Dr. Metablog

Cornell English Then and Now -- 3C

I'm a lifetime fan of Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. I love all the shipboard stuff, the adventure, the exoticism, Crusoe's self-reliance, his  psychological complexity, his religious ponderings, and especially the recapitulation of nascent capitalism on the island. I'm as entranced as ever by the attempt to domesticate goats, by his attempt to build a boat, by the single footprint on the beach, by Friday's escape and the battle with the cannibals. With a little effort, I have been able to set to one side the novel's faults: the author's careless repetitions, his appalling colonialist racism, those last anticlimactic adventures and the return to England, the unnatural absence of sexuality or passion, the paranoia and the unnecessary violence. Massive defects, yes indeed, but Robinson Crusoe is still a great eternally wonderful mishmash of a novel. 

So it came as a surprise to read Laura Brown's one-sentence summary of the novel in The Counterhuman Imaginary: "Robinson Crusoe enacts a self-creative other-than-human vitality by setting matter in motion through the persistent repetition of irresistible succession."  

Maybe Robinson Crusoe does "enact" and "set matter in motion" -- I don't know, can't say. But I do not plan to undergo the pain and woe of making sense out of her ungainly and mystifying sentence. For Laura Brown, Robinson Crusoe is not the pleasure and challenge that it has been for three hundred years -- it's just raw material for her dry-as-dust ideological machine.

And a waste of my precious time.

 

[February 1] Bernhard Starr writes:  "Brown transforms the gold of literature into the dross of criticism."

[February 1] Professor Merlon Crenelle, Southwestern Louisiana U., writes: "Vivian, you're totally unfair. You take one sentence out of the chapter and make fun of it. You don't even bother to see how the sentence is related to the larger argument. You owe Professor Laura Brown an apology. You're irresponsible."

[February 1] Marianne Morrison, Ph. D. writes: "Vivian, I agree with Mr. (Ms.?) Crenelle. You've not tried to understand Brown. Your lazy."

[February 2] Vivian de St. Vrain responds:  "Whether I'm lazy or not, Brown writes in an obscure code. Why should I have to try to crack the code?  Why can't she write in English? She's a Professor of English, for goodness sake. It's not my job to figure out what she's trying to say; it's her job to make it plain."

[February 2] Sean R. Fine writes: "It makes me wonder about the "imaginary" in which Laura Brown seems to thrive. Closed, cloistered, self-congratulatory."

[February 3] Thurman Valentino (SVDGA) writes: "I think that Vivian de St. Vrain is absolutely correct not to try to figure out what that sentence means. It's not a reader's responsibility. My opinion is that Laura Brown is smart enough to produce a complicated argument, but not smart enough to make complicated argument clear."

[February 3] Michael F. Bristol writes: "Or maybe, dear Viv, you're not smart enough to figure it all out."

[February 4] Vivian de St. Vrain replies: "OK, Bristol, if you're so smart why don't you just tell us exactly what "persistent repetition of irresistible succession" means."  

[February 4] J C Occhiogrosso suggests: "One thing regularly follows another?"

[February 7] Beulah Cussen writes:  "The problem is not with just that one sentence. It's that whole paragraphs and pages are filled with such difficult sentences. After each of these, a reader has to pause and interpret before going on to the next one. It puts far too much burden on the reader." 

[February 9] Gabriel Withee III writes: "I tried to read the book but I didn't get very far. Do visitors to this blog remember the criticism of academic articles and books: "What is new is not true and what is true is not new." This book is even worse, because what's true is utterly trivial."

[February 9] Bernhard Starr responds: "Gabriel Withee, I agree with you.  There's no there there."

[February 13]. Herbert Lecovin (Cornell '61) writes: "The important question is what is going on in her classroom. Does she lecture in this dialect and does she expect her students to write as she does?

Cornell English Then and Now: 3B

I'm still trying to come to terms with Laura Brown's book, The Counterhuman Imaginary. I've wrestled the title to a draw, and now I'm going to take a crack at the Introduction. Is this task a good use of my limited time?

Let me quote a sentence that I take to be the very heart of the book and the heart of the problem. It's a doozy.

"Human story telling is found to provide a subtle scenario for affirming the other-than-human, based on an imputed commonality that replaces human priority with cross-species inclusivity that transcends the human." 

Laura Brown's prose reads as if it were first drafted in German and then rendered into English by Google Translate.  

It takes effort, but once you penetrate its peculiar idiom, it makes a kind of sense. For those of my readers who are still with me, let me try to parse this sentence. I suspect It may mean something like, "human beings project thoughts and feelings onto animals and objects."

"Human story telling" [that is, literature]

"is found to provide" [the passive "is found," should be deleted even though it functions as a compliment to the person (i.e. the author herself) to whom this insight has been revealed.]

"a subtle scenario" [I don't know exactly what the phrase "subtle scenario" means; nor do I think it anyone does.] 

"based on an imputed commonality " [I understand "commonality" because I know that humans and animals share many features. I don't see the necessity for the word 'imputed"; imputed by whom? who other than humans can "impute."] 

"that replaces human priority" [i.e. there should be no preference for humans over animals and rocks, despite the paradox that humans and not animals can think about the equivalence.] 

"with cross-species inclusivity" ["inclusivity" is implicit in the previous rejection of "human priority." Wow, these abstract nouns do pile up (commonality, priority, inclusivity). Suggested simplification: "that includes other species"]

"that transcends the human.]. Transcends, in this final clause, smuggles into the argument a new idea, because "to transcend" means "to surpass." The claim now, as this snake of a sentence winds its weary way to conclusion, is that the meaning that humans attach to things is greater than the humans who do the attaching. At least I think that is what it may mean.]

So after completing this investigation, I think that the claim is that literature projects ideas onto animals and also things. And sometimes these projections illuminate and enhance both things and animals. 

I'm exhausted. I had planned to discuss the Introduction at greater length, but I've had enough. Instead of proceeding with the introduction, I'm going to try to understand the chapter on Robinson Crusoe (a novel that I first read as a boy and have read several times since, and which I feel that I understand). Stay tuned.

 

 

[January 31]  Petal Rivera writes:  "So it seems that Brown's book is not a novelty of ideas, but a novelty of language."

[January 31] Sean R. Fine writes: "I agree with Ms. Rivera. Simple ideas cast in pretentious language to make them seem important. This emperor of literary criticism has no clothes. None whatsoever,"

[February 1] Joel Salzberg writes: "Vivian, good job of unravelling that sentence even though I still don't quite understand it."

{February 1] Viola Pilbeam writes:  "Vivian, you're too kind. Why don't you just  admit that this whole book is absurd American nonsense."

[February 4] Helena Hotchkiss-Jones replies: "This absurdity can't be blamed on the Americans. It's as much the fault of Deleuze, Adorno, etc."]

February 4] Joel Salzberg replied: "Who is Deleuze Adorno?" 

Cornell English Then and Now -- 3A

I am absolutely buffaloed by Laura Brown's book, The Counterhuman Imaginary (Cornell UP, 2023).

The title is a puzzle. Why does the adjective come after the noun? And what does the word "counterhuman" mean?  (One hundred and forty-six pages to go and I'm already off balance. I'm worried that if I can't understand the title I'm going to have a heck of a difficult time with the content.)

I took a guess that the coinage "counterhuman" would signify something monstrous or terrifying, like a vampire, troll or ogre. But I was not even in the ballpark. "Counterhuman," I have now discovered, is a term of art in contemporary literary criticism that refers to everything that is not human: not only animals, natural phenomena such as storms and earthquakes, but also "things" or objects -- anything that is constructed or manufactured. Not "inhuman' -- just not human. (But why "counter" rather than "non" human?)

Moreover, the word "imaginary," which I have for a lifetime understood to be an adjective signifying what is not material but rather a product of the human mind, as for example, art and literature and dreams, has also undergone metamorphosis. According to wiki, the adjective-turned-noun "imaginary" "is the set of values, institutions, laws, and symbols common to a particular social group and the corresponding society through which people imagine their social whole.” That's a deal of territory, but I think I understand: "imaginary" is essentially a synonym for what I might, naively, have called "culture." (Might an alternative to The Counterhuman Imaginary be The Culture of Things? It's a more inviting title and much less pretentious.)

But now I'm stopped in my tracks. The "imaginary, it appears, is "the work of a particular social group." How in the world, then, do the "counterhuman," who are incapable of thought, possibly generate "a structure of ideas?" Pots and pans and volcanoes and marmosets don't have brains that think or speak, except when we humans attribute such traits to them. 

In a whimsical moment, Duke Senior, in As You Like It, proposed that there are "tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones." Am I to understand that this author takes seriously what Shakespeare regarded as an ironic jokey extravagance? Gosh, I hope not.

I think I now get the point: Laura Brown, the John Wendell Anderson Professor of English at Cornell University, intends to defend a paradox. She will explain to me how non-humans, things without an intelligence, can create a culture. I'd better pay close attention. Or perhaps the author means to advance the trivial but more sensible and less sensational idea that humans can attribute culture to animals and things.

Nevertheless, I must say what's on my mind -- what a deliberately off-putting title. It's clearly designed to repel the general reader, someone like myself, and to speak only to coterie fellow-travelers who might understand either or both of the words "counterhuman" and "imaginary." Not a large potential audience.

Do I have a chip on my shoulder as I turn from the title to the Introduction. Yes, I believe I do.

 

[January 25] Marianne Morrison, Ph.D. writes:  "Vivian, you should not go on with this. You're so prejudiced against this writer that you can't give her a fair hearing."

[January 25] Vivian de St. Vrain responds: "Marianne, I'm trying my best to be fair and honest."

[January 26] Petal Rivera writes: "Vivian, I think you're naive to suggest a less pretentious title. I hate to say it, but the point is not to avoid pretense, but to be pretentious. No modesty in this book."

[January 27] J C Occhiogrosso writes:  "Vivian, you're being deliberately obtuse. C'mon, it's not so difficult."

[February 4] Vivian de St. Vrain responds:  "Ok, J C, if it's so easy, why don't you suggest a better title."

[February 12] Winifred A. Walker writes: "Like it or not, this is typical academic jargon. If you want to read this book, you must master the idiom."]

Words of My Life -- Poop

Nowadays, the ordinary meaning of the noun "poop" is feces. Perhaps because "poop" is a nursery word, it is apparently less offensive than "crap" or "shit." And yet less infantile than kaka or doodoo.

But "poop" did not refer to the work of the lavatory until about 1720. Nor do I remember it being in general use during my childhood.

I myself first encountered the word "poop" in the escapist seagoing novels to which I was addicted as an adolescent: the Bounty trilogy, the Hornblower series, Treasure Island, Mr Midshipman Easy, and the buccaneering books of Rafael Sabatini, Jeffery Farnol, and many many others whose names have been long forgotten. In these romantic novels, it was often the case that a handsome young midshipman and a pretty maiden, her golden hair cascading over her shapely shoulders, would flirt while leaning against the taffrail of the "poop." I had known or suspected that "poop" carried stercoraceous overtones, my budding fantasy life would have turned to dreck. Thank goodness I knew nothing.

The poop deck, I soon deduced, was the roof of the cabin built into the aft of a sailing vessel. Why "poop?" From the French word for stern, poupe, itself derived from the Latin puppis (also signifying stern). Wherefore puppis? No one knows -- the word has no analogues in other ancient languages.

Shakespeare used the naval "poop" in the celebrated passage in Anthony and Cleopatra in which Anthony was greeted by Cleopatra. It's the epitome of classical conspicuous consumption as well as Shakespearean eloquence.

The barge she sat in, like a burnish'd throne,
Burn'd on the water: the poop was beaten gold;
Purple the sails, and so perfumed that
The winds were love-sick with them.

 

An impressively decorated vessel and a spectacular poop, which, because languages change and meanings shift, now provokes involuntary undergraduate titters. In truth, generations of teachers of Shakespeare have amused themselves with the notorious (or perhaps mythical) student blunder: "her poop was beaten gold." 

 

Other varieties of "poop." There's the poop that means exhausted, as in "I'm pooped." And poop as inside information. "I got the true poop on this." And poop as a useless or ineffectual person (thought to derive from nincompoop): "He's an old poop."  A party-pooper.

 

Shakespeare himself knew still another, and rarer, poop. In Pericles, a pander and a bawd discuss their need for fresh "creatures."  Their conversation is mighty vulgar.

 

Bawd:  The stuff we have, a strong wind will blow it to pieces.

Pander: The poor Transylvanian is dead that lay with the little baggage. 

Bawd:  Ay, she quickly pooped him; she made him roast-meat for worms.

 

Poop was also, it would seem, a slang term for the female genitalia. The Bawd has "denominalized" (as the linguists say) the word and converted it into a verb ("she pooped him)" that has the force of "infect with a venereal disease."

 

Certainly, the word poop has, over the centuries, done yeoman duty.

 

 

Other words of my life: try here.

Cornell English Then and Now -- 2

To begin my project of getting a fix on Cornell's Department of Literatures in English, I attempted to read Professor Jeremy Braddock's Collecting as Modernist Practice (Johns Hopkins, 2012). 

My plan is to read these Cornell contributions to knowledge with as much empathy and as little prejudice as I can muster.

Despite my good will, I got off to a bad start. The title of Braddock's book, Collecting as Modernist Practice, struck me as dispiriting and uninviting. It's an uncompromising coterie title that seems to say to me (and to every general reader), "I don't care whether you read this book or not." And indeed the copy that I borrowed from the university library had sat on the shelf unthumbed and pristine for the twelve years since its publication. Perhaps it's the minuscule typeface.

Collecting as Modernist Practice is not a page-turner. I found it rough going, and I now confess that I read closely only the introduction and one chapter -- and skimmed the rest.  Braddock studies the work of collecting and anthologizing art and poetry in the modernist (mostly 1920s) period. The chapter that I studied, The New Negro in the Field of Collections, was enlightening and I was glad to have read it. Braddock is an indefatigable researcher. Sentence after sentence is supported by extensive archival work and a plenty of footnotes. I do wish that the author was as interested in the art and mystery of literature as he is in literature's reception. Collecting as Modernist Practice might be more at home in a department of sociology. 

Braddock's prose style is awkward and forbidding. He loves long static sentences with complex subjects and predicates that are sutured with weak verbs. In the pages that I studied, I rarely encountered a metaphor or any other figure of speech. Braddock is also partial to newly-coined polysyllabic abstractions that he may think add heft to his thesis, but which in fact frustrate his readership: minoritarian, identitarianism, anthologization, narrativizing. On the whole, entirely too much suffixizationality.  

I will always be grateful to Braddock for introducing me to Witter Bynner's 1917 Spectra hoax, of which I was ignorant, and especially for acquainting me with the fabulous name of one of poets that Bynner invented: Anne Knish.

 

[January 13] Oksana Sartry writes:  "Vivian, I don't think that you're entirely fair to Braddock. It's true that his prose style is imperfect, but remember that the book is most likely his dissertation.  And for a diss. it's quite good. I also think that when he writes about poetry, he's quite thoughtful and insightful."

[January 13] Marianne Morrison, Ph. D. writes:  "Vivian, your too harsh about Braddock's vocabulary. Those words that you poke fun at are the regular vocabulary for people of his generation; your out of touch.  

[January 14] Oksana Sartry replies: "I wonder why Johns Hopkins published this diss. in its modernism series. Good diss., but immature book."

[January 17] Sean R. Fine writes:  "I'm interested in modernism, but frankly, this book is absolutely unreadable. Whatever value it has is buried beneath tons of jargon. Gives academia a bad name." 

 

Cornell English Then and Now -- 1

Here's a truth that blows my freakin' mind: since I earned my B. A. in English from Cornell University in 1960, sixty-five years have come and gone. Glaciers have melted and rivers have changed their course since, way back when, in a previous millennium, I was first introduced to serious literature -- to Chaucer and Milton and George Eliot.

My professors in those far-away-and-long-ago days were exclusively male and for the most part veterans of WW2 or the Korean war. They wrote definitive scholarly articles for the Philological Quarterly and for Modern Philology; they published learned monographs on canonical poets and novelists; and they taught courses with such forthright titles as The Seventeenth Century and Wordsworth and Coleridge. Although I was an indifferent student before I arrived at Cornell, I found an intellectual home in the Department of English. Inasmuch as I did not have a brain for rigorous science or for the tough analytic philosophy that was then in fashion, I was fortunate that the work of English suited my limited abilities -- curiosity, patience, a good memory, and something of a feel for language.

Just yesterday (what prompted me?), I took a peek at the current website of Cornell's English Department. (In the index-card 1950s, when the manual typewriter represented the summit of technology, the word "website" would have signified a dark corner colonized by spiders.) Even at first glance, the 2025 Cornell website said to me "very very different, very 'now'." While an occasional word or phrase was recognizable, it was the novelty -- the modernity, I guess -- that flew off the electronic page. Time marches on, no doubt, but whether it marches boldly forward or plunges over a cliff remains to be established.  

First of all, it's no longer the Department of English. It's now, hurrah, the "Department of Literatures in English." What a welcome redefinition -- an assertion that English is a world language and that it houses a world literature. Nowadays, if I sit down with a work of fiction, I'm just as likely to read a novel by a writer from Africa or India or Australia as one from Britain or North America. There's not a reason in the world why Chinua Achebe or Abdulrazak Gurnah should not be studied in an English Department. I respect this shift in focus and I regret that my 1950s Chaucer-to-T. S. Eliot English department was so parochial, so provincial. I can only admire the fact that the Department of Literatures in English has annexed to itself whole continents of writing -- a case of academic imperialism that for this one time seems wholly right and just.

The website also reveals that, in a nation in which the study of the humanities in higher education is at risk, Cornell's English is a huge thriving enterprise. There are fifty-one people on permanent staff, almost all of professorial rank. Of this number, twenty-seven -- or slightly more than half -- are women. And among those pictured on the site, a significant number are "of color." Undoubtedly, the present department is a far more representative collection of individuals than my 1950s faculty. Moreover, the chair, the associate chair, the director of undergraduate studies, the director of graduate students, and the director of writing are all women. It may once have been the case that the occasional female interloper was a token for display only, but not so now.

And what do these handsome and distinguished men and women study? Fortunately for me, members of the faculty list their areas of concentration. Most claim two or three specialties, some as many as five; a few recalcitrant individuals list none, leaving me to wonder whether they are polymaths or just ornery uncooperative academics. Among the fifty-one, the single expertise most commonly claimed is "cultural studies." This preponderance set me back a bit, because "cultural studies" is not a term I recognize nor one that existed, as far as I know, in the 1950s, when the word "culture" was synonymous with "civilization" -- sometimes just Western Civilization -- and when "cultured" meant something equivalent to "educated" and possibly even "socially established." But now, apparently, "cultural studies" is, and I quote a respected source, "an academic field  that... investigates how cultural practices relate to wider systems of power. These include ideology, class structures, national formations, ethnicity, sexual orientation and gender." Am I correct, and is it possible, to infer from this litany of nouns that "cultural practices" comprehends just about everything that we as a society say or do? Clearly the Department of Literatures in English lays claim to a heck of a lot of intellectual territory -- and that it is a far more aggressive entity than is revealed by its absorption of Anglophone novels. I was initially suspicious of these extensive claims, but after reflectingt for a while I recognized that, if I set to one side the self-aggrandizing listing of ideology, ethnicity, class... etc,), cultural studies may in practice simply bring to the forefront such elements as imperialism and nationhood in Robinson Crusoe or race and gender in Othello. Wouldn't it be comforting if "cultural studies" is at least in part merely traditional wine in fancy new bottles? I, for one, certainly hope so.

After cultural studies, it is "literary theory" that claims the largest group of adherents -- thirteen, or about a quarter of the faculty. This revelation surprised me because I would have guessed that "theory" had long since gone the way of the aurochs and the mouflon. "Theory" had its herd of enthusiasts in its obscurantist heyday in the last century, yet it seems to be alive and kicking at Cornell -- but only, I suspect, as a vestigial remnant of an earlier time and only among the more senior members of the Department.

Following "theory" in popularity among the professoriate are the seven members who stake their claim to "gender studies." Six other say "African-American." The nine who announce a specialty in creative writing may not know that they are the successors and the beneficiaries of late revered James McConkey. Not a single member of the faculty offers "Shakespeare" or "Milton" as an area of expertise. I do not doubt that the study of gender and African-American and Asian-American literatures is a good thing, but I would have wished that the authors of the finest works of art in all of Anglophonia be accorded equivalent attention and status.   

Would a reincarnated Youthful Me elect take a degree from such a faculty?  I'm skeptical, but I can't say for sure because I don't know whether or not, in the classroom, the scrupulous examination of literature and ideas has been compromised by transitory and faddish ideologies. I must confess that the biases of the website make me feel old and wary and out of touch. And tired.

Well then, what does take place in the classroom?

Let's sample some evidence.

In days of yore, I enrolled in "Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama," a course taught by the distinguished scholar and teacher David Novarr. The course was organized as a chronological march from Kyd and Marlowe in the 1580s right through to Ford and Massinger -- the last playwrights of significance before the theaters went dark in 1642. I remember savoring some delightful comedies by Ben Jonson and Francis Beaumont and also a couple of ferociously brilliant tragedies by Thomas Middleton -- writings, I suspect, that 2020s English majors are not destined to encounter -- even though an acquaintance with these plays is essential background for understanding the timeless works of Shakespeare.  

There's no equivalent course in the present curriculum, but there is an analogue, and it appears in the catalogue of offerings thusly: 

ENGL 3240. Blood Politics:  Comparative Renaissance Drama

Blood is everywhere. From vampire shows to video games, our culture seems to be obsessed with it. The course examines the power of "blood" in the early modern period as a figure that continues to capture our imagination, not only as a marker of racial, religious, and sexual difference and desire, but also as a dramatic player in its own right. How does a politics of blood appear on stage when populations are being expelled and colonized for reasons (mis)understood in terms of blood? In the course of trying to answer this and other questions of blood, we will read plays by Shakespeare, Webster, Kyd, Cervantes, Lope de Vega, and Calderón de la Barca. Topics include honor, revenge, purity, the body, sexuality, conversion, and death.

The course description itself is a mess -- both incomprehensible and meretricious. I'm shocked by the catchpenny pandering. Do 2020s teachers need to lure students into their classrooms with "vampires" and "videos?" The assertion that "blood is a dramatic player in its own right" is both false and foolish. The description reads like advertising copy for a cheesy low-budget horror flick playing at some louche all-night grind house.

Moreover, "blood" isn't "everywhere." 

I'm afraid that these entrancing plays are doomed to be put through the "cultural studies" homogenizer.

Ah, well.

Back in 1960, I had a summer job in Ithaca and therefore happened to be loafing around the campus when the University hosted its returning alumni. Among the returnees were the old folks  -- some of them members of the class of 1895 -- who had assembled for their Sixty-Fifth. Geezers, I thought. I never imagined that I myself would ever live to be quite so "mature." It's sobering to realize that those codgers were the same age -- 86 -- as I am now. Should I  return to Ithaca this coming spring, for my very own Sixty-Fifth, I will be perceived by the young 'uns exactly as I observed those Class of 1895 guys: as ancient and irrelevant.

It follows, therefore, that my reservations about the 2025 English curriculum have their exact parallel in the 1895ers perspective on my 1960 curriculum. It's not hard to imagine that they -- I mean the members of the class of 1895 -- who had been educated in elocution and Old Norse, would have been shocked and perhaps outraged by the 1950s "modern" curriculum that I found so enticing and illuminating.

And now, because I don't want to go full curmudgeon and become the kind of codger who shakes his crooked stick at the modern world and deplores the decline of civilization, I'm going to make an effort to find out what's really going on in 2025. I have therefore set myself the task of reading a representative sample of the books written by members of the present-day English faculty.

I'll report on my studies right here.

Stay tuned.

[January 18] Bernhard Starr writes:  "Vivian, you are right about the course description. It's a disgrace. It's badly written and ridiculous. Why didn't you include the name of the prof. who wrote it?  He/she needs to be exposed. What "populations are being expelled and colonized" by Volpone or The Changeling?  And did you look other course descriptions -- are they equally silly?  What's worst about the course description is that it doesn't respect the plays that the class is going to examine. They're not important interesting dramas to the teacher -- they're just fodder for an ideology. 

[January 19] Vivian de St. Vrain replies: "Mr. Starr, I didn't identify the author of the course description because the website doesn't identify him/her. Just as well. Also, I didn't read other course descriptions though I might do so in the future. I think you're correct that the course description does not respect the dramas or their authors. Which is, as you suggest, mighty disappointing." 

[January 19] Bernhard Starr replies:  "I think I'd rather study Old Norse."

[February 4] Thurston Dale replies:  "I guess I'm a geezer, too (Cornell, '65). I'm glad I majored in English before criticism turned crazy. Great teachers -- Mizener, Abrams, Parrish, Novarr."