Author: Sarah Pearce

Posted on

Dante per stranieri

A copy of a watercolor by Dante Gabriel Rosetti depicting the lovers Francesca da Rimini and Paolo Malatesta, the subject of my first composition in L’Inferno per stranieri.

I’m taking an Inferno per stranieri course on Zoom over winter break — it’s reading Dante’s Inferno over twelve weeks in the original/sometimes in modern Italian or English translation and discussing it in intermediate-to-advanced level Italian. My writing has noticeably improved although I find speaking frustrating (I’m much smarter in other languages!) and I’m still firmly in the intermediate-level camp as I don’t feel like I have good control over the subjunctive yet or any kind of handle on which prepositions go with which verbs. Also, in a class that’s for stranieri who aren’t necessarily spagnoloparlanti, I can get away with hispanisms in my vocabulary that someone teaching primarily Spanish-speakers would call me on; so I just need to be a bit more attentive to not letting myself get away with not looking up the real Italian word after I’ve made something up on the basis of Spanish. Be that as it may, it’s exactly the kind of language class I like because it integrates interesting content with language learning and practice rather than treating those two things like they are separable.

Posted on

My Year in Books: 2020

This year’s book roundup, with 2020 being the first year in recent memory that I’ve come even vaguely close to doing as much non-work as I would like because the combination of tenure, quarantine, and audiobooks makes for getting through rather a lot of fiction and other miscellaneous reading. I’ve still got more on my to-read list than I’ll get through in a lifetime, though. Next year, more essay collections. I’m excited about the ones I have queued up.

Without further ado, a very idiosyncratic list of the books I read outside my own research reading:

***

Least sympathy for a problem the protagonist created for himself and then exacerbated through his solipsistic outlook and life and very ineffective explanations to everyone in spite of situations being totally innocuous : Salvo Montalbano and all the women in his life he freaked out and otherwise upset by cluelessly toting around some suspicious blow-up sex-doll evidence from a crime scene in The Treasure Hunt by Andrea Camilleri, (all Montalbano audiobooks read by Grover Gardner)

Why, yes, I have read Life is a Dream by Pedro Calderón de la Barca: The Game of Mirrors, by Andrea Camilleri

Best typesetting issue: The standard Olivetti in the office when the guys needed a typewriter that could type in Arabic letters, The Snack Thief by Andrea Camilleri

Lawrence of Sicilia: Ngilino “il sheikh” Sinagra in The Excursion to Tindari by Andrea Camilleri

The moment at which I was cautiously (if ultimately incorrectly) hopeful that this wouldn’t be a faux-benevolent Orientalist novel: “Montalbano was certain that the doctor was repeating word for word what he had asked him to say. Though he didn’t know any Arabic, he had the impression he understood a few words. As he was listening he remembered that once upon a time all the fishermen in the Mediterranean spoke a common language, known as ‘Sabir.’ It was anyone’s guess how it had come into being, and it was anyone’s guess how it had died. Nowadays it would have been extremely useful to everyone.” The Other End of the Line by Andrea Camilleri

Lost track of who all was shooting at whom, and honestly didn’t care: The Terra Cotta Dog, by Andrea Camilleri

Because it was time to try something different by Camilleri: The Sacco Gang, audiobook also read by Grover Gardner

The series really declined in the end: The Safety Net by Andrea Camilleri

Kinda can’t quit it, though: The Sicilian Method by Andrea Camilleri

But my God, is Montalbano a jerk to women: The Paper Moon, by Andrea Camilleri, audiobook read by Grover Gardner

Read more detective fiction by women: The Dance of the Seagull by Andrea Camilleri*

Pre-pandemic women-in-translation book club: Space Invaders by Nona Fernández, translated by Natasha Wimmer (and I played nice was wasn’t the person who showed up to the lit-in-translation book club having read it in the original)

No, seriously, read more detective fiction by women: The Mysterious Affair at Styles by Agatha Christie, read by Phoebe Judge

With that said, I do tend to read monographically: A Small Town in Germany, Agent Running in the Field, Tinker, Tailor, Solider, Spy, A Murder of Quality, all by John Le Carré.

Pretty sure I’m rooting for the wrong side: Call for the Dead by John Le Carré

Honest-to-God jaw drop at the end: The Looking Glass War by John Le Carré

Kept losing track of all the different intelligence agents: The Honourable Schoolboy by John Le Carré

Kenneth Branaugh’s American woman accent is awful: Death on the Nile by Agatha Christie, audiobook read disappointingly 

I have been reading the series since the beginning and despite the kerfuffle over the latest entry, I chose to read it *before* deciding that I didn’t like it despite my previous comment about the value of reading more detective fiction by women: Troubled Blood by Robert Galbraith, audiobook read by Robert Glenister

Should have read in Italian but didn’t: Chronicles of a Liquid Society, by Umberto Eco

Am reading in Italian: Inferno, by Dante Alighieri (to be finished next year; am taking a class for intermediate-to-advanced language learners)

This is not how the academy works. Not at all: Camino Island by John Grisham

Honestly, this is a better representation of university life, and it’s a *fantasy* novel: The Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo

Not really that much less prudent than anybody else: The Imprudent King by Geoffrey Parker

The other books I read to prepare to take students to the aforementioned king’s palace at El Escorial because I am Not An Art Historian(tm): El Escorial by Henry Kamen and De El Bosco a Tiziano: Arte y maravilla en El Escorial by Fernando Checa

My own Madrid travel and thwarted travel reading: El anarquista que se llamaba como yo by Pablo Martín Sánchez (to be finished in the coming year — it’s a brick); Pagan Spain by Richard Wright

Further proof that I’m more of a non-fiction girl: The Man Who Played With Fire: Stieg Larsson’s Lost Files and the Hunt for an Assassin by Jan Stocklassa, translated by Tara Chase

Surprise neo-Nazis: See above.

Non-surprise neo-Nazis: Culture Warlords by Talia Lavin

Non-surprise, classic Nazis: Citizen 865 by Debbie Cenziper

Crossover/trade books read with an eye toward writing my own, a list that doesn’t include any of the books I was planning for it to at the start of the year: Jean Genet by Stephen Barber, Petrarch by Christopher S. Celenza, Maimonides by Sherwin Nuland

Haven’t read it since about the third grade and wanted to refresh my memory before watching the movie: Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe, audiobook read by Simon Vance

Palate cleanser after reading and watching Robinson Crusoe: Foe by J.M. Coetzee

Read in memoriam, just weeks after sending him his offprints from my edited volume: Ours: The Making and Unmaking of a Jesuit by Frank Peters  

Because, thank God 2020 is over already: Subtweet by Vivek Shraya; Diary of a Plague Year by Daniel Defoe; Too Much and Never Enough by Mary Trump

*Disclaimer because I know some dude is going to pop up and make sure that i know that Andrea, in Italian, is a man’s name. Yes, yes I do. And that’s rather the point.

Posted on

Securing Opportunities to Write

Three buzzard stuffed animals sitting on top of a teal typewriter.
My typewriter buzzards.

I recently had a lengthy and negative review essay published about a book that has, publicly, been received with acclaim in Medieval Studies but privately (and more in Jewish and Islamic Studies than English lit) been critiqued. The over the top enthusiasm for the book and the rush to treat it not as the first word but the last one on the subject, as a foundational text that must be accepted in whole moving forward, is what led me to treat the book in such detail. I knew that anything less would have no impact. (The review is available through OA at the journal’s web site through the end of the year, and a PDF is available on my academia page for after that.)

I knew that I was opening myself up to a lot of criticism, and I anticipated quite a bit of it exactly. I wasn’t surprised, for example, by people announcing that they were refusing to read it on the grounds that it’s racist for a white woman to critique a book on race written by a woman of color. I knew that was coming. Honestly, I also expected to take some flak for how I cited Peter Abelard, or for citing him at all since some scholars consider him to have been a rapist; and I was pleasantly surprised not to have that come my way. 

What I didn’t expect were suggestions that as a white woman I had been handed an opportunity in the form of being allowed to write a review essay at all where a woman of color wouldn’t have been. I cannot deny the reality behind the charge: Many opportunities do go to white scholars that could just as easily and even should go to scholars of color.  But I was still surprised because I don’t see this as an opportunity that was handed to me at all. In other words, it absolutely could have happened like that, but in this case it didn’t.

So without denying that I benefit professionally from white privilege, I thought it might also be helpful to walk through some of the steps I took to pursue this publication and a related, recent one . Academic publishing is not at all transparent; and at the beginning of my career I definitely didn’t know what I was doing or even how to figure out what I was doing in the arena of journal publications. 

 There are things I can do and try my best to do about systemic racism and there are things I can do about other problems in academic publishing that sit atop those structures. This blog post is meant to address the latter; it’s about the smaller, immediate, concrete issue rather than the much bigger one.

Continue reading “Securing Opportunities to Write”

Posted on

Teaching in Quarantine, Part 4 of ?

This post is a lightly edited version of a Twitter thread I wrote up earlier in a fit of pique over something I read in the New York Times. The author of the piece seems to think she has solved online education while managing to disparage faculty, ignore the realities of student body size and adjunctification at many institutions, overlook the temporary nature of the current situation, and spin out a very facile discussion  about the cost and value of college instruction. Hence the pique. All the same, I think I managed to address some misconceptions that I know go beyond just the author of the piece, so I didn’t want my reaction to get lost in the ether of my Twitter feed. The original piece can be found by clicking here, and my walk-through is below: 

An actual screen cap of college classes taught on Zoom.

“No one wants to pay $30,000 per semester for what they’ve been getting.”

“What they’ve been getting” was triage. Faculty had very little notice that we would be going online this semester (36 hours in my case).

“What they’ve been getting” is not what they will be getting in the fall because my colleagues and I are working dozens of hours above and beyond the work we normally do during the summer (and please note that most US college faculty are paid nine-month salaries, not twelve-month ones, but would never succeed in our professions if we didn’t work all year) to develop born-digital courses that will work. This extra work involves reading up on online education, taking webinars about how to use the technology available at our institution, participating in town halls on best practices for online education, making readings available digitally (sometimes with our camera phones because we can’t get into our offices to use scanners), and developing workarounds for the equity issues that crop up when our students have vastly different access to technology because of socioeconomic and geopolitical factors. And again, this is on top of the work we regularly do in the summer, when we are not paid: In my case, that’s writing an academic book, translating a popular book from Spanish, drawing up plans for the trade book I want to write, and finishing three articles.

In the spring we were working in emergency conditions; in the fall conditions will be sub-optimal (because what deadly pandemic isn’t?) but we will have planned for and adapted to them.

“A survey of college students in the spring found that about 75 percent were disappointed with the online learning experience during the lockdown.”

Trust me, your (children’s) professors were, too. That’s why we’re scrambling now.

“I’ve learned that my family gets the best bang for our buck when our daughter engages directly with her professors, her classmates and the material.”

The current situation is, for sure, emphasizing a number of existing philosophical questions about what college education is, what it’s for, what it costs, and what it’s worth.

Continue reading “Teaching in Quarantine, Part 4 of ?”

Posted on

1071 — Emily Dickinson

I’m participating in a translation workshop this month (more on this soon). It’s mostly Spanish and English, with some French, Italian, and a little German, as well. One of the first exercises was to translate and analyze three existing translations (including one by Silvina Ocampo)  of a poem by Emily Dickinson. It would never (at least not now, maybe in the future) occur to me to translate into anything other than my native language. (There’s that great quip of Gregory Rabassa’s, that when someone asked him how he knew his Spanish was good enough to translate Spanish texts into English, he replied that the question was never that, but always whether his English was good enough.) But for an exercise, for a first try at translating out of English, Dickinson’s agramaticality is very liberating.  There’s lots I’m not sure of in what I’ve done, but here’s the poem and my attempt: 

Emily Dickinson, 1071:

Percebir un Objeto cuesta
precisa su pérdida— 
Percepción en sí — Ganancia 
Replicando su precio— 

El Objeto Absoluto — nulo —
Percebir adjusta
y luego reprende cierta Perfección
Que sitúa tan lejos—

  

Perception of an object costs
precise the Object’s loss —
Perception in itself a Gain
Replying to its Price —

The Object Absolute — is nought —
Perception sets it fair
and then upbraids a Perfectness
That situates so far —

 
   
Posted on

Teaching in Quarantine, Part 3 of ?

It’s not really clear how my institution is going to proceed for the fall semester and nor is it clear that I’ll be teaching in the fall. (One of the options that has been floated is to treat AY 20-21 as if it has three semesters rather than two semester plus a summer session, with faculty teaching in two of three; I volunteered to teach in the summer instead of the fall if we go that route.) But of course the possibilities for online instruction are at least simmering on my mental back burner and proceeding at a rolling boil on #pedagogytwitter.

One of the recent controversies has been over whether it is permissible to require students to turn on their cameras in Zoom seminar or whether that’s an invasion of privacy. Having taught my lecture class this semester to a whole screen full of blank boxes, I am definitely going to require that cameras be on. I can’t imagine an entire semester in which I don’t have the visual cues to tell tell how my teaching is landing, whether students are with me, or whether they understand what’s going on — especially when it’s a new group of students I won’t have at least had some face-time with at the beginning of the term.  For seminars, there’s no way to even try to build rapport among the students if they only know each other as small gray rectangles . And in terms of accessibility, cameras-off is a challenge for students who read lips; I had a lip-reading student this semester and almost every time a student asked a question, I had to stop and remind them to put on their camera because even though I made a general announcement at the start of online instruction, it didn’t seem to stick. I understand that some students might not want other people to see their homes, be it for self-consciousness about socio-economic class, general concern for privacy, or any other number of reasons.

So in my syllabus language that requires cameras to be on, I’m going to explicitly state that they can use a background if they have privacy concerns relating to their classmates or me seeing into their homes. And I’m going to feature it, both so that students with privacy concerns don’t feel singled out and to make instructional use of the tools available. I haven’t quite worked out the details, but I’m planning to make an extra credit assignment to choose a background that somehow relates to the week’s reading or theme and keep a short record of the rationale for each choice. I hope it’ll be a way for students to engage while making the most of a sub-optimal situation. 

I taught from the Zoom Mosque of Córdoba for one class session this semester.
Posted on

Academic Writing Despair

I posted this on Twitter and it seemed to strike a chord I figured I’d post it here, too, just so that it doesn’t get lost in the constant churn of social media:

I’m hitting that particular kind of writing despair where my own over-familiarity with my materials gives the false impression that this is all obvious and that my book won’t contribute anything that everybody doesn’t already know. It’s an illusion, but it’s a pernicious one.

And I’ll just add two more quick thoughts to my  280 characters: 1) This happens a lot earlier in the process of writing a book that it seems like it should. 2) I absolutely felt like this with the last project and with other substantial articles I’ve written since, but I think the feeling is more acute with the current book project because I’m writing about authors and texts (Salman Rushdie! Yehuda Amichai!) much more widely known and so it aggravates the sense of simply pushing the things that everyone already knows around on a plate.

Posted on

Teaching in Quarantine, Part 2 of ?

I finished teaching this week; I may reflect more on remote instruction over the summer as I start preparing for the fall semester, but for now I need some distance and time to recover from a semester that had already shaped up as one of the most difficult I’ve had even before the global health crisis took hold. And for the time being, I’m not doing any planning for the fall because we don’t really know what it’s going to look like. But I am really worried.

We have gotten a few emails from the administration with contradicting messages about plans for fall instruction, ranging from proceeding as normal to being able to opt out of teaching in the fall and teaching regular courses next summer instead. It makes sense that there aren’t concrete plans yet because there is so little that is known about COVID-19 still and it’s so unclear what will happen in terms of disease spread as states and cities lift lockdown orders.

I’m in the age group that’s seeing this charming consequence of the disease. I’m really scared of getting sick once campus becomes more densely populated in the fall.

The most recent email was for faculty teaching in the core curriculum, suggesting that one option might be to split lectures (typically 80-120 students) in half, with half the students attending each lecture in person and half by video to leave enough room in lecture halls for appropriate social distancing; the groups would alternate so that every student could attend lecture in person once a week. 

That seems plausible on paper but it doesn’t seem to take into account any of the out-of-classroom factors. The weather has been beautiful for most of this week. It was eighty degrees and sunny over the weekend and I stayed indoors the whole time because there were too many people outside to be able to keep a distance. Even today, when the temperature was much lower, there were loads of people gathering in Washington Square Park, effectively the heart of campus, riding bikes and skateboards, running, and doing other activities and without masks or sufficient space between them. I worry that mitigation strategies like keeping classrooms half full won’t be sufficient when thousands of students return — even if a smaller than usual number return — and are going to parties, lining to get up into buildings, walking down the narrow streets of campus and the Village, and hanging out in the park. 

This is worry from a place of lacking information. But I’m not sure that the information exists to be able to make the right decisions, not yet anyway. But what I do hope is that the people who are charged with making those decisions take a walk through the campus and the neighborhood on a nice day this spring or summer and think about where all the additional bodies are going to go.

Posted on

My Eyebrows Attend a Book Club

One of the ways that organizations have tried to maintain some kind of social connection during the shelter-in-place order is by creating Zoom book clubs. This is it!, I thought to myself. I can finally socialize in a way that is based around something I’m comfortable doing — reading! 

But going to a book club as an academic is hard. I analyze text for a living. I read for a living. I ask questions about what I’m reading and explain it to people for a living. And all of those facts of my life mean that it would be very easy for me to dominate a conversation about books and talk over people’s heads. It’s not that I’m necessarily smarter, just that I have the tools to do this kind of thing a little bit more refined and in a little bit more regular use than most people. I make it a goal to blend in, but it doesn’t usually work. Even before the shelter-in-place order, I attended a book club meeting in person at a local bookstore. I shared at thought about the structure of that month’s novel, a thought I considered to be totally innocuous. I guess it wasn’t. Everyone was blown away by my insight (imagine me rolling my eyes here as I retell the story), and I had blown my cover. 

The offending brow.

This week I tried a Jewish book club for people in their 20s and 30s, run by the synagogue I’m thinking about joining. Even though I found the book to be hopelessly superficial, I was resolved to behave myself like a civilian and try blend in. But my eyebrows betrayed me when one of the women in the group, during a conversation about lashon hara as discussed in the group’s book, said that she knew it was a solidly Jewish value because she hadn’t met any Jewish religious leaders who would ever engage in the practice. When the rabbi insisted that I verbalize what my eyebrows were already evidently saying by jumping about six inches above the top of my head (they do that of their own accord — traitors!), I said, “Well, it’s just that I was thinking about Ovadiah Yosef…” The woman looked kind of embarrassed. I felt terrible. I don’t think my eyebrows cared.

The offending book.

This exchange happened after a first one: The rabbi leading the group talked about imitatio dei being a Jewish value and I cringed. Apparently enough for it to be visible on Zoom. My overactive eyebrows are fairly substantial and therefore hard to miss when they jump up my face, even on a tiny screen and across a bad internet connection. The rabbi asked why I reacted so strongly to that, and I said that it just seemed like a very Christian way of formulating things. He insisted that it isn’t, that a phrase at the beginning of this week’s parsha — קְדֹשִׁ֣ים תִּהְי֑וּ כִּ֣י קָד֔וֹשׁ אֲנִ֖י יְהוָ֥ה אֱלֹהֵיכֶֽם׃ — is proof that imitatio dei is also a Jewish concept. We ultimately left it alone.

But I didn’t like it. The phrase, to me, evoked the idea of behaving in a god-like way within a salvific framework that is not operative in Judaism. So I did what any academic who has just been a total pain in the arse in a book club would do: I found a couple of articles and read them. Both are Jewish Studies-related and both use the phrase imitatio dei without comment. The second one I’ve linked to here, the one by Harvey, a noted historian of Judeo-Islamic philosophy, is published in an academic/Orthodox Jewish context, namely in the journal of the Rabbinical Council of America.

I realized that it was the very Latin-ness itself of the phrase that was what was bothering me, which is strange. Rationally and in every instant of my professional life I know very well that languages aren’t inherently confessional: Jews in the MENA speak Arabic, Arabic-speaking Christians use the word Allah to mean God when they pray, a large swath of the population in medieval Spain were native speakers of a Romance language, regardless of their faith tradition, etc. I’m often aware of the King Jamesiness of contemporary Jewish liturgies in English and it catches my attention, but ultimately I see it as an example of Anglophone Jews using the language that has evolved for us to talk to and about God.*

So what to make of this reflexive jolt of Latin = Christianity? It was valuable for me to read and react to things that I think about a lot professionally, but as a completely non-academic reader who wasn’t expecting much out of the book or the discussion. My low expectations let me just react without thinking about it, because I wasn’t expecting to be thinking about anything. I don’t know that we can ever deliberate sit down and try to read like a civilian, but there is something to be said for being surprised into it or by it. Reading reflexively is reminder of something that sometimes gets lost in textual criticism: that pure reaction is a part of reading that provides another path by which to seek meaning in a text.   

All the same, I’d like the lockdown to be over soon. I think I prefer my old, familiar ways of being terrible at socializing. And honestly, a social life conducted entirely the internet has been pretty rough for my eyebrows.

*I have a review essay forthcoming in which I discuss the use of phrases from the KJV to describe medieval Jewish communities in contemporary English-language scholarship. I’m critical of it there, but to me there’s something different about Jewish liturgists making a deliberate, intellectual choice to integrate through theologically non-problematic words and phrases and non-Jewish academics imposing theologically very problematic words and phrases on their Jewish subjects. I mention this here because I’m expecting a lot of criticism for the review essay and I don’t want inconsistency on this position to create extra room for more; the two contexts are quite different.