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Tuesday, December 06, 2005

Rhetorical Occasions

All right, I’ll let you all know what’s been keeping me so busy lately.  At the end of October I turned in the final draft manuscript of What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts?  Classroom Politics and “Bias” in Higher Education.  While that’s in copyediting, I’ve been finishing up a book of collected essays, Rhetorical Occasions: Essays on Humans and the Humanities.  (That book will even include some material from this humble blog!  But not this post.  That would be just too weird.) Yes, that’s right, I’m planning to have two books out next fall/ winter—it’s all part of my plan for world domination by 2009, as you might remember.  But I haven’t wanted to say anything about Rhetorical Occasions because I didn’t want to jinx it.

Don’t laugh.  I’ve mentioned Liberal Arts on this blog many times over the past two years, and as a result, I lost two chapters of it in a computer failure, saved unrevised versions of chapters over revised versions, and basically screwed things up again and again in a most uncharacteristic and vexing manner. What? you say. Here you are posing as a defender of Enlightenment reason against the incursions of superstition and pseudoscience, and you believe in this ‘jinx’ and ‘magical thinking’ nonsense? To which I reply: uh, well, actually, yes.  Time and again in my career, whenever I have spoken about a manuscript to people before it was done, I have jinxed it.  This is true both of book manuscripts and magazine essays: the principle works regardless of the length of the manuscript and irrespective of the publication venue.  So I have learned not to mess with the Angry Spirits who determine the fate of all mortal manuscripts.  Begone, Angry Spirits!  Go mess with Jonah Goldberg for a change.  (Ah!  I see you have.  Thank you, Angry Spirits.)

Anyway, Rhetorical Occasions isn’t just a collection of much of my work over the past ten years; a good chunk of it is substantially rewritten, and of the opening four essays (on the Sokal Hoax and its aftermath), one is entirely new, one has doubled in length (all by itself—it happened while I was sleeping), and one is an almost unrecognizable version of its former self (this is the “brute fact/ social fact” essay).  Over the past five weeks, I’ve been reading or rereading the whole pre- and post-Sokal crew, from Paul Gross and Norman Levitt to Paul Boghossian and Ian Hacking.  (That’s why I came across Steve Fuller’s blurb for Meera Nanda—and yes, I’ll have that reply to Steve a bit later this week.) As a result, there’s a kind of continuity between my arguments about postmodernism in Liberal Arts (which I’ve been hinting at here and there) and my work in the first four essays of Rhetorical Occasions. Just so you know how I’ve spent the fall of 2005.

More specifically, this project has required me to write seventy or eighty pages of new material over the past month, which is why I haven’t had a lot of spare time for commentary on politics and hockey—or updates on Jamie.  Or anything else.  But all that will change soon, because I’m finally getting the manuscript out of my house this week.  Unless, of course, I’ve just jinxed myself.

But hey, you know what?  While I was slaving away here over a hot laptop, I learned that I’ve been nominated for one of them Wizbang Weblog Awards.  So if you’ve been entertained or edified over the past year by this blog’s bizarre mix of cultural studies, Theory Tuesdays, Arbitrary But Fun Fridays, omnidirectional film and music commentary, and Jamie stories, please consider heading over to Wizbang and casting your vote my way.  You can vote once per day, every day between now and December 15.  (That’s right, it’s the Chicago System!  Vote early and often, people.) When last I checked, I was running well ahead of a couple of right-wing blogs, but in a virtual tie with Austin Bay for second behind . . . Sadly, No! Can we allow this all-important 251-500 category to be taken by Sadly, No!?  I think we all know the answer to that one.

Thanks!  I’ll be back in a bit with one of those pleasant, facetious posts you’ve come to expect from this harried blog.

UPDATE:  Sadly, No! answers the bell.

Posted by Michael on 12/06 at 01:19 PM
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