Responding to Other Scholars

Rohan Maitzen recently gave her colleagues a kind of primer on "academic blogging," and among the responses she received was this:

Finally, another colleague proposed that, overall, the internet is great for connections, comments, and other 'lighter' forms of scholarly interaction (I'm paraphrasing) but not suited for sustained analysis. I think this is true in a way, but more because of how we use the internet than because of any necessary limits on its forms. . .

I also think it's true that few blogs offer the kind of 20-page "sustained analysis" that still stands as the paradigm for academic publishing, but this is, as Rohan says, more a function of how the internet has been used so far than an inherent limitation of the blog post. Much valuable literary criticism is being offered on many blogs, both "literary" and "academic," but most bloggers and readers of blogs still conceive of a blog post as "essay lite," an attempt to engage in some "sustained analysis" without running on to umpteen screens-ful of text. There's nothing wrong with this, but it does reflect an attitude toward screen-reading that continues to consider it ridden with "screen fatigue" and other ills endemic to the act of reading online text. And it tells us nothing about the long-term potential of blogging and other forms of online publishing, especially when print periodicals start to disappear (as they will) and most reviews, essays, and articles are "printed" online.

I've concluded that folks like Rohan's colleague are never going to be converted to online publishing. Their professional identities are too intertwined with the supposed "prestige" of print and of peer review for them to turn to the internet simply because it provides an opportunity to write about literature in interesting and still-unexplored ways. They are too invested in the notion of the lengthy "sustained analysis" (much of which turns out to be rote citation of sources and mindless repetition of academic conventions, anyway) to see, for example, that a "sustained analysis" might unfold over the course of several blog posts, perhaps winding up even longer than a typical scholarly article but without its filler. Or that critical discussions on blogs can really turn into discussions across and between blogs, discussions that actually advance the consideration of writers and texts rather than personal agendas and careers. As Rohan further puts it, "I don't see why [this kind of discourse] should be taken any less seriously by writers or readers than, say, 'responses' to articles that sometimes appear in journals by invitation--which are not, strictly speaking, peer-reviewed in the same way as anonymous submissions. Participation in book events is a form of on-line academic discourse that seems basically equivalent to publishing a book review, with the extra burden of having to respond to other scholars' queries or dissenting views."

Sometimes I thinks it's really this disinclination to entertain "queries or dissenting views" that accounts for the blogophobia among certain critics and scholars that has seemed to be on the rise lately.

Comments

[Mark Thwaite]

I think this is key, Dan: "'sustained analysis' might unfold over the course of several blog posts." Certainly, there is nothing inherent in the blog form that prevents it from aping the worst academic conventions (and producing overstuffed, overlong, dry 20-odd page essays), but the beauty of the comparatively short entries on many good blogs is that on a regular basis, over time, the wide series of interventions and responses reveal the blogger's style of thought and their way of perceiving many different texts. Our learning as we read this can be very rich.

[Trevor Ross]

I am the colleague to whom Rohan referred. I must admit to being rather aback by your comments. You don't even know me and you've already concluded that I'm against electronic publishing, that I don't believe that sustained analysis is ever possible on the net, that I'm an old fart whose sense of prestige is bound up with traditional modes of academic discourse, etc. I suppose it wouldn't change your mind one iota to declare to you that I'm all in favour of electronic publishing, that in my capacity as Research Dean of my Faculty I've actively showcased our efforts in electronic publishing including our e-journals, and that I was referring only to how the need for speed has for better or worse dictated how the internet is being used primarily (though not exclusively) to circulate information and opinion rather than to inspire lengthy and informed reflection. The fact that you have permitted yourself such strong and unsupported opinions about me might, I suppose, confirm me in my doubts about the net as it is currently being used, but that would be jumping to conclusions.

[Rohan Maitzen]

While Dan is, as it happens, wrong in his assumptions about Trevor in particular, I think he is right about some of the reasons *other* academics are skeptical or negative about blogging and electronic publishing. It sounds like all three of us agree that the internet *could* be used for 'critical' purposes better than it often is. One of the challenges for academics in this context is making it professionally worthwhile to use it more deliberately.

I agree with Dan and Mark Thwaite that one way sustained analysis can occur is across a series of posts (including responses etc.). The result of such a model is a very diffuse resource, though, which pose new kinds of challenges in terms of how to kind of gather it up or synthesize it.

[Dan Green]

Trevor:

If you didn't say that blogs/internet are not well-suited to sustained analysis, I retract whatever implication was left that you personally do hold that view. However, the sentiment expressed by the "colleague" in Rohan's post is otherwise all too common among academics and certain literary critics.

You're wrong that literary/academic blogs are not encouraging "lengthy and informed reflection." (Although I'm not sure if "lengthy reflection" refers to the length of the posts or the time spent pondering them.) Have a look at some of the blogs on my blogrolls.

[Rohan Maitzen]

I think the key is whether the statement about what blogs are suited for is meant as descriptive or prescriptive, a distinction that I obscured in my original post (and wasn't entirely sure of myself--there was wine and a lot of hubbub around the conversation in which the remark was made!).

By far the most common response I've had from other academics about blogging is that they are too busy [with 'real' work, is the inference] to get involved in it. This automatic reaction is part of what I hoped to interfere with in the talk I gave. (Just to be clear, Trevor is not among those who respond this way...)

One topic you (or your readers) might have some thoughts on, Dan, as you have moved your critical work outside the 'ivory tower,' is the suggestion made by another (very tech- and blog-savvy) colleague that we (that is, academics) underestimate the extent to which our research is read by non-academics--that in fact we have a wider audience than we think. I have no real sense of whether this is true. It may be the kind of thing it's impossible to generalize about.

[Jacob Russell]

I'm not an academic in my critical interests. As a writer, I gravitate toward thought "in-process" --working out, rather than "worked out." The essay, as Montaigne would have it, essayer, to try out ideas, but in the company of others, as an ongoing, multi-faceted conversation.

In the blogs, 'peer review' takes place in the open. The quality of critical writing, like that of the academic journals, depends on editorial selectivity. In the blogs, you see this in the links. I find that I judge blogs by their content--and classify them by the links they choose to publish.

There's a sorting out at work here. Those who are primarily interested in increasing hits and raising their "authority," to the degree they succeed, drift into a general bookish cloud of blogs that now and then will have posts that might interest anyone, but I see more discriminating, more sharply defined associations coming together, recognizable constellations, proximities of interests and ideas and modes of expression that encourage readers to draw connecting lines, as between stars, galaxies, nebulae.

Sustained analytic works are hardly absent from these blogs, but they more often appear as links: sources suggested for readers to visit and harves, to bring back what they find to the more protean, generative milieu of interconnected conversations--the characteristic mode of the blogs.

There is no incompatibility between this and the academic mode. I think that academics who claim to have no time for searching them out might be astonished--if they were to do a search--at how many academic scholars and publications are referenced in these blogs. I would like to see longer, more systematic articles published on blogs. I see no reason why that shouldn't happen; but they would serve a different purpose here, address a different readership, opening into ever wider concentric spirals of response, throwing out sprays of sparks and light, of fructifying energy, as opposed to the self-consuming vortex of the academic journals... black holes devouring everything they produce into the same gapping maw, impotent to generate anything but more of the same.

There is no incompatibility