disadvantages

[truepenny]

I have a ten-page distillation of my committee's comments on the albatross. I've gone through and highlighted everything that is about me not knowing how to engage in dialogue with other critics. I'm not sure those highlighted bits are actually half the list, but for an eyeballed estimate, it's pretty close.

Which, on the one hand, is good. Almost everything else is quibbles, typos, or places where my language was ambiguous enough that one of the sheep got away from the sheepdog. There are maybe only two or three that are going to require much more than rephrasing and maybe an extra sentence or two. And really, you know, that means I've done a pretty good job with the actual argument.

I am reminding myself to be pleased by that.

Because the bad news is that that means this thing that I don't know how to do and that I hate is the thing that's going to keep this albatross around my neck. Catch-22. If I wanted to go up, they wouldn't let me.

I have told my director that I need to talk to her about this, and I'm hoping that we'll be able to work something out that will keep me from going mad and needing to be locked in the attic. At the very least, maybe she can give me a crash course in this subject that four years of undergrad and three years of graduate coursework failed to teach me, and failed even to register as something I needed to be taught.

Yes, I am a little bitter. Thanks for asking.

However, Mirrorthaw introduced me to Neverwinter Nights over the weekend. It's a good thing to have outlets for one's agression, so if y'all will excuse me, I'm going to go kill some monsters now.

Comments

[oracne.livejournal.com]

Making an appointment with your director sounds like a wise thing to do.

Now kill! Veins in your teeth...

[libskrat]

See, this is what RPGs are for. It's not all they're for -- but sometimes hacking a dragon to teeny tiny bits is just what the committee ordered.

[libskrat]

Oh, my. *roflmao*

Bravo! Bravo! Encore!

[skalja.livejournal.com]

Aha! I knew there was a reason I don't want to be an academic. I hate pissing contests.

[libskrat]

Word.

One of the last straws for me was when a titan in the field (Yakov Malkiel) died, and a department dinner I went to sported dozens of encomia about what a great guy he'd been, mostly designed to establish the encomiator's (is that a word?) connection to the titan.

About a week later, I came upon a Malkiel article whose unique purpose was brutally savaging the entire career and work of another Ibero-Romance philologist. I mean, I've seen attack articles, but this was a class unto itself. Nice guy, uh-huh.

I, um, get the impression sometimes that we've forgotten that knowledge is a building-up as well as a tearing-down.

[libskrat]

My bad. The word is "encomiast." Now I know.

[oracne.livejournal.com]

Ahem. Maybe you should hire out...

[larryhammer]

I used to work with a guy who got his degree from Surplusage University. He induced proctalgia.

The all-time master of academic flameage was, of course, Housman. You can learn a lot about how to troll the 'Net by studying his articles. Nothing like classical scholar infighting.

---L.

[vass]

*whistles* I'll have to look it up. I saw a few things in Stoppard's The Invention of Love that just sounded like direct quotes, and brrr.

[ex-greythist387.livejournal.com]

Minor fixes are indeed a happy thing. Much sympathy for the other half. Reminding professors that we (and possibly they, in the past) do not inhale "critical dialogue" like obedient battery-powered vacuum cleaners has its uses. I think it's rarely taught / modeled explicitly because its implementation is so personal--sometimes too personal for the instructor, I mean.

Though I don't view it as a pissing contest, it can be really hard to keep critical dialogue from sounding like one. Doing it well means actually grounding your reader in what's informed your views and not taking easy sniper shots, unless of course you're publishing an op-ed piece in Chronicle of Higher Ed or NYT. (sigh.)