Uren Blog 4

A couple of weeks ago I wrote and then failed to actually post a blog entry about which readings for this course had resonated with me. For this blog entry—number 4, about the interrelationship between the content of GRAD 5124 and my current research—I'd like to start with that previous would-have-been post.

I didn’t do the second blog post, but those readings resonated with me most. In Jim Collier’s class Themes and Contestations in Academic Inquiry, we talk about the effects of market logic on the practice of scholarship and, in my case, creative writing in the US university. When Margaret Stieg Dalton writes, “A press looks for manuscripts that have sales potential,” and, “In American society, numbers confer reality,” I hear echoes of Lindsay Waters and Martha Nussbaum, who worry over the fate of the humanities in the neoliberal academy (260, 257). Reading about the death of the author in Theory and collaborative learning in Pedagogy at the same time that I’m asked to interrogate my assumptions about the nature of academic work has left me questioning the extent to which individual authorship (and its tool, the quantified CV) can and ought to be reconciled with those impulses and beliefs that compel me to read, write, and teach in the first place. What I mean is, if I write to create a meaningful, or at least entertaining, experience for a reader, what does that have to do with a line on my CV? If the arts are about communicating toward connecting real people, how can I in good conscience use—which I mean in the worst sense of the word—that most humanistic endeavor to advance my career?

Now onto blog 4. So, I'm worrying over a clash of ethics—the marketing of myself in quantifiable terms—Robert Uren has published in Blah, Blah, and Blah and has won the Blah award and was a visiting writer at Blah (so please [like him/hire him/read him/take his class/apply to the program where he teaches/blah blah blah])—versus the cultivation of myself as an artist, or even as a scholar (because don't the same humanistic principles undergird scholarship?). In this course, I most appreciate the opportunity for that sort of reflection in the Module 3 readings, in which investigation into academic publishing allows room to consider the meeting place of market and humanism (or posthumanism, etc.). Who are we when we run in “the self-congratulatory and absurdly insignificant hamster wheel” of professionalized academic creative writing? These are the questions I'm asking and being asked in Collier's class. And Dalton's article is particularly pertinent for that work, so I'm glad it was here and here early in the semester.

As I continue to look into these matters, I benefit from off-campus access to and improved familiarity with online databases such as Academic Search Complete, wherein I may find relevant material to better shape both my questions and my “answers.” Even more practically, I'd obviously benefit if I could become proficient in the use of bibliographic management programs (I went for the "undergrad-y one"), so I'm glad that I've been introduced to them in this class.