"Whatever AI might be in some imagined utopian future, AI companies in our present moment extract and exploit...This is simply what they do, intrinsically, necessarily — in a perverse sense of the phrase, on principle."
https://blog.ayjay.org/ai-week/
Solenoid by Mircea Cărtărescu
Consider Phlebas by Iain M. Banks
Filterworld by Kyle Chayka
Consent by Jill Ciment
Relationship-Rich Education by Peter Felten and Leo M. Lambert
The Agony of Eros by Byung-Chul Han
The Power of Moments by Chip Heath & Dan Heath
American Flannel by Steven Kurutz
Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind by Molly McGhee
Lamb by Bonnie Nadzam
My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russell
Cahokia Jazz by Francis Spufford
]]>Building on an assignment suggested by Mark C. Marino, I aim to embolden and empower students by asking them to identify AI’s limitations, recognize the labor involved (i.e., “training” on both AI input and output), and reflect on the value of their own approaches and methods for writing. Such goals contrast with benefits listed in the first MLA-CCCC Joint Task Force on Writing and AI Working Paper, benefits which appear to relieve students of responsible participation in the writing process and remove opportunities for centering their own voices, experiences, and abilities. Part of resisting AI hype necessarily involves reaffirming our humanity, and reading texts like Futureproof by Kevin Roose and Unmasking AI by Joy Buolamwini that contextualize and historicize AI development also keep our collective head out of the cloud. Of course, I'd be glad to share early results of students' responses to these assignments.
Xenos by Dan Abnett
Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks
Unmasking AI by Joy Buolamwini
Revolutionary Mathematics by Justin Joque
Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
Breaking Things at Work by Gavin Mueller
The Robotic Imaginary by Jennifer Rhee
The Algorithm by Hilke Schellmann
Literary Theory for Robots by Dennis Yi Tenen
The Corner That Held Them by Sylvia Townsend Warner
How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement by Fredrik deBoer
Every Man for Himself and God Against All by Werner Herzog
Mobility by Lydia Kiesling
Writing for Busy Readers by Todd Rogers and Jessica Lasky-Fink
Shards of Earth by Adrian Tchaikovsky
]]>Dayswork by Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel
Spaceships Over Glasgow by Stuart Braithwaite
Hollow by B. Catling
The Guest by Emma Cline
Exit Interview by Kristi Coulter
Ultra-Processed People by Chris Tulleken
Harold by Steven Wright
]]>Saving Time by Jenny Odell
The Citadel of the Autarch by Gene Wolfe
The Claw of the Conciliator by Gene Wolfe
The Sword of the Lictor by Gene Wolfe
The Master & Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
Monsters by Claire Dederer
Momo by Michael Ende
The Secret History of Twin Peaks by Mark Frost
Hiroshima by John Hersey
Western Lane by Chetna Maroo
A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness
The White Mosque by Sofia Samatar
The Shadow of the Torturer by Gene Wolfe
How to be Animal by Melanie Challenger
All My Sins Remembered by Joe Haldeman
Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World by Barry Lopez
I Let You Go by Clare Mackintosh
Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel
After the Apocalypse by Maureen F. McHugh
The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller
The Guest Lecture by Martin Riker
The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell
]]>Venomous Lumpsucker by Ned Beauman
Just After the Wave by Sandrine Collette
Writing on the Job by Martha B. Coven
My Nemesis by Charmaine Craig
The Farthest Shore by Ursula K. Le Guin
Ohio by Stephen Markley
These Precious Days by Ann Patchett
Fieldwork by Iliana Regan
Devotion by Patti Smith
Year of the Monkey by Patti Smith
]]>The Travelling Cat Chronicles by Hiro Arikawa
Rubyfruit Jungle by Rita Mae Brown
The Leopard by Guiseppe di Lampedusa
Chevy in the Hole by Kelsey Ronan
The Future is Analog by David Sax
The Tombs of Atuan by Ursula K. Le Guin
A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin
Midlife by Kieran Setiya
The Right to Sex by Amia Srinivasan
]]>Ancient Sorceries by Algernon Blackwood
The Twilight World by Werner Herzog
Howl's Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones
Drive Your Plow Over The Bones Of The Dead by Olga Tokarczuk
Acceptance by Jeff VanderMeer
Germinal by Emile Zola
]]>Academia Next by Bryan Alexander
The Wall by Marlen Haushofer
The Iliad by Homer
Lapvona by Ottessa Moshfegh
Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin
Denial by Jon Raymond
Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer
Authority by Jeff VanderMeer
]]>Midnight in Chernobyl by Adam Higginbotham
Cogan's Trade by George V. Higgins
Remainder by Tom McCarthy
Once There Were Wolves by Charlotte McConaghy
The Employees by Olga Ravn
The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is by Justin E.H. Smith
The Gone World by Tom Sweterlitsch
Ground Truth by Mark L. Hineline
The Odyssey by Homer, translated by Emily Wilson
Summerwater by Sarah Moss
Hummingbird Salamander by Jeff VanderMeer
I Love You But I've Chosen Darkness by Claire Vaye Watkins
]]>Running Out by Lucas Bessire
The Conspiracy Against the Human Race by Thomas Ligotti
My Work Is Not Yet Done by Thomas Ligotti
Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson
Wayward by Dana Spiotta
]]>The Summer 2021 MLA Newsletter opened with the following question: “Where Have All the Majors Gone?” A subsequent article noted that, from 2009 to 2019, “the number of bachelor’s degrees awarded across all subjects in the discipline fell by 29%.” The article provided plenty of additional data related to the above question, observing that declines in awarded English degrees is, “particularly troubling.” However, what departments might do to reverse this trend remains “unclear.” As the former chair of an English department that no longer exists and as a tenured faculty member in a program on borrowed time, I want to suggest that maybe there is no reversing this trend, that perhaps we need to consider a different question: “What now?”
Such a suggestion and consideration come from the experience and knowledge that the development of unique and in-demand courses, the diversification of teaching appointments, concerted efforts toward enrollment management, and an active and visible presence at every campus event did not prevent the dissolution of my department. And I worry that such actions are unlikely to stop the end of others. So, much as conversations about climate change have moved from prevention to adaptation, similar discussions are overdue in our field. In therefore drawing upon recent, relevant scholarship on the precarious position of English (broadly construed) within higher education, I hope to highlight and invite testaments of disciplinary survival and to identify the coffins to which we cling while facing our future.
The Midwest Survival Guide by Charlie Berens
Gun Island by Amitav Ghosh
The Plot by Jean Hanff Korelitz
Leaving The Atocha Station by Ben Lerner
No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood
The City & the City by China Mieville
At the End of the World by Lawrence Millman
Everett Ruess: A Vagabond for Beauty by W.L. Rusho
Outside Lies Magic by John P. Stilgoe
After Cooling by Eric Dean Wilson
We by Yevgeny Zamyatin
]]>The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt
Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett
The Last by Hanna Jameson
Subprime Attention Crisis by Tim Hwang
Futureproof by Kevin Roose
Amazon Unbound by Brad Stone
All Systems Red by Martha Wells
Artificial Condition by Martha Wells
Rogue Protocol by Martha Wells
Exit Strategy by Martha Wells
]]>The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green
Under a White Sky by Elizabeth Kolbert
The Wall by John Lanchester
The Complete Mushroom Hunter by Gary Lincoff
Fulfillment by Alec MacGillis
Inconspicuous Consumption by Tatiana Schlossberg
Irreversible Damage by Abigail Shrier
Stoner by John Williams
]]>I'm annoyed with, frustrated by, and tired of the ridiculously unrealistic "critical" takes on The Chair. Below are some more positive and nuanced responses:
But as it unfolds, The Chair offers far deeper insight into the interpersonal and intergenerational dynamics of campus culture than any novel I’ve read. The show’s dramatic energies are focused on issues of free speech, the changing paradigms of scholarship and teaching, and the prejudice that women faculty and faculty of color face. Yet the subject that gets the most screen time is none of these, nor is it chairing. It’s parenting—although as the series rolls on, we slowly realize that, just possibly, chairing is parenting by other means.
Kevin Dettmar, What The Chair Gets Unexpectedly Right About the Ivory Tower
If we're watching The Chair as Ji-Yoon's story, the portrayal of activist students would exist to shed light on the pressure and complexity of the situation Ji-Yoon is facing as a woman of color in a position of authority, not, as some have interpreted it, as a commentary on activist students in general. That is, Ji-Yoon experiences student activism as high-stakes and unwieldy precisely because she respects their principled stances -- to the point that they intensify her suspicion that, despite her best efforts and intentions, she is not transforming the master's house from the inside (shout out to Audre Lorde).
To operate as if the portrayal of student protesters matters more than how the portrayal illuminates something about Ji-Yoon is to give these characters the primacy
Koritha Mitchell, Stop asking if The Chair is realistic
The show, co-created by Amanda Peet and Harvard Ph.D. Annie Wyman, feels like a real attempt to grapple with the problems of contemporary academia, and the humanities in particular, by someone who has felt invested in them.
Lidija Haas, The Chair Is an Elegy for the Life of the Mind
I don’t know anyone who has gone through the trouble of becoming a professor with the express goal of ending up as a department chair. The role draws on organizational skills that many academics have made a career out of avoiding; it also leeches away time that could be spent researching or teaching...The Chair thrives in scenes where manners and decorum get stripped away and Kim recognizes the futility of her situation. Her strange profession begins to seem relatable. Her face, usually so attentive and patient, evinces rage and disappointment. One complication of institutional diversity is that diverse faces can now lead institutions that are in free fall.
Hua Hsu, Sandra Oh's Masterly Performance of Empathy in The Chair
But as much as the characters are—wonderfully—never cynical about the study of literature, they are also exhausted by the situations they find themselves in, both personally and professionally, and especially where those two spheres collide. The current pandemic permanently damaged the academic careers of parents (mostly women) who had to abandon their (our) research to take care of their (our) children, and forced faculty to teach in windowless classrooms to hundreds of students without mask or vaccine requirements. None of that is in this show, yet even so, it depicts the study of literature as unsustainable. I wish it were clearer to the viewer that it’s unsustainable because it’s not supported.
Johannah Winant, Moby-Done
]]>For the time being, this will be a space for checking myself against reality. I want to make sure I have the story straight, that I’m not finally losing my mind eighteen months into the pandemic.
So, yesterday, my new department chair emailed all faculty members about the agenda for an upcoming meeting. The message ended with the following question: “Can your discipline realistically complete its deliberations about a program revision in time to meet the October 29 deadline?”
I anticipated this prompt in comments I made during an English department meeting in late April as well as emails I sent in early May. My anticipation arrived in the form of concern over colleagues’ capacity to do the work of curricular development amid whatever new efforts arose as a result of the College’s reorganization.
At present, there is a call for volunteers to serve on four different ad hoc committees at the department level. Faculty are also managing another semester of uncomfortable teaching, whether they returned to in-person instruction or not. And program revision is no small task, particularly when accounting for three different specializations among more than a dozen faculty members.
This is why I pushed for proceeding with program work in May. At that time, I was engaged, invested, and ready to get shit done. I took the liberty of completing both official and unofficial documents on the department’s behalf. I suggested that we have an initial proposal and market analysis information ready for review by June 30th. Assuming a positive outcome in our final action as the English department, we could then signal our new program to the College and request that the appropriate associate provost begin work on the market analysis. Through July and August, we could work on the program proposal proper with the intent to provide our new department with that document as well as the market analysis in early September. We’d therefore be well in advance of the October deadline and likely prepared to announce a new or revised major in Winter 2022 and months before the sunsetting of our current programs.
But none of that happened.
At this point, I’m no longer interested in program revision. Beyond my summer bitterness, here’s why: I have six students in my business communications class that expressed a love for reading and writing but all of them are majoring in finance or management. I also have a dozen students in my first year writing class that are “English intolerant,” as one put it. There are, of course, a number of factors at play here, but the elements are so interrelated as to comprise an intractable issue. I think now that declining enrollments in English constitute a sociocultural problem that cannot be adequately addressed by a handful of faculty at a regional campus of one of the top universities in the country. No matter the amount of effort we commit, the problem persists because a career-oriented narrative remains dominant. And students are either too stubborn or too scared to be persuaded otherwise.
I can’t and won’t blame the younger generations, though. There will always be students who buck the trend, but I doubt their numbers have ever been sufficient to maintain a program anywhere but the most prestigious institutions. Given the discipline’s origins as well as its resistance to change, perhaps English was always destined to be a program for the elites.
But maybe the week I spend on how the descriptions of whaling in Moby Dick contribute to the overall story will stay with my technical writing students. Maybe the selections from Frankenstein I assign to engineering and entrepreneurship majors will keep their future hubris in check. Maybe that will be enough for them, and for me.
]]>Description: University of Michigan-Flint assistant professor of English Dr. James Schirmer talks about using twitter in a college classroom and how twitter impacts the way we watch sports.
Leaving Academia by Christopher L. Caterine
The Silence by Don DeLillo
Islands of Abandonment by Cal Flyn
How We Live Now by Bill Hayes
Beowulf by Maria Dahvana Headley
Topics of Conversation by Miranda Popkey
Sympathy by Olivia Sudjic
Erosion by Terry Tempest Williams
]]>The Summer 2021 MLA Newsletter opens with the following question: “Where Have All the Majors Gone?” A subsequent article provides plenty of data and demographics related to the question but not much of an actual answer. A three-decades long decline in awarded English degrees is indeed “particularly troubling,” but what departments might do to reverse this trend remains “unclear.”
Maybe there is nothing to be done. When I served as chair of the English department, we had four solid years of enrollment management. Robust returns enabled us to respect and retain the same corps of longtime lecturers while also offering necessary coursework for degree completion. Lecturers and tenure track faculty diversified teaching appointments through first year seminar and honors courses; others developed and directed unique in-demand courses and programs. We employed pretty much every suggestion to reverse our declining enrollments. We participated in welcome events, engagement fairs, mid- and end-of-semester celebrations, and campus-community get-togethers. And we took every opportunity to correct and enlighten provosts, deans, associate deans, parents, and students about the utility and worth of the English major.
Year after year, we committed ourselves to a collective engagement, but what happened after all that work? Our dean dissolved the department as part of a broader reorganization of the entire college. Enrollment declines continue, causing our lecturer corps to crumble. Faculty in linguistics and literature are set to teach first year composition and business communication alongside colleagues who have PhDs in the field and decades more experience. And my own early summer efforts to propose a new integrated major were met with insufficient support, somehow even causing a colleague I once respected to call me a sellout (to whom or what I don’t know).
I wish there was something to be learned from these persistent declines as well as the failures to turn them around. But perhaps there’s nothing to be learned. Perhaps there’s nothing to be done. Perhaps it’s time to let it all end.
]]>The most we can do is to write -- intelligently, creatively, critically, evocatively -- about what it is like living in the world at this time.
- Oliver Sacks in How We Live Now by Bill Hayes
]]>Mauve Desert by Nicole Brossard
Working Backwards by Colin Bryar and Bill Carr
The Ethics of Ambiguity by Simone de Beauvoir
Demolition Means Progress by Andrew Highsmith
Desert Cabal by Amy Irvine
The Anthropology of Turquoise by Ellen Meloy
Why I Don't Write by Susan Minot
The Inland Sea by Madeleine Watts
]]>Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey
Days of Distraction by Alexandra Chang
Rust Belt Femme by Raechel Anne Jolie
The Home Place by J. Drew Lanham
The Two Cultures of English by Jason Maxwell
Looking for Hickories by Tom Springer
The Star in the Sycamore by Tom Springer