The doctor is in.
Happy new year, dear readers, whoever you may be! Whatever you seek from 2008—be it
tumultuous recollections,
relief from labors,
live pictures or bons mots
or faults of grammar—
may you find, in this blog, at least a few crumbs!
Some of you may recall that I spent the past seven years getting a Ph.D. in comparative literature. Well, in 2008 I will be putting this degree to use as a Visiting Lecturer at Stanford, where I’m going to teach an “academic writing workshop” for seniors who are writing interdisciplinary honors theses in the humanities. I am very excited at this opportunity to convert my own recent dissertation-writing experiences into beautiful pedagogic theories. “Do as I say, not as I did,” I will tell my students, whom I will be instructing in the use of EndNote.
Do I myself use EndNote? This is a technical question. Many scholars don’t; I remember one professor who renounced it on the grounds that he didn’t want any superstructure mediating his relationship with the text. For me, it was always more about how EndNote costs $250. But now I have scored a free copy from the Interdisciplinary Humanities program (w00t!), so you know, bring it on.A few weeks ago, I received copies of my future students’ thesis proposals in the mail. I have no factual basis for saying this, but I think a lot of writers—Philip Roth, for example—wouldn’t have actually read them, at least not until closer to the first meeting (which isn’t until mid-January). But I read them right away. I mention this as a testament to my interest in today’s youth and their culture.
How movingly the proposals testified, despite their more-or-less academic style, to the “hopes and tender melancholy” of “tumultuous youth’s season”! 
I was particularly touched by a proposal to examine “the consequences of virtual worlds approaching reality,” through a study of Second Life (the 3D online digital world designed and created by its residents), and There (the online virtual world that is your everyday hangout). Heidegger, Baudrillard and Jean-Pierre Dupuy are in there, talking about Enframing, hyperrealities, and the attempt to “out-do” nature by remaking it in art.
Thus the first four paragraphs. At that point, the thesis itself develops a Second Life, involving the films of Leni Riefenstahl, Andy Warhol, and Peter Greenaway, and then a Third Life, in which the author, with a Cartesian gesture of larvatus prodeo, steps out from behind the mask of academic “atopia” to divulge that she has been writing from
To which I find myself exclaiming, with Pushkin:
I like furious youth,
the crush, the glitter, and the gladness,
and the considered dresses of the ladies…
A brief autobiographical digression about youth and the Musée Grèvin. Like many hopeful American comparativists (and like the dissipated sons of some Brazilian millionaires), I spent one summer of my youth studying French at the Sorbonne. During this time, I visited the Picasso Museum, and walked by the Arts et Métiers museum several times—but I had never even heard of the Musée Grèvin, which I have now determined to be a waxworks, with, however, the Baudrillardesque innovation of displaying two copies of every world-historical entertainment professional: there is Monica Belucci leaning her head on the shoulder of a beautiful woman, who turns out to also be Monica Belucci; there is an exhibit simply and eloquently titled: “Nicolas Sarkozy et son double.”
Well, OK, as you, astute reader, have probably already realized, these are actually photographs of the signifier being brought into contact with the signified, viz., the more beautiful and less waxy-looking woman really is Monica Belucci; although what qualitatively differentiates the real Sarkozy (the smaller one, one presumes) from the wax Sarkozy is more difficult to articulate.
Returning to the senior thesis proposals: if the Second Life/ Leni Riefenstahl/ wax museum one wasn’t enough to make your head explode, they were ready for you, these kids, with material like “Understanding Space in the Digital Era”: an art-historical analysis of the two projects executed by Asymptote Architecture for the New York Stock Exchange, namely: (1) a “virtual trading floor” (a software program that represents various data about stocks in 3D space); and (2) the “Advanced Communications Center” (a physical structure located on the real trading floor, displaying, on ten 20-inch plasma monitors, seven different views of the virtual trading floor).
These structures were commissioned in response to the 1987 stock market crash: a catastrophe precipitated, as the student has established through telephone interviews, by the inability of “NYSE’s Operations staff… to ‘see’ what was occurring on the [trading] floor.” The theoretical framework involves the Foucauldian Panopticon and questions of total digital surveillance, as well as Castells on whether the historical and cultural attributes of physical space are being eroded by a proliferation of virtual “places.”
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| Virtual trading floor, by Asymptote Architecture |
As I read, I was filled with enthusiasm by the prospect of initiating these students into life’s wonderful journey of bibliographic software—and yet, my enthusiasm was increasingly tempered by self-doubt. For aren’t these talented young women surely galloping, even as we speak, through a hyperreal thematically networked, three-dimensional simulacrum of their total bibliographic information in the MLA format? The more I thought about it, the more I was reminded of Tolstoy’s immortal essay: “Who Should Teach Whom to Write, We, the Peasant Children, or They, Us?” (1862).
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| Tolstoy among the peasant children of Yasnaya Polyana from the Russian General Education Portal |
Tolstoy among the peasant children of the village Krapivnafrom the Krapivna Historical Web Page |
To be continued…
Tags: academic life, comparative literature, Pushkin, today's youth, Tolstoy, w00t!