Posts by Jolisa
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Hard News: Limping Onwards, in reply to Greg Dawson,
You mean Oh the humanities?
Indeed. Not sure who's playing the Hindenburg in this particular production, though.
(Nice avatar, by the way. Are those torpedoes of truth?)
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Hard News: Limping Onwards, in reply to James Butler,
Also, is it redundant to add that you don’t need to have a Humanities education in order to benefit from a Humanities education? [...] If the cost of maintaining the academic critical mass necessary for these subjects to continue to be studied is some hypothetical number of students who take “easy” humanities papers “just for interest” and somehow don’t benefit from the experience, then so be it.
Just wanted to highlight this beautifully expressed point so it didn't get lost in the mêlée. Also, in the hope that Danyl may actually address it.
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Hard News: Limping Onwards, in reply to HORansome,
I would totally take a philosophy class that used H2G2 as its master text! Who wouldn't? Which is why it's weird to me that Danyl seems to be conflating "popular" with "unworthy of intellectual consideration", and "enjoyable" with "not productive."
I think it's entirely defensible -- for me, to the point of actually being beyond debate -- to use "popular culture" (setting aside for the moment the question of the canon and who makes it) as a test case for a given analytical framework, or as raw material for teaching a particular skill. It's also worthy of investigation in its own right; but I would say that, wouldn't I, being a Comparative Literature major.
On the question of popular culture as the medium for a pedagogical message: when I was lucky enough to be a graduate student at A Fairly Big-Name American University, I taught a couple of "freshman writing seminars" under the auspices of the a program that was widely admired and imitated as a model of how to teach basic rhetorical writing skills to undergraduates.
These writing classes were:
a) compulsory for all undergrads regardless of their major subject (in fact, you had to pass two writing seminars in order to get your degree)
b) mostly taught by graduate students in the humanities, and
c) often based on, or framed by, "popular" materialI taught a seminar on detective fiction (the reading list included Conan Doyle, Sayers, Poe, Akutagawa, and Woolf), and another on notions of the future, using both canonical literature and science fiction/speculative fiction (including Gibson, Wells, Verne, Wired magazine, a book by Bill Gates, and the Communist Manifesto).
The at-first-glance frivolous material was the spoonful of sugar that enticed undergrads into my lair. By the end of the detective fiction seminar, for example, they were discussing questions of class, gender & education in texts like Bertolt Brecht's "A Worker Reads History" and Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own. And writing coherent essays about it, at the rate of one draft or finished essay per week.
One student (a working class kid from Québec) wrote a passionate documentary script about working conditions in the university kitchens; she went on to major in Food Tech and is currently strategy manager of a corporation you'd know by name; some of you probably have a can of it on your desk right now.
Another student -- a quiet engineer -- won that year's prize for best essay produced in an undergraduate writing seminar. He's now doing medical research in genetics & oncology at another Big-Name University.
Are they (and their equally engaged classmates) still "using" the insights and skills gained in those compulsory writing classes? You'd have to ask them to be sure. They probably don't even remember the reading list, or my name. But I imagine that their hard work in that class has positively affected everything they've written since - every job letter, every grant application, every research report, every email to a congressman, every love letter.
And I bet that they all still read for fun.* That, in the end, would be the point, at least as far as I'm concerned.
*where "fun" includes "doing that cool thing we used to do in our writing seminars, viz. noticing the interesting bits and seeking out other people's take on them and then coming to our own well-supported and cogently argued, but always provisional, conclusions."
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Hard News: Limping Onwards, in reply to Keir Leslie,
In fact Fran Walsh has a BA in English Literature from Victoria University of Wellington, while Phillipa Boyens has a BA in English and History from Auckland.
Well, Danyl's 33% correct, which must be some comfort.
So, wait: 2 x BA (at 1980s prices) = 66% of the money made by the LOTR franchise? That's like, a Lotto jackpot ratio of profit awesomeness, relative to original investment. (Disclaimer: I am not an entertainment lawyer or accountant so my numbers may be wildly off).
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Hard News: Limping Onwards, in reply to giovanni tiso,
Oh - Vic offers one too? It is the end of the world, humanities-wise.
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Just to be absolutely clear what (and whom) we're talking about here: Danyl is extrapolating from a single summer school paper taught by Otago to the 100% negative utility of the study of the humanities at large in Aotearoa?
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Can I also nominate Ben W & Megan C, for their stellar work in the later pages of this very thread, as Public Intellectuals? Because they are.
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Hard News: Limping Onwards, in reply to Jackie Clark,
I gave an example. Which was ignored. So bollocks
Thank you for reminding me that I wanted to give you a giant thumbs-up for that example:
I have a BA – a very common degree – in History of Art and History. I’m a kindergarten teacher – one would think I would never use my degree. I do, every day. Not always the content of the degree but what I learned from sitting in hours of lectures, discussing ephemera with peers, knowing how to find out about stuff. I can shoot the shit for hours with a 3 year old.
I bloody love this example, and not just because I trust that "Can shoot the shit for hours with a 3 year old" is a bullet-point on your CV.* It is a source of great joy and satisfaction to me that my just-turned-5 year old comes home from pre-school talking about mandalas (thanks to his awesome teacher with the art history degree).
* actually, it should be a bullet point on everyone's CV.
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Hard News: Limping Onwards, in reply to Megan Wegan,
And that is why we are nominating you as New Zealand’s Next Public Intellectual.
Whereas, a person who persisted in twatcockish sophistry would be a... Pubic Intellectual? (Can't think of any, but you know what I mean).
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Hard News: Limping Onwards, in reply to Keir Leslie,
And barbaric, of course
Which reminds me: I wonder if the new definition of "barbarian" is "someone who wouldn't do an arts degree if you paid him."