Octalog II

I enjoy the Octalogue entries (I & II) because they are mini-manifestos!
I’ll be progressively blogging over the next few days, but I wanted to comment in particular on Octalogue II, which sets an agenda, in many ways, for a course in historical study.

From Octalogue II:

“Serving Time in the Archives” “Where were the women? The people of color” (Ferreira-Buckley 26).


Ferreira-Buckley makes an excellent point about the nature of archival work: many of us do not receive training in the ways to conduct traditional research, and such research takes a lot of time and resources (travel to archives, time to sift through archival boxes, make sense of documents, etc). There is also the problem of language—knowing Hebrew, Greek, Latin well enough to read and translate texts. Ferreira Buckley worries that our obsession with theory and with its narrative structures will make for shallow or under researched histories. I find this an honest and reflective account. She raises many strong points about the nature of archival research: its material demands, in particular. But I want some thoughts from her about what it means to try to address, overcome, and/or compensate for these factors? What are ways that graduate schools should try to address these problems? With the speed-up productivity pressure around publication, how can academic departments and promotion and tenure committees factor in the time it takes to do traditional historical research?

“Storiography and Rhetoric and Composition”
Lauer writes critically of the ways in which our histories of the field are compromised by shallow methods of study.. She is particularly critical of how graduate students consume histories of the field: portraying historical figures as heroes or villains or as examples of particular theoretical categories. She makes a good point that there is a tendency to “fix” historical figures and scholars into a particular time and place instead of acknowledging how such figures/scholars grow and change over time, develop new ideas, take new directions. She opposes the static way in which some of us tend to read in the field: fixing a particular piece in time instead of trying to read it in context. What Lauer does not address are the ways in which the field itself helps perpetuate static readings through its writing of histories where hero/villain narratives are commonplace: e.g., Fred Newton Scott (hero) and Adams Sherman Hill (villain) in Berlin and Connors. I love Robin Varnum’s history of composition at Amherst College Fencing with Words because she avoids the binaries.

More later!