The Future of Scholarly Writing Critical Interventions

by Bammer, Angelika; Boetcher Joeres, Ruth-Ellen

• ISBN13: 9781137520463
• ISBN10: 1137520469
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2015-09-02
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

Recent developments in the American academy - the growing emphasis on interdisciplinary collaboration, the attention on public scholarship, and the potential for alternate forms of communication created by new media technologies - have put pressure on how scholars write. Within this shifting landscape of institutional demands and professional expectations, The Future of Scholarly Writing brings together a group of distinguished scholars from across the contemporary university to discuss the importance of form in their work. Scholarly work is commonly discussed in terms of its content, not its form. In contrast, this book makes a strong case that both are consequential and critical. Drawing on their experience as authorities in their fields, the authors describe the conventions of academic presentation in their disciplines, discuss their usefulness, and explain when and why they decided to write differently. As they weigh the costs and benefits of writing within the framework of discipline-based conventions they provide insight into they ways in which scholars can write for different publics while adhering to the rules that define good scholarship. This much-needed book combines cutting-edge scholarship with experimental writing methodologies to deepen the scholarly discourse.

Author Biography

Angelika Bammer is Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Humanities and Comparative Literature at Emory University, USA. She has received fellowships from the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the National Humanities Center and is the author of Partial Visions: Feminism and Utopianism in the 1970s, the editor of Displacements: Cultural Identities in Question, and the producer of a multi-media installation of her work on Memory Sites: Destruction, Loss and Transformation. Her engagement with the issues explored in the volume on academic writing that she has co-edited has marked much of her professional career. Most recently, she has developed a set of graduate courses and workshops on academic writing called "The Art of Scholarly Writing," "Experiments in Scholarly Form," and "Explorations in Interdisciplinary Scholarship" for which she was honored with the prestigious Emory Williams Award for distinction in Humanities teaching.

Ruth-Ellen Boetcher Joeres is Professor Emerita of German and Women's Studies at the University of Minnesota, USA. She was the editor of Signs from 1990-1995 and has received fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung, and the American Philosophical Society. She was the recipient of the 2004 Distinguished Women Scholars Award in Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences at the University of Minnesota. She has thought about, taught, and presented lectures on the topic of academic writing for much of her career, including the jointly written and presented "Writing That Matters: An E-pistolary Dialogue," with Angelika Bammer at the 2007 annual conference of Women in German and the 2006 Ada Comstock Distinguished Women Scholars Lecture in the Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, "The Universal Appeal of the Particular."

Table of Contents

Introduction; Angelika Bammer and Ruth-Ellen Boetcher Joeres
1. The Work of Writing; Jane Gallop
2. Writers, Authors, and the Extraordinary Ordinary; Naomi Scheman
3. Tribal Rites: Academic-Speak and the Ambiguity of Belonging; Angelika Bammer
4. When Nothing Is Cool; Lisa Ruddick
5. Writing in the Clinic, or What Might Be Expressed; Rita Charon
6. Looking for the Right Path; Paul Stoller
7. Found in the Details: Thoughts About Particulars; Ruth-Ellen Boetcher Joeres
8. The "State" and the "Plantation": Writing Differently; Gyanendra Pandey
9. Stories and the Language of Law; Kate Nace Day
10. "Life has a mind of its own": Public Administration and "The Soloist"; Ralph Hummel & Camilla Stivers
11. Undisciplined Practice: Experimenting with Anthropological Form; Anna Grimshaw
12. Big Words in Small Circles: Bad Writing and the Social Sciences; Michael Billig
13. A Discontinuous Voice; Amy Katz Kaminsky
14. First Person Plural: Notes on Voice and Collaboration; Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer
15. Writing about Music - and the Music of Writing; Susan Mcclary
16. The Poetry of It (Writing History); Carolyn Kay Steedman
17. In the Meantime; Ruth Behar