On 9 Oct 2010 at 23:17, Nicholas Thompson wrote: > Steve Smith and Lee Rudolph, and everybody, > > Why would I want a PhD to lead a discussion on Literature? > > Because, even though I was a participant in the Berkeley dustup of the > sixties, I still think that expertise has its place in the world.
Yes, indeed, Nick, it has. My point is that (with certain honorable exceptions) PhDs in English (of the sort produced in the past 50 years or so) have an expertise that is worse than irrelevant to what seems to be your goal. If J.I.M. Stewart (better known to most by his pen name of "Michael Innes", using which he wrote many quite wonderful works of fiction--none of them fictional works, I may add-- in the detective genre, most featuring John Appleby: I can particularly recommend _Hamlet, Revenge!_ from his earliest period, and _The Daffodil Affair_ from his middle period) were still available, I think *his* expertise (demonstrated in his volume _Eight Modern Writers_ in the Oxford History of English Literature series, on Hardy, Henry James, Shaw, Conrad, Kipling, Yeats, Joyce, and Lawrence) might suit your goal. Deliberately exposing yourself to a more recently minted Ph.D. in English, with expertise in deconstructionism and Theory (capital letter required, and used) and all that jazz, would give you greater head- and heartaches than any you ever experienced trying to figure out just WTF was going on in the Kitchen Seminar at its wooziest: and the pain wouldn't buy you either insight or pleasure, I am nearly certain. So why do it? > If any of you know of a retired or an underemployed literature professor, I > wish you would have them give me a call. What you need is a retired or underemployed *writing* professor (not that they all can be trusted, either), whose expertise is (generally) in helping seminar members to engage with the text (which, again generally, often includes not only writing by the seminar members, but "exemplary" writing by others, in apposite genres) in a much less high-handed way than the kind of "engagement" with the "text" that insists on "post-modernly-ironic 'scare quotes'" around "every" "second" "word". Lee P.S. (just to Nick): I wronged Stanley Sultan by including him in that list in my last message; he was (as far as I can tell) at worst a "New Critic" (meaning, by now, a member of an old, old school). But, honestly, did you *ever* try to talk about writing with Fern? It's bafflegab all the way down, in Ph.D. programs in literature these days. ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
