Wednesday à la cute with Chris: no voting, no podcast
Last night Ryan and I met some neighbours as we all were headed to the Tuesday night ride. They live in a palatial home one door down from our small duplex. They’re moving to the San Francisco Bay area next week. She practices corporate law. The two of us talked about travelling, Tucson, rhetoric, writing, and our love of Lululemon sales. We chatted the whole ride, which made the time seem to fly by.
Tonight I’m taking care of a friend’s dog while she’s out of town. He’s a pitbull and dog aggressive, so I’m a little nervous. After walking Buster Brown I would like to see Mr. Lonely at the Loft. There’s something compelling about a commune of celebrity impersonators who all strive to become less ho-hum by mimicking someone else and in the process discover more about themselves.
I just baked a loaf of cardamom bread and some muffins. The muffins are still warm and very tasty.
Since I always appreciate cute furry animals, here’s a belated picture of the wild bunny I found while mowing the grass at my parents’ house in Virginia. Yes, he really was smaller than mom’s hand. No, he didn’t try to get away while I was taking pictures. He must have been too frightened to move.
Completely unrelated to wild animals, I decided this morning that it was the meta-issues in rhetoric that attracted me to it in the first place. To this end I’m starting a general reading list for my comprehensive exams. Steven North’s much criticized book The Making of Knowledge in Composition is the first one on my list. Strangely even writing the title makes me feel like I’m committing to a project in composition.
Why all this disciplinary rumination? I found a glaring typo in the leading journal in my field. The typo is one that makes me call into question how said journal could publish such obviously poorly researched scholarship. Mostly I don’t like to point out these kinds of errors, but it’s so sad for the field that I’ve got to blog about it at least. It’s one thing not to read some theorist or another. It’s another thing to borrow from a field, in this case philosophy, and to incorrectly spell the name of the theorist you’re supposedly borrowing from and claiming some familiarity with. I’d expect an error like that from a graduate student term paper, but not from a published author in the leading journal in the field.
A few things I’m clear about: 1) the field let a philosophy refuge like me into it in the first place, so I will always play nicely with others; 2) there is increasing pressure on graduate students to publish before they are ready and so some of what’s out there is undercooked; 3) writing studies is a lower prestige field than philosophy or English literature and so the bar for published scholarship is lower.
July 10th, 2008 at 2:53 pm
We have bunnies all over at our place. I took a picture of a baby bunny and sent it to Cute With Chris. He said it was “abandoned” but it really wasn’t. Here is is on the site. http://www.cutewithchris.com/rabbits/page/3/
It’s the last one at the bottom of the page.
July 10th, 2008 at 4:47 pm
It looks like some of the people commenting thought the bunny’s name was Cobban because of the tag on the picture. Very cute!
July 15th, 2008 at 7:08 pm
Hey Jessica,
Re: “writing studies is a lower prestige field than philosophy or English literature and so the bar for published scholarship is lower.” I’m interested in this claim not only because I identify with writing studies, but also because I wonder just how contingent a concept “prestige” gets to be across the disciplines.
I don’t know whether you’ve seen the issue yet, but Karen Kopelson’s article in the latest CCC (59.4) resonates in certain ways with what you are suggesting above. I hope you’ll consider contributing something in the carnival a few of us are putting up for next week through the end of the month.
July 15th, 2008 at 9:17 pm
Hey Derek,
Karen Kopelson’s piece certainly influenced my thinking when I wrote this post. I read her “Sp(l)itting Images” in its entirety. The ending leaves a lot to be desired. The trope of having the last word is tired.
The piece I’m pointing to is Ellen Barton’s. The first full paragraph contains a striking error. The feminist philosopher Barton means to cite is Sandra Harding. Sondra Harding is likely more than a typo. Raul Sanchez makes the same error on page 13 of _The Function of Theory in Composition Studies_.
Russel Durst gets Harding’s name right in his review of Kirsch and Sullivan’s 1993 book in CCC (44.2). I don’t have Kirsch and Sullivan’s _Methods and Methodology in Composition Research_, so I’m not sure whether they spelled Harding’s name correctly or not.
All I’m saying is that mispelling a theorist’s name casts doubt on whether someone is familiar with—let alone has actually read—the theorist in question. Sure mistakes happen, but this is a pretty big mistake. And, it’s one that has happened in at least one other location in the field. So, I’m left wondering if some folks reading primarily in rhet/comp actually believe Sandra Harding is Sondra Harding.
It’s unlikely that Harding changed the spelling of her first name at some point in her career, but possible.
It’s also possible, but unlikely, that there’s someone in rhet/comp by the name of Sondra Harding who does work that’s strikingly similar to Sandra Harding’s.
Your question about how “prestige” gets to be across disciplines is a philosophical one. By this I mean that we could debate it for a long time, come up with two equally reasonable conclusions and still not settle it.
Thanks for the link to the carnival. I’ll check it out. Teaching summer school and trying to finish a manual for the Writing Program is kicking my butt, so no promises…