Dynamic Subspace

Category: Review

  • A Brief Note on Steven Lynn’s Rhetoric and Composition: An Introduction

    When I asked Dr. Courtney L. Werner, a friend and colleague at Kent State University where we earned our PhDs (find her blog here and connect with her on Twitter here), what I should read that captures the theoretical breadth and historical depth of her discipline of study–Rhetoric and Composition–I dutifully wrote down what she told me: Steven Lynn‘s impressive Rhetoric and Composition: An Introduction. I think that it has been about three or four years since I jotted down her suggestion, but I’m happy to report that I finally got around to reading it over the past few days and I’m certainly the better for it.

    For those of you who might be like me–not really knowing anything about Rhetoric and Composition when going into graduate school, but wanting to learn more about this important discipline after learning of its existence–I recommend Lynn’s book as a thorough starting point.

    Lynn begins his book with a chapter on the relationship and interconnectedness of Rhetoric and Composition. He guides his reader through seeing them separately and together while peppering his discussion with an exhaustive and concise (what a balancing act throughout the book) theoretical-historical context.

    In the chapters that follow, he designs them around the five canons of rhetoric as an art: invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery. Each chapter combines discussion of the historically relevant development of the canon, its major contributors, its past and present scholarship, and applications for the classroom. The final chapter on delivery has a lot of helpful material for first time composition instructors, too.

    During my time at Kent State, I am glad that I taught in the writing program and I am glad to have had the opportunity to learn from and share ideas with graduate students and faculty in the Rhetoric and Composition Program, including Brian Huot, Pamela Takayoshi, and Derek Van Ittersum. In retrospect, however, I wish that I had made it a point to join a Rhetoric and Composition seminar (for credit or to audit), because I see now how it would have enriched my scholarship and pedagogy in pivotal ways. If you are like me in this regard or still on your path to a terminal degree, I recommend Lynn’s book for learning Rhetoric and Composition’s ideas, debates, and scale as a student, incorporating its ideas into your daily practices as a teacher, and opening up new possibilities in your thinking as a scholar.

    Lynn, Steven. Rhetoric and Composition: An Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010. Print.

  • Review of Donald E. Hall’s The Academic Self: An Owner’s Manual, Recommended for Graduate Students, Postdocs, and Junior Faculty

    Hall, Donald E. The Academic Self: An Owner’s Manual. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2002. Print.

    I picked up Donald E. Hall’s The Academic Self from the Georgia Tech Library after completing my teaching assignment for Spring 2013–eleven years after the book had been published. Specifically, I was looking for books and articles to help me grapple with the challenges of this stage of my professional life as a postdoctoral fellow: teaching a 3-3 load, performing service duties, researching, writing,  receiving rejections (and the far less often acceptance), and applying for permanent positions. In the following, I summarize Hall’s arguments, provide some commentary, and close with a contextualized recommendation.

    Hall states in the introduction that the goal of The Academic Self is, “encourage its readership to engage critically their professional self-identities, processes, values, and definitions of success” (Hall xv). I found this book to be particularly useful for thinking through my professional self-identity. As I was taught by Brian Huot at Kent State University to be a reflective practitioner in my teaching and pedagogy, Hall argues for something akin to this in terms of Anthony Giddens’ “the reflexive construction of self-identity” (qtd. in Hall 3). Hall truncates this to be “self-reflexivity,” or the recognition that who we are is an unfolding and emergent project. I use this blog as part of my processes of self-reflection–thinking through my research and teaching while striving to improve both through conscious planning and effort.

    However, unlike the past where the self was static and enforced by external forces, modernity (and postmodernity–a term Hall, like Giddens, disagrees with) has ushered in an era where the self is constructed by the individual reflectively. From his viewpoint, the self is a text that changes and can be changed by the individual with a greater deal of agency than perhaps possible in the past (he acknowledges his privileged position earlier in the book, but it bears repeating that this level of agency certainly is not equally distributed).

    In the first chapter, titled “Self,” Hall writes, “Living in the late-modern age, in a social milieu already thoroughly pervaded by forms of self-reflexivity, and trained as critical readers, we academics in particular have the capacity and the professional skills to live with a critical (self-) consciousness, to reflect critically upon self-reflexivity, and to use always our professional talents to integrate our theories and our practices” (Hall 5). If we consider ourselves, the profession, and our institutions as texts to be read, we can apply our training to better understanding these texts and devise ways of making positive change to these texts.

    He identifies what he sees as two extremes that “continue to plague academic existence: that of Casaubonic paralysis and Carlylean workaholism” (Hall 8). In the former, academics can be caught in a ignorant paranoia like Casaubon of George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871-1872), or in the latter, academics can follow Thomas Carlyle’s call to work and avoid the “symptom” of “self-contemplation” (qtd. in Hall 6).

    In the chapter titled “Profession,” Hall calls for us to apply our training to reflective analysis and problem solving of our professional selves and our relationship to the ever changing state of the profession itself. He questions to what extent the work of professionalism (seminars, workshops, etc.) are descriptive or prescriptive. “The ideal of intellectual work” varies from person to person, but it is an important choice that we each must make in defining who we are within the profession.

    He reminds us that, “much of the pleasure of planning, processing, and time management lies not in their end products–publication or project completion–it is derived from the nourishment –intellectual, communal, and professional–provided by the processes themselves” (Hall 46). He builds his approach to process on his personal experiences: “Unlike some, I know well when my work day is over. Part of the textuality of process is its beginning, middle, and most importantly, its end” (Hall 46).

    His talking points on process are perhaps the most practical advice that he provides in the book. In planning, he advises:

    1. begin from the unmovable to the tentative in your scheduling, know yourself–plan according to your habits and work on those aspects of your planning that need adjustment, and stick to your well planned schedule to yield the personal time that you might be lacking now without such a plan
    2. break goals and deliverables into their constituent parts [or building blocks (my Lego analogy) or code (my programming analogy)]
    3. monitor your progress and see daily/smaller goals as ends in themselves rather than simply means to a greater end
    4. take ownership of your goals, schedule, and commitments to others [this is something that I carry forward from my Mindspring days: Core Values and Beliefs: Do not drop the ball.]
    5. deal with and learn from setbacks–life, bad reviews, rejections, etc. [this is easier said than done, and the external effects of bad reviews goes beyond its effect on the writer]
    6. let change happen to our goals and research as our workplace, interests, and circumstances change
    7. taking ownership of our work in these ways can help protect us from and strengthen us against burnout

    Hall goes on to suggest ten steps for professional invigoration to help folks suffering from a stalled career or burnout. However, these ten pieces of advice are equally applicable to graduate students, postdocs, and beginning faculty: join your field’s national organization, read widely in your field, set precise goals, maintain a daily writing schedule [my most difficult challenge], present conference papers, write shorter artifacts to support your research [reviews or my case, this blog], know the process and timeline of manuscript publishing, foster relationships with publishers and editors, politely disengage from poor or dysfunctional professional relationship/praise and value positive relationships, and find support in your local networks.

    The final chapter, “Collegiality, Community, and Change,” reminds us, “always t put and keep our own house in order” (Hall 70). He suggests strategies counter to what he calls “the destructive ethos of ‘free agency’ that seems to pervade the academy today–the mindset that institutional affiliations are always only temporary and that individuals owe little to their departments or institutions beyond the very short term” (Hall 70). On professional attitudes, he encourages a focus on the local (institution) before national (beyond the institution), the current job as potentially your last job–treat it with that respect, meet institutional expectations, collegial respect of others, and learning the history of our institution/school/department from everyone with whom we work.

    Perhaps most notably, he writes, “If we measure our success through the articulation and meeting of our own goals, as I suggest throughout this book, we can achieve them without begrudging others their own successes. However, if we need to succeed primarily in comparison to others, then we are deciding to enter a dynamic of competition that has numerous pernicious consequences, personal and inter-personal” (Hall 74-75). As I have written about on Dynamic Subspace before, it was the overwhelming in-your-faceness of others’ successes on social media like Facebook that distracted me from my own work. Seeing so many diverse projects, publications, and other accomplishments made me question my own works-in-progress before they had time to properly incubate and grow. For all of social media’s useful and positive aspects for maintaining and growing networks of interpersonal relationships, I had the most trouble resisting the self-doubt that the Facebook News Feed generated for me.

    Finally, he encourages dynamic and invested change in departments and institutions. However, as junior faculty, it is important to research and weigh the possible repercussions for working to make change. Hall is not arguing against change by those without tenure, but he is warning us to proceed cautiously and knowledgeably due to a number factors: potential sources of resistance, jeopardizing our jobs, etc.

    Hall’s “Postscript” reinforces the overarching idea of ownership by calling on the reader to live with “intensity,” an idea that inspired Hall from Walter Pater’s 1868 The Renaissance: “burn always with [a] hard, gem-like flame” (qtd. in Hall 89). Hall’s intensity is one self-motivated, well-planned, dynamically agile, and passionately executed.

    Hall’s The Academic Self is a very short read that is well worth the brief time that it will take to read. It offers some solid advice woven with the same theoretically infused self-reflexivity that he encourages. It practices what it preaches. The main thing to remember is that the book is eleven years old. When it was published, the field of English studies was experiencing an employment downturn (albeit one not as pronounced as in recent years). Michael Berube’s “Presidential Address 2013–How We Got Here” (PMLA 128.3 May 2013: 530-541), among many other places–this issue just arrived in the mail today, so I was reading it between chapters of Hall’s book, picks up some of the other challenges that graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and junior faculty have to contend with in the larger spheres of the profession and society. The other advice that Hall provides on personal ownership and collegiality, I believe, remains useful and inspirational. In addition to reading Hall’s book, you should check out his bibliography for further important reading in this vein.

  • If You Like Lego, Read Paul Di Filippo’s Review of The Cult of LEGO

    Paul Di Filippo, the science fiction author, shares how he built really awesome multi-storied marble mazes with his Legos as a child in his review of The Cult of LEGO on the Barnes and Noble’s website. It is worth the read.

    Updated 7/23/2024: Revised language and changed link to one cached on the Internet Wayback Machine.

  • James Blish’s A Case of Conscience

    After a wonderful dinner at Mack and Sue Hassler’s house with my wife Y and our new friend Carter Kaplan, Mack lent me a copy of James Blish’s A Case of Conscience (1958). Mack knew that I had already presented a paper on James Cameron’s Avatar, and that I would present a revised version of that essay at the upcoming SFRA 2010 Conference in Carefree, AZ next week. He told me that Blish’s novel was related to Avatar either as inspiration or merely part of the cultural discursive currents that made Avatar possible today.

    A Case of Conscience is about a group of four Earth men on the distant planet of Lithia. They are each scientists in various fields who are studying the planet to make a recommendation to the UN whether Lithia should be made a safe port for future travel there by humanity. What drives the novel is the group of people largely absent from the narrative–the native Lithians. The adult Lithians, who stand 12′ tall in reptilian bodies and have a highly developed culture, cater to their four Earth guests who carry on their deliberations without any input from the Lithians themselves. It is only the innocuous gift of Chtexa to Father Ramon Ruiz-Sanchez, the Jesuit biologist and narrator of the novel, of his not yet ‘born’ child Egtverchi that the Lithians are given a voice of sorts that is still unheard by the humans who play host. Ultimately, the humans are arrogant towards the Lithians and their culture. They cut down their “Message Tree” which enables their global network of navigation and communication, and through their experiments they destroy the entire planet after Egtverchi’s return. Most importantly, Ruiz, who submits the heretical belief aligned with Philip K. Dick’s cosmogony that the adversary or demiurge has creative abilities and that the seemingly perfect Lithian world and its people are a trap for humanity, cannot see that it is humanity that is at fault for their blindness to the possibilities in a vast cosmos for other points of view and other paradises that are not imbued with human-Christian dogmatic trappings.

    Ruiz is an interesting character who tries to work out the unique case of conscience of Lithia. He and his other evaluators of Lithia are each blinded by his own cultural and educational restraints. These humans who are on Lithia for some time never get around to studying the Lithians themselves, and it is only at the end that Ruiz learns how the Lithians procreate and develop into adults. This realization comes to Ruiz as a hidden danger, and a fact that leads him to think of the Lithians as creations of the Adversary/Satan rather than souled creations of Almighty God. Their perfections, in Ruiz’s worldview and experience, can only be aberrations of the design that he believes was put into effect on Earth. Even at the end, as he is intoning the rites of exorcism, he cannot see that it is human beliefs that has colored what Lithia is and how humans see Lithia.

    A Case of Conscience is a superb example of postcolonial science fiction. It starts off with the power of an Asmovian hard science fiction combined with the social. Lithians have a well developed society that the humans, even Ruiz who knows their language, does not actively work to engage. Even this seemingly interested character does not leave his plant specimens long enough to realize that the Lithians are far more interesting and important to any decision arrived at by the visiting human contingent than the other studies these humans are undertaking. Back on Earth, the social constraints of living underground, which comes about from the Cold War and mirroring Dick’s The Penultimate Truth, explodes when Chtexa’s child Egtverchi incites the human outsiders of society to revolt.

    Egtverchi is an outsider to human culture, but he is still a product of human culture. The Lithians do carry a certain amount of memories and ingrained abilities in their DNA, but Egtverchi’s acculturation and learning, particularly his developmental years under observation and scientific examination, mold him into a being divorced from his own people who can pass judgement on humanity as excluding certain individuals from the decision making process and full enjoyment of modern life. However, Ruiz, Michelis, and the others cannot see this. They cannot see that Egtverchi is a creation of humanity and it is not his Lithian-ness that makes him capable of inciting unrest on Earth. They cannot see that humanity had passed judgement on Lithia without understanding the Lithians or even caring that the Lithians had a society and culture or that the Lithians have agency and sovereignty. Ruiz and the others, even the Asian female scientist Liu Meid, use their own discursive background to assert authority over Egtverchi and the Lithians.

    A Case of Conscience is a powerfully moving novel that should be more widely read, not necessarily for its connection to Avatar, but as another science fiction work that challenges humanity to not be so bullheaded and domineering when it comes to excluded persons or groups. This novel would be a strong text for a postcolonialism course as well as other courses in which hegemony of various colors is challenged, critiqued, and questioned. It is a hard science fiction novel, which means that Blish does spend some time explaining his science. Nevertheless, his character development of Ruiz in particular carries the novel. Ruiz is depicted as a likable person who wants to do right, but he cannot see right outside of his situation as a Jesuit scientist. He requires his beliefs in Christianity to provide a basis for his logic. As such, his logic is human and male centric. The Lithians lose their appealing interest to him when he fits them into his domineering logic of Christian belief. For him, that belief cannot change, even allowing for his heresies, so the Lithians must be made to serve a particular preselected role within his belief system. I hope that you will read this novel, and in doing so, find yourself disheartened with human chauvinism. You may also find some relevant threads connecting the novel to America’s current conquests in Iraq and Afghanistan.

    And a final question: How many science fictions have Jesuit or religious order protagonists? I’m thinking of Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz, Stephenson’s Anathem, and MacDonald’s Brazyl.

  • Stanislaw Lem’s “Philip K. Dick: A Visionary Among the Charlatans”

    In Science Fiction Studies #5 (1975), Stanislaw Lem wrote an article, translated from the Polish by Robert Abernathy, describing, analyzing, and challenging the work of Philip K. Dick (up to that point). Titled “Philip K. Dick: A Visionary Among the Charlatans,” it is a rich essay that has much to say about Dick’s work and the work of the critic.

    Lem says that Dick, like other science fiction authors, takes from the “warehouse which has long since become their common property,” or what Damien Broderick later theorized as the SF mega-text (57). One of the themes that Dick relies on is the catastrophe, but unlike most other science fiction authors, the catastrophes in Dick’s fiction occur for unascertainable reasons, i.e., the uncovered causes are deferred to the end. The common denominator in all of Dick’s fiction is a world beset by an unconstrained and monstrous entropy that devours matter and even time. Following his instincts, as Patricia Warrick would later say of Dick that he is understood intuitively, Lem says of Dick that he does not go in for rational explanations, but instead, confounds both the plot and the conventions of the science fiction genre itself. Of this, Lem demonstrates that genres have conventions, but those conventions were formed by previous breaking of convention to make the genre thus. Dick does this to science fiction, changing it to meet his own needs and creativity. Coupled with his genre breaking is the fact that Dick is a bricoleur, though this is not the word Lem uses, but it is very much what he is describing. Lem describes Dick’s work as something offered for sale at a “county fair,” having been made from a variety of concepts and ideas, but making the new creation solidly his own. Dick is not a futurologist, but rather representing the very idea of futureshock in his stories. Dick is not an extrapolator who changes one thing and leaves all the rest unscathed. He shows how civilization goes on, progress forward, but having been changed radically by the events presupposed in his stories. He acknowledges that history cannot be rewound. The fusion of the natural with the artificial, a point also raised by Warrick, Leo Marx, and Sharona Ben-Tov, means that there can be no more talk of a return to nature. In this, Dick does question progress, but not by chucking the concept. Instead, he complicates it, and again, confounds it. For Dick, our technological labyrinth prevents us from returning to nature–again, connections with Warrick, Marx, and Ben-Tov. Lem conjectures on this as something beyond the scope of Dick’s work, but nevertheless should be taken into account. He thinks about how the “irreversibility of history, leads Dick to the pessimistic conclusion that looking far into the future becomes such a fulfillment of dreams of power over matter as converts the ideal of progress into a monstrous caricature” (64). It is this carrying Dick’s ideas further in his criticism that Lem attempts to practice the very thing Dick practiced in his writing. And most importantly, in his short engagement of the novel Ubik, Lem, a good structuralist, avoids the author’s interpretation of the work, and instead considers how the thing ‘ubik’ and its combination of the old and philosophical with the modern and consumer culture resulted in such a powerful metaphor and not a futurological or technical artifact (66).

    Two other things that I would like to leave with you from this essay is Lem’s idea about the relationship of the critic to a work–as defender rather than prosecutor–a way that I have tried to work in my own scholarship and reviews: “I think, however, that the critic should not be the prosecutor of a book but its defender, though one not allowed to lie: he may only present the work in the most favorable light” (60).

    And I would like to quote at length, Lem’s concluding paragraph, in which he gives a honest, gracious, and thoughtful tribute to Dick’s writing. Lem says:

    The writings of Philip Dick have deserved a better fate than that to which they were destined by their birthplace. If they are neither of uniform quality nor fully realized, still it is only by brute force that they can be jammed into that pulp of materials, destitute of intellectual value and original structure, which makes up SF. Its fans are attracted by the worst in Dick–the typical dash of American SF, reaching to the stars, and the headlong pace of action moving from one surprise to the next–but they hold it against him that, instead of unraveling puzzles, he leaves the reader at the end on the battlefield, enveloped in the aura of a mystery as grotesque as it is strange. Yet his bizarre blendings of hallucinogenic and palingenetic techniques have not won him many admirers outside the ghetto walls, since there readers are repelled by the shoddiness of the props he has adopted from the inventory of SF. Indeed, these writings sometimes fumble their attempts; but I remain after all under their spell, as it often happens at the sight of a lone imagination’s efforts to cope with a shattering superabundance of opportunities–efforts in which even a partial defeat can resemble a victory (66-67).

    I am also under that spell and happily on the battlefield, a little the worse for wear, but with kit in hand. At least, I thought I was on a battlefield until I realized that I was sitting at a desk in front of a computer wildly typing away on this very blog. I suppose the battlefields, like ontologies, can change unexpectedly and for inexplicable reasons.

    Image of Lem at the top of the post is from the Wikimedia Commons, details here.