fetch
For the midterm in my doctoral seminar in rhet/comp, I emailed each student an individualized question and they had 4 hours to compose a response, which they then emailed back to me. The following week, one student asked what the average page length was, and without really thinking through the effects of what I was about to say, I told them it was about 7-8 pages. So of course the people who wrote less than that felt like they didn't do enough work (the theme of the seminar is rhetorics of work in comp).
It then occurred to me that we never really get over this internalized message that more pages equals better work. I told them about the damn book manuscript I'm working on, that it's just over 100 pages right now, that I feel like it's wimpy, and in that very moment the best metaphor occurred to me. My book will be a frisbee, I said. I can ask the publisher to print it round, and its title, which previously had no colon, could be The Affective Economics of Citation: A Frisbee.
K. revises for me on the spot. No, she says, The Affective Economics of Citation: Fetch!
Labels: book
posted by aerobil @ 5:31 AM
3 comments
3 Comments:
Remember doing that whole page count thing after exams? "How many pages did you write?!" Craziness.
In my first incarnation as a doctoral student, the prof asked which of the essays in a book we wanted to read, and I suggested one--because it was the longest. She asked if I were a size queen.
Try that as a metaphor in your seminar! :)
And the flipside: I wrote 14 single-spaced pages in 3 hours for Eileen's qualifying exam, and she thought really hard about failing it because there was too much hay, not enough needle. I was pissed, but she was right.
What are books about? How you are judged by your peers? Your own self-satisfaction? Or, something you may never know--what your book comes to mean to another person? In 1990, I purchased two slim volumes on lapis lazuli for the sum of $26.45. The author was born in 1901. She was 74 years of age when she obtained her BA. The first volume was 50 pages long and published when she was 87; the second was 65 pages long and published when she was 89. Both volumes have extensive bibliographies which due to her poor eyesight had to be read aloud to her, and both volumes were published in English although this was not her mother tongue.
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