Reaccessed from my del.icio.us feed to the right, it’s Stephen J. Pyne in the Chronicle of Higher Ed:
It may be that the scientific model of the grant-supported article is becoming more dominant, or that the simple production of data has become a sufficient justification for scholarship. Surely one reason is that research seminars offer enough time to compose an essay or a journal article but not a book, or even a book chapter. Perhaps an obsession with historiography has blocked interest in historical writing as literature, or the belief has arisen that the best way to meet the challenges of postmodern literary criticism is to deny its claims altogether, particularly since the contamination of memoir by fictional devices has tainted the whole question of applying “literary” techniques, borrowed from fiction, to nonfiction sources.
It may be simply that most of us don’t know how to teach writing —real writing, which is to say, finding the means to express what we want to say. Instead we defer to the off-the-shelf formulas of the favored journals and the thesis-evidence-conclusion style of traditional dissertations.
Yes, it’s another “history isn’t relevant” article in a major national publication. Here’s a quick story: The most useful panel I’ve ever been to at an AHA was last year in New York. It was about publishing for trade presses and included an agent, a publishing exec and a couple of prominent authors. Ever since, I’ve been asking all the prominent historians I’ve met about their experiences in that world and they’ve been thriving. One of them – a labor historian, no less – has an agent shopping his book around Hollywood.
Perhaps Stephen J. Pyne and I just meet different people, but I do agree with most of this:
For some scholarly writing, the prevailing formulas are sufficient, and part of good writing is recognizing when they work. Yet they often falter when confronted with new ideas, and learning how to adapt traditional templates to the actual requirements of the material and the enthusiasms of the writer is a craft that can be learned, and even taught.
Without departmental support, however, writing with literary imagination is not only difficult to teach but detrimental to graduate students because they will not get credited for the work nor be allowed by dissertation committees to use what they have learned. Before writing can be taught seriously to graduate students in history, their professors will have to agree on what good writing means, decide that it matters, and accept themes as well as theses. Before we can educate students about good writing, we may have to re-educate their teachers.
It’s funny that he puts it this way, because my friend Scott Martelle has kindly been re-educating me in order to write for a popular audience. Scratch that. It’s not a re-education, he’s helping me learn a different set of conventions for a different audience. It’s not like I’m going to give up writing scholarly articles with lots of evidence, it’s rather that I’m learning an additional way to write in order to attract additional readers.
And, of course, if I didn’t have tenure, I wouldn’t even consider doing this. Your audience may small in some journal with a subscription list of 200 libraries, but your audience is an important one. Professors with grad students should be preparing them to please that crowd if they want to stay in the professoriate.
I, on the other hand, am enjoying the freedom to try new things. It’s not re-education, it’s just lifelong learning.
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