Fall TV and Grad Students: What do we watch, and why?

Hello readers!
    Fall is in the air in NYC! It's a season of reuniting with old familiar faces, and meeting and assessing new ones -- no, not the start of a semester -- I'm talking about FALL TV!  Graduate students do not have time for a ton of TV watching, but when we do have free time, we often turn to TV -- mostly because it is less expensive, more reliable, more comforting and easier than other kinds of entertainment. We'd rather budget for Cable, Netflicks, or DVD's on the weekend than fancy dinners out in the city or getaway trips to Miami; and after all those hours hashing out theoretical arguments and scientific data, it's nice to have something easy on the brain to turn to during downtime. But, as it turns out, the appeal of TV might not only be its comforting entertainment quality but also its ability to stimulate us intellectually, after all. A recent article in The Chronicle of Education, "Storied TV: Cable is the New Novel," offers the provocation that "long-form, episodic television" may be on its way to being today's premier literary genre. The writer of the article, Thomas Doherty, calls it "ArcTv," which he defines as "the dramatic curvature of the finely crafted, adult-minded serials built around arcs of interconnected action unfolding over the life span of the series." Doherty postulates that the shows being created and consumed today -- "shows like Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Downton Abbey, Homeland, Dexter, Boardwalk Empire, and Game of Thrones—the highest-profile entrees in a gourmet menu of premium programming—are where the talent, the prestige, and the cultural buzz now swirl."

   As a fan of TV shows like this, I'd say I think Doherty is on to something. I remember when I first started graduate school, a colleague of mine had said that if Shakespeare was alive today, he'd be writing feature films. That was back in 2004. Perhaps today, 8 years later, that same colleague would say that Shakespeare would be busy writing an amazing ArcTV series. I know there has been serious buzz among GSAS students for Downtown Abbey, Mad Men, and Dexter. Some of my personal favorites of recent years have been Lost, which is not cable but still amazing for its character development and mythic story-telling, American Horror Story, which carries on the tradition of American Gothic short stories in a sexy, post-post modern way, and How to Make it America, which was cancelled by HBO before it reached its full story-arc but started out telling a cool updated version of the American Dream story in NYC.  What blows my mind about these kind of shows is the quality of writing taking place in the TV format -- somehow the arc is crafted to survive months, years, season across season -- without losing quality or creativity. That, to me, is the literary achievement of these wonderful shows. They also portray characters in stirring lights, avoiding or sometimes confronting stereotpyes of representation in ways that really good novels did, could, and do. For me, a good literary work also has to create an emotion that was not there before -- and that is certainly what these shows accomplish, as well. With long-form episodic TV, viewers latch onto the characters in ways that don't happen when watching a movie; these characters keep coming into our homes, on a regular basis. We become attached.

    What are you looking forward to this fall? More Mad Men and Dowtown Abbey? Or some new ones? Revolution seems to be one that speaks to the post-apocalyptic literary genre; Elementary is yet another re-imagining of the Sherlock Holmes archetypes and story-lines; 666 Park Avenue combines Miltonian good versus evil type questions with a seemingly anthropological view of urban Americans. Which will be your new favorite? And do you agree with Doherty's claims about Arc-Tv? Weigh in!! And be sure to "like" the blog's new Facebook page!
   Until next time, Liza 

Topic of the Day: The 5-Year Plan

Hello Readers!
   I hope this Tuesday finds you well! I am actually blogging today from an airplane -- whoohoo! I love in-flight wifi!!
   Since I have recently been thinking a lot about my personal future and about how amazing and crazy life's twists and turns can be, I thought today would be a good day to broach the topic of how graduate school fits into one's life as a whole -- in other words, how it fits into, or doesn't fit into, your grand plan for life. If you are not familiar with graduate school life, or maybe if you are just starting out as a degree candidate, you should know that life does not stop for graduate school. Despite enrollment, courses, classes, papers, dissertations, comps, exams, and tuition, life, indeed, keeps occurring. I have known colleagues who have fallen in love, gotten married, bought houses, had children, gotten divorced, traveled, climbed mountains, ice-skated in national competitions, played in rock and roll bands, and achieved other typical and non-typical life milestones all while working towards their degrees. Life rolls on around us, and most of us treat graduate school just as if we would treat a regular job -- we work, we play, and we live our lives. The only thing that is different than being in the non-academic working world is that there is an ending to grad school. And even then, life doesn't really change that much.
   Immediately when I decided to write about this topic, I thought of Dr. Karen's 5 Year Plan. For those of you who don't know Dr. Karen, allow me to introduce you to her website, The Professor Is In. A colleague of mine had passed her site along to me a while back, and it provides a gold-mine of  information and anecdotes and advice that will give interesting and candid perspectives about the academic world. Dr. Karen's perspective on the 5 year plan is basically that while you can't expect to control everything in life, you can however take charge of your career and make choices based on your own personal goals. She writes, "I don’t think anybody should ever be in graduate school, or on the tenure-track, without a five-year plan," and continues:

"Some of my clients are masters of the five-year plan, and even have things like getting pregnant in there. I admire that, even while I know that 'the best laid plans…' You can’t plan for everything (or, you can, but your plans may not work out). But the core point of planning is this: that you’re taking control of your process into your own hands, and not leaving it out there somewhere, in the hands of your advisor, your department, or 'fate.' You decide when you’ll write, when you’ll defend, when you’ll publish, and so on. These are all your decisions to make."

   What Dr. Karen is sure to point out, though, is that a plan in and of itself is not going to get you anywhere. You have to stick to the plan. In other words, you have to meet deadlines. In a follow-up post, Dr. Karen asserts:

"Staying on top of deadlines is exactly what allows a person to achieve  huge life goals. Yes, I’m quoting Thomas Edison:  ”success is 10% inspiration, and 90% perspiration.”  The people who succeed in getting into the national conference are, first and foremost, the ones who actually remember to submit the proposal to the national conference, by the deadline, properly formatted. One of the most important outcomes of the 5-year plan is that you never miss a submission deadline for a conference or a funding opportunity.  As you learn of new conferences and funding opportunities, you simply add them in, without losing track of the other deadlines. You also plan out a publication schedule, and put your own deadlines for submission to journals there in the plan.  And money racks up, and publications rack up, and networks rack up, and voila, the cumulative effect 5 years later is—an epic CV that gets you an epic job offer, or tenure."

    Ok, well, yes, but never miss a deadline? "Simply" add them in? It sounds great in theory, but I think the biggest problem most graduate students have is that meeting deadlines is not at all simple. Life sometimes tears you away, even if your academic work is your number one priority. It is not always so black and white.

    So what are your thoughts on the 5 year plan? Though I may have some theoretical questions about how the 5 Year Plan works, most of my questions about creating a 5 Year Plan are entirely logistical -- meaning, what does the plan actually LOOK like? By this I mean literally how does it look? What format does it take? Is in in calendar form? List form? Do you try for a month-by-month set of goals, or set up it up year by year? Or something in between? Do you work on multitple goals at a time, or try to nail one thing down before moving onto the next? I'm sure different solutions work for different people, but I am wondering what would work for me, and what has worked for you? I'm curious to hear your thoughts!
    And another thought I always have when I revisit the 5 year plan post: how do you know if your goals are realistic? Is there such a thing as shooting too high? Should your goals be based on practical things such as making money and attaining a job with benefits, or should the goals be focused on advancing the scholarly conversation? How do you set yourself up for success with the 5 Year Plan?
   Please share your thoughts about how grad life fits into your big picture!
Until next time, Liza

Neurodiversity and Autism Awareness Month

Hello!
       I hope everyone at Fordham and beyond had a nice Easter Break, and will continue to enjoy the upcoming holidays and beautiful spring weather!
      This month, I wanted to mention a cause that is dear to my heart: Autism Awareness. April is Autism Awareness Month, and in this post, I wanted to increase awareness by sharing briefly how my interaction with individuals with autism has shaped my academic interests and intellectual pursuits.

      I began graduate school as someone who loved literary studies. I thought, and still think, that studying and teaching literature, and art in general, could make the world a better place; that by extending conversations about art, we could forge connections and understandings between individuals and groups that would create harmony in the world. I know these are maybe naive ideas, but I truly feel that studying and teaching humanities provides a benefit to the world.
       In order to help put myself through graduate school financially, I began working as an ABA therapist in the home of a family with two children who had been diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder. What was incredible about working with these two boys was that it opened me up to understanding how diverse the human brain and mind really is. These boys each learned, thought, and processed information in ways completely different from each other, and completely different from anyone I'd ever met. It changed my whole perspective on the ways in which studying and teaching art, language arts, and humanities subjects could, indeed, have an impact on the world. Suddenly, I began to see that forging connections and understandings between individuals and groups was important to bridge not only cultural and social gaps but also cognitive, perceptive, and sensory diversities.
      This realization changed my life and changed the way I studied literature and narrative. I embarked on my dissertation project which studies the history of representation of mental disabilities in American fiction. I also began attending disability studies panels and conferences, which are great because they are interdisciplinary and thus have exposed me to a wide variety of graduate research and scholarship  related to disability, bodies, difference, and neurodiversity. I also began working at a school for children with Autism, hoping to be able to help more learners with Autism acquire the skills in the way they learn best, in order to become more independent and self-expressed.

         In celebration of Autism Awareness Month, I urge you to learn something new about ASD, or share what you know and have experienced with someone else to keep the conversation going!
In the meantime, check out the Organization for Autism Research, which gives grants to graduate students researching autism issues across disciplines such as psychology, sociology, biology, neuroscience, and more. And, here's a great article from The Chronicle in 2009 called Autism as an Academic Paradigm. 
Let me know if you have any other questions or thoughts!

Life/Scholarship

 The words on either side of that forward slash are more closely linked than you might think. What we study while we're in Walsh has everything to do with who we are outside of it.

Fordham professor and novelist Christina Baker Kline has a fabulous blog on creative process and craft called Writing/Life. She taught a class at Fordham by the same name about the lines between memoir and fiction. As writing students in her class, we investigated the relationship between life experience and the narrative decisions we make about our work in fiction and creative nonfiction.

I'm fascinated by the way life experience -- from the big moments to the seemingly insignificant ones -- define so many of our choices as writers and scholars. I wonder why my peers in graduate school as well as my professors and mentors have chosen their fields. What about our pasts draws us to a particular field of study?

For example, why does one become a Virginia Woolf scholar? A mathematician? A classicist? Why does one choose to dedicate her life to the study of black feminist poetics?

To say that we study what we study because we love it is true, but a bit opaque and incomplete. "I love Mrs Dalloway," and "Math is the universal language," are straightforward answers. "I've always been good at Latin," and "I believe in the power of black feminist expressive culture," might be honest answers too, but they do not get at the deep personal roots of scholarly passion. I would contend that even if we do not fully understand why we have chosen to work in our fields, we are not grad students merely because of our proficiency in a field or a coincidental interest in a text. Our motivations are profound and intimate. Why else would we devote our lives to scholarship, research, and writing?

I decided to pursue writing for many reasons. The more surface reasons are because I loved it and it was fun.  I enjoyed the process of discovery in writing. I feel a rush when I imagine a whole world and whole people. I am exhilarated when I'm writing and I feel my initial plan begin to shift. The story takes me somewhere unexpected, or to a place I had expected to go but by an entirely different route. This rush and exhilaration is part of why I write.

I was an avid reader as a child, and I became obsessed with words and the meaning they could convey. This childhood love persists and has grown to include my love of editing. Re-envisioning an image, reordering sentences, and cutting extraneous words are puzzles and brainteasers that fully absorb my attention. When I make strides in a revision, I feel a satisfaction that is so visceral it could be described as "a tingly feeling."

But these reasons explain why I like writing and why I am good at writing -- not why I am drawn to it, why I have chosen to pursue it in grad school and beyond, or why I must keep at it. This reason is deeply rooted in my own personal experience of my family and my community, and my own place in both.

As a girl, I adored hearing stories. I learned so much about the world and life from listening to women in my family speak. Sometimes they spoke to me, and sometimes to each other. Sometimes they were intentionally telling stories, and other times they were doing it without noticing how much they were disclosing. I loved the way I could fall into their experiences and their way of seeing the world. Their words transported me to specific moments in time and to regions of the Dominican Republic, where they were raised, that I had never been. I felt their loss and ecstasy and reality although I had never lived them.

As a shy child, writing and storytelling became a way for me to connect to others. I not only accessed the memories and consciousness of other people with pen, paper, and my imagination, but I learned to express my own inmost hopes and ideas, which I found difficult to do aloud. (Being shy ain't easy.) I knew firsthand how telling a story, or hearing one, could change a person. This power made me want to spend my life sharing other people's stories and my own.

I imagine the same is true for the poet interested in the sacred in Gloria Anzaldúa's work, or the scholar interested in Anglo-Norman saints' lives. We want to contribute to our fields because we have seen and known their power intimately. We choose to do what we do because of who we have been and who we hope to be.

As we move forward in our fields, our personal lives and our scholarly lives may seem to diverge. Life might be partners and parties and travel and bills, maybe children and families. Scholarship might be what we publish, the universities where we teach, our paid work. But I believe there will always be synergy between scholarship and life, an inextricable relationship between who we are and what we pursue.

What about you? What experience in your personal life has inspired your course of study? Was it a particular event or a series of moments? In short, why do you do what you do?