Recently published in the MLA series
Approaches to Teaching
WORLD LITERATURE
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Approaches to Teaching the
Works of Naguib Mahfouz
WAÏL S. HASSAN and
SUSAN MUADDI DARRAJ, eds.
“This volume’s usefulness for teachers
and students of Mahfouz as well as for
undergraduate and graduate courses
on the Arabic novel and surveys of
Arabic or world literature is beyond
question.”
NEW
—Adnan Haydar
University of Arkansas
viii & 226 pp. • 6 x 9
Cloth $37.50 • Paper $19.75
Approaches to Teaching
H.D.’s Poetry and Prose
ANNETTE DEBO and LARA VETTER, eds.
“An impressive volume . . . I am
struck by the richness and variety of
approaches to teaching H.D.”
—Cynthia Hogue
Arizona State University
This volume aims to assist instructors
in helping their students navigate the
intricacies of H.D.’s work and overcome
some of the frustration of deciphering
modern poetry.
x & 208 pp. • 6 x 9
Cloth $37.50 • Paper $19.75
x & 342 pp. • 6 x 9
Cloth $37.50 • Paper $19.75
Approaches to
Teaching the Works of
François Rabelais
TODD W. REESER and FLOYD GRAY, eds.
“This volume meets an essential
pedagogical need in the ;eld and will
therefore be a most welcome addition
to the MLA Approaches series.”
—David Posner
Loyola University, Chicago
Rabelais’s exuberant satire deals not only
with the major cultural and intellectual
issues of his time but also with issues of
interest to students today.
www.mla.org
B2 THE CHRONICLE REVIEW
My Daily Read
Contemporary habits
on page and screen
Helen Sword is a professor in the Centre for Academic Development at the
University of Auckland. Her new book,
Stylish Academic Writing, is just out from
Harvard University Press.
Q. What’s the first thing you read
in the morning?
A. On weekdays I get up at 6 a.m., put
the kettle on for a cup of tea, and settle
myself in front of my computer to write
for an hour before breakfast. If I’m being
good, the first thing I read before I start
writing is the last paragraph that I wrote
the day before. If I’m not being good, I
take a peek at my e-mail first.
Q. What newspapers and magazines
do you read regularly?
A. My family subscribes to The New
Zealand Herald and The New York Times
online, plus a few glossy magazines
such as National Geographic, the
Princeton Alumni Weekly, and Rugby World
(a publication of high intellectual caliber, according to my husband). I tussle
For more, see
http://chronicle.com/pageview
with my teenage kids at the breakfast
table to get a glimpse of the NZ Herald before work—a quick hit of local
news and international stories from
the major U.S. and U.K. wire services—but for deeper coverage I go to
The New York Times.
Q. What books have you recently
read? How do they stand out?
A. Ann Patchett’s wonderful novel
State of Wonder sent me back to reread
Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, which
Patchett subtly and not-so-subtly rescripts. Now I’m making my slow and
fascinated way through Walter Isaacson’s
biography of Steve Jobs, whom I can’t
help comparing to Patchett’s Dr. Swen-son and Conrad’s Kurtz: a charismatic
leader who sucks followers into a “reality
distortion field” that makes them believe
anything is possible. Whether the setting is the Congo, the Amazon, or Silicon Valley, it’s essentially the same story:
Ethics and individuality are sublimated
to one person’s overwhelming vision.
Q. What is the best article you’ve
read recently?
A. A few days ago, following a serendipitous trail of recommendations and
links, I came upon an article by management professor Amanda Sinclair called
Ted Benson for THe CHroniCle revieW
“Body Possibilities in Leadership”—a
compelling account of how contemporary leadership discourse fails to account
for the gendered, racialized, and otherwise embodied reality of leaders’ physical presence. Although it was aimed at
an audience of management scholars, I
found the article both accessible and illuminating. Now I look at photographs
of local and world leaders in a completely
new way.
Q. What is your greatest criticism
of much academic writing?
A. In contrast to Sinclair’s engaging
paper, many academic articles are, quite
frankly, unreadable. Often the problem
is simply poor craftsmanship. Perhaps
the author has tried to cram three or
four major ideas into a single sentence,
leaving the reader to do the hard work
of disentangling all those nested subordinate clauses. Another common issue is
an excessive allegiance to the discourse
of abstraction; it’s not uncommon to find
nine, 10, or more spongy abstract nouns
(examples: allegiance, discourse, abstraction) cohabiting in a single sentence. The
human attention span has trouble coping with that much vagueness. Stylish
academic writers anchor abstract ideas
in the physical world, using stories, case
studies, metaphors, illustrations, concrete nouns, and vivid verbs, and lots and
lots of examples.
Q. Has your reading of profes-
sional journals changed in the past 10
years?
A. I now find it almost impossible to
read an academic article without analyzing its style. For example, if I open up
a higher-education research journal and
find a sentence that says “Rarely is there
an effective conceptual link between the
current understandings of the centrality of text to knowledge production and
student learning and the pragmatic problems of policy imperatives in the name
of efficiency and capacity-building,” I automatically note the high proportion of
abstract nouns, the total lack of concrete
language (even the word link is used
abstractly), and the erasure of human
agency (neither students nor higher-education researchers, the subjects of
the article, are grammatically present in
the sentence). Fortunately, this tendency
works both ways: I am also highly attentive to and hugely appreciative of stylish
academic writing.
