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

[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.