More on Bourdieu + Lab Notes

I'm going to drop the Dissertation Update titles in lieu of the "dissertation" tag below. The blogs gets to be even more monotonous than usual when all the titles start off the same.

Today I thought to look up for the first time when Bourdieu died and what sorts of things he was up to in his later life. There's a deeply cynical side to academic research, one where the news of Bourdieu's death in 2002 provides a sense of frank relief. After all, what if he was still out there, thinking about all the new media things I'm planning to write about? It's much easier to work with a fixed body of work, no matter how great (or just controversial) that achievement is. I found a wonderful little obituary for Bourdieu in The Nation, written by Katha Pollitt.

Finally, I'll add a link to Work Product, a "research diary or lab notebook" put together by Matthew Wilkens, a postdoc at the Humanities Research Center at Rice University. Wilkens is doing some very interesting stuff and his blog is a more sophisticated (and consistent) example of what I'm hoping to accomplish here. He's evaluating Part of Speech taggers right now, which is a major service to us all. Way to go, Matthew!

Dissertation Update #3: The Book of the Month Club

I've gotten my Bourdieu (it turns out it wasn't poached, but misdelivered to the right house on the wrong street). It is looming rather smugly over me on the shelf.

I've been listening to Amy Hungerford's undergraduate course on American novels post-1945. This is possible through a new Yale University initiative to make several of their courses available online--syllabi, audio and video. The first book she tackles is Richard Wright's Black Boy and she tells the fascinating story of how the Book of the Month Club, which published it, dramatically influenced it editorially.

This dovetails nicely with one of my current reading projects, Janice Radway's A Feeling for Books, which starts off with an anthropological mission to The Book of the Month Club just as the realities of modern publishing were catching up to it. At least I think that's how things will turn out--I'm only in Part I.

Curious, I tried accessing the Book of the Month Club website. They're still a going concern though from what I gathered on news sites the new owner, an outfit called Direct Brands, is cutting staff.

Dissertation Update #2: Somebody Poaches my Bourdieu

It's been quite a week around here. I've been working on a long-running editing project, made my first visit to the ASU campus (and its library), and put together a paper proposal for next summer's Digital Humanities Conference.

In the midst of all that and an unusually busy social schedule, I didn't notice that my copies of Pierre Bourdieu's Distinction and The Field of Cultural Production had never arrived from Amazon. It looks like somebody poached the box from our front porch! I hope they enjoy massive French sociological tomes. The ironies here are left as an exercise for the reader.

Next week I'll start drafting my dissertation proposal and post some more details about the general outline of my project.

Dissertation Update #1: Wherein the Expedition sets off in Crisp Morning Sunshine

I'm going to try a little motivational experiment here by writing about my progress on the dissertation. I don't know how frequently I'll be doing this but I hope at least weekly.

Right now my topic, broadly, is the question of cultural capital in an era of digital literacy. How are ecologies of reading and writing evolving online and what does that mean for authorial fame and fortune? I have many more ideas but I'll save them for future posts (and more mulling).

The reason I'm writing now is to share the geeky thrill I felt when I picked up a stack of books from the ASU library today. It's been a bit of a struggle getting access and requesting books from a new institution where I have no official status, and it's a relief to know that I can still track down the books I need.

I'll put texts up in LibraryThing as I tackle them. Time to get reading!

Zap!

I'm downsizing. My long-running blog Parlay began as a personal experiment, evolved into a largely unsuccessful promotional vehicle, dawdled along as a lifeless bundle of digital flotsam, and now has finally been put to rest. Maybe with just one garden of words to tend I can do a better job. Http://www.edfinn.net will now point here.

I hope to write here about my research, the looming dissertation (more on that in a separate post), and items of more general interest.

Digital Fiction

I just came across a post on BoingBoing to some new digital fiction put together by Penguin. I'm excited about this for two reasons. First of all, each of the pieces (there are six in all) experiments with a different digital form. Second, a major publishing house is demonstrating interest in digital literature--great news for someone who's hoping to write, and write about, some digital lit himself one day.

The Future of Search

I've been meaning to post this for a long time. A couple of months ago I wrote a short article about a Stanford Humanities Center workshop that I help coordinate. Literary Studies and the Digital Library: Beyond Search and Access is doing some cutting-edge research in the digital humanities. Check it out!

Out of the Cold

It's been a long, dark winter of exam preparation, stressed-out reading, and gallons of tea. Parts of it were a lot of fun, and I've now read a lot of books that I would surely have taken years to finish otherwise. But: I am glad to be finished.

The sun is shining, the requisite post-Orals sloth and dazedness are wearing off, and it's time to get going on some new projects. I have a few work-related tasks to grapple with, and I have a paper to polish. Then, on to dissertation planning. Time to get back to work!

//Cross-posted from Open Culture//

For a graduate student in an English Ph.D. program, the Oral Exam is one of the big milestones on the road to the dissertation. In my case this involves five professors, a list of 60-80 books, and two hours in a (rhetorically) smoke-filled room. Since I’m working on contemporary literature and new media, one of the challenges I have to deal with is how to address novels, films, television shows, video games and more as part of the same “list.” How does one put these things together? How can a video game be read as a text alongside Gravity’s Rainbow or Brave New World?

One way to approach this question is to include the work of literary and cultural critics who are already looking at new and traditional media side by side. Following that line, I try to keep up with the academic blog Grand Text Auto, which covers “computer narrative, games, poetry and art.” One of its contributors, Noah Wardrip-Fruin, is working on a book about digital fictions and computer games that looks perfect for my Orals list—and he’s publishing it, chapter by chapter, on Grand Text Auto for blog-based peer review. It will come out next year with MIT Press, but for now, it’s a work in progress.

All fine so far—I could list it as “forthcoming” and direct my professors to the link. But what happens when I start commenting on this book as I read it? What are we to do with the knowledge that this “text” will most likely change between now and next year? Does this item on my Orals list signify a draft of the book, the blog and its comments, or the experience of reading and writing into the MS myself (including, perhaps, responses from the author)?

I find the dilemma particularly interesting because it touches on a central conflict in humanities scholarship. Are we passive observers of the literary scene or active participants in it? It’s a rare academic critic who thinks of calling up a poet to ask her what she meant in a particular line, but that’s exactly the kind of connection that our hyper-conscious, digitally mediated world offers up.

P.S. After all of this hand-wringing, it’s obvious I’m not going to have time to read Noah’s book before I take my exam, so it’s off the list. But I can’t wait to dig in next month!