Some Resources on Canonization and Prize Culture

You might ask yourself why UC thinks it worthwhile to put vinyl transfers
of great authors on our fine corrugated temporary learning space.

Aside from the formal canon-building that Eaglestone describes in today's reading, there are more subtle processes that enshrine (and exclude) works of literature from various field ands eras.

One of the more common methods, inside and outside of academia, is the simple act of list-making, from the 54-volume Great Books of the Western World series, first published in 1952 by Encyclopædia Britannica, to more recent lists like the Modern Library 100 from 1998 (with separate lists for fiction and non-fiction), the BBC's "The Big Read" List from 2003, and Time Magazine's All-Time 100 Novels (published in 2010, and, despite its name, only covering books published since Time's launch in 1923).

More idiosyncratic versions of this phenomenon show up on our newsfeeds all the time: cf. Flavorwire's recent "A College Curriculum on Your Bookshelf: 50 Books for 50 Classes" or Buzzfeed's "How Well Read Are You?" quiz.

Another sort of list-making  is tied to prize culture. In the US we typically recognize three major literary prizes given annually in various genres: the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Britain has the Man Booker Prize, which recently (and controversially opened to non-UK authors), Canada has the Griffin Poetry Prize, and there are many other national and/or regional prizes, grants, etc.

One might also consider career-long awards such as the Nobel Prize in Literature, the MacArthur Foundation Prize (colloquially known as the "genius grant"), and Guggenheim Fellowships, along with literature grants from the National Endowment for the Arts.

If you're interested in reading more about this process — which has generated a lot of ink over the past several decades from both sides of the debate — here are a few titles worth looking into:

• Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students
• Andrew Hartman, A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars
• James Atlas, Battle of the Books: The Curriculum Debate in America
• Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives for Critical Theory
• Jim English, The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value

Weeks 1–2: Robert Eaglestone's "Doing English"

Robert Eaglestone's Doing English: A Guide for Literature Students is a book that has a lot of traction within our English department, particularly in ENGL-3000, because it does an excellent job of providing a thoughtful foundation for work in the field and a sense of how that field has changed over time. 

(not) Robert Eaglestone

"People usually set off 'doing English' without thinking about what they are doing in the first place and, perhaps most importantly, why they are doing it," he observes, continuing, "While it sometimes looks as if English is simply the discussion of literature, it is a subject, or a discipline, and this shapes ideas that are often 'below the surface' or taken for granted and are not discussed." Thus, though it leads to a somewhat awkward title, the key notion here is for Eaglestone's readers to be actively and mindfully engaged in their navigation of the world of English language and literature. We'll follow his example and consider how we might actively "do" other sorts of related discourses (like audio, video, and visual arts) within the realm of English studies after we finish with his book.

Eaglestone offers three main aims for his book:

• to orientate you, by explaining what you are doing when you are doing English;
• to equip you, by explaining basic key ideas;
• to encourage you, to explore newer ways of doing English.

And this will be carried out over the book's four sections — which are concerned with how and what we read; the relationship between reading, writing, and meaning; and the ever-changing and growing realm of English studies — before concluding with a consideration of the importance of English. One caveat: Eaglestone's book is somewhat delightfully British, and aside from providing us with a fair amount of insider's perspectives on local turf wars and the state of the UK's secondary and college programs, we also get to see wonderfully un-American words like "orientate."

Here's our reading schedule for Doing English:

• Friday, Aug. 28: Part I: How We Read
• Monday, Aug. 31: Part II: What We Read
• Wednesday, Sept. 2: Part III: Reading, writing and meaning
• Friday, Sept. 4: Part IV: English Studies . . .? + Conclusion

Wednesday, Aug. 26: What Is English? / Reading Habits Icebreaker

Saratoga Springs, NY's excellent Lyrical Ballad Bookstore — where I've often spent far too much
money over the past decade — keeps rare books locked up in a former bank vault.

As a means of starting our semester's work, I'd like you come up with your own brief answers to the following two questions and bring them to class on Wednesday. Your responses will be the foundation of our in-class discussion:

1. How would you succinctly define English? Where does it come from and where is it going What makes it different from other languages? (Answer to the best of your ability and knowledge in < ~100 words)
2. What does it mean to be an English major? How does an English major interact with the English language differently than laypeople? What does an English major intend to do with her life (or what can she hope to do)?

In addition to this short response I'd also like you to post a little info about your reading habits on our Facebook group.

First, list what you read this summer. Feel free to include things you completed and things you partially read and to indicate the genre of each. Mark books you were rereading with an (R). Since Facebook will butcher italics, don't worry about proper presentation. Also, don't feel the need to pad your list — "Oh yeah, I read Ulysses and Infinite Jest and that was just my June" — everybody's life circumstances are different and nobody's here to judge. This is just about getting a sense of who each of us is and what our interests are.

Second, since books are only part of what we read, I'd like you to briefly detail your online reading habits. What sites do you frequent on a daily basis? Feel free to categorize/group/explain as needed.

I'll post my own answers this evening as well.

Welcome to ENGL-3000!

As its name implies, Introduction to English Studies is a foundational course that will help provide you with many of the tools you'll need as you pursue a major (or minor) in English here at the University of Cincinnati — and thankfully, many of you are taking this class as sophomores (or juniors) rather than waiting until your last year.

While this is an important class, it's one with a bit of an identity crisis: it's not a theory course, or a composition course, or a lit course, though it touches upon all of those areas. As a result, each professor who teaches it puts their own personal spin upon it depending on what they see as the necessary skills they'd like their students to carry with them.

Since 2010, I've been co-editor of Jacket2, an online journal of poetry and poetics journal that carries on and builds upon the groundbreaking work of Jacket Magazine (1997–2010), one of the world's first online venues for serious poetic discourse. In that role I've spent a lot of time thinking and talking with my colleagues about the evolving role of criticism in the 21st century as we move from a print-centric culture into a bustling 24/7 world of online discourse. That brave new world that you, as budding scholars, find yourself in is very different than the one I knew when I was in your shoes a generation ago, and it's vital to understand how to make your way through it, regardless of whether you plan to be an English professor, a high school English teacher, or to enter into any number of other fields.

Towards that end, you won't be writing traditional academic scholarship this semester. In the first half of the course we'll take a foundational look at the English language and the history of English scholarship, then explore other sorts of media literacies before applying our lessons to a pair of books by writers producing compelling and critically-acclaimed hybrid works of poetry, nonfiction, and criticism: Claudia Rankine and Maggie Nelson. The second half of the semester will be run as an academic writing workshop, where you'll be creating content — in a number of different modes and responding to a variety of audio, visual, and textual texts — for a thematically-constructed online writing project influenced by the work of Rankine and, in particular, Nelson (i.e. in the mode of her book Bluets).

Of course, we'll talk a lot more about how that will work as the semester progresses, but for now, welcome to the class! I hope you're as excited as I am for what we have in store.