Wednesday, October 13, 2010

Now Accepting Congratulations

If you are an academic, then you are very familiar with this feeling of seeing yourself as a completely worthless, useless, unintelligent screw-up that you get when you haven't published anything for over a year. You slink in an out of the department, trying to make people notice you as little as possible because their questions of "Still no news on those articles?" are painful to hear. You don't speak up during meetings with colleagues because why should they listen to somebody who can't get herself published? You feel like an impostor grading your students' essays because what right has somebody who hasn't been published in so long to evaluate anybody's work? You can't do any research because it seems like everything you write will be rejected anyways. You start asking your partner obsessively if they will leave you if you never publish anything again. You persecute your friends and relatives with endless queries of "You don't think I'm a loser, do you?" In short, this is a very special kind of insanity that everybody in academia experiences on a regular basis.

So today I finally - FINALLY - got an article accepted for publication. It is the most heavily theoretical piece I have ever written (hello, Mr. Pippin!) and one that I never really hoped to get published because of its very strong ideological content. You see, I'm not really interested in doing the kind of literary criticism that counts the numbers of metaphors in a work of literature or that comes up with critical editions of texts. This is an important part of literary criticism, but it isn't something I want to be doing. For me, works of literature that I analyze are a pretext to discuss things I find important politically and ideologically. This statement is often greeted with gasps of terror among my colleagues. I, however, believe that discussing exclusively the formal aspects of literary works would be a huge waste of time.

8 comments:

BenYitzhak said...

Mazel Tov!

Clarissa said...

Toda raba!

Izgad said...

Good astrological sign! :p

Of course the trap of writing an ideological piece. It opens you up to attack by the opposition. Your opponents now have the card to point blank try to keep you from getting a university job as you have now used your position to advance your ideology. Much the same way I have the right to make sure that a certain gay basher does not become the governor of New York.

Clarissa said...

As somebody who just got an article accepted on theory of ideology :-), I can say that nobody is ever free of their ideology. Writing an article that discusses the number of syllables in adverbs is as ideological a statement as my more directly political pieces.

Anonymous said...

congratulations!!!!! you should never feel like an impostor though - with the number of publications you already have, it's for everyone else to try and catch up

M

geo said...

Hey, Ya gotta do what ya gotta do - and if it helps your future be more of what you want it to be- fine.

Sounds like you can and will write more of what you want to also.

Congratuliterations!!!!!!!!!!!!

el said...

Let you have many such happy moments in the future!

It can't be read on-line, right?
Or something else you published?
The topic sounds interesting.

Clarissa said...

Thank you, guys!!!

el: this particular journal considers itself to be too good for the Internet. :-) But I'm hoping for another acceptance in November and that one will have an online version. I will be happy to share it. :-)