A discussion in the comments in Clarissa's excellent new wordpress blog had me laughing out loud. She thought at first that I was a graduate student because I was enthusiastic about what I did, apparently not a quality shared by senior professors in my field. She eventually realized that I was "THE Jonathan Mayhew," not just someone using my name in tribute to the real me. It reminds me of the recent discovery that Scott Kaufman, the blogger, is the same Scott Kaufman who teaches composition at UCI, when he is constantly blogging about teaching composition at UCI.
I confess it. I am still as enthusiastic about my field as I ever was. I never got jaded or negative, and I still am surprised when people have heard of me, since I labor in an obscure subfield of Spanish literature.
3 comentarios:
In my case it is much worse than that. I thought you were a person using the name of American clergyman Jonathan Mayhew, 1720-1766
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Mayhew), as a handle.
I didn't know Jonathan Mayhew, you, to think of right off, not being in Peninsular and all. This would not normally embarrass me but it is pretty bad considering that I ended up teaching a class that had Lorca, Spicer, Duncan and others on the reading list and we read some pieces of your book. And I remembered it but not the Name of the Author. Hm.
This is getting funnier all the time.
I had you on my suggested critical readings list in grad school. And I knew of Apocryphal Lorca even though I hadn't read it before. A friend was using your work a lot for a doctoral dissertation at Yale. If a person is active in research in our field and produces interesting scholarship, they become known. If one's name is completely unrecognizable to people within the same field after 20+ years in it, I'd say that is cause for concern.
And thank you for the compliment to the blog!
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