Last week “The Writing of History,” my graduate course, got underway.
Once the logistics were arranged – Who is presenting when? What are the assignments? How does the Blackboard site function? – we settled into a conversation about the motivations for writing any history, and the motivations for writing history differently.
Among the published pieces we read, Virginia Scharff’s 2008 Western History Association presidential address received the most attention, for her call to action, her valorizing of Fawn Brodie — and for the lobster.
“Professors like me,” Scharff writes, work at “dissecting term papers and senior theses and master’s theses and dissertations like somebody eating a lobster. The cracking of the claws, the slicing open of the tail, … probing the legs and crannies for that last piece of succulent meat.” Hoping her students were laughing as they heard this, she nevertheless wondered while “wielding that bloody red pen” whether “they wish, perhaps, that someone had stroked them between the eyes until they fell asleep, before being dropped into the pot of boiling water.”
“Yes!” one student exclaimed, and the stories came pouring out – the papers dripping with red ink, the insistence on more theory or fewer descriptions, the choice to include the first person or the tortured efforts to argue without personality. My students revealed tears, and frustration – and the desire to learn the language of the discipline. The students concurred that history has its forms and formats – and, if one is to succeed in expanding the audience and meaning of history papers, one also has to learn those strictures.
The class admired the courage and efforts of Fawn Brodie, the desire to tell a new story, using new evidence. Yet we also acknowledged her years spent outside of the profession – and, seemingly, outside of the stream of regular income. Must experimental history be done by freelancers, by the independently wealthy, by loners? I hope not! Brodie is thus a double-edged example, of how to expand the realm of what history can be, but to pay a price in historians’ disapproval (and the limits placed on professional women.) As Scharff notes, after a contentious battle Brodie was tenured at UCLA. Who was discouraged, further back along the path to radical change?
We also discussed the genre of these readings. The pieces from Marjorie Garber, Gabrielle Spiegel, and Virginia Scharff were all talks – not conceived as closely argued articles as much as exhortations, delivered by tenured women who, in two of three cases, spoke as presidents of their organizations. While it is encouraging for such a call for innovation to come from the top – “in Salt Lake City?!” one student gasped, on looking closely at where Scharff vaunted the work of Fawn Brodie – I wonder if the exhortatory address ends up as another ephemeral call for better history writing.
“What academic revivalists worthy of the name would fail to establish a journal?,” James Goodman wondered, in another of the readings for last week, written early in the life of Rethinking History. “Or fail to ensure that at every major meeting numerous sessions were devoted to the practice of narrative? Or fail to hold meetings of their own in the hope of converting graduate students (and other untenured historians), the future of the profession, to the faith?” As I hinted before, I share this concern – and would be happy to hear from those willing to participate in workshops, sessions, and side meetings on innovative history writing at future conferences.
Is writing history with pizzazz merely the work of outsiders, or the pleasant dream of a fond conference nightcap? Surely it is not. But shouldn’t its proponents have more to say to one another?
Hi Adam,
First, thanks to you and your class for your thoughts on this essay. I’m a big believer in the idea that readers rescue writing, and I’m guessing that presidential addresses aren’t among the most frequently rescued renderings.
Second, I taught a grad seminar at UNM last fall, titled “Writing as a Historian.” I’m going to send the link to this blog to the students in that class, in the hope that they will join this conversation. I think all of us learned something about writing, and I certainly learned a lot about teaching writing.
My approach was a little different, I suspect, from yours. Rather than zeroing in on how to write history, I modeled the class on William Zinsser’s famous undergraduate seminar on nonfiction writing. I wanted students to tackle different approaches and techniques and topics, rather than simply practicing the genres we historians generally write (book reviews, review essays, research articles, eventually, books). I hope some of the students will let me and the readers of this blog know what they thought about that approach.
I will confess that I have not abandoned my propensity for lobster-picking. Too many students have learned bad writing habits. It takes time, practice, even repetition before they even see the passive, wordy sentences, the confusing, imprecise and hastily chosen words. In a seminar, students don’t risk much by presenting ragged work. They have the opportunity to revise. But once they send their pieces out to strangers (panel commentators, journal editors, prospective employers), the costs of poor prose increase.
Readers are in a hurry. Writers have to compete with “30 Rock” and “Talking Points Memo” and the first warm day of spring. Writers have to get it right, to get it read.
Looking forward to more conversation,
Gingy Scharff
Comment by Virginia Scharff — January 28, 2010 @ 12:20 pm |
Thanks, Gingy, for joining in! Students are also shocked to find out that these “assigned names” are actually people, who can read and comment and respond as well!
In this course, I am taking most of the mechanics for granted — you should enter knowing what a book review or a review essay or a research paper is, and you have learned the “correct” way to write it.
Our primary writing assignment will be to revise that piece in a risky way — to blow a hole in the standard model, and see where it leads. I’ve encourage the students to find which paper needs rethinking without re-researching, and we’ll turn to that assignment in the second half of class.
More reports from the classroom to come…
Comment by adamarenson — January 28, 2010 @ 1:08 pm |
Adam, Gingy, and anyone else who’s reading:
It seems to me the number of people interested in having these kinds of conversations (by talking, formal writing, blogs like this one) is growing. I find I have no shortage of people to engage with, or new books to read, that satisfy my “writerly” cravings. I know this isn’t the center of the discipline–but I don’t think real innovation comes from the center.
I also think that it’s important to keep these conversations going, growing, engaging, welcoming.
The tenor of some of this conversation seems to perpetuate the notion that writerly history is a fringe and kind of a lonely enterprise. It’s not what everyone wants to do, but lots of historians are interested. So the issue is communication, communication, communication…working to make “writerly historians” feel less lonely (in spite of the hours alone that good writing requires).
Thanks, Adam, for launching this thread. It needs to keep happening.
Maybe one way of addressing the notion that this is a peripheral exercise, relegated to a panel at occasional conferences and seductive night-cap conversations, is to start real, consequential conversations about how writing features in tenure and promotion for historians with academic appointments.
If we think the profession should pay a different kind of attention to writing, then we have to link it to material conditions. If we want to keep talking among ourselves, then our writing, and our students’ writing, will improve. And we’ll keep having fun. Not a bad plan B.
Comment by Laura Mitchell — January 28, 2010 @ 6:49 pm |
Hi Adam,
I notice that the tone of this blog, the comments, and perhaps your seminar, is very professional. Please do not take it the wrong way when I say that, despite the potential radicalism of the questions you engage in, this fact is typical of U.S. academia. People in your academia are very worried about their careers, and of course they are right.
On the first floor of my ragged apartment building there is a carpenter who assembles beds. For purely experimental reasons, last month I offered to work for him part-time. He asked if I was a carpenter and I said I was a writer. He thought for a moment, looked at my hands, and finally put the box of glue he was holding down. “Can you make things that people sleep on?”
Notice, the second question is qualitatively different from the first. Historians often think about their profession as a kind of method, a set of things people do in history departments. You want to open their eyes to the fact that what defines them as historians is not a set of practices they already do, but the final product. And this final product must constantly be interrogated: What are you, dear history? What are your components? How necessary is each of those components? Must you have four legs to be called a bed? Or are you a place in which people dream about the past?
Maybe it would be helpful, at least for the purpose of the seminar, to put departmental issues to the side for a moment; to hold these papers down, red ink and all, and dream: what could they do?
I.S.
Comment by Icaza-Salim — January 29, 2010 @ 1:05 am |
I.S., thanks very much for the comment. Of course there are successful nonfiction writers, and successful and influential history writers, outside of the academy.
I have simply chosen to be a historian in the academy mindful of the larger world, so I both try to read the history and nonfiction and fiction that feeds my understanding of what history is and can be, and connect the too-often-insular conversations of the professional history world with the concerns and innovations of everybody else.
So, I have chosen a professional tone and posture, but I hope it can still be an inviting one, to anyone who has the courage, verve, and insight to give history a place to sleep.
Welcome, and thanks again!
Comment by adamarenson — January 29, 2010 @ 8:28 am |
Come on! Let’s talk about tone and quit the posturing. Tone distances academic writers from real world readers more than anything. OK. So maybe it ain’t just tone. Add undeveloped narrative sense, overdeveloped vocabulary, and the inability for concise argument and we start to understand the failure of much historical writing. Does it matter? By and large the profession votes no. Without nodding off, can you read an entire AHR article? Yes? I must go get me some Ritalin off the internet too.
Before becoming the historians’ Barry Bonds, I point to how graduate students learn to read: quantity over quality, argument over style, and, assessment over enjoyment. A good writer knows her audience. Why waste time crafting a wondrous word pyramid, then, when a pile of crap will suffice?
Comment by Scott Gac — January 30, 2010 @ 7:29 am |
In fairness to my creative self, it must be noted that my above post was edited by Adam for “crude language.” I leave here with one last item, from The Marshall Court in Gibbons v. Ogden (1824): “As men whose intentions require no concealment, generally employ the words which most directly and aptly express the ideas they intend to convey, the enlightened patriots who framed our constitution, and the people who adopted it, must be understood to have employed words in their natural sense, and to have intended what they have said.”
Comment by Scott Gac — January 31, 2010 @ 7:14 am
[...] of this was rattling around in the back of my mind as I read an exchange in the comments section at the Making History Podcast blog (full disclosure, I also blog there [...]
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