eh

[pylduck]

I keep looking in the fridge, hoping something I want to eat (holy shit, Giles was just trying to make a phone call on the cordless phone -- he must've been trying to call for help) will materialize out of what remains unprepared. I'm hungry!

I'm feeling remarkably unqualified to be an academic. I never have any response to articles and books I read or lectures I attend. I feel that as an academic, I should have thoughtful responses and questions that get at the critical points, problems, and possibilities of the arguments I read and hear. But for me, there's just nothing analytical in my response. I hear arguments I like and dislike, that I agree with or don't. But I don't know how to parse an argument, to understand the fields against which it works, to think about its assumptions, and so on. (The ironic thing, of course, is that I am supposedly teaching my composition students these skills.)

This all leads to feeling like I have nothing to say, nothing new or even interesting to add to the discourses of my field. All I can do is lamely paraphrase other people's arguments, missing all the nuances anyways.

Sigh.

At least I wanted to retch when I read the transcript of W's inaugural address on-line.

Comments

[saltbox.livejournal.com]

Maybe you're like me. I never have any specific analytical responses either, and mostly am like "ooh, that's cool" or "yuck, that's not," but I'm all right at putting together something totally different that ties together the stuff I've read but really involves my own random train of thought anyway. The only time I'm good at coming up with analytical responses is when I go into editor-mode, and then I'm all "well, the argument could be stronger if . . . ."

[poetofthefuture.livejournal.com]

actually, I pretty much only learned to have critical skills when I taught comp. Still working on building those skills, though. Read articles by Elizabeth Povinelli. It makes everything better.

har har

[pylduck.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I guess teaching comp was what made me aware of all my lacking skills. I do still have to check out more of Povinelli's stuff. I'm just not so into anthropologists (sorry to the accomplice) because they hate us literary studies folk. Yes, that's a crass generalization. But it's the trend in cultural studies work to use cultural anthropology work to beat up on the limitations of literary studies work.

mmmm

[pylduck.livejournal.com]

Editor-mode does seem to help me a bit. I suppose I should try to imagine myself in that mode even when I'm not reading a piece of writing from someone in my writing group. Mostly, my difficulty is in remembering all the stuff that I should in considering someone's topic and argument -- like what other people have said, the historical contexts for their work, and so on. Being a professor is going to be hard.

Re: mmmm

[saltbox.livejournal.com]

I like editor-mode. It reminds me to ask probing questions. Which is my main problem, that I don't often remember. Part of that probably derives from the fact that, as a non-academic trying to get "back in," most of my academic reading is for pure celebratory pleasure, which often involves not turning those critical skills on.

Being a professor is going to be hard.

I hear ya. I'm lucky that in my field, though, teaching and scholarship can be pretty different. And I'm pretty good at questioning the strengths and weaknesses of legal arguments.