Posts Tagged ‘Rosemary Johnsen’

The subject is dear to my heart: the importance of literature in our everyday lives, as an additional lens to recognize, interpret, and understand the world we see around us. I’ve written about it here and here, among other places.

Rosemary Johnsen is of the same mind: “Literary criticism has the potential not only to explain, but to actively change our terms of engagement with current realities.” She is Professor of English, Associate Provost, and Associate VP of Academic Affairs at Governors State University in University Park, Illinois. (She’s also the author of Contemporary Feminist Historical Crime Fiction – more on that here.)

She joined forces with kindred spirit Rachel Arteaga of the University of Washington’s Simpson Center for the Humanities. Arteaga writes that she was inspired by a 2009 Daedalus article on the future of the humanities. What would public literary scholarship mean? What would public literary criticism look like? The result result of their partnership is a book, co-edited by both: Publish Scholarship in Literary Studies, just out with Amherst College Press. The book is available at Amazon here. Or you can get the book via open access here.

My humble self was invited to contribute, and so I did, with an essay titled “What Lasts,” discussing my own work with The Book Haven, Another Look, and Entitled Opinions. In the conclusion to the volume, Johnsen says the chapter “demonstrates the impact of her work, grounded in the practices of literary criticism.” Let’s hope so. I try. My position statement in the book:

“The task of making the case for literature, and the humanities more generally, has never been more urgent. Great literature is endless. Nevertheless, it has become the province of a shrinking coterie who prefer solitary insight to Snapchat, something with a metaphysical bite rather than bytes. Quo vadis? Some years ago, the Polish poet Adam Zagajewski outlined one option for the future during our interview: ‘We’ll be living in small ghettos, far from where celebrities dwell, and yet in every generation there will be a new delivery of minds that will love long and slow thoughts and books and poetry and music, so that these rather pleasant ghettos will never perish— and one day may even stir more excitement than we’re used to now.’ It may come to that. I’ll opt for a less exclusive option: we may still learn to make a persuasive case for literature to a wider public, opening the essential world of literature across lines of class, race, and ethnicity.”

The book also tips its hat to the National Endowment of the Humanities for its creation of a “Public Scholars program,” in its “long-term commitment to encourage scholarship in the humanities for general audiences,” Johnsen notes. (Careful Book Haven readers will remember I am one of the program’s recipients; I wrote about that here.)

From Johnsen’s conclusion:

“The power of literature to enrich and inform understanding is well known to literary scholars. Increasingly, however, that foundational truth is disregarded or actively attacked. Literature, like much of the humanities, is often spoken of as a luxury or, even worse, as useless. Bringing literary study into the realm of public scholarship can help counter those misperceptions, working both individually and collectively to restore some confidence in what we do as scholars of literature. Public scholarship becomes the means to share what literary scholarship offers, but also to chip away at the presence of anti-intellectualism in contemporary society. Our ability to serve as intermediary between text and audience—the kinds of work we routinely do in our classrooms and at campus events— positions us to contribute beyond campus and our scholarly communities and to learn from the perspectives and insights available from those who do not inhabit our campuses. Public scholarship often takes forms recognizably similar to teaching and learning, but it can also serve as advocacy. We need that now more than ever.”

Over at the blog for the American Philosophical Association, I have a guest post describing my work with Robert Pogue Harrison‘s brainchild, the intellectual talk show Entitled Opinions, available as a radio show and podcasts. The piece been adapted from a longer essay that will appear in Literary Criticism as Public Scholarship (edited by Rachel Arteaga and Rosemary Johnsen), under contract with Amherst College Press. An excerpt from the blogpost:

I teamed with Harrison to plan for a bigger future for Entitled Opinions a few years ago. A generous donation from former Stanford President John Hennessy helped fund a website redesign, with easily searchable programming and a home of its own that was not in a hard-to-find corner of the French and Italian Department website.

I argued that there was nothing on either the new or old website to indicate what a listener would hear in the particular podcast – a powerful disincentive for anyone thinking to invest an hour. Not everyone will gamble an hour of their precious time that way. Jazz scholar Ted Gioia, a master of the social media, had counseled me that the missing component in our modern cyber-edifice is this: while there is much transferring text to visual images, tweets, audio, and so on, there is comparatively little transfer going in the opposite direction – that is, turning audio and visual content into text. A few synoptic paragraphs with quotations from the episode would entice as well as inform potential listeners.

We forged a partnership with the Los Angeles Review of Books, establishing a podcast channel for Entitled Opinions that would bring more visibility to the program and draw new audiences. We also struggled to get a presence on social media – no small thing either, as Harrison was at first resistant to Facebook, Twitter, and the rest. He cherished the cult status of Entitled Opinion, and emphasized the whole message of Entitled Opinions was for long thoughts over short ones, through the medium of intensive hour-long conversations. I was sympathetic. But in today’s world, to get the word out without using social media is to try to get the word out without getting the word out.

Now we are taking the next step: we are creating lightly edited transcripts and pitching them to the international media to spread the word about Entitled Opinions. Harrison’s interview with German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk ran in translation in Die Welt. The original English transcript is forthcoming in Los Angeles Review of Books. The first of a two-part interview with French thinker René Girard ran in England’s Standpoint; the second is scheduled for Zurich’s Neue Zürcher Zeitung, which has also run a translation of Harrison’s interview with American philosopher Richard Rorty. The Chronicle of Higher Education has published part of a transcript of a conversation with “metahistorian” Hayden White.  More are on the way. (Both the Girard interviews will be published in my forthcoming Conversations with René Girard, to be published by Bloomsbury in 2020.)

Read the whole thing here.