Terri Senft - My publisher sent me this piece. I love it.

RIGHT ON BROTHER/SISTER!!!!!!

Perfect!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Not to tell everything = Great Art.

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I definitely relate to the struggles/dilemmas with academic writing that he describes, but as regards Foucault as the murderous stalker (!?!), wouldn't you say he was sympathetic to this struggle on the most general level of institutional power and discourses, even if the reception and applications of his OWN work have exacerbated the problems with academic modes of writing? The stuff of his I've been reading lately seems to speak to that...

I’d have liked there to be behind me... a voice that would speak like this: “One must go on, I can’t go on, one must go on, one must say words as long as there are any, one must say them until they find you, until they say you—strange pain, strange lack, one must go on, it’s perhaps already done, they’ve perhaps already said me, they’ve perhaps already brought me to the brink of my (hi)story, before the door that opens onto it, I’d be surprised if it opened.”
There is among many, I think, a similar desire not to have to begin, a similar desire to find oneself, to get in the game, from the other side of discourse, without having had to consider from the outside what there could be that’s singular, dangerous, maleficent/unlucky perhaps. [...]
The desire says: “I would like not to have to enter myself into this hazardous order of discourse; I would like not to be privy to that in which things can be trenchant and decisive, I would like that it be all around me like a transparent calm, profound, indefinitely open, where the others would respond to my waiting/attempt, and where the truths, one by one, would rise; I’d have only to let myself be taken, in it and by it, like a happy stray.” And the institution responds: “You have nothing to fear in beginnings; we are all there to show you that discourse is in the order of laws; that we’ve kept watch for a long time on its apparition; that a place was made for it, which honours but disarms it; and that, if it comes to have some power, it’s really because of us, and us only, that it holds it.”

--L'Ordre du Discours (The Order of Language), my translation

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If you read that essay as an indictment of Foucault--hell, even as a discussion of Foucault-- you missed its point.

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Well, I guess I did, so help me out. I thought I read the whole thing on its own terms. I just was thrown by the Foucault allusion.

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For the purposes of this essay, Foucault could just as easily been Derrida, Heidegger, Marx, etc. You are throw off because you are engaged in close readings of Foucault for your own work and naturally you saw meanings that weren't intended by Germano. Sort of how you think about buying a red sportscar and then suddenly they seem to pop up all over the highway.

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For the purposes of this essay, Foucault could just as easily been Derrida, Heidegger, Marx, etc.

So just any kind of theoretical forebear that could "stalk" the student's work, or only those with notoriously difficult ideas and writing?

You are throw off because you are engaged in close readings of Foucault for your own work and naturally you saw meanings that weren't intended by Germano. Sort of how you think about buying a red sportscar and then suddenly they seem to pop up all over the highway.

Not exactly--I just wasn't sure if the reference had to do with Foucault as a WRITER/writerly influence, or as a thinker/theoretical influence more generally.

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slit responds better than I could (as usual), below. I hardly think Foucault needs defending here, but feel free to continue if you feel that accomplishes anything.

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but feel free to continue if you feel that accomplishes anything.

!?

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Apologies for the tone; I was having a bad day yesterday.

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Thanks; so was I. Be well.

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Oh wow does that first line kick major ass.

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but what if i want foucault to come after me in a hockey mask?

i have to say thisapplies to fiction as much as dissertations -- at least for me, right now. it's like i don't want to come off so gushy and enraptured by the book i am writing as i write it. like it's awkward or something.

me and my foucualt finger puppet will tarry on.

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but what if i want foucault to come after me in a hockey mask?

I think my guy has those fantasies, too, but they're probably of a different nature than what you're speaking to here. Um.

But anyway *ahem* I think there's a place for what you're saying, especially outside academia. There are times I want some scholarly heft to what I'm writing because it's lacking the distance and the rigor that I'm longing for (and here I remember inne once saying that when she was younger she wrote a 5,000-word essay that she could have condensed to one sentence if she'd known the word "hegemony" -- I totally felt her pain).

But at the other end of the spectrum (and where I think the author is coming from) is that terror of "did I include everything? no, really, every single thing? like this factoid here is tangential to my argument but if I don't include it my committee will think I don't know it! the horror! the horror!" So in running from Foucault, style suffers. And who really gains from that? Certainly not the reader, who never signed up to read The Complete History Of Everything Ever.

Which begs the question: what are we (you know, "we") doing this for in the first place? I think it's too easy (and hi, at this point I'm really just talking to myself, so all apologies) to say that those of us who insist on speaking clearly are rationalizing away our anti-intellectualism, our lack of rigor -- that we're all secretly stupid and are hiding behind our stated fondness for accessibility in order to cover up for our more fundamental unwillingness to buckle down and read Derrida in the original. Certainly there are those who do that, who claim they had to write in fifth-grade prose "in order to REACH PEOPLE" and what they end up with is Chicken Soup for the Soul, but to paint everyone who makes that argument into the same box is offensive. Yet we all (well, okay, I, anyway :P) constantly live with that doubt -- if I'm readable like a letter home to Mom does that mean my underlying thought process is just as common and banal?

I think there's a comfort in academic prose. I came to college with a background in journalism and remember realizing with relief in my sophomore year that the pressure to be interesting was off when I was writing term papers, that I could say what I wanted to say until I'd well and truly said it without having to drag the reader along by the wrist. My professors were required to read my papers, weren't going to give up in the middle because there was something better on Page 6 and then I'd lose my job. Oh my God. Once that dawned on me a whole new world opened up. It was thrilling -- no, truly, THRILLING -- to realize I had license to follow ideas to their natural conclusion without having to worry how my thought process would play among the farmers who used to read me when I was writing straight journalism.

But to rely on that forever is to adopt an entitlement to the reader's attention that I find insulting. Professors are paid to read us; that's their job. Normal people aren't. That doesn't make them imbeciles -- it means they only have so many minutes here on planet earth, and they're going to prioritize their time. If an author isn't clear, or her arguments are bogus, that's one thing, and it may be true that the pressure to be interesting is getting in the way of her ability to properly make her case. But readable prose _in and of itself_ != "lowbrow."

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(An aside: I read the title of this essay to Connor from across the room because I thought it was funny, and he said, "If dissertations could talk? If dissertations could talk they'd say" -- insert nasally whiny little-boy voice -- "are we THERE yet?!?")

:)

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I'm glad I wasn't drinking anything when I read A real book manuscript doesn't look over its shoulder, worrying that Foucault is running after it in a hockey mask.

It may be that writing papers for journals and conferences is adversely affecting my writing. I started out writing things the way I think they should be written, and then found I had to do massive paring to get things down to fit into the page limits. I seem to be writing a bit better to the page limits, but I think the readability of my prose has suffered.

My favorite class papers I've written as a grad student have been the ones where I tossed in a bit of passion (something sorely lacking in much of Computer Science), even (on one occasion) commenting about an author's penchant for "straining at gnats, and swallowing camels whole".

Thanks for the post. I think reading this essay will have a positive effect on how my dissertation will go. Bur now I want to go back and read my Master's thesis and criticize it from this angle - I fear it was pretty dry, even though my committee seemed to be well impressed.

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I wonder how the process toward publication compares for Ph.D's in the British system, with external reader, compared to that in most U.S. universities.

Many science Ph.D's now just write a series of papers for publication, but I really did not want to opt for that. It seems like you should create some complete text, whether it ever comes out as a published book or not.

I actually think publishers are overly obsessed with more "popular" and less "academic" prose and layouts these days. There is something to be said for publishing works that appeal primarily to scholars or serious students. Some academic publishers do still manage to stay afloat this way.

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Routledge doesn't publish science texts.

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I finished most of the piece after writing the above. It does apply, I think, to any academic who intends to reach a mass audience through publication. I guess I am a bit less enthusiastic about applying it to all dissertations. Some very good dissertations may just not work out as popular books no matter what. The piece is written from a publisher's perspective, and every graduate student may not be planning to approach a publisher right away. Publishers also vary, as do the demands of the public.

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Absolutely agreed on that score.

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It's not just science PhDs and not just Britain - plenty of people in humanities and psychology here publish four papers and an introduction and whoosh, instant PhD. (Although it can take a long time to publish the four papers.) And most science PhDs are done that way.

I insisted on doing a monograph because I wanted the experience of doing it, and also because I change my mind a lot. However, the mechanism that pushes students toward publishing papers means I will also have many papers published by the time I finish (between 7 and 13 depending how you count). Whereas I get the feeling that in the US and maybe Britain publishing too much before you've finished your PhD is frowned upon, like it's chutzpah or something. I would certainly have preferred to publish less and of higher quality, but have been kind of expected to publish regularly in order to add to the department's output and stay in the game.

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You know what? While I like quite a lot of what Germano says here, I'd be a lot more inclined to believe his lectures about publishing if Routledge weren't one of the worst perpetators (in my mind, at least...) of the kind of babbling academic-ese that he claims makes a book unreadable. Don't get me wrong, they've published a lot of good things, but they've published just as many "Methinks I'd like more dill in that, Mrs. Havisham!":(Dis[enf])ranch{ising the art of} dress(mak)ing in the Nineteenth-century Novel kind of books than almost any press I can think of. The irony of Germano working for one press and publishing with another (Chicago) that have reputations of being bastions of crito-babble is not lost on me as he chides me for being too into citations.

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hahahha that title made me laugh, because I am immature like that

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As part of the review process for the hiring committees I've been on, I've seen a lot worse than that one let me tell you...

Apropos of the quote you took from Germano's piece, I think the worst/best was something along the lines of F(o)uc(ault and) K(issinger:) You(th culture and political protest). If I remember it was a panel paper rather than a diss. Kind of funny, but I think Foucault/Fuck puns (e.g. "Foucault youcault!") are way too easy anyway.

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