Stratofanatic's Emporium

I don't often talk about writing pedagogy here, but given that most of my teaching is for Writing Program classes, and that my professionalization is continually ongoing, I've obviously developed many, many views on the theory and practice of writing, especially in Writing Programs. Anyway, we've recently devised the draft for a "values statement," and it's loaded with words like compassion, autonomy , equity , inclusion , and curiosity . The whole thing made me roll my eyes, and in response to this draft, I presented my objections to the entire statement in the following manner ----------------------- So .... I'll be honest. I absolutely hate this statement. The bolded words [ compassion, autonomy ,  equity ,  inclusion , and  curiosity]  are a simple list of abstract-noun buzzwords, and although I have no real objections to any word in particular (for example, what rational person would reject autonomy?), that is largely because each buzzword is so vague...

Recently started reading Amber Lehning's The Map of Wilderland: Ecocritical Reflections on Tolkien's Myth of Wilderness  (2022), and while I'm not far along enough in the book to offer a final opinion, I did get stopped in my tracks by one early remark in particular:  Had he written nothing else, " Beowulf : The Monsters and the Critics" would have been enough to rank Tolkien among the great critical thinkers of Western literature. (8) It's hard to believe that no one, nowhere, in the entire  production process, caught this truly wince-worthy hagiographic exaggeration. Of course, Tolkien's essay undoubtedly is the single most famous essay ever composed on Beowulf , but still ..... "great critical thinkers"?  Tolkien was a brilliant philologist, to be sure, but even among medievalists there's a lot of competition for the spot of top dog. When you branch that out to great "critical" thinkers of all Western literature, that makes me qu...

Yeah, this maybe will be a weird post, coming from a Tolkien scholar. Still, reflecting more on John M. Bowers's excellent Tolkien's Lost Chaucer (2019), I realize that Tolkien would have struggled badly as a modern academic ... and that I, most likely, would have resented him deeply as a colleague.  Not as a person , mind you; Tolkien's a decent enough fellow. But my feelings are very much the product of academic labor under the modern neoliberal university. Thousands upon thousands of academics in various states of precarity: contingent laborers who, despite exceedingly high competence in every area of academic labor (research, teaching, and administration), and despite no research support, poor wages, and stressful labor conditions, nevertheless toil in precarity while certain excessively privileged faculty (certain tenure-trackers, Ivy Leaguers, etc.) muddy along with at best middling competence. Don't get me wrong -- as a philologist, Tolkien was brilliant, and he ...