Hello friends,
I’m trying out this new platform, Substack, which isn’t actually very new at all, in internet time, but which is new to me because I’ve been using TinyLetter for the last couple of years. One difference, for instance, is that I had too much fun with footnotes in this post (but rest assured you can ignore them if you like; I am using them, at least here, pretty much as asides). There are a few1, mostly2 boring3, reasons for the switch to this platform, and if lots of you end up disliking it, I’ll go back to TinyLetter (so let me know, yeah?).
As some of you know, I’m getting my doctorate in English, a process that I realized recently is evoking a lot of impostor syndrome. I complain often—and loudly—about the various access issues in academia, the elitism inherent in the ivory tower, and the institutional privileging of certain ways of learning over others. All of that is true, and I certainly stand behind my critiques. But I’m still here, in a PhD program, and I wonder whether at least some of the vehemence with which I critique the academy arises from the simple fact that I have no idea how or why I am worthy of this advanced degree.
The more I learn, the older I get, the more I read, the more ignorant I ultimately feel. For a while, I thought that this was a common experience, and maybe it is. But for many thinkers and writers I admire from close and far, learning seems to be a confidence booster, a way of backing up and developing beliefs and ideas and opinions and observations, which then are concretized in often fantastic and riveting writing. I, on the other hand, find myself hedging, worried always about what I haven’t read, what I don’t yet know, how I might be unintentionally cribbing from something I don’t remember reading/hearing, and about the ten or fifteen or twenty perspectives I surely haven’t considered4.
I’ve taken courses and written papers, it’s true, and I am currently in the midst of reading for my comprehensive exams5, but I don’t really know that I can point to orderly stacks of knowledge that I’ve acquired. By which I mean, my education feels (has always felt) scattered, and I don’t know if I can draw a coherent line along an axis and show a neat accumulation of X Knowledge over Y Time. I never took a theory class, for instance, although I did read the entirety of Chela Sandoval’s Methodology of the Oppressed while taking a class with Dr. Amelia María de la Luz Montes and I loved it, although I had to read each paragraph about four times plus give myself mini crash courses via Wikipedia so that I could familiarize myself, broadly, with the critics that she discusses. Which is to say, I find what theory I’ve read fascinating and also incredibly difficult.
I hope one day to read more of it - in fact, I will be reading at least some as I move through my comps lists - but the fact is that I simply don’t retain abstracts very well and so often find myself confused, trying to parse through language that seems to obscure rather than reveal. Thus, this specific kind of imposter syndrome6: Shouldn’t a PhD in English know a whole bunch of theory? I know I’m good at writing about books—I’ve written literally dozens, if not hundreds, of book reviews over the past six or seven years—and I consider myself a critic, even a good critic. But I can’t always see the forest because I’m focused on the individual trees; similarly, I rarely feel confident enough to make sweeping judgments about modes or genres or eras or aesthetics, because I’m too focused on the specificity and too worried I’ll miss things.
Maybe this isn’t a good vs. bad, knowledge vs. ignorance thing, which is how I often think about it. Maybe, instead, it’s simply one approach vs. another approach, with both being legitimate and working for difference audiences, readers, thinkers, etc.
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For each of the books on my comps lists (80 in total) I have to write an annotation that briefly describes and reacts to it. I wanted these annotations to be very ~smart~ and considered, but I’m too impatient for that, and besides, I know that the annotations are more a formality than anything, because the essays I’ll be writing will be what my committee really cares about. For fun, I decided to try making erasures which I think both semi-accurately reflect the books (or aspects of them) and also betray (to me) just how unnecessarily longwinded I can be. Here are the results for the first three books on my field list (The Novel: 1945 to the Present):
I am not a poet, and these aren’t *really* poems, but I enjoyed making them a whole lot, and I’m trying to remind myself what it feels like to play, to enjoy the process, to be okay with it failing sometimes. Maybe I’ll keep making these, maybe I won’t.
I hope you have a good week, friends, and thank you, as always, for being here. I appreciate you.
Yours, etc.,
Ilana
I find this platform a bit more aesthetically pleasing and has more intuitive formatting options;
there’s an option to monetize (not that I foresee doing that anytime soon, but maybe one day if I decide that anything I’m going to say seems worth paying for, which, seeing as I am who I am, is doubtful);
and there’s also an option to leave comments on posts here, which I like because it’s interactive, and which makes this almost more like blogging, which is a genre I kind of miss and kind of don’t (what are cultural hot takes if not sanctioned blogging, really), but which most of all tickles my nostalgia buttons, because I did it for so many years.
Maybe this is the effect, in part, of the social media spaces I spend time in, places where not considering every single point of view can result in variously negative responses, from disingenuous whataboutism to genuine hatred, from legitimate critique to knee-jerk disdain.
I feel the urge to explain what these are every time I bring them up because they are a strange practice that works a bit differently depending on the degree and the university. In my case, I have two lists, a field list and a focus list, each 40 books long, made up of 30 primary sources (in my case, books of fiction) and 10 secondary sources (criticism of various kinds, some more academic than others). I have to read these 80 books and write one essay on each list. Those essays, along with a couple syllabi, and some other supporting documents, make up the portfolio that ends up being the comprehensive exams themselves.
As opposed, I mean, to the run-of-the-mill daily imposter syndrome regarding being a fiction writer.
It is so easy, sitting here on the sidelines, to see your amazing talent. When you doubt yourself, know that we who read and follow you, don’t. Lean on that when you need to.