Sunday, November 23, 2008

More papers, more anxieties

I'm currently trying to write a paper on do-support in Shakespeare. It was all so clear in my head a day ago, and then I waited to do the actual writing and the ideas became more muddled. But it's imperative that I finish this paper as soon as possible so I get to the other two.

Here's a basic outline of what I want to say: this is a corpus-based study of Shakespeare's language that focuses on one grammatical feature that was in flux in Early Modern English, known as do-support. My main (small, possibly already obvious or simply misguided) discovery is that the distribution of do-support among male and female characters in Shakespeare reflects the sociolinguistic reality of do-support during the time when Shakespeare was writing. A team of Finnish researchers working in the emerging field of historical sociolinguistics have determined that the rise of auxiliary "do," like other grammatical changes in EME, varied systemically according to the gender, region, and register of the speaker/writer. This is signficant because synchronic sociolinguistics long ago formulated a number of principles that guide language change-- that women tend to be at the forefront of linguistic innovations, that the diffusion of a new linguistic feature follows an S-curve when one graphs frequency of occurance over time, and that both bottom-up and top-down change according to status or social class are possible-- and it's gratifying and exciting to see that these principles are in fact borne out by diachronic data spanning centuries.

There are many variables one could isolate when it comes to the thousands of instances of do-support and non-do-support in Shakespeare, and I want to briefly touch on a number of them-- sociolinguistic variables like status and formality/informality, textual variables like verse vs. prose, possible semantic and phonotactic triggers for do-support such as emphasis and avoidance of particular consonant clusters, and, of course, rhetorical effect and wordplay, which are much harder to qualify. I want to acknowledge the previous efforts to see do-support as a feature of style or idiolect, but then invert the question and ask not how Shakespeare crafts a distinct "style" from the linguistic resources of Early Modern English, but how Early Modern English shapes or limits or informs Shakespeare's plays. My main focus is the variable of gender, and thus my statistics will focus on how the use or non-use of do varies with the gender of the character. In my Shakespeare corpus, female characters consistently show higher rates of do-support in every syntactic context that eventually led to obligatory do-support in modern English. These syntactic contexts include negative declaratives, negative imperatives, wh-questions, and yes-no questions. The rates of do-support for women and men in fact closely match the gender-split data on periphrastic do from the Corpus of Early English Correspondence. This is a striking and exciting result because one wouldn't expect something as subtle as do-support-- a linguistic feature that one assumes operated "below the level of consciousness"-- to in fact show up in dramatic literature in accurate sociolinguistic distribution. This says something about the verisimilitude of Shakespeare's plays.

What complicates this picture further in other exciting ways is that the CEEC researchers determined that the diachronic data for do-support exhibit a "switch from male to female advantage." In the middle of the 16th century, men apparently used do-support more than women, but right around the turn of the century women overtook them even as both groups continued up the curve in frequency of use. In fact, this period-- from about 1580 to 1620-- is a nexus point at which a multiplicity of sociolinguistic shifts converge, even as grammatical changes either accelerate (and go on to become regulated) or peak (and subsequently fall out of use). In my data, women robustly lead men in negative imperatives and questions of both kinds. The data for negative declaratives remained ambiguous while I collected it, though, and with each successive play that I encoded the advantage seemed to shift from male to female and back again. In the end the do-support rates for men and women seemed almost identical. When you divide my corpus of 16 plays into two groups, however, it becomes clear that in the first half of the period of Shakespeare's writing that I'm addressing (from about 1588-1603), men show a slight but significant lead over women, and in the second half (from about 1604-1611), women show a slight lead over men. It would be quite extraordinary if the sociolinguistic distribution of do-support in Shakespeare's plays in fact enacts a contemporary sociolinguistic shift in EME. It would seem to suggest, among other things, an extraordinary sensitivity on Shakespeare's part to shifting usages around him and a desire to portray gender with sociolinguistic fidelity.

There are still problems with this line of argument-- the CEEC researchers don't address the development of d0-support in negative imperatives and questions, for example, because they didn't have enough tokens in their corpus. I thus cannot prove that do-support in questions and negative imperatives was more "advanced" than it was in negative declaratives in Shakespeare's period, or that, indeed, there would have been any shift from male to female advantage at all. I do know from Ellegard's study, of course, that questions already had much higher rates of d0-support than neg declaratives, and thus I can claim somewhat plausibly that such a shift, if there was one, would already have been completed by this time. Negative imperatives are a problem, though: the rates are low, and yet women lead men considerably. My figures also don't resemble Ellegard's, although I think this may be the case because he includes cases with main verb "be." The way to handle this may be just to let the tables speak for themselves and not speculate or theorize about the reasons for female advantage in negative imperatives and questions-- the only studies I can rely on for these, after all, are Ellegard, Stein's massive but somewhat hard-to-use diachronic study of do-support, and maybe Tieken-Boon's study of d0-support in the 18th century.

I don't think such a paper would be at all meaningful or submittable unless I was able to connect this observation about Shakespeare's portrayal of sociolinguistic realities to some larger interpretive argument. What does this usage of language say about gender? Are female characters "innovators" in Shakespeare in other ways as well? Are there clear internal reasons for the higher rates of do-support in females-- for example, a tendency to use "thou" over "you" (if one is to believe Stein's theory about 2nd-person-singular consonant cluster inflections, at any rate)? An higher rate of impassioned pleas and commands (if one is to believe that do carries the connotation of emphasis even in these syntactic environments)? I know other students might experience the temptation to thematize the women-overtaking-men pattern of linguistic change, but I think I'll find that relatively easy to resist. But I do want somehow to be able to ground some observations about women in Shakespeare in a series of close readings.

Tuesday, November 4, 2008

Finally, a whip-smart, supremely capable, consensus-building president

Obama wins by a landslide. Cars are honking outside our window. I knew this was going to happen, but I feel utterly euphoric.

He gave an inspiring victory speech in Chicago, too.

Something's wrong with the timestamp mechanism on this blog-- right now the time should read 12:51. I'm posting this on November 5, an hour after midnight.

Monday, November 3, 2008

Election 2008

It's past 3am and I can't stop reading every last election news report, polling result, and op-ed online (I've already read the NY Times, Slate, Salon, the Guardian, and Der Spiegel and have gradually spiraled down to various Christian conservative websites). Obama's going to win today, and it's just such an extraordinary and pivotal moment that I can't quite focus on anything else.

I think this Sidney Blumenthal column (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/nov/04/uselections2008-johnmccain) accurately and articulately describes why this election is so momentous. Basically, the current support for Obama reflects one of those major political realignments that hits the US every half-century or so, always prompted by utter catastrophe. The Civil War empowered the Republican party of the mid-19th-century; the Great Depression spawned the New Deal and put Franklin's Democrats in power until the "great fracturing" of the liberal coalition in 1968; the Vietnam War and the cultural conflicts of the 60s discredited the Democrats of the time; Nixon's tactic of appealing to the "silent majority" then inaugurated the long, corrupt, backlash-driven, plen-T-plaining era of Republican rule that culminated in Reagan and went nova with Bush.

I think it's pathetic that things had to get this bad before the Republicans lost widespread American support. Right now people are alert to the bad economy and (perhaps) to the pointless, ruinous war in Iraq. But by the time of the 2004 election the government had already proven itself to be laughably, grotesquely horrible and immoral; corrupt and staffed by incompetent clowns; obsessed with PR and image management to the exclusion of actual governance; and people still went and voted for the guy. I was in Philly at the time. I remember going to bed hopeful that Kerry had won and waking up in disbelief and heartbreak. Wasn't Abu Gharib enough? Wasn't the absence of weapons of mass destruction enough? Bush had too many blunders and damaging policies to mention, and Bush's 2004 campaign was itself a cringe-worthy hypocritical sham (the rich scion of a political dynasty is the one who represents the ordinary Joe? the president who attacked the wrong country is the one who's "tough on terrorism"?), but above all, the tragic, unprovoked war undertaken under false pretenses should have triggered national outrage and chased him all the way back to Crawford.

The past eight years have been so dramatic and surreal that they truly have been stranger than fiction. From the illegitimate election of 2000 to Sept. 11 attacks, from the invasion of Iraq to Bush's reelection, from the wiretapping civil-rights violations to the Wall Street crash, the whole Bush presidency reads like an exceptionally well-plotted tragedy. The period even begins at the start of a millenium. I'm fairly certain the decade will be studied as a unit in humanities courses in the future, much the way the 1960s are studied now.

It's sobering also to recognize that the Bush presidency has framed my entire young adulthood. September 11th occured during my second week of college. I vote for his successor as a married graduate student, in my last year as a "young voter." In between, my entire adult political awareness has been shaped by the culture wars of the Bush era and by the dominance of thugs in the federal government. When I was younger my shock and disbelief took the form of a cautious worry about my own political awareness--this can't really be the way the world is run, can it?-- although it has since morphed into a secure but despairing view of the American political establishment. In many ways I became convinced of the validity of English literature as a field of study because of the urgency of the Bush years. Satire, political allegory, propaganda, dystopia, and counterfactual narrative all take on a certain power when confronted with authoritarianism and the wholesale manipulation of truth by political leaders; I was incredibly impressed by how The Onion and Stephen Colbert rose to the occasion and delivered stinging critiques when other critical voices were absent (or being drowned out). Literature is ultimately about life; imaginative writing makes space for dissent, and thereby makes itself relevant.

Wednesday, October 22, 2008

Regrets, already

I waited too long. It's now Wednesday, I've made very little headway, and I feel exhausted because I've spent the wee hours of each morning industriously avoiding my paper.

Gotta relax. I'm stuck in a psychological bind of my own making: when I'm intellectually alert, I'm so anxious and self-critical that my automatic writer's block shuts down any effort to get to work. When I'm tired and feeling like a zombie, I'm sufficiently zoned out to sit in front of my paper for hours, but I can fit neither ideas nor words together.

We'll see how this turns out.

Sunday, October 19, 2008

On the writing process

It's paper time-- first paper of the term, 7 pages long, on Defoe's Roxana.

It seems eminently do-able, and yet I often feel so overwhelmed when I sit down in front of that blank screen. After all these years I still have no sure-fire method for (1) arriving at an insightful thesis about some work of literature and (2) expressing it cogently in English. The brainstorming process lasts a long, long time with me-- right now I'm staring at three pages of crabbed notes that attempt to link together disparate themes as various as "disguise and multiple identities," "tension between proper names and generic titles," and "the relationship of anonymizing dashes to the concept of suppositional personhood." But a long list of loosely related themes, even if they are meticulously grounded in textual evidence, does not a thesis make. Somehow I have to kick this list of transcribed and expanded marginalia up to the level of an actual argument.

I have only the dimmest memories of the psychology of paper-writing from the last 50 times (or so) that I did this. I open those paper files now (in particular one on orality in Petronius's Satyricon, composed Fall 2004), they look reasonably intelligent and polished, and it's like, how'd that happen?

And this is only the idea stage! The writing process, for me, is typically longer, more painful, and less exciting than the crabbed-note process, where anything goes and new discoveries come with regularity. I think the Petronius paper was the last time I wrote in an orderly fashion, when I actually knew what I planned to write before I started putting together sentences. For the 5-6 longer papers that I subsequently wrote, I started composing text out of desperation about deadlines. After I had several pages of unfocused text, I chopped and glued and jammed them together into something resembling a forced argument, and continued from there. That's not the ideal way to do this.

The deadline for this paper on Roxana is already looming-- it's on Friday. I had noble ideas about working on this steadily over the course of two weeks, and that hasn't happened. I absolutely must, must generate two pages of usable text by the end of today-- say, 9:00, to give myself time to inhale another 200 pages of Clarissa tonight.

Papers always push me into spewing a constant ticker-tape of self-talk, so, invisible readers, pardon me if I stick that here. No fear. Just excitement, diligent work, and self-forgiveness for language or ideas that aren't very good. Keep starting if you find your mind wandering. You've done this many, many times before, and your spouse reassures you that the quality of your mind hasn't changed over the past 5 years. You've also signed up to do this for a living, after all, and the university *pays* you to write these papers! Would you rather be composing reports on widget advertising budgets?

Saturday, September 13, 2008

Places to study in New Haven

Some of my most appreciative memories of Penn are of the study spaces. Van Pelt and the reading room of the Fine Arts Library were both terrific places to work: comfortable, well-lit, spatially elegant. After midnight I usually retreated to the study center in the Linguistics building (quite nice, though it got a bit cold in the winter) or to those wonderful tables with the reading lamps in Houston Hall. The garden-level lounge in the library was pretty good too, when it wasn't overrun-- the trick was to get there at 11:30, before the rest of the library closed and expelled all the procrastinating undergrads to the basement. I was especially fond of all the places open after midnight. I'm not as studious as one might think; I'm just a distractable night owl who prefers to flit from cozy nook to well-lit cranny, changing study spaces every 90 minutes or so, the night before the reading is due.

For whatever reason, it hasn't been as easy to find congenial study spaces here in New Haven. The university is smaller, and its library hours more limited. Of the three large library reading rooms, two are gloomy tributes to dark-wood paneling (the L&B room also has these ancient green leather chairs with springs that poke into your backside). The carrels are cold and rusty. Bass Library, though in many ways beautifully renovated, is an organizational disaster: the only actual tables are the same long cafeteria-style tables available upstairs in the reading rooms, which force you to work elbow-to-elbow with other students sitting in your assembly line, while all of the best locations, near the windows, are occupied by armchairs, coffee tables, and the constant stream of students walking to the exit.

I think Yale's plush undergraduate colleges must contain all the communal reading areas that were sprinkled among academic buildings at Penn. By comparison, I suppose, the study spaces available in the dorms at Penn were pretty dismal: you'd find yourself studying under operating-room fluorescent lights (English House library), sitting at heavy-duty elementary-school art-class tables (Hill House library) or on leftover-scrapwood couches overlain by thin sheets of scratchy canvas (all 3 high rise rooftop lounges, circa 2002). On the other hand, West Philly has few coffee shops (just Bucks County and Starbucks, I think), whereas New Haven has tons. I've begun compiling a list of library rooms and coffee shops that are among the better places to study here at Yale. Major requirements: tables, chairs, quietness, and light. Preferred qualifications: wide tables, comfortable chairs, sunlight or incandescent light, permission to bring (or buy) drinks, few people, nearby electrical outlets, and late hours. I'll keep this list up to date as I learn more about Yale's campus.

Coffee shops (ranked in order of study atmosphere):

Koffee on Orange: M-F 7a-8p Sat 8a-8p Sun 10a-4p
Book Trader: M-F 7:30a-9p; Sa-Sun 9a-9p
Publick Cup: M-F 7am-12am; Sat 8:30am-12am; Sun 9am-12am
Koffee: M-F 7a-10p, Sa 8a-10p, Su 9a-8p
Starbucks: M-Th 6a-11:30p F 6a-12a Sa 6:30a-12a Su 7a-10:30
Willoughby's: M-Sa 7a-7p, Su 8a-6p
Gourmet Haven (on Whitney) : daily 24/7
Gourmet Haven (on Broadway): daily 24/7
Claire's Corner Copia: Su-Th 8a-9p; F-Sa 8a-10p
Woodland Coffee and Tea (Ninth Square): M-F 7a-6p, Sa 9a-4p, Sun 10a-4p
Woodland Coffee and Tea (Chapel): M-F 7a-6p, Sa 9a-4p, Sun 10a-4p
Cafe George (?): mornings and lunchtime, as far as I can tell
Cafe Java (?): M-F 7:30a- 4p


Libraries other than Sterling:

Law library: Mon - Sun 7:30 a.m. - 2:00 a.m.

Architecture library: Mon - Thurs 8:30 a.m. - 11:00 p.m.
Fri 8:30 a.m. - 5:00 p.m.
Sat 10:00 a.m. - 6:00 p.m.
Sun 2:00 p.m. - 11:00 p.m.

British Art Center Library: Mon Closed
Tues, Thurs-Sat 10:00 a.m. - 4:30 p.m.
Wed, 10:00 a.m. - 8:00 p.m.
Sun 12:00 p.m. - 4:30 p.m.


Music library: Mon - Thurs 8:30 a.m. - 8:45 p.m.
Fri 8:30 a.m. - 4:45 p.m.
Sat 10:00 a.m. - 4:45 p.m.
Sun 1:00 p.m. - 8:45 p.m.


Social Science library: Mon - Thurs 8:30 a.m. - 9:45 p.m.
Fri 8:30 a.m. - 4:45 p.m.
Sat 1:00 p.m. - 4:45 p.m.
Sun 1:00 p.m. - 9:45 p.m.

Divinity School library: Mon - Thurs 8:30 a.m. - 10:50 p.m.
Fri - Sat 8:30 a.m. - 4:50 p.m.
Sun 2:00 p.m. - 10:50 p.m.