I’ll be presenting again this spring at the The Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture since 1900. The abstract:
Title: “Susan Howe’s Mis-taken Male Mentors”
This presentation will examine Susan Howe’s engagement of male mentor figures in her book-length encomium of Emily Dickinson, My Emily Dickinson. My Emily Dickinson is well-known for its attempt to correct feminist readings of Emily Dickinson that emphasize the disabling effects of patriarchal authority over Dickinson’s poetic genius. Such readings, she suggests, are complicit with the patriarchal authority they would oppose. My Emily Dickinson contains, then, corrections of both masculinist dismissals and feminist curtailings of Dickinson’s work. The problem is, as Stein has it in The Making of the Americans, opposing rather than insisting. Instead, she works in an economy of love of poetry and poets similar to that described by both H.D. and Robert Duncan. Despite this, criticism of Howe’s poetry often emphasizes the elements of her feminism that oppose both patriarchy and the male poets whose work is seen to embody patriarchal authority. Alternatively, critics often will locate the source of Howe’s critique of both patriarchy and feminism in an antinomian individualism.
I will argue that the origins of Howe’s double critique and her antinomianism lie in her deep affection for both male and female poetic forebears. This view is encouraged by the fact that My Emily Dickinson begins in dialog with William Carlos Williams’s either wrong-headed or mis-taken assertion in the “Jacataqua” section of In the American Grain that America has never seen a poet, save, and only then almost a poet. And that’s Emily Dickinson, “starving,” as he says, “in her father’s garden.” Howe’s criticism of Williams in My Emily Dickinson contrasts with her criticism of critics like Gilbert and Gubar, who, rather than reading Dickinson as starving, depict her in their Madwoman in the Attic as emotionally stunted. Howe favors Williams’s wrongness over that of Gilbert and Gubar, taking his outcry as indicative of a sympathy for and love of Dickinson’s work, in essence reading Williams’s seeming misogyny as embittered advocacy.
I’ll continue by showing how such a reading of Howe opens up her other texts, particularly her earlier work, The Liberties, in which the two female characters Stella and Cordelia deform and transgress gender boundaries in a quest for personal liberty. I’ll conclude by pointing out that Howe’s love of Williams is comparable to her love of Duncan and H.D. by contrasting her encounter with Williams with her critique of Charles Olson in two early essays— “Where Should the Commander Be” and “Since a Dialogue We Are”— in which she finds Olson’s misogyny irredeemably chilling or killing to female creativity. Given time, I will offer brief comparisons between her treatment of Williams in the opening of My Emily Dickinson and her treatment of Duncan in her valediction for him (“For Duncan”).
If you study in this time period, this is a great conference. The size is just right. You can meet people. And some really good people attend it. This year you can see Mary Jo Bang and Michael Davidson.
I present on Thursday 2/18 at 1:30:
Chair: Victoria Brockmeier, State University of New York, Buffalo
Mark Scroggins, Florida Atlantic University
"The 'Half-Fabulous Field-Ditcher': Ruskin Pound, Geoffrey Hill"
J. P. Craig, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
"Susan Howe's Mis-Taken Male Mentors"
Ruth Williams, University of Cincinnati
"Palimpsestually Yours: Illuminating Absence in Sappho and the Urban Landscape"
James Wheeler, Mississippi State University
"Palimpsestually Yours: Illuminating Absence in Sappho and the Urban Landscape"
11/15/2009
Advice for Job Postings
I see a lot of advice from faculty and professional organizations to people seeking jobs in English departments, but most of the potential feedback for search committees trying to create job postings is buried in discussion boards and wikis where job seekers kvetch about the process. Since I’m looking for a job now and I’ve been on a couple of committees trying to formulate job postings, I thought I might offer a little feedback and advice from the job seeker’s perspective.
It all boils down to telling people what you really want. Of course, that’s not so simple, is it? You may want to offer a broad description to gather a wide range of responses. Or you may be trying to balance the disparate desires of the various faculty in the department. But there are a few things you can do to make sure that you don’t end up having to sort through a big stack of applications that don’t suit your department’s needs.
Establish priorities as clearly as possible. Many listings are confusing because they demand multiple, distantly-related specializations. Others demand relatively specialized skills but then say those will be applied to teaching only introductory courses. I know you’re working in committee, and it’s probably a long, tiring process to produce the listing, but specifying very clearly what qualities are most important and which are truly optional will save the committee work when it comes time to read the applications.
If your school has a mission statement, provide a link for it in the job listing. This is especially important if the mission statement is hard to find and/or that mission is a little different from the common and honorable goal of providing students with a solid liberal arts education.
If your institution has a religious affiliation, listing the mission statement is even more important, especially if you expect applicants to provide a statement of adherence to your school’s particular religious doctrine. It’s helpful to indicate if you only expect a new faculty member to support your school’s mission or if you expect them to be a professed communicant.
It’s also very useful to make sure that you have faculty webpages that are up to date and clearly show the research and teaching interests of your current faculty. If a job seeker sees that her research interests are already well-covered by your department, she can move on to apply to another school. If, however, you want more of the same, you might specifically indicate a desire to continue building in that particular area.
Also, I have been surprised at the number of faculty who are unaware that the job search today takes place primarily online. I do not know a single job seeker (and I know at least a dozen) who consults the MLA print job list. The online MLA job list is updated every Friday, and job seekers consult this weekly. HigherEdJobs.com is also popular, and there are also lists popular in Europe; I’ll try to update this post with a couple of those when I have a chance to ask the colleague who tipped me off about them. At any rate, there’s no real need to be nervous about making the deadlines for the print job list.
My last suggestions are simply pleas for kindness and consideration.
Be mindful of the expense to which you put applicants. Official transcripts cost money, as does mailing writing samples. I happily send these out, but I wonder if committees are throwing out large stacks of unread manuscripts as part of the winnowing process. Certainly, your department may be working under a time-crunch, and if so, you may need to request all application materials at once. But I can tell you that applicants are grateful to be asked to send a job letter and CV with a later request for additional materials, especially as anything more than a letter and CV means a trip to the post office to have the package weighed.
If you have any suspicion that your listing is contingent upon funding that may or may not materialize, it wouldn’t hurt to say so. Sure, some people might not apply. But I suspect those would be people for whom the position isn’t a very good match.
Thirdly, it can be helpful to provide some indication of how comfortable ethnic and gender minorities will be on your campus. I know this can be touchy on some campuses, but a simple statement like “Our university/college supports a diverse faculty” can be very helpful. This is another area where a campus or department website can help by providing links to student and faculty organizations or simply by showing the faces and research interests of the faculty.
16 Nov 2009
A friend pointed out that Michael Bérubé recently addressed similar concerns about application expense in a blog post entitled “Applications.”
Another friend suggests that faculty websites often might be more easily navigable, and she requests a direct link to the course catalog. And I’ll just add that it’s always wonderful when course descriptions are up-to-date, not only for job-seekers but for our students.
It all boils down to telling people what you really want. Of course, that’s not so simple, is it? You may want to offer a broad description to gather a wide range of responses. Or you may be trying to balance the disparate desires of the various faculty in the department. But there are a few things you can do to make sure that you don’t end up having to sort through a big stack of applications that don’t suit your department’s needs.
Establish priorities as clearly as possible. Many listings are confusing because they demand multiple, distantly-related specializations. Others demand relatively specialized skills but then say those will be applied to teaching only introductory courses. I know you’re working in committee, and it’s probably a long, tiring process to produce the listing, but specifying very clearly what qualities are most important and which are truly optional will save the committee work when it comes time to read the applications.
If your school has a mission statement, provide a link for it in the job listing. This is especially important if the mission statement is hard to find and/or that mission is a little different from the common and honorable goal of providing students with a solid liberal arts education.
If your institution has a religious affiliation, listing the mission statement is even more important, especially if you expect applicants to provide a statement of adherence to your school’s particular religious doctrine. It’s helpful to indicate if you only expect a new faculty member to support your school’s mission or if you expect them to be a professed communicant.
It’s also very useful to make sure that you have faculty webpages that are up to date and clearly show the research and teaching interests of your current faculty. If a job seeker sees that her research interests are already well-covered by your department, she can move on to apply to another school. If, however, you want more of the same, you might specifically indicate a desire to continue building in that particular area.
Also, I have been surprised at the number of faculty who are unaware that the job search today takes place primarily online. I do not know a single job seeker (and I know at least a dozen) who consults the MLA print job list. The online MLA job list is updated every Friday, and job seekers consult this weekly. HigherEdJobs.com is also popular, and there are also lists popular in Europe; I’ll try to update this post with a couple of those when I have a chance to ask the colleague who tipped me off about them. At any rate, there’s no real need to be nervous about making the deadlines for the print job list.
My last suggestions are simply pleas for kindness and consideration.
Be mindful of the expense to which you put applicants. Official transcripts cost money, as does mailing writing samples. I happily send these out, but I wonder if committees are throwing out large stacks of unread manuscripts as part of the winnowing process. Certainly, your department may be working under a time-crunch, and if so, you may need to request all application materials at once. But I can tell you that applicants are grateful to be asked to send a job letter and CV with a later request for additional materials, especially as anything more than a letter and CV means a trip to the post office to have the package weighed.
If you have any suspicion that your listing is contingent upon funding that may or may not materialize, it wouldn’t hurt to say so. Sure, some people might not apply. But I suspect those would be people for whom the position isn’t a very good match.
Thirdly, it can be helpful to provide some indication of how comfortable ethnic and gender minorities will be on your campus. I know this can be touchy on some campuses, but a simple statement like “Our university/college supports a diverse faculty” can be very helpful. This is another area where a campus or department website can help by providing links to student and faculty organizations or simply by showing the faces and research interests of the faculty.
16 Nov 2009
A friend pointed out that Michael Bérubé recently addressed similar concerns about application expense in a blog post entitled “Applications.”
Another friend suggests that faculty websites often might be more easily navigable, and she requests a direct link to the course catalog. And I’ll just add that it’s always wonderful when course descriptions are up-to-date, not only for job-seekers but for our students.
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