The Reception Desk

After doing my BA in 1994-1998, I spent a year working as a legal secretary in London by day, while writing a novel by night. (You don’t need to know about the novel.) Then I did an MA and a PhD at the Centre for Cultural Studies at Leeds, while simultaneously discovering fandom and the Barbelith Underground* (and still working as a legal secretary in the holidays). In the four years of my PhD, I wrote a 100,000-word thesis and about 100,000 words of fan fiction, and I was a member of four enormously generous, supportive and challenging communities: the postgrad cohort at Leeds; the Beechwood Collective (a bunch of women in the area who used to meet up and watch Buffy together); the Barbelith Underground; and Blake’s 7 slash fandom. In all four of those contexts, we talked ideas and theory and personal experience and passion, and we produced readings and writings for each other to share. (I think this is what Aren Aizura is talking about when he talks about a ‘commons’, though his account of grad school emphasizes its territorializing/professionalizing aspects.)

Then I finished my PhD and I had to decide whether I wanted to be an academic. I knew that I wanted the centre of my life to be reading books and having ideas and talking about them with people, but of course I knew from my other three communities that academia wasn’t the only place to do that. At that time, it seemed to me that my two options were:

1. Be an academic; or
2. Be a legal secretary by day and a theorist/novelist by night. (Actually, the plan was to be a legal secretary by night and a theorist/novelist by day: someone once told me that the big law firms in London employ night-shift secretaries, which would have been like my perfect job and is still a road not taken for me, though of course mostly I did audio typing and presumably there will not be jobs in that field for much longer.[YouTube link])

I decided to be an academic for two reasons. The first was that academics have much easier access to the cool stuff – especially in the UK, where university libraries are not open to the public. (Seriously, UKers, in Australia you can just WALK IN OFF THE STREET to any university library, sit down, and read all the books! It is amazing!**) But, basically, if you work at a university you get free access to books, inter-library loans, journal subscriptions, etc, which are hard to access from the outside.

And the second reason, which was really the more important one, was that it struck me that, basically, over my five years at Leeds, almost all the important ideas/conversations/things to read that had come my way had done so in snatched moments in the corridor between one class and the next meeting. (Oh, Ika, I meant to tell you about this book I read about Rome, and that was how I discovered Michel Serres…) Being a lone scholar, working as a legal secretary by day and reading/writing by night, I just wasn’t going to be in the kind of space that would maximise my chances of those random encounters that, in practice, were what shaped my work and my thought.

I really like working in academia, and I’ve had an uncharacteristically easy ride of it. I haven’t been through the post-doc/one-year-teaching-fellow precarious hypermobile can-I-still-live-with-my-girlfriend mill. I got a full-time permanent job at Bristol University within a year of completing my PhD, and by the time I was ready to move on [<--euphemism] I got another full-time permanent job here at Wollongong within about two years of seriously starting to search. Which was nice. [YouTube link]

But academia isn’t, and shouldn’t be, and mustn’t be, the only place where knowledge is produced and shared and transmitted. Most of the fields I’ve been most energized by and enjoy working in the most have been co-produced by people working in the academy and people working outside it: feminism, queer theory, reception theory/fan studies. But those two barriers to intellectual work and community outside the academy still remain: access to books, journals, ideas; and access to communities of thought where random, everyday interactions can occur and spark things.

All of this is preamble to sharing two links with you. One is to the Call for Papers for a book called The Para-Academic Handbook, co-edited by the amazing feminist philosopher Alex Wardrop and the excellent ‘researcher who makes things’ Deborah Withers:

Frustrated by the lack of opportunities to research, create learning experiences or make a basic living within the university on our own terms, para-academics don’t seek out alternative careers in the face of an evaporated future, we just continue to do what we’ve always done: write, research, learn, think, and facilitate that process for others… As the para-academic community grows there is a real need to build supportive networks, share knowledge, ideas and strategies that can allow these types of interventions to become sustainable and flourish. There is a very real need to create spaces of solace, action and creativity.

The other is an interview with the also amazing Eileen Joy, co-director of the ‘para-academic’ punctum books, an open-access and print-on-demand academic publisher:

Given that the University (writ large across many different sorts of institutions – an actual network of site(s) but also an Ideal) ought to be the place where we practice free speech (Foucault’s “fearless speech,” in my view) as well as put into place Derrida’s “university without condition,” it seems to us at punctum that academic/public intellectual writing should be made widely accessible to whoever, wherever, wants to read it… What we need now, in the academy as well as the world, is more, and not less, thought, more, and not less, experimentation, more, and not less, “free play” of ideas.

Read! Write! Enjoy!

*The Barbelith Underground was founded and run by Tom Coates, who was writing ‘don’t-go-to-grad-school’ blog posts back in 2004, n00bs.

**People don’t seem to, though.

What I want to use this blog for in future is for bits and bobs of thinking about reception, which is both my job (my main research interest is how people make sense of, use, and circulate the texts they read – books, TV shows, videogames, films…) and my hobby (mostly what I do is talk about the texts I’ve read, whether in conversation with friends, in teaching literature, or by writing fan fic). But it occurs to me that before I can start jumping in with a series of posts which will probably look quite unconnected, I should set up what it is I mean by ‘reception’. And AS IT SO HAPPENS, I have a paper – originally drafted as the introduction to my book-in-progress, What We Talk About When We Talk About Books, but then given as a seminar paper to the Classics department at Bristol in my last semester there – which explains it pretty well, or as well as I’m able at the moment. I’ve put it up here as a pdf.

Reception, in a word, is a way of talking about books (and other texts) which takes into account the different meanings we make out of them and the different uses we have for them, and which tries to make as visible and sharable as possible the processes by which we come to make meanings out of books. The paper argues that although “talking about books” is an everyday and ordinary experience, which doesn’t require any special expertise beyond literacy (by the way, why not donate to the Indigenous Literacy Foundation?), it’s surprisingly difficult to map the complex, interrelating and often invisible forces and structures, from many different domains of human experience, which make those everyday conversations possible. I write in the paper:

What is in a book – even at the apparently simple or literal level, the level of the events which make up the plot, of what happens in a narrative – is not a simple question, then. It cannot be answered simply with reference to the ‘words on the page’, not only because those words themselves are the end product, not the origin, of interpretative acts, but also because in order to become meaningful, these words need to be interpreted, and they are interpreted according to particular conventions or rules which cannot be extrapolated from the ‘text itself’, from the words on the page: these rules come from outside the text. A lot of what a book is is not in the book, but in its context, or in its readers.

Given that, the central question of the book I’m writing is this:

Anything can mean anything – so why, in practice, doesn’t it? How do we know that Macbeth is not a murder mystery? Who decides which readings are legitimate, which contexts are appropriate and which are inappropriate?

This is the point where talking about books (or talking about talking about books) cannot avoid engaging with history, sociology, politics, and cultural studies. Reading is not an individual act which takes place in the privacy of the reader’s mind: it is a sociocultural system, involving an intricately knotted set of relationships between reader and text, reader and other readers, reader and institution, reader and context(s). Successfully producing and circulating a new reading of a text therefore involves a struggle not so much against the text as against other readers, institutions or disciplines.

The work of producing a new reading involves a struggle not just on the conceptual level, over meaning or interpretation, but also, on the level of institutional and even state power, a struggle over legitimacy and over truth. The right to produce and circulate one’s own meanings – to insist on one’s own truth – is central to the workings of literary studies as a discipline, but its implications go far beyond the boundaries of that discipline, connecting disciplinary and conceptual struggles to broader political projects of resistance. Indeed, many (if not all) contemporary political and legal struggles can be understood as interventions into what words or texts are able, in specific contexts, to mean: must the word ‘marriage’ refer only to a relationship between a man and a woman? Must the word ‘woman’ refer to someone who was assigned female at birth? These are not simply abstract questions of interpretation: they have concrete effects on the legal status, privileges and rights of many people.

What I’m hoping to do on this blog is to talk about the work of producing readings, both theoretically – in posts like this one – and practically, in posts like the one I made a few months ago on the world-building in The Hunger Games. I hope you’ll find it interesting – and I hope people will respond with works and readings of their own.

I haven’t been blogging lately for a number of reasons, but one particular one is that I’ve been between two worlds, and I’ve always found it hard to write when I haven’t got a clear sense of who I am or who I’m writing for. At the moment, I’m between two jobs, two kinds of post, and two countries, which is making it particularly tricky.

In April this year, while on research leave in Melbourne, I interviewed for, was offered, and accepted a post in the department of English Literatures at the University of Wollongong in New South Wales. Because of the mismatch between the UK academic year (which runs from October to June) and the Australian academic year (March to, um, November?), I then returned to Bristol for a semester. I’ll finish at Bristol on 25 January, fly out on 29 January, and start at UoW on 1 February 2013.

I’m very excited about the new job. Wollongong looks like a brilliant university, with a fantastic reputation for teaching. I’m going to have some really interesting colleagues, and the possibility of research and teaching collaborations with Cultural Studies and Creative Writing.

I also want to use the move as a springboard for starting to use this blog a bit differently. You’ll see I’ve changed my ‘About’ page and put up a list of publications: I’m hoping to post a little less randomly, and to use this blog more consistently to think and write about topics connected with reception. (This is not too hard, as basically all topics are connected to reception.) Hence the new URL, and the new look, for a new year, a new job, and a new country.

Happy 2013 to everyone. I hope it’s a good one.

So I finished The Hunger Games, and rather than trying to give an account of my reading of the rest of the book, or even of some of the things that struck me as particularly annoying, tedious or problematic (Prim! The Hunger Games!*), I ended up writing a slightly more analytical/synthetic account, spinning out of one of the major problems I had with the book (how does food get to the Capitol?) and turning, as things do in my head, into a potential major research project on representations of the University in speculative fiction.

It’s under a fold for length and spoilers (main body is spoiler-free, but footnotes contain minor spoilers for the Hunger Games themselves).

Continue reading →

Tl;dr:* if you are feeling like reading The Hunger Games, just read Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed instead.**

I’m about three-and-a-half chapters in to The Hunger Games now, and the main thing that strikes me – apart from the fact that the lead character appears to be a psychopath, which I find a bit peculiar in terms of how and where my sympathies are being solicited/directed – is how fundamentally the universe doesn’t make any sense. I think this is because the author is so profoundly embedded in contemporary urban consumer capitalism that even when she’s writing a book whose major selling point is its depiction of a dystopic future subsistence economy/totalitarian regime… she basically makes it all about shopping.

I found this annoying enough to want to go in fairly slow motion through the opening chapters of the book, trying to figure out exactly where and how the worldbuilding is broken. So that’s what this post is for. I’m going to go through the first few chapters more or less in order, but occasionally refer forwards or backwards when I needed to combine textual details/information to make sense of something (or when I couldn’t help combining textual details/information even though it stopped the text from making any sense whatsoever).

This is a very, very long post, so I’ve put it under a fold: Continue reading →

Really, I am going to post about my book one day. I have drafts both in my head and on my dashboard.

But this is just to post a link to the Call for Papers for Sarah Annes Brown’s and Berit Åström’s June conference on allusions and echoes: everything that is interesting, from Chaucer to fanfiction. So pleased that fanfic is finally starting to talk to Classics and to other literary scholars/comparative literature people who are interested in rewriting and allusion and intertextuality and all those good things. I can’t go, because I’ll still be in Melbourne, but I hope some friends of the text will make it.