¡Bemsha SWING!: Teaching and Research (II)

31 ene 2011

Teaching and Research (II)

If teaching and research are diametrically opposed in our minds, then we will tend to have impoverished, caricatured views of both.

*Research becomes even more "esoteric," if we believe that it could not possibly be of interest to our students. (See Cordon Sanitaire below). The more removed research is from the subject of instruction, the better, according to this mentality.

*Teaching becomes more and more a matter of transmitting very basic knowledge. No intellectual curiosity enters. So you might as well have an M.A. level instructor as a PhD. Customer satisfaction becomes the model and for-profit universities step in to train students vocationally.

We don't offer our students the very best of our research, our best ideas, because those ideas are too highly specialized.

My proposal is to involve undergraduates in research and to start thinking about research differently. I don't mean that we would not allow for more specialized projects, but that we would start to think of an expanded audience.

4 comentarios:

Clarissa dijo...: I find teaching extremely useful for my research. I can spend months thinking about my research project, and still it's insufficient.

Then, I come into the classroom and begin to speak to students. And new ideas just start rushing in as I speak. So I absolutely agree that there is no need for a divide between teaching and research.

Of course, we don't always get a chance to teach courses that are advanced enough for this to happen. And don't get me wrong, I love teaching the language. But teaching only the language for an entire semester is not as rewarding in terms of my own intellectual development. There is a big temptation to fall into a rut and just repeat the same activities I did in the past in the same course.; 4:42 p. m.
Jonathan dijo...: Yes. I love teaching language too and have learned a lot from the process, but too much of it reinforces the research-teaching split in precisely the way I was talking about.; 4:51 p. m.
Bill Hawthorne dijo...: Dear Bemsha Swing,

My name is Barbara O’Brien and I am a political blogger. Just had a question about your blog and couldn’t find an email—please get back to me as soon as you can (barbaraobrien(at)maacenter.org)

Thanks,
Barbara; 9:13 a. m.
Jonathan dijo...: You can email me at jmayhew "at" ku.edu.; 9:16 a. m.

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Blurbs & Reviews

"Jonathan Mayhew’s new work belongs to a certain class of surprising books: those so obviously necessary once they appear that it apparently required a stroke of genius to come up with the idea for them."

--Daniel Katz

"Jonathan Mayhew's Lorca is less the distinctive Spanish poet, whose murder in 1936 marked the beginning of the Civil War, than he is an American invention. From the 1940s to the end of the century, our poets have invoked Lorca-in translation, of course-as a Romantic, exotic, radical, and, in many cases, gay icon-the poet of mystery and the duende. The Lorca myth, Mayhew argues persuasively, has enriched American lyric, but it has also been an obstacle to a more adequately grounded understanding of Spanish poetry in the 20th century. Apocryphal Lorca is revisionist criticism at its most acute."

-Marjorie Perloff

"Enhanced by copious notes and an excellent bibliography, this book offers a perceptive, intriguing assessment of the Garcia Lorca created by the postwar generation of American poets." (Choice )

"Mayhew is a critic who is at the top of his game; he combines a breadth of knowlege of the field with acute analysis."

--John C. Wilcox, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

"Let me just cut through all the usual, boring book review preliminaries and say the following thing: Jonathan Mayhew has, in Apocryphal Lorca, written an amazing book. "

--Brandon Holmquest, Calque

"The great merit of Mayhew's study is his sustained effort to document and interrogate Lorca's reception, unique among American encounters with foreign literatures in its nature and extent."

--Lawrence Venuti, TLS.

"Se trata de Jonathan Mayhew y su extraordinario estudio Apocryphal Lorca. Translation, Parody, Kitsch. Esta obra se ocupa no de García Lorca sino de cómo los escritores estadounidenses han reinventado a Lorca, desde Spicer y Rothenberg hasta O’Hara y Koch. Asimismo, es una discusión de la Deep Image —¡cuánto hay que desmenuzar de ese capítulo!— y la manera en que la poética norteamericana se ha apropiado de lo lorqueano (o lorcaesco) y del concepto de lo 'otro' que éste representa. Éste es un libro repleto de sutilezas, de tesis, apuntes, datos."

--Heriberto Yépez

"Apocryphal Lorca, sin embargo, es mucho más que un estudio de las vidas posteriores de Lorca en la poesía americana entre principios de los años 50 y 70. También ofrece un acercamiento histórico a la traducción de su obra, descubriendo reseñas de prensa significativas y discurriendo acerca de reconocimientos críticos. El texto es elegante y fresco; el análisis amplio e históricamente específico."

--María Delgado, Revista de Literatura

¡Bemsha SWING!

31 ene 2011

Teaching and Research (II)

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