Roger Ascham, Virtuoso

When I first encountered Ascham, famed author of The Scholemaster, I found him dull. My relationship to his writing has changed over the years, moving through admiration to, having just completed his archery treatise Toxophilvs, envy.

Ascham's writing is unobtrusive, simple, direct. It never announces its brilliance; rather than searching for verbal fireworks, it pieces together just the right anglo-saxon blocks and simple Latinisms laying ready to hand:

Running, leaping, and coyting be to vile for scholers, and so not fit by Aristotle his iudgement: walking alone into the felde, hath no token of courage in it, a pastyme lyke a simple man which is neither flesh not fisshe. Therefore if a man woulde haue a pastyme holesome and equall for euerye parte of the bodye, pleasaunt and full of courage for the mynde, not vile and vnhoneste to gyue ill example to the laye men, not kepte in gardynes and corners, not lurkynge on the night and in holes, but euermore in the face of men, either to rebuke it when it doeth ill, or els to testifye on it when it doth well: let him seke chefelye for shotynge.

One can imagine a sentence as long as that last one in contemporary critical writing, but not with so little hypotaxis. Rarely does the word “holes” convey so much as here, and I think it does because of the unusual preprosional phrase “on the night” to which “in holes” is parallel. Ascham's long sentences are rarely difficult to follow in part because the parallels and subordination are aligned so clearly, and in part because he knows when to punctuate with a simple figure, even a borrowed one:

I maruell howe it chaunceth than, that no man hitherto, hath written any thinge of it: wherin you must graunte me, that eyther the matter is noughte, vnworthye, and barren to be written vppon, or els some men are to blame, whiche both loue and vse it, and yet could neuer finde in theyr heart, to saye one good woorde of it, seing that very triflinge matters hath not lacked great learned men to sette them out, as gnattes and nuttes, & many other mo like thinges, wherfore eyther you maye honestlie laye verie great faut vpon men bycasue they neuer yet praysed it, or els I may iustlie take awaye no litle thinge form shooting, bycasue it neuer yet deserued it.

Ascham did not invent the paradoxical encomium of gnats and nuts, but his effortless integration of the example and use of the running “n” assonance makes the line skip at this point and introduces a kind hitch step right when the sentence threatens to grow too long and repetitive.

Reading his description of the swirling snow, to which Thomas Greene pointed years ago, I couldn't help recalling the end of Joyce's “The Dead,” (though the passages have quite different resonances, clearly.) Joyce is softer and sadder, to be sure, but his alliterations in that stunning paragraph sound strained in comparison:

That morning the sun shone bright and clere, the wind was whistelinge a lofte, and sharpe accordynge to the tyme of the yeare. The snowe in the hye waye laye lowse and troden wyth horse feete: so as the wynde blewe, it toke the lowse snow with it, and made it so slide upon the snowe in the felde whyche was harde and crusted by reason of the frost over nyght, that therby I myght se verye wel, the hole nature of the wynde as it blewe that daye. . . .Sometyme the wynd would be not past two yeardes brode, and so it would carie the snowe as far as I could se. An other tyme the snow woulde blow ouer half the felde at ones. Sometyme the snow woulde tomble softly, by and by it would flye wonderfull fast. And thys I perceyved also that the wind goeth by streames & not hole togither. For I should se one streame wyth in a Score on me, than the space of two score no snow would stirre, but after so much quantitie of grounde, an other streame of snow at the same very tyme should be caryed lykewyse, but not equally. For the one would stande styll when the other flew a pace, and so contynewe somtyme swiftlyer, sometime slowlyer, sometyme broder, sometime narrower, as far as I coulde se. Nor it flewe not streight, but sometyme it crooked thys waye sometyme that waye, and somtyme it ran round aboute in a compase. And somtymee the snowe would be lyft clene from the ground vp in to the ayre, and by & by it would be al clapt to the grounde as though there had bene no winde at all, streightway it woulde rise and flye agayne.

And that whych was the moost mervayle of al, at one tyme two driftes of snowe flewe, the one out of the West into the East, the other out of the North into the East: And I saw two windes by reason of the snow the one crosse over the other, as it had bene two hye wayes. And agayne I shoulde here the wynd blow in the ayre, when nothing was stirred at the ground. And when all was still where I rode, not verye far from me the snow should be lifted wonderfully.

You can see an entire nation's schoolmaster in this passage, showing his countrymen: this is how to write a description.

Ascham crafted academic prose in the interstices between scholasticism and science. It's probably impossible, even for those who agree with his marriage of verba and res, to mirror his project now. And considering how high he set the bar, I wouldn't want to try. There are scholarly writers who today have moments of plain-style brilliance, but I've yet to read anyone who can square a cabinet like Ascham.

Academic Job Hopping

Nosce te ipsum

It's campus visit season, and seeing the performances of our job candidates and listening to conversation as our faculty try to suss out precise motivations and long-term goals has reminded me of the brief tempest (aka the “Unicorn Gumdrop Kerfuffle”) that started when posters at Reassigned Time criticized Dr. Crazy for wanting to leave a TT position (see here, e.g.) Is it okay for junior faculty to job shop, or do they owe something to the departments that have put so much time and effort into their recruitment?

One of Crazy's most straightforward justifications for job hopping: “My institution has not yet made a lifetime commitment to me, and so I'm not certain I understand why I'm supposed already to have made a lifetime commitment to it.” True, but to be consistent, one would also have to concede that accepting tenure would carry with it the ethical responsibility to remain at that school for the rest of one's career. I doubt many people who see no problem with job hopping would grant that.

But I do think that this rationale (and the ensuing discussions in her threads) gets at a broader problem that, even amidst all the job search angst and focused preparation for the job search that's now de rigueur in doctoral programs, is rarely addressed head on. And I think it helps to explain why job hopping really is justified from the vantage of the job searcher. Among the problems with the current underemployment of PhDs is the way it forces all new faculty (yours truly included) to act in bad faith. I don't mean this in a simple way of hiding one's real motivation or ambition (“Your university is perfect for me! [to publish my way out of.]”) It's something more existential.

I.

Imagine an ideal job market, where everyone would be guaranteed a job that matched their primary desires. Geographical location your number one criterion? You can be assured that you'll get a position within a 100 mile radius of your chosen location. Is your primary preference the right balance between research, teaching, service expectations and pay/benefits: you'll get something close to what you want. Do you really want to work at a SLAC, community college, research university? You'll have your choice. Is your primary concern to work in a department with a certain mix of personalities, or find a job for a significant other, or work with a certain type of student population, or . . .? Whatever it is, whatever is the thing you most want, you'll get it (though you may have to give up other things.)

Even in this kind of semi-ideal situation, how many recently-minted PhDs would be able to make the right choice? Who can say what they really want from their careers? Life is a long and funny thing, and knowing oneself, in my experience, is really hard. Dr. Crazy's been remarkably open about her own questions about what she wants. I've found this salutary. In an ideal world, graduate programs would be able to invest some time and energy into helping students think through questions about what kind of professional life we really want as we move into the later stages of our apprenticeship. Even then, though, there would be no guarantee, because self-honesty (perhaps I am projecting) is a rare and precious.

II.

But we don't live in an ideal world. There's no time or point in having anyone really try to think about the question of what we want with our careers in a job market where it is a stroke of luck just to land a full-time job, let alone one in a tenure-earning position. The kind of bad faith this job market forces us into, then, is a kind of self-deception or self-ignorance. To wonder what kind of position I really want, or for a graduate program to lead students through this question systematically, would waste precious resource (psychic, temporal, material) that just aren't available considering this competitive market. No wonder people only begin to ask this question once they've landed the job. And since there's still no real guidance for understanding this question even then (perhaps especially then) no wonder so many junior faculty these days feel a kind of chronic restlessness. Furthermore, to ask that question honestly and openly after the fact almost inevitably involves a certain level of guilt, a guilt partly assuaged through the “angry huff” that I've seen a few people work themselves into at universities where I've worked to justify leaving for greener pastures.

So I do think it's okay for junior faculty to leave. But it's not because a school hasn't made a permanent commitment to them. Rather, it's because the structural problems with the job market don't allow people to wonder what kind of job they want. At the same time, I think it's important to find a way to ask, meaningfully, honestly, what kind of a career and personal life I really do want. When I'm sixty and moving into the last stages of my career, what do I want to be able to savor about my experiences as a college professor? Who am I?

Is Satan Gay?

Dame Elenor Hull's musings about performance have inspired me to post on an idea I've been mulling over about reading Paradise Lost. The question of Satan's sexuality is a way to get at a bigger question about performative reading and interpretation of Paradise Lost.

The lines in question appear in Book 5, after the Father has exalted the Son. Satan is not happy:

Soon as midnight brought on the duskie houre
Friendliest to sleep and silence, he resolv'd
With all his Legions to dislodge, and leave
Unworshipt, unobey'd the Throne supream
Contemptuous, and his next subordinate
Awak'ning, thus to him in secret spake.
Sleepst thou, Companion dear, what sleep can close
Thy eye-lids? and remembrest what Decree
Of yesterday, so late hath past the lips
Of Heav'ns Almightie. Thou to me thy thoughts
Wast wont, I mine to thee was wont to impart;
Both waking we were one; how then can now
Thy sleep dissent?

[Courtesy of the Milton Reading Room]

I know I am not the first person to raise questions about Satan's sexuality. Ask whether Satan is teh ghey among Miltonists, and discussion will likely go into angelic ontology and other Greek words ending in “-gy” or "-cy" (In defense of the “gay” anachronism, see magistra on “gay” for medival sexuality here.) Shakespeareans would be much more comfortable allowing several possible answers, and might offer performative consistency rather than some form of authorial intention (so-called or not) as the key criterion for legitimate interpretation. Not “what does this mean?” but “what works in performance while remaining consistent with the rest of the text?”

Shakespeareans, for obvious reasons, are much more willing to bring performative questions to the fore in their readings than Miltonists. Harry Berger, for instance, often brings up performative questions in the process of brilliantly illuminating Shakespeare. But as an epic, Paradise Lost ought to be heard, and I wonder how useful questions of performance are, especially in a teaching context.

The question of Satan's sexuality, then, might not be whether Satan and Beelzebub are lovers, but rather the question of how the modern day rhapsode might deliver these lines. If you will allow me to indulge my inner A.C. Bradley for a moment, here are two possibilities for the rhapsode “visualizing” in order to find the character's “motivation”:

1. Beelzebub, an aristocratic angel, sleeps alone in his mansion. Satan barges in, throws open the doors to Beelzebub's chamber: [A bit angry, and a bit incredulously]: "Sleepest thou?! . . ."



2. Beelzebub and Satan, lovers, lie in bed together. Satan is restless, can't sleep. He gently strokes Beelzebub in the bed they share: [softly, trying to wake without startling]: “Sleepest thou, . . .”

I find the second more compelling than the first, because in the first version the “companion dear” would have to be delivered with a bit of a sneer, and as the line continues, it becomes harder and harder to rein this back in to express a real mutuality, which Satan seems to want to play on. (Of course, this is his first seduction, and the question of how much Beelzebub is manipulated/duped by Satan into rebelling is interesting.) In the immediate context, I find the first second more consistent with the lines and easier to deliver. It's consistent with much else in the epic (Raphael's embarrassed description of the angelic hibbity-dibbity in Book 8, for instance, though many Miltonists would insist that his language of substantial interpenetration isn't really sexual). But to fully check its consistency one would have to check the language Satan and Beelzebub use for each other throughout (“compeer” and such). Still, the question would not be what did Milton mean, but what works in a performative reading of the epic.

There are dangers in treating Milton this way, surely, not the least of which is that most students will only get one crack at Milton and could come away thinking that the epic is X or Y, rather than can be read X-ly or Y-ly.

Semi-Defense of My “Non-Tech” Colleagues

There's a not so hidden annoyance on the part of scholars engaged with digital media at the backwardness of many academic humanists. It's a sentiment that sometimes appears on the techrhet listserv, and some recent posts (and threads) by both Timothy Burke and Geeky Mom dance around this annoyance.

In large measure I agree that humanists can and should learn more about and use developing communication technologies. But I do think we need some perspective on the uses of old-fashioned-ness, especially with respect to humanism.

Adopting new communication technologies inevitably entails loss. I wish we had managed to preserve more of the culture of oral disputation from medieval universities (minus the silly cantankerousness it often encouraged.) Those who look backwards and criticize, from Socrates to Sven Birkerts, provide an important function. They help us to recognize what we are losing and ask what and how some of that might be preserved. I don't think it's generally recognized how much even current educational practice reveals our affinities with Socrates' criticism of writing in the Phaedrus. We still, as part of our educational process, get people together in face to face meetings and talk, often about pieces of writing. (I might want to argue that what we do when talking about texts is just a kind of technical training, showing people to use the technology of writing, but that's a subject for another day.)

In the process of adopting new technologies, how much room is there for human agency? I think, for instance, about Howard Reingold's fairly well-known article on the Amish from Wired. Here is a community where people think carefully about the effects introducing new technologies will have on their social life and make decisions about what to use. Too often we treat newer technologies and the worlds they call into being as inevitable. What decisions can we make, as individuals or as groups, and what are the consequences of those decisions? How can we ask these questions without seeming simplistically pro or con? In some ways, the recalcitrant and the blithely ignorant have the most to teach us as we continue to consider how to integrate these technologies into teaching.

Let me try to put this another way. All current academic humanists are remarkably sophisticated users of a technology: print. Indeed, writing itself is a technology. The techne of writing requires not only learning to encode and decode the alphabet. Even more, it involves learning to put a dialectic (people talking with/against each other) into a "monolectic" medium, and then somehow to reawaken its dialectic origins, even in the mind as reading. Writing and reading in general are much more deeply rhetorical technologies than is usually recognized, even among those who understand literacy's fundamental rhetorical structure.

Most of the blogs I read are imbued with print literacy. The best pieces are really essays, not all that different from what Montaigne and Bacon wrote. They are based in the same process of somehow mashing dialectic into the monolectic medium. And, I also hope that humanists continue to train readers who will be able, and even want, to read such things as essayistic blog posts and other "long-form" pieces. Burke, in this thread, alludes to a presentation from Kathleen Fitzpatrick that asked questions about “how to do 'long-form' scholarly work in digital environments that isn’t just an attempt to translate the book or codex into those environments, but is net-native in some respect .” Such activity requires readers who would still want (and be able) to read long form works as a basic condition. But that's an assumption. I'd guess that not many people today could follow a 14th-century disputation, because we don't have the same kind of knowledge about oral arguments and Aristotleian logic that was de rigueur for the university educated then. “Long-form” literacy could very well be lost as communication media develop in the direction of presenting everything short-form. I take this as part of what Burke means when he calls “complete hooey” much of the talk of current students being digital natives. They aren't long-form digital natives.

All this said, I agree that academic humanists often miss the boat right now. And because campus humanists often remain embedded in print culture as we move into the digital future, we don't exercise enough power, on campuses, over the direction IT takes. We ought to be leaders in this regard. But I think a large part of what we have to offer is specifically thinking about ways to use these newer technologies of the word to preserve the goal of promoting just the kind of understanding that Socrates lamented would be lost with writing.

On the difficulty of seeing things differently: Note on Rereading Ong

I've have, yet again, been rereading Ong's lecture “Writing is a Technology that Restructures Thought” in preparation for teaching it tomorrow. I like Ong, and despite understanding and accepting many criticisms of the Great Leap theory from New Literacy theorists (never got into Derrida enough to assimilate him effectively), there's still something about the basic ideas that I find compelling. But that's not what this post is about.

I just had a moment when I finally “got” the idea that writing is a technology just like the printing press or computers. It's not that I didn't get this on some level before, but I had always felt it as somehow different, that writing was somehow more fundamental and that as a technology it was different in kind from these others. In other words, it seemed an equivocation to call writing and the printing press technologies; the definition of “technology” seemed somehow to change when addressing one or the other. And to point out that they were each technologies because each one relied on tools seemed somehow to mistake accident for substance (as so many definitional arguments do.)

But I just had a moment where this idea I've been mulling over for years really did sink in. Maybe I'm just dense. But it's helpful, as a teacher, to recognize how hard it can be to think differently, how difficult it can be to assimilate a new perspective, and why it's valuable to do that work.

Why I Teach: I Love Knowledge

I'm going to pile on the "why I teach" meme, comfortable that no one will tag me seeing as how I've just started here.

This started with Dr. Crazy's excellent reaction to the MLA "Why Teach Literature" panel. It's been buoyed by reaction to Stanley Fish's two columns on the delicious uselessness of literary study. And there's also the desire, spurred by Free Exchange, for professors to explain our real motivations for teaching in the face of the Horowitzian accusations of indoctrination. (And note the spring offensive of the Academic Bill of Rights supporters, just in case you thought they had finally gone away.)

I won't repeat what others have have already said more eloquently than can I. But I'll add two things.

I.

First, the Chaucer's clerk reason: I teach because I love knowledge. I've never gotten over the pure wonderfulness of learning new things and sharing what I know with others. The problem with Fish's view is that he highlights only one kind of knowledge: the recognition of aesthetic craft. That's fine, but there's more to know, and drawing strict disciplinary boundaries around knowledge doesn't work. It doesn't work for reading literature, and is especially deforming when engaging with ideas generally, something that humanists just do, whatever our primary expertise. Yes, the pure desire to know exists beyond questions of utility, but that does not preclude the idea that knowing "in a general way" leads to a host of pragmatic ends (many of which the blogs I've linked to explain in some detail.) And I would say that this thirst for knowledge is also why research and teaching, for me and many others, really do go hand-in-hand.

I think the reason most academics are willing to do what we do for a fraction of what we'd earn for similarly demanding work is that we really do find discovery and sharing knowledge rewarding. I don't think that is so odd -- witness the number of people who still say that when they retire they would like to get a part-time teaching gig.

II.

The second important thing about teaching is that I recognize I have a limited role, albeit an important one. I won't change the world: my students will.

Most humanists I've spoken with share this point of view, which is why the idea of "indoctrination" is so far from the mark. Now, to be clear, we all have areas of expertise. Some of them are clearly useful. When questions of policy arise involving those areas of expertise, decision-makers should genuinely listen to what we have to say. (Not blindly follow, but genuinely listen. The ability to know the difference, and know how to listen, comes in part from a good liberal arts education.)

That said, I don't take it as my job to dictate what students should do with the knowledge, and more important ability to learn, that my teaching provides.