Tuesday, December 8, 2009

And then again...

from that same file, called "great email," and from that same period, 3 months before i started my job, this dot-matrix fragment:

... raft of management strategies going on now, largely because the traditional english areas are - get this - claiming minority status. they feel marginalized by the interest in the "new" (read feminism and postcolonialism), and so the grad committee has reorganized so that we provide "balanced" coverage at the grad course level. which means fewer poco courses, mandatory sign-ups for the early stuff. in other words, it's not about us, and the real problem they are worrying over is Whither English over the next quarter century? .... the department needs to hear more about rigorous models approaching cultural difference (not blanding it out into pop theories of "difference") that don't buy into simple national boundary issues, and that means we have some work ahead of us. daphne read, you, and i will do some summit work on this, and OBVIOUSLY we are not in competition with one another, no matter what SB would hope or think.

i've been going crazy lately but heather it's great to hear from you. write write write. have a wonderful break in ireland.
XO stephen

2 comments:

mari said...

First of all: you kept your emails from '93? Impressive! Secondly, these are fascinating, given I was an undergrad at the time and at the mercy of-- who?-- for what courses were available. I was really interested in the feminism and poco stuff, since I'd never really heard of such things. It was so great to finally read and study things that I had some experience in. I'm pretty tired of the rhetoric that including new areas of study "marginalizes" the canonical works that still dominate the world anyhow.

It's partially because it makes me suspect that they don't just mean squelching books and theory from non-white males, but also the actual people themselves. Guess I'm just paranoid.

Dana Wilde said...

There was email in 1993? Good thing.