I figured it was about time I was ushered into the "Me" Generation, so here I am (somewhat against my will, as I'd always suspected), writing about what I think.
I can't remember the last time I kept a journal. I can't remember what my last paper was about. Sometimes I consider myself a fraud. I tell myself, ineffectively, Quit while you're ahead. You're a fraud. And very soon everyone will realize you know much less than you think you do.
Nowhere was that made more clear to me than in my attempt at reading Old Books and New Histories. Now I don't consider myself a slow reader. In fact, I consider myself a very competent one. I do not admit to having an extremely large and broad vocabulary, but I feel mine is sufficiently placed above the average for a human being (although I do not, unfortunately, possess the necessary evidence to confirm this; suffice it to say, I have a hunch). And I have not only felt, but on more than one occasion, it has been mentioned to me that I have somewhat of an acute sense of disseminating complex ideas into more easily digestible and readily available language; a "tutoring" instinct if you will, targeting those who seem to struggle with said concepts.
Yet I, quintessentially, forever remain a lay person. I am resigned to this fact. I will always be a professional at nothing, an amateur at everything; a jack of all trades, but king of none. How did I come to this depressing conclusion?
I could not concentrate on this book.
I refuse to stoop to the level of the sophomoric and call it "boring," for I am intelligent and insightful enough to recognize that Howsam's self-proclaimed "little book" contains more than its fair share of academic merit (beyond all of the fancy and completely esoteric citations which mean little more to me than a game of bibliographical Mad-Libs), but I. Could. Not. Follow. Along.
Could I be stupid? Lazy? Disrespectful of the hard work and concentration of others? Have I lost the magic?
Or could it just be that I don't give a shit that Howsam wants to validate her obscure niche in the academic cave?
And it just cannot be that this is entirely my fault, because I will direct you to the second paragraph of page 34, the moment that any interest I had in the further reading of this book all but dissolved. Howsam found it relevant to add a juvenile argument by Adams and Barker over semantics that only serves to perpetuate the accepted view of bibliography as a "'handmaiden' to another discipline." An academic pissing contest I am not interested in, nor in the inferiority complexes of its insecure constituents.
Don't get me wrong. I love reading. And I tried reading this. But I had to persevere. And at least after a 5k run, you walk away with a feeling of accomplishment and satisfaction.
After this reading, I think I was startled awake this morning from some sort of Oedipal nightmare about being trapped in an insane asylum and yearning for the comforting embrace of my mommy... but that could be totally unrelated...
And it's true I've been remembering my dreams more vividly since I quit smoking...
-M.C.
I have to say that I found a lot of comfort in your struggles with Howsam. I realize that sounds cruel but please hear me out. I'm a returning student who has been 6 years removed from the classroom and Old Books & New Histories is the first book I have picked up for "academic" purposes and I felt like my return is going to be more difficult than I anticipated. I went as far to ask my brother, who is a physician, if I'm suffering from ADD because I simply could not concentrate and found myself reading and rereading every paragraph twice and three times before moving on. When he looked at me with a puzzled look, I asked him to read a page of Howsam. His response was not complimentary as you can imagine but it wasn't until I showed up to class and heard the criticism of my peers that I felt a bit better about myself. Reading your blog has also contributed to somewhat restoring my shattered confidence. So, thank you.
ReplyDeleteGhyath
Michael, as I stated in class, I figured this was your blog, because I recognized your unique brand of cynicism from another class (I think it was one of Dr. Shaviro's classes, but I'm starting to lose track). I hope you do not take this as an insult or criticism, because it is not. You seem to toe a line, and manage to remain as cynical as one needs to be these days, but at the same time, not allow it to be arresting--at least I gather that from what I have heard you say in class discussions.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, Howsam's book is indeed dense, and indeed a formidable read, but she does seem to be concerned that all of the time and effort being put into this "discipline," is being recognized as valuable and relevant. There is no short way around some things. I don't know if you're familiar with the branch of literary criticism known as Hermeneutics, but I had the pleasure of taking Dr. Craig Smith's course on it this past summer, and the first book on Hermeneutics that we dealt with was as dense as Howsam's book, and dealt with some of the same confusing, monotonous, and unnerving issues of "interdisciplinarity," but was at least three times as long as Howsam's book.
Which I guess is neither here nor there, but seems to explain why I may have had more patience with Howsam's book, than what I hear other people attesting to. I do feel her book is written like she is on the defensive, which would make sense, seeing as the value and relevance of this particular "discipline" is continuously called into question by other branches of "academia." Like she writes towards the end, will "Book History," if allowed to grow as its own field of study, "repay the devotion of massive intellectual (and economic) resources?" I think it should, but perhaps the onus lies on the shoulders of Dr. Maruca to guide us all to conclusions about this by the end of the semester--and if not conclusions, than at least to a point where we can form an opinion...I guess. We are only two classes into the semester for crying out loud.
Considering how many people go to college these days, to do nothing more than get some half-ass, jive, mediocre, bullshit career, I welcome every new field of actual academic study I encounter.
Inconveniently,
Scott
Though I read this post nearly right after it was posted, I have thus far refrained from commenting on it. Like you, I found Howsom's book elusive at best. There were portions that thrilled me, that clicked in an intellectual way among ideas that had hitherto remained unformed, and there were portions that tied my mind in knots, confusing me beyond any sort of eloquence on the subject.
ReplyDeleteHowever, despite my personal trials and tribulations with Howsam, I persevered and read the book through, giving the author the benefit of the doubt that, though I might not be able to make heads or tails of what she has to say about, as you put it, an "obscure niche in the academic cave," she might know what she is talking about.
I suppose that because of this, what surprised me most about last week's discussion was the level of animosity - or if that is too strong a word, critcism - on Howsam's book. Granted, I will admit to her flaws; her subject matter is dense and worthy of a much longer treatise than her 77-page essay. Indeed, I feel it is her central flaw and where most of the confusion over her study on interdisciplinarity in book culture arises from. Too much information, not enough detail.
But despite this flaw, perhaps even because of it, I focused all the harder on what Howsam was attempting to get across. As she clearly states on pg. 3, "As one of my students once concluded, 'the book is a shape-shifter,' and the attendant conditonn of disorientation can be both pleasurable and disturbing, intoxicating and mind-altering, creative and confusing." I don't believe you are supposed to understand absolutely everything Howsam has to say. That's the point. Interdisciplinarity is a wide, far-reaching discipline, one that exhibits both vague and concrete traits. It is a 'shape-shifter,' moving among the academic disciplines with stealth, a combination of all relevant theories and processes.
Howsam, in her best interests, is only attempting to illuminate a few of these traits and disciples by their relation to book culture. She might not have succeeded fully, but that does not mean we should refer to it as "an academic pissing contest." I think you come down to hard on her... but even harder on yourself. It sounds to me like you gave up before you even started. There are always going to be books you dislike; it is simply the nature of higher education. The trick is to find something, no matter how miniscule, that you do find interesting and run with it.
Don't give up on yourself so early. After all, isn't being a "jack of all trades" just another way of saying that you yourself are a work of interdisciplinarity?
Scott makes the cogent point that seems to underline what I think is a major goal behind Howsam's book. "I do feel her book is written like she is on the defensive, which would make sense, seeing as the value and relevance of this particular 'discipline' is continuously called into question by other branches of 'academia'." A lot of the 'turn-offs' that you and other bloggers have been describing probably relate to a prejudice about the validity of the study of book history as a field in its own right.
ReplyDeleteHowsam is a historian engaging in a strong "defence of the perspective of the discipline of history upon the history of the book." As a historian, she is pained to learn that "the history of the book was not a subspecialty that departments of history in even major universities felt obliged to cover." So, in her essay, she tries to rally the troops from the fields of bibliography, and literature to stand up and demand credibility for the study of the history of the book. She is trying to defend her pursuit from her own colleagues by fomenting discussion and research by practitioners in the two other major fields that pertain to it.
Just consider the title of her book, "Old Books and New Histories: An Orientation to Studies in Book an Print Culture." She's not even pretending to engage historians! She directs her essay to "book and print culture" enthusiasts; in other words, those people in the field of literature and bibliography. She can fight the battle with historians on her own ground, but she's calling on the other two disciplines to raise the flag and carry onward.
We seem to have really let her down. By not even attempting to shed light on the "obscure niche in the academic cave," we fall prey to the same old prejudice that Howsam is trying to fight. The history of the book should engage us as English majors because its the elephant in the room that everyone ignores. We pretend to be interested in history as it relates to the texts and the authors that we study, but when it comes to the development, maturation, growth, transformation, and history of the very mechanism that we purport to care about, we simply gloss it over with nothing but pithy words and placating gestures. Shame on us.
My, my, my. What an infinitely interesting mind you have. The way you write causes me to want to read pages and pages of your thoughts, ideas, and concepts about life and literature. I know that sounds a bit grand, but, as an actor, I have been training for years to be able to "hear" text, to turn black and white into an audible dialogue in my mind and understand tonality and inflections without actually hearing them. Your writing is pleasantly fresh and melodic in my mind. Or at least that is what I imagine.
ReplyDeleteAnyways, I wanted to comment that, just because you may have a difficult time with a book, that doesn’t meant that there's a problem... anywhere. Not necessarily with the writing, not necessarily with the reader, just that a veritable melding of the analytical mind with the palpable words on the page seems to fail, and that doesn’t have to be the fault of anyone. Not every way of thinking is going to match with every other way of thinking, and that is exactly what this book is: a representation of one way of thinking. If that constant connection did happen every single time two minds collide with each other, what fun would this world hold for perpetuators of chaos like me?