interaction.

In reaching out in a format that is readily accessible to a culture that is increasingly engaging the texts we study, we have a chance to let intellectuals and enthusiasts who are not “academics” see inside the “ivory tower” a bit more. Perhaps in the process, that tower might be dismantled, allowing the study of medieval cultures and texts a place in a society that often finds it inaccessibly remote. All we need do is connect.

Footnotes:

[1] Scott Eric Kaufman. “An Enthusiast’s View of Academic Blogging.” Inside Higher Ed. 1 November 2007.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Joseph Kugelmass. “Academic Blogging Revisited.” The Valve. 1 November 2007.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Here I would like to thank the director and assistant directors of the University Writing Program at Columbia – Joseph Bizup and Nicole Wallack – for introducing me to the theoretical aspects of writing, and in particular this focus on process, which is one of the key components of the course.
[7] “Claiming my Voice” Old English in New York. 16 May 2007.
[8] Although In the Middle began as a single-author blog, Cohen has hosted a number of guest bloggers during the two years of its existence, including Jon K. Williams and Michael O’Rourke. The first In the Middle “book club” event featured contributions from Susan Kim, Heather Blurton and Asa Mittman. Karl Steel and Eileen Joy, who are now co-bloggers with Cohen, also began their work on the blog as guest bloggers.
[9]Eileen Joy. Comment on “Scholarship and Blogs part 54656” by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen. In the Middle. 21 December 2007.

cross posted at ITM.

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Kalamazoo '07: Claiming My Voice

As some of you may have already read over at In the Middle or Quod She, I’ve officially decided to reveal my identity. Reading that over again, I have to say it sounds a lot cooler than it is, I’m afraid. I'm just a medievalist. A graduate student. An Anglo-Saxonist. One who shares a name with an Olsen twin -- though you’ll note that I don’t hyphenate.

I suppose, in some ways, it makes sense that my first post-Kzoo post is about my decision to drop my pseudonym and blog under my real name. There are a lot of reasons that, in the past year, I left the question of my identity out of this blog. And there are still good reasons to do so – not least of which questions of power and integrity that seem to be inevitably involved in the online world when it intersects the academic one. Blogging “anonymously” – even if more than one person, on reading my name tag this weekend, was heard to exclaim “I read your blog!” – seemed like a safer route.

And I guess that’s where the ideas raised in the sessions at this year's conference came into play. I seem to be finding that “the pleasure of displacement” seems to sum things up rather nicely: moving out of my own small sphere of operation and into a zoo of medievalists of all interests and levels gave me a different perspective on my work, and a different perspective on my blog. The value of this displacement, in this sense, is also form of remembering something I seem to need constant reminders of: I am not finished. Not as a person. Not as an academic. Steven Kruger had a remarkable phrase in his Saturday afternoon paper that seems to speak to this idea: the idea of “identity as transition.” Having been displaced this weekend – taken out of New York, to the best Kalamazoo I’ve had the pleasure of attending, I was caught off my guard by the question of anonymity. Perhaps being away from the blog, and in the “real world” of my work and the bloggers I know who function in it, I realized that to continue writing this sort of a blog, my pseudonymity is no longer viable. For practical purposes, it never really was – those who know me have inevitably known that I’m “Anhaga,” and it doesn’t take much poking around websites to narrow down the possibilities of female Anglo-Saxon graduate students in New York City.

Moreover, I’ve realized what my engagement with the wider implications of my work, both as an academic and as a person who is involved in the world – and who wants to be involved in that world. There are a number of anonymous voices in the Middle Ages – some men, of course, but many, many women. Because of their social situation, women in the Middle Ages couldn’t – or didn’t feel they ought – claim their voices. Too many women in the modern world are silenced in the same ways, though perhaps sometimes for entirely different reasons. In the end, I’ve been a student of inspiring feminist scholars too long to be another anonymous voice.

I aim to maintain my voice as it has been for the past year. This blog is, after all, a “professional” blog. The difference now is that I’m choosing to claim my voice as it appears here. It’s not the right choice for everyone, and in fact, I’m still not entirely sure it’s the “right” choice (whatever that means) for me. However, I’ve told my students on numerous occasions to “take responsibility” for their written voices – and I suppose that mantra was always going to come back to haunt me. I don’t really know what claiming my name will do this blog. Though I won’t stop posting, occasionally, on my more light-hearted interests, in the past year Old English in New York has become an extension of my academic persona, and will now function in that capacity “officially”. These posts are my thoughts. They are articulated, however tentatively, in my words. After this most recent displacement to Michigan, and a surprising amount of encouragement from my senior academic colleagues -- among them these three inspiring academic bloggers -- I think I’m ready to claim my voice, and take on the responsibility to my work and to my professional self that this endeavor entails.

Appropriate, then, that I’ll finish posting on Kalamazoo once things have settled down a bit here in NYC.

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Old English in New York, One Year In

Well, last Friday, in my whirlwind of finishing small projects, answering student pleas concerning papers and extensions, and reading Margery Kempe -- I managed to overlook posting on the one year anniversary of starting my blog. It all began on the 27th of April, 2006, with the statement that April is not the cruelest month, per TS Eliot's poem.

I've avoided, in the past year, writing what I think is an obligatory blog considering the reasons I have for blogging, and for doing so anonymously. It's not that such things don't concern me -- rather, I've been letting this blog develop as my own work does, tracing both frustrations and excitements as I went through this crazy process of struggling for exams.

Lest I get too meta about all this, the real purpose of this blog was to trace my orals progress. Granted, so little got done in the first months of the blog that much of it was focused on outside thoughts and considerations and ideas. I don't think that's a bad thing. In fact, a lot of the most enjoyable writing I've done has been on the blog rather than on papers I've turned in. My hope, this summer, is to get back to the texts. I've been charged with really living with the texts I'm working on for my exams this summer. This blog -- my work blog, as I refer to it when it comes up in conversation -- has been of much use this past year, making connections with other medievalists and anglo-saxonists, allowing me to enter conversations I might not otherwise have participated in. But I hope -- and we'll see how this goes -- that during this summer, while I study in the Wake Forest library, I can use this space a little more diligently to trace ideas I find in texts.

Most importantly, tho -- I get to go to Kalamazoo again this year, and I will be attending the blogger meet-up (wherever it ends up being held). And the 'zoo -- as anyone who knows me knows well -- always makes me happy. Let the countdown begin! And the rewriting of the paper commence!

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