Summer, where are you?

I refuse to turn on the furnace before September. I refuse to turn on the furnace before September. I refuse to turn on the furnace before September. I refuse to turn on the furnace before September. I refuse to turn on the furnace before September. I refuse to turn on the furnace before September.

Finished... sort of...

Finished all 4 syllabi for this semester - hooray!

I say I sort of finished them because although the actual syllabus is finished for each class, there are many, many assignments yet to write - I think I've got about a dozen new ones this semester - and I don't feel like I've finished the syllabus until I've at least drafted what I want those assignments to say.

Funny how I don't feel the same need to write exams ahead of time, but writing assignments and presentations I do.

Academic Sponges

When I think of a metaphor to describe my academic career, I sometimes think of a sponge.

I know that's not terribly pretty, and depending on your experience with sponges, it might even be slightly disgusting, reminding you of clean up jobs that you'd rather not remember. But think of it as a nice clean washing sponge or the sort that one might have used before the advent of the ubiquitous loofah sponge. You know, the ones the size of small dinner plates with all those lovely big holes in them.

Anyway. I sometimes feel like my academic career to this point has been like a sponge, soaking up other people's ideas. In classrooms, at conferences, reading books and articles, I feel like I always know so very little about what people are talking about that I just soak it all in.

As a sponge, every once and a while I get a poke, and some of what I've soaked up comes back out in the form of a conference paper or an article, and a really big poke (by my committee to some extent but mostly a self-imposed impatience to finish things) resulted in the dissertation.

Of course this creates a problem that I think I've mostly shed at this point, but that haunts me nevertheless. Because some of what I read wasn't necessarily smart or useful. Especially during my undergraduate career, some of the things I chose to read for research papers and the like wasn't always good.

Which has me wondering how I might integrate more critical analysis of sources into my classes so that my students don't base their research on shoddy sources. I'm thinking of incorporating a research proposal into my lit classes and maybe even the gen ed one so that I have the opportunity to engage in conversation with students about the sources they are considering useful to their projects and steer them away from the superficial or less useful ones. If nothing else, such an exercise should result in better research papers, even if it does little for the student's understanding of quality scholarship and ability to critically analyze sources.

At least, that's what I'm thinking.

Forecast: flurries

No, the Great White North is not going to be getting snow in August... though the way the weather's been so changeable this summer, I wouldn't be surprised. Not that I want it to snow...! *knock on wood*

No, it's a flurry of emails over the last three days that I suspect will just continue to snowball.

It's our first week 'back' at the university, even though classes don't start for another three weeks, and suddenly my daytimer is filling with events/meetings and I've gotten emails from pretty much every department on campus, welcoming me back.

Not to mention the emails about contracts that still need to be drawn up and signed over the next few weeks, and last minute class assignments that now need syllabi and textbook orders. (I'm keeping my fingers crossed that the bookstore can get them in on time, though they should have plenty of time)

It feels like I went from merrily working away on my scholarship last week to a sudden need to finish syllabi (actually, it's mostly just finishing schedules at this point) and start teacher-thinking mode instead. It's a bit of a jarring transition, and the urgency of some of that email flurry isn't helping matters!

Going back and seeing familiar faces

I've been thinking about the 'going back' phase of summer. It's that time when August is in full swing and I start to think about the upcoming semester.

Sometimes there's a sense of panic because I haven't gotten as much done over summer as I had hoped. Sometimes it's with anticipation at teaching a new course.

This year, I've both got new courses - including one that is essentially teaching the dissertation (and I'm not even on the tt track!) - and the panic isn't manifesting since I had almost no expectations for work this summer and what few ones I did have are fulfilled.

I am a little confused and dazed as I try to figure out where to go next with the dissertation. But that makes the prospect of focusing on teaching for a bit pleasant as it will be a distraction from the problem of what to do next and I suspect sometime during that distraction an idea will emerge that will be worth following up on.

I'm also eager to meet my students this year. The class list for one of my classes isn't posted yet, but of the other two, I spotted a few familiar names, and I'm looking forward to getting to know these students in a new class.

Recognizing names on a list is one thing. But I've also been running into my colleagues in some of the most unexpected places. I met two colleagues - one from my department and one from another one - when I was on the coast for vacation. They weren't together, so seeing familiar faces in two different places on the same day was odd. Then two days later and 300 kms away, I bumped into another colleague when we stopped in a small town for lunch. Apparently we all like vacationing in similar places! Finally, I met another colleague last night at a restaurant in town that just opened two weeks ago.

Familiar faces and familiar names. Frankly, I can't wait to go back!

(I know, I know, remind me of this post in a couple of months and I won't believe I wrote it, but there it is!)

When did the twenty-first century begin?

At a recent conference - the first I'd ever seen on twenty-first century literature - I found myself surprised by how many speakers referenced 9/11 as one of the markers for the beginning of the century.

Hmmm....

I was frankly a bit surprised by it and so much so that I feel the need to blog about it by wondering at the markers that signal literary periods. Aside from the gloominess of defining a century by its disasters, what really surprised me the most is that almost every person who mentioned 9/11 in the context of a marker of the twenty-first century was not American.

That surprised me because I guess I hadn't thought of the disaster as being indicative of the century. This is of course partly because I work in representations of science and technology (and by extension, science fiction), so I tend to think in timelines that involve technological change or scientific paradigm shifts and such. But falling so soon after the beginning of the century, the 9/11 event does seem an ideal marker.

But at the same time that it makes it easy to mark off centuries of literature according to the calendar, there are exceptions.

Of course there's the long eighteenth century... Although I'm not a specialist in this area, I realize that there are long discussions (often at the curricular level) about what constitutes eighteenth century literature.

And the nineteenth century often gets chopped into two separate sections because a "long" nineteenth century is really, really long, so that we have the Romantics and the Victorians (at least on the English side of the house).

Even the twentieth century has been divided fairly consistently between the early part of the century, sometimes defined as pre-WWII, but more often associated with the modernist style that developed shortly after the century began, and the post-WWII or "postmodern" period. (There are problems with the label postmodern, but I don't want to take that detour right now)

So then, where does this post-WWII period or postmodern period end (i.e. where does the twentieth century end) and where does the twenty-first one begin?

Standing so close to that line, wherever it might be drawn, makes it difficult to see it, and certainly most of the lines we've drawn through the literature of the past have been assigned to those periods long after they were over. The benefits of hindsight operate healthily in this respect.

But where does the twenty-first century begin?

Y2K?

1989?

9/11?

Now you might be wondering, 1989? What's up with that?

Well, there were several events in 1989/1990 that might make it valid to include the last decade of the twentieth century in the twenty-first, depending on how things unfold as we continue into this century, of course. 1989 was the year of Tiananmen Square and the fall of the Berlin Wall, both events that changed the political landscapes of the East and the West

On the literary front, the fatwa against Salman Rushdie for The Satanic Verses, although not the first case of attempted censorship through violence, was certainly widely reported and the upsurge of anti-Western sentiment that has built since then certainly attests to the critical effect of such beliefs in the world.

On the scientific front, the Human Genome Project was conceived in the late eighties, with an official start date of 1990. Although it seems somewhat anti-climactic now, at the time, the promises of genomics seemed endless and the project was hailed as a marvel that would allow us to cure all kinds of diseases. (Even though the promise of the project seemed to offer more than it delivered, it was that promise and the envisioned new future that seems to me to be a marked break with the more mundane visions of science in the post WWII period. But I can be wrong.)

So, when did the twenty-first century begin?

It's a question whose answer I'm hoping to watch unfold over my career. And that's exciting to me.

Organizational woes

I think I've mentioned before that I signed up for Library Thing in order to keep track of my books (and because I suspect if I ever have to make an insurance claim, the company won't believe me when I tell them the number of books I own). I also signed up for Movie Collector Plus for the same reason.

But I've had to juggle book space a lot in the last few years, which means I sometimes know that I own a book, but can't figure out which bookshelf it's on! Which means I need to spend long periods of time scanning shelves looking for something that's not where it used to be.

So, the question is: would it be extravagant to buy a RFID system to keep track of them?

Just wondering...