Geek Studies

[ellenkushner]

(inspired by writingjen's comment yesterday: )

Robin Hood Studies . . . Arthurian Studies . . . Shakespeare . . . [your passion here - they do have academic courses in Anime now, don't they?] . . . .

Those of you who've taken the Academic Route, I'm curious: Is there a great difference between informally loving something and formally studying it?

For extra credit:
Why did Shakespeare have no interest in writing a Robin Hood play?

Comments

[thistlerose.livejournal.com]

Is there a great difference between informally loving something and formally studying it?

YES. Because geeking out with professors is better than pie.

Extra credit:

Because it would have been disrespectful toward the monarchy? And/or because the version of Robin Hood that we know and love today had not yet been established?

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

My first thought was that you meant studying geeks, their sub-cultures, and the larger societies reaction to them.

[apintrix.livejournal.com]

Oh yes.

My one great love is probably music, particularly 19th and early 20th century music. But I hate writing about it academically! I find some of the neurological research around music perception interesting, but in the writing there's just no give and take. The discussions seem so secondary to what is important. What a contrast to textual scholarship, and particularly English scholarship, which is more like a collaborative art form-- the way music performance is a collaborative art form, or collage.

I have one colleague who deliberately studies Renaissance drama because he *doesn't* have any particular affinity for it, and didn't want his scholarship to be biased. Brilliant guy. Strange decision... for me, I think that in academia it's important to have passion for something, but it's often a different kind of obsessiveness. I can read Highlander fanfic all day (apparently... *sigh*), but I have absolutely no desire to write a paper about it. It just doesn't have enough to offer an *academic* dialogue, not enough for a collaboration on that particular level.

(er, I can't think if I've ever commented here before-- Julian Y.'s girlfriend here, we met at a play last summer.)

[rozk.livejournal.com]

As someone who has not so much studied things academically as studied them in order to write books academics take seriously, I think it is all about structure. The more you determine that you will understand something in order to write about it, the more you come to love it and want that passion to swell further so that it motivates your understanding and informs your writing - sort of thing. It's the difference between passionate romantic strumming and turning it into a proper sonata-form movement.

As to the Robin Hood question, it's a bit of all the above, I'd say. The legends and ballads were mostly around, but it was the Romantics who systematized the material - Scott in particular. The whole bandits allied to a rightful king aspect of the situation probably wasn't the problem - after all, you get that in As You Like It with a specific link to Robin Hood in the dialogue - but it may be that something more specifically English would have seemed more subversive. The simple fact that he had used a similar situation would probably have weighed with him, along with the fact that it is a difficult set of stories to turn into a plot. You either have the story of how King Richard came home again, or you have the story of the Death of Robin - neither of these strike me as particularly Shakespeare's sort of thing because the first is the sort of theodicy he tended not to be all that keen on unless everyone learns a valuable lesson, and the second is a bit of a downer without the catharsis of tragedy.

[kijjohnson.livejournal.com]

Or an Arthurian play, for that matter?

[calligrafiti.livejournal.com]

I wonder if writing a Robin Hood play would have been politically expedient, especially during Shakespeare's earlier period. A story built around an outlaw hero working against agents of an illegitimate ruler until the return of the "real" king might not have gone down well under Elizabeth I. Things were calmer toward the end of her reign than at the beginning, but still. Her early life saw a procession of rulers whose legitimacy was always under question and her own rule was plagued by people questioning her own right to the throne.

Maybe it would have been better under James I, but I understand there were a few other claimants to the English throne at the time of his ascension, too.

[wintersweet.livejournal.com]

Flippant answer: Studying it academically takes all the fun out of it.

Okay, that's not really true, but I've had at least one series ruined for me after I wrote a paper on it. Hee. But usually the big challenge is connecting the thing you love to established theory in your field.

The end result of that is that even if you still love the thing, you'll never be able to comprehensibly talk about it to your friends again (unless they're in the same academic field).

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

There are Robin Hood plays contemporary with Shakespeare: The Downfall of Robert Earl of Huntington and the Death ditto, by Anthony Munday (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Munday) (no, Wikipedia isn't a great source, but it's not a bad place to start). I haven't read them, so I can't tell you anything more about them than that.

Speaking as someone who has a Ph.D. and has chosen to leave academia, I think the biggest difference between studying something academically and loving it informally is that in academics, you have benchmarks and standards: an outside authority to tell you whose scholarship is respectable and whose isn't, or to tell you about the existence of resources you'd otherwise have no idea existed. And to say, okay, when you have this much knowledge and critical insight into your subject, you have this level of expertise, and when you have this much knowledge and critical insight you have this level of expertise. It gives you a way to judge your progress--which can be very hard if you're trying to learn about something entirely on your own. At least in the liberal arts, there's nothing in academic scholarship that you can't do or learn or learn to do on your own (although primary research is going to be easier with access to an academic library). matociquala is every bit as accomplished a Renaissance scholar as I am.

Ideally, of course, studying something academically has the additional benefit of teaching you how to study academically, from the basics of close reading, to footnote chasing, to critical thinking and the use of theory, to using Pollard and Redgrave's Short-Title catalogue of books printed in England, Scotland, & Ireland and of English books printed abroad, 1475-1640. But, sadly, that isn't always the case.

[shrewreader.livejournal.com]

My understanding from the late Kramer was that he did -- it just (a) didn't get finished and (b) couldn't find a willing theater (due to the whole disrespectful of monarchy [Although, the Evil Catholic King tactic, presumably, could have been used to great advantage] thing] and / or (c) some other reason I can't recall as it was buried in the horror that was the Constance Gardner dominated translations from across the driveway in the Russian dept.

Also, this memory is about 12 - 14 years old, ergo quite possibly badly faulty.

[belledewinter.livejournal.com]

There may be a psychological element involved somewhere that makes *insert-object-of-study-here* less-nice when you have to study it. Maybe there are parts of fandom that informally-loved-subject that wouldn't be as appealing to you and that you'd still be forced to swallow.

I wouldn't mind geeking out for a living, though. ♥

[aidara.livejournal.com]

YES. Because geeking out with professors is better than pie.

Seconded. :) I took a class on C. S. Lewis last semester and was afraid that it would ruin my liking for the Narnian stories, but it mostly just ended up deepening my understanding of them and convincing me that Lewis was a horrible misogynist.

Though to be honest, I've never been a huge fan of Narnia. Tolkien, on the other hand, is a different story. I'm taking a class on his work next semester, so we'll see how it goes.

[coloredink.livejournal.com]

I like linguistics, but I don't think I'd want to study it, taking class after class after class after class and writing papers and worrying about grades and buying books. . . ugh. I'd rather geek out with my linguistics friends and/or read about linguistics on Wikipedia.

I did study English and graduate with a bachelor's degree in it, which is probably the most useless degree ever, asides from Anthropology. It also did virtually nothing to improve my writing, although I got a lot better at bullshitting essays and picking professors that I knew were going to be an easy A.

[orbitalmechanic.livejournal.com]

I imagine it depends a lot on the fields. I study English lit and in my area, a lot of the work is getting away from the personal response that makes the reading pleasurable. That's not to say that the result isn't pleasurable itself; but it's very different to fall in love with a character on the one hand, and figure out exactly what you're in love with or how the author hit your buttons, on the other hand. It also means you can enjoy yourself tremendously when studying a book you don't like! Or pick apart something you hated, aesthetically or politically or whatever, and get some joy out of that.

There is also academic politics/collegiality, external benchmarks, a horrible job market, etc etc, but those strike me as specific to contemporary university culture rather than formal study itself. Of course what I've described above is also a very modern view. (I know I'm in a minority in enjoying the rigor and restrictions just as well as the schmoopy fannish adoration.)

[krismcd59.livejournal.com]

This is a fabulous question. I'm lucky enough to research and teach in the field that I love -- Renaissance Drama -- but I also dream of writing fiction about it because the researching and teaching aren't quite enough by themselves. I have to tear my attention away from the material in order to attend to my students' questions, practical problems, writing, etc. -- and I have a responsibility not to get so caught up in my enthusiasm for a play or a poem or a topic that I forget what the students need from me just to get through the next exam or essay assignment. It's hard, too, to consciously pull back when I'm narrating a particularly juicy bit of historical info or an interpretation of a scene. So I can see why some profs might be more comfortable teaching/researching something they can be more detached from -- and, in a way, it might be better for the students. I know that I am better about letting the students discover the material without my "interference" when it's material I'm not as knowledgeable about. It's always a balancing act. And regarding Robin Hood, I agree with all the comments above and think it's partly for the same reason Shakespeare didn't write an Arthurian play either (although there is an ongoing debate about whether he wrote a lost play called "The Death of Arthur.") As rozk noted, his references to Robin Hood in several plays, including As You Like It, are usually a metaphor for cliched rural traditional tales, even though Will never met a cliche he couldn't wrestle to the ground and make his own... Ben Jonson actually did write a Robin Hood play at the end of his life (The Sad Shepherd), but didn't finish it, probably because of ill health, but it was also kind of falling apart at the point he quit. And possibly, the Robin Hood story was just too ubiquitous to bother dramatizing in its own right -- it was performed in circle-dance form every spring and summer holiday, and was the basis of countless children's games. In a way, it would be like making a play out of "The Night Before Christmas" or "The Farmer in the Dell." OK, enough...now I need to check out the profiles of everyone who commented here -- I think there are lots of kindred spirits present!

[lyonesse.livejournal.com]

the difference is all in your advisors/mentors/professors and classmates. it's hard to undertake formal study without them; it's easy to love things all by yourself, if your fellow amateurs drive you bananas.

that said, ime it's been totally worth it.

Hard but interesting question

[medievalist.livejournal.com]

I've deliberately avoided taken classes in SF/Fantasy in grad school, once I realized that I'd been, well, traumatized, sort of, by Ph.D. qualifying exams.

That said, I still love medieval lit, and the lit I'm writing about, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and Sir Orfeo, and Thomas of Erceldoune, and the Mabinogi . . . it's all about medieval fairies and fantasy and spec fic.

And I love it, passionately, still. And I'm citing and writing about modern fairy fantasy too, so I've ended up studying it just the same.

And what makes you think Shakespeare had no interest? He might have actually written one . . .

[gaedhal.livejournal.com]

That also begs the question as to why Shakespeare never dealt
with the Arthurian material, either. He tended to go for
Roman sources or continental stuff -- Lear excluded. Maybe
it was what was trendy at the time -- was Mallory considered
old fashioned? Robin Hood too lowbrow? He was writing for
the popular taste, after all.

[vschanoes.livejournal.com]

Roman sources or continental? There's a whole genre of history plays straight out of the Chronicles.

It wasn't just Shakespeare; really it's an era question--you don't see any Renaissance drama about the King Arthur mythos.

[tacithydra.livejournal.com]

Is your icon a very nonplussed radish?

[vschanoes.livejournal.com]

When you work on something academically, you have to hold yourself to a higher set of standards, and you have to commit to approaching the work with some degree of...what's the word I'm looking for, not rigor, not objectivity, but...um...completeness and argument. Academically, you have to be able to make a complex, detailed, and grounded argument, and you have to make sure it can stand up. I do that for the stuff I work on. I don't have to do it for the stuff I just love. I make no argument about Joe Strummer, except that he was amazing and wonderful and brilliant and I love him. That's not an argument, it's an opinion (actually, of course, it's a fact). It's not less fun...it's just a different kind of fun, and it produces a different kind of relationship to the art. The approach you take as an academic is far more like that of a writer--you have to know the details from the inside out and understand how it's all put together, and how it fits into a larger context. And then you have to generate an argument about how it works, one that can stand up to real interrogation.

For your bonus question, you might want to email Erika. Her second project is, I believe, on Robin Hood plays, which were a folk tradition.

[tacithydra.livejournal.com]

I think there's a difference - my opinion echoes most everybody's above me.

Going into academia means you're fitting the stuff you love into pre-existing frameworks and attaching them to larger theories. This is cool, because a lot of the time it illuminates aspects of the stuff you love that you haven't noticed before, and that's inherently neat. On the other hand, it means that when you are squeeing about stuff you might drop into language comprehensible only to other academics. In addition, you're not necessarily fitting everything into *your* frameworks anymore. Or if you are, you're going to need to justify your frameworks using pre-existing theory and work.

It's like getting your mind out of the house and forcing it to make friends with other minds. It's harder to be as quirky as you were when it was just your mind, sitting there, noodling around with stuff. On the other hand, as long as you're interacting within the context of the frameworks that everyone else is using, you have access to an entirely new world of geekiness.

[coloredink.livejournal.com]

An onion, actually! It's, er, a bit of a long story.

[tacithydra.livejournal.com]

Oh! That explains all the green.

Anyway, cute onion. ;)

[calimac.livejournal.com]

I managed to find a way to take the Academic Route without formally studying literature at all. I just wrote papers on Tolkien, and people liked them, and I found myself anointed an expert.

The question I want to ask about Shakespeare is, why did he write a play based on Geoffrey of Monmouth? Considering the sources for his other plays, that wouldn't have seemed to be his thing.

[gaedhal.livejournal.com]

I meant the more mythic stuff apart from the History
plays. He gets into a bit of English folklore material
in "Merry Wives" but there must have been a myriad
of English material that he might have drawn from --
the Robin Hood stuff only scratches the surface.

It's interesting to think of why writers are drawn to
certain material and not so interested in others.
Why Romeo and Juliet and not Tristan and Isolde?
Why Cleopatra and not Boudicca? Again, was it what
the audience demanded?