Bruce Chatwin
This article is an attempt to answer the question Bruce Chatwin posed in the title of the last book published during his life: What Am I Doing Here. A critical focus on Chatwin’s masterwork, The Songlines, and its exploration of nomadism paired with wandering, leads to an exploration of his lifelong quest for spiritual renewal and ascension. Part literary criticism, part personal essay, the article makes personal connections with Chatwin’s life and work. Included here are several book lists, featuring an extensive list of books that Chatwin read and references in his own writing, assembled possibly for the first time.
- Research Article
- 10.24919/2519-058x.18.226512
- Mar 30, 2021
- Східноєвропейський історичний вісник
Анотація. Інвентарі бібліотек римо-католицьких монастирів Луцько-Житомирської дієцезії є важливим історичним джерелом з історії інтелектуального життя ченців, монастирської культури, а також шкіл, які діяли при монастирях. Вони є складовою частиною монастирської візитації – універсального документу, що містив опис всього монастирського комплексу та його майна. Мета статті – дослідити джерелознавчий потенціал бібліотечних інвентарів римо-католицьких монастирів Луцько-Житомирської дієцезії кінця XVIII – початку ХІХ ст. Методологія підпорядкована принципам науковості та історизму. Вона ґрунтується на методах джерелознавчого аналізу та синтезу. Акцент зроблено на методі критичного аналізу документального матеріалу. Наукова новизна. Вперше проаналізовано джерелознавчий потенціал інвентарів бібліотек одинадцяти монастирів Луцько-Житомирської римо-католицької дієцезії, що є складовою частиною візитацій, датованих кінцем XVIII – початком ХІХ ст. та збережених у фондах Державного архіву Житомирської області. Особи, які проводили візитацію, не керувалися визначеними вимогами щодо складання інвентаря бібліотеки. Віднайдені нами в архівних фондах інвентарі мають різну інформаційну наповненість. Деякі з них містять детальні відомості про наявні в бібліотеці монастиря книжки: автор/автори, назва книжки (повна чи скорочена), місце та рік друку, кількість наявних томів і примірників. Часто укладачі інвентарів записували лише назву книжки, її розмір, фізичний стан, кількість примірників. Зрідка зазначалися лише тематичні розділи книжкового фонду та кількість книжок у кожному з них. 
 Одна з найбільших бібліотек належала Луцькому монастирю тринітаріїв, про що свідчать візитації цього монастиря за 1799 р, 1816 р. та 1819 р. Однак лише інвентар бібліотеки за 1799 р. є детальним (займає 45 аркушів). У ньому було записано назву книжки, рік та місце виходу. Вивчення усіх трьох інвентарів дає змогу прослідкувати динаміку книжкового фонду бібліотеки: у 1799 р. він налічував 2177 книг, у 1816 р. – 2578, а у 1819 р. – 2368. Зменшення кількості книг у 1819 р. могло бути пов’язане з передачею начальної літератури для потреб парафіяльної школи, яка діяла при монастирі. 
 У 1799 р. монастир тринітаріїв у містечку Шумбар Кременецького повіту мав всього 19 книг, а основний бібліотечний фонд був перевезений до монастиря в Берестечку, де місцеві отці-тринітарії утримували школу. Станом на 1816 р. в їхньому розпорядженні було близько півтори тисячі книг, але інвентарний опис цієї книгозбірні дає можливість лише визначити її жанровий репертуар та вказати особу бібліотекара. Ним був отець Норберт Підвисоцький.
 Велику бібліотеку (близько тисячі книжок) згромадили реформати у селі Дедеркали біля Кременця. Наявність детального інвентаря дає змогу визначити її тематичну наповненість, час і місце друку творів. Найбільше з книг походили з друкарень Венеції, Львова, Варшави та Кракова. 
 У візитації монастиря піарів у Дубровиці Рівненського повіту 1818 р. книгозбірня поділялась на костельну, монастирську, парафіяльної школи та колегіуму (повітової школи), які функціонували при монастирі. Найбільше книжок налічувала бібліотека колегіуму: у розпорядженні учнів та учителів закладу було 2087 творів, виданих у XVI – на початку ХІХ століття. 
 Візитації двох францисканських монастирів (у Межирічі Острозькому і Кременці) за 1819 р., в яких вміщені невеликі інвентарні описи книгозбірень, засвідчують, що францисканці зібрали порівняно небагато книжок (близько трьохсот), головним чином, твори, необхідні для проповідницької діяльності. 
 Висновки. Проаналізовані інвентарі монастирських бібліотек подібні між собою кількома рисами: поділом на тематичні розділи (хоча інколи по-різному названі), чисельною перевагою латиномовних книжок, домінуванням серед творів польською мовою проповідницької і навчальної літератури, відсутністю інкунабул, збереженістю книг, виданих переважно у XVIII столітті.
 Ключові слова: інвентар бібліотеки, монастирська бібліотека, церковна візитація, стародруки, римо-католицькі монастирі, Луцько-Житомирська дієцезія, Волинська губернія.
- Research Article
- 10.1177/009155219902600408
- Apr 1, 1999
- Community College Review
Distance Learners in Higher Education: Institutional Responses for Quality Outcomes edited by Chere Campbell Gibson. Atwood Publishing, Madison, Wisconsin. 1998, 156 pages. ISBN 1-891859-23-4. In Distance Learners in Higher Education: Institutional Responses for Quality Outcomes, Chere Campbell Gibson and her colleagues explore a variety of topics related distance learners. The contributors are primarily seasoned professionals who hold positions related distance education, academic technology, or the fields of adult, continuing, or vocational education at universities in the United States and Canada. Instead of presenting a to book about distance education, they focus on their experiences and research findings as educators and relate this information distance learners in higher education. In addition, the reader is pointed resources about distance education in the final chapter through a useful list of books, journals, newsletters, and World Wide Web sites regarding distance education. The title suggests that two questions will be answered in this text: Who are distance learners in higher education, and what can higher education institutions do provide quality education at a distance? The first question is answered in Chapter 1. From an analysis of the existing literature, Thompson informs us that distance learners are likely be older, female, employed on a full-time basis, and married. However, she couches this description in the caveat that the profile even for an individual learner . . .must be [understood as] tentative and dynamic (p. 19) and that the distance education population as a whole is heterogeneous. This profile could imply that distance education has had a greater impact on four-year colleges and universities than it has had on community colleges (where students already tend be older, female, and employed on a full-time basis). Distance education provides an avenue for the nontraditional student enroll in the institutions, thus changing the profile of their student body. For senior institutions, this change in student population brings the forefront a question that community colleges have been grappling with for years: How do we serve the educational needs of those students who have work, family, and community responsibilities that compete with learning for their time, energy, and attention? This new question for the senior institutions is reflected in Gibson's observation in Chapter 7: Distance education has had an impact on enrollment in higher education courses, by serving pursuing postsecondary education, . . . husbands [whose] wives work, . . . older persons (beyond the traditional age of 21) enrolled in degree programs, and men and women alike considering recareering in their 30s and 40s (p. 121). The authors also answer the second question implied by this book's title: What can education institutions do provide quality education at a distance? The answer, however, may not be what the reader expects. A central theme running through the seven chapters is that we, as distance educators, need be learner-centered, reflective practitioners (p. 139). Thus, like all other educators, distance educators focus on quality education. Their perspective, however, must widen include the distance education context. As discussed in various chapters in this volume, distance educators share many challenges with their colleagues who teach on campus: how address gender issues, cultural diversity, barriers access, communication problems, and students' academic self-concept; how develop learner support systems; and how enhance learning strategies and student motivation. Distance education, however, introduces another level of complexity into the already complex field of teaching and learning. For example, there are specific skills involved with learning at a distance. As Gibson points out in Chapter 7, the lack of these skills will affect students' academic self-concept as well as their course performance. …
- Research Article
5
- 10.1111/j.1750-4910.1991.tb00258.x
- Mar 1, 1991
- Nurse Author & Editor
Developing a Unique Slant
- Research Article
- 10.5860/choice.35-4831
- May 1, 1998
- Choice Reviews Online
Preface Index of Writers, Book Titles, and Stories The Guide Index of Stories by Type Index of Cultures Index of Names Index of Book Titles by Grade Level Index of Book Titles Index of Illustrators List of Standard Books of Myths and Hero Tales
- Book Chapter
- 10.1016/b978-075066845-3/50034-3
- Jan 1, 2007
- Design Recipes for FPGAs: Using Verilog and VHDL
27 - Bibliography
- Research Article
- 10.1353/bcc.2007.0638
- Sep 1, 2007
- Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books
Reviewed by: The Storytime Sourcebook II: A Compendium of 3500+ New Ideas and Resources for Storytellers Cindy Welch Cullum, Carolyn N. The Storytime Sourcebook II: A Compendium of 3500+ New Ideas and Resources for Storytellers. Neal Schuman, 2007489p Paper ed. ISBN 1-55570-589-8$75.00 Occasionally, staff at school and public libraries need assistance invigorating storytime or developing new programs, and Cullum offers an updated and expanded version to accompany her 1999 Storytime Sourcebook (BCCB 2/00) that will help with the task. Though this looks like a second volume, it's really a useful revision of the first: the program topics, nearly 150 of them, have stayed the same, picture books and other resources published prior to 1995 have been replaced by newer materials, and the author has added more current music, video (DVD and videocassettes), and movement recommendations. The topical tie-ins for each program have been updated, and Cullum has added recommended lists of reference and picture books along with a special new picture books list entitled, "Classic 'Not To Be Missed' Picture Book Titles." There are updated lists of publishers and distributors of both videos and music, and the plethora of indices include picture book authors, titles, music/movement, crafts, activities, and songs. As in the earlier volume, there are no suggestions for telling stories, and only citations (rather than the text itself) are provided for fingerplays and songs, which necessitates an extra step for busy staff using the book to assemble a program. In addition, simple navigational aids such as side tabs or meaningful headers would have helped users negotiate the 489-page volume. Even with these limitations, this is a useful work, especially for paraprofessionals planning programs or staff looking to augment their children's collections with an array of resources equally at home with a single reader or an excited group of toddlers ready for a storytime romp. Copyright © 2007 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
- Research Article
- 10.1353/cnf.2018.0043
- Jan 1, 2018
- Confluencia: Revista Hispánica de Cultura y Literatura
"Let's Be Unyoked from Landscapes":Travel and Place(s) in the Poetry of Rane Arroyo Betsy A. Sandlin Award-winning poet, playwright, short story writer, and scholar Rane Arroyo (1954–2010) authored a long list of books yet has received little critical attention to date.1 Born in Chicago to Puerto Rican parents, Arroyo earned a PhD at the University of Pittsburgh and later relocated to Ohio, where he taught English and Creative Writing at the University of Toledo until his untimely death. His 11 collections of poetry are especially notable for their often-humorous and colloquial engagement with popular culture in the United States, their experimentation with form, and their largely autobiographical and self-reflexive meditations on identity, influenced by his own life experiences as an openly gay, Puerto Rican man of working-class roots who navigated many predominantly Anglo and heteronormative spaces throughout his life. In a footnote, Marc Zimmerman proclaims that Arroyo "may indeed be the most prolific and most important of the Chicago Puerto Rican poets" (154). Notwithstanding a prolific literary career and prestigious prizes and recognition, Arroyo remains mainly in the footnotes, so to speak, in the shadows of both Latinx and broader U.S. literary criticism. One explanation for his absence is that Arroyo's work defies stereotypical understandings or expectations of Latinx literature and, more specifically, Puerto Rican literature written in the U.S. His poetry is not filled with code-switching or Spanglish nor does it present an urban experience like that which is easily recognized in Nuyorican texts. Furthermore, the cultural touchpoints in Arroyo's work include as many references to Broadway and Bruce Springsteen as to salsa music, as much influence from Buddhism as from Catholicism, as much Hart Crane and Emily Dickinson as Federico García Lorca or Reinaldo Arenas.2 There is very little nostalgia present in his writing, and there are as many playful and absurd meditations on the self in his poetry as there are serious ones. As Luis Urrea states in his introduction to Arroyo's collected poems, The Buried Sea, "The brother just doesn't sound like anybody else in the Latino crowd" (xii). Urrea concludes, "He is not a 'Latino' poet. He is a world poet who is Latino" (xiv). Arroyo's poetry deserves a larger posthumous audience and increased critical attention, particularly for its destabilization of the prevalent notion that a strong sense of place is a defining feature of Latinx literary production past and present, an idea that has been discussed widely by literary critics and literary historians and that stubbornly prevails in studies of Latinx cultural production in the 21st century, despite globalization and [End Page 115] challenges to theories of place-based identification. "It is a poetry … that tries to reconcile geographic specificity … with cosmopolitanism," according to Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes and colleagues (144). While Arroyo certainly claimed a birthplace (Chicago), a stable residence for most of his professional life (Toledo, Ohio), and a place of familial and cultural origin (Puerto Rico), his poetic production as a whole reveals a clear preference for wandering through a multiplicity of places rather than identifying with any particular place or places. Likewise, his work refuses to identify with a strictly binary geography, which forms the backbone of many configurations of Latinx and diasporic identities, including the writing of Latinx authors who describe lives "on the hyphen" (Mexican-American, Cuban-American, etc.), as suggested by Gustavo Pérez Firmat. In other words, Arroyo's poetry is not limited to what Vanessa Pérez Rosario describes as a "double consciousness," which she argues is typical for Hispanic Caribbean literature written in the U.S. In his own introduction to The Buried Sea, Arroyo attempted a list of identifiers that would capture his complexity. He wrote: "I'm a Puerto Rican, gay, Midwestern, educated, former working class, liberal, atheistic, humanist, American, male, ex-Mormon, ex-Catholic, pseudo-Buddhist, teacher, reader, global, and popular culture-informed poet" (2). Nonetheless, Arroyo's poetry questions the stability of his chosen identifiers, particularly the place-based ones, and instead highlights movement through place(s) as fundamental to understanding his latinidad and his literary work. Arroyo's writing, both...
- Research Article
22
- 10.1080/14623520500349910
- Dec 1, 2005
- Journal of Genocide Research
There's a serious risk that a commemoration of Raphael Lemkin's work will not become an act of remembering, but an act of forgetting, obliterating what was so singular about his achievement. (Micha...
- Book Chapter
19
- 10.1057/9781137383105_3
- Jan 1, 2014
Over the last decade or so, Milton criticism has come to be dominated by a group of republican critics. Milton and Republicanism, a 1995 anthology, sought to establish a claim for Milton’s lifelong political commitment to classical republicanism as key to understanding his writing.1 It includes essays by such literary critics as Thomas Corns, Martin Dzelzainis, Nigel Smith, and Nicholas von Maltzahn, all of whom are among the editors of the forthcoming 11-volume Oxford University Press Complete Works of John Milton, which appears to be being launched under the aegis of this critical paradigm. The first volume to appear, volume 2, “The 1671 Poems: Paradise Regain’d and Samson Agonistes” edited by Laura Lunger Knoppers, announces a historicist agenda in its title.2 These poems, the last Milton published, appeared together in 1671; for Knoppers, this means the poems are to be tied to that date and to what she refers to as a “print event” (inexplicable quotation marks accompany her phrase). This thesis shapes the volume’s 100-page introduction, most of which is about Thomas Starkey, the publisher of the volume, and John Macock, its printer. What matters about the poems is their supposed politics. On the basis of Starkey’s list of books, Knoppers argues for his “longstanding interest in republican theory” (xxxv); this made him a “‘kindred spirit’” (xl, more inexplicable quotation marks surround that phrase) for “the republican Milton” (as he is called from the first page of the introduction, xix), “the inveterate republican” (as he is declared just a few lines down).KeywordsParadise LostLongstanding InterestRepublican TheoryKindred SpiritModernist PoeticsThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
- Research Article
4
- 10.7710/2162-3309.2177
- Oct 25, 2017
- Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication
INTRODUCTION Graduate students sometimes express consternation about whether the presence of their dissertation in an open access institutional repository (IR) will harm their chances of being able to publish the manuscript as a book. Several studies have addressed the question from different perspectives, but the avenue of examining what had actually been published had not been explored. METHODS This study examines books published in 2014 and 2015 that were listed as dissertations in one large book vendor database. A list of books was downloaded and searched in both ProQuest’s Dissertations & Theses Global database and Google to identify a matching dissertation. RESULTS Only a small percentage of books published as dissertations were found in ProQuest and then subsequently in IRs. The number of libraries holding book titles with corresponding dissertations in IRs dropped between 2014 and 2015. The lists of publishers who published dissertations as books was very similar between 2014 and 2015 data and included large, commercial publishers. DISCUSSION Students should be aware that only a small percentage of the total number of dissertations produced in a year are subsequently published as books, that the time between dissertation and book publication is substantial, and that some subject areas are more likely to be published than others. CONCLUSION These findings provide nuance to the discussions of dissertations in open access repositories and a starting point to monitor trends in this area. They should also provide librarians who are providing supplementary guidance to graduate students with information about the publishing landscape.
- Research Article
29
- 10.1353/eal.2008.0005
- Jan 1, 2008
- Early American Literature
History, Literature, and the Atlantic World Eric Slauter (bio) During the past decade, literary scholars have produced an impressive list of books and articles in the emerging field of Atlantic literary history. Atlantic historians, however, rarely acknowledge this work and have moved away from the issues of identity and expression that made literary scholarship attractive and central to Atlantic historiography ten or twenty years ago. This phenomenon is a local manifestation of a wider problem affecting the market for literary scholarship in the wake of the linguistic and cultural turns within history and the resurgence of historicism within literary studies; call it a "correction" of sorts. While literary studies once served as a major exporter of ideas and methods to the human sciences, especially history, literary scholars now import more from historians than they export to them. To put the point in figurative terms that do not disguise the economic stakes involved, a trade deficit now exists on the side of literary studies. Even as literary scholarship has become markedly more "historical," it has apparently become less marketable to historians. This essay charts the changing status of literature in recent historiography by focusing on historians as much as on literary scholars. It is designed to be descriptive and prescriptive, to diagnose what I see as a problem for historians and literary historians alike, and to offer some suggestions for better field integration and dialogue. Atlantic studies offers a compelling case study because literary scholars are clearly producing more scholarship in this area while historians seem to be consuming less of it. Yet my evidence base will turn at times to the fields represented by the primary readers of the journals in which this essay appears, early American history and early American literature, and my remarks will occasionally refer to disciplinary shifts within the larger enterprises of history and literary studies. Attending more to practice than theory and focusing on scholarship published in [End Page 153] English about colonial and early national North America, the essay invites readers to reflect on what historians and scholars of literature do when they encounter each other, when they interpret literature, and when they use literature to interpret something else. Though early Americanists seem more divided now than ever before, the real division may not be between history and literary studies so much as it is between competing concepts within history and within literary studies about what texts are and do. The three sections of this essay address different ways of conceiving of disciplinary relations. The first section briefly examines the growth of Atlantic literary history and the declining citations to literary scholarship by historians. The second section uses a decade of cross-disciplinary book reviews (that is, reviews in which historians evaluate new books by literary scholars and vice versa) to see what historians and literary scholars actually have to say about each other and how individual readers have constructed disciplinary commitments by confronting work in another discipline. The third section examines the use of literature as evidence in recent documentary collections edited by historians who have been interested in the recoverability of the voices, epistemologies, or subjectivities of Native American peoples described in and by European-authored texts. I conclude by suggesting a few ways of overcoming the growing trade gap in Atlantic scholarship, directing my remarks to both historians and literary scholars. In the past few years, historians have produced histories of the Atlantic world, histories of histories of the Atlantic world, and arguments about the utility of the concept of an Atlantic world, but they have done so largely without reference to current or past literary scholarship. The rise of the Atlantic world as an object of analysis and a site of scholarly contestation is surely one of the most significant developments in the historiography of the last decade. Though the phrase "Atlantic world" appeared in a handful of books and articles in the 1970s and early 1980s, it began to take hold of the historical profession as a phrase repeated annually in the titles of books, articles, and dissertations in the late 1980s, following the publication of Nicholas Canny and Anthony Pagden's edited collection of essays Colonial Identity in...
- Research Article
- 10.21697/sc.2015.22.15en
- Jan 1, 1970
- Saeculum Christianum
The first historically confirmed records of the library of Szczyrzyc monastery are from the time of abbot Joahim I Cieniawski (1592-1607). Among the 40 titles of books recorded during the visitation in 1597 was: six antiphonals, eight missals, five psalters, four graduals, two copies of the Bible, homiliarz, kolektarz, the life of St. Stanislaus bishop and martyr, the St. Benedict’s rule and also Liber Definitorum, which is the book of the resolution of the General Chapters of the Cistercian. The first catalogue of books was made in 1755 and was entitled Cathalogus librorum Monasterij Ciricensis iuxta alphabetum authorum mense Augusto Anno Domini 1755. Conscriptus. It is a pity that only two initials cards including a list of books within the letter “A” were preserved until modern times. Three nineteenth century inventories provide full knowledge about this collection of books taking into account the title of a book, the author’s name, the description of a book (place and year of publication) and format of a book. The person who wrote the book made their thematic segregation. Undoubtedly the number of books, titles and in particular the authors demonstrate the need and the importance which the Szczyrzyc monastery given to the books which reading had to help the monk in his pilgrimage to God.
- Research Article
1
- 10.21697/sc.2015.22.16
- Sep 20, 2016
- Saeculum Christianum
The first historically confirmed records of the library of Szczyrzyc monastery are from the time of abbot Joahim I Cieniawski (1592-1607). Among the 40 titles of books recorded during the visitation in 1597 was: six antiphonals, eight missals, five psalters, four graduals, two copies of the Bible, homiliarz, kolektarz, the life of St. Stanislaus bishop and martyr, the St. Benedict’s rule and also Liber Definitorum, which is the book of the resolution of the General Chapters of the Cistercian. The first catalogue of books was made in 1755 and was entitled Cathalogus librorum Monasterij Ciricensis iuxta alphabetum authorum mense Augusto Anno Domini 1755. Conscriptus. It is a pity that only two initials cards including a list of books within the letter “A” were preserved until modern times. Three nineteenth century inventories provide full knowledge about this collection of books taking into account the title of a book, the author’s name, the description of a book (place and year of publication) and format of a book. The person who wrote the book made their thematic segregation. Undoubtedly the number of books, titles and in particular the authors demonstrate the need and the importance which the Szczyrzyc monastery given to the books which reading had to help the monk in his pilgrimage to God. The inventory of the books of the Abbey library of Cistercians in Szczyrzyc to the end of nineteenth century
- Research Article
2
- 10.1177/0021989415573034
- Jul 27, 2016
- The Journal of Commonwealth Literature
Sylvia Ashton-Warner’s fiction achieved considerable international success, particularly her novels Spinster (1958) and Incense to Idols (1960), which both reached Time magazine’s best books list. This achievement meant that Ashton-Warner was able to resign from teaching and focus on being a fulltime writer and she was eventually awarded an MBE in 1982. Ashton-Warner’s success in literature was matched by her work in education and over the past 50 years there has been a significant body of criticism from scholars in that field analysing her non-fiction as well as her novels. Ashton-Warner’s significance as a writer makes her continuing neglect by literary critics in her homeland of New Zealand all the more curious. This article argues that Ashton-Warner’s novels are neglected in New Zealand literary culture largely because they were published at a time when local criticism privileged a mode of masculinist realism and that their recuperation by feminist scholars keen to challenge the restricted canon has been problematized by their author’s divisive personality, as well as by the conventional conclusions of her novels that tend to involve a level of containment. By taking a feminist approach to two of Ashton-Warner’s most popular novels — Spinster and Incense to Idols — this article aims to demonstrate how they utilize, extend, and subvert modes of writing associated with popular female fiction in order to explore the contradictions of prevailing versions of mid-twentieth-century femininity.
- Research Article
- 10.1353/clj.2017.0007
- Jan 1, 2017
- Community Literacy Journal
Reviewed by: The Slow Professor: Challenging the Culture of Speed in the Academy by Maggie Berg and Barbara K. Seeber Sandra D. Shattuck The Slow Professor: Challenging the Culture of Speed in the Academy by Maggie Berg and Barbara K. Seeber Toronto: U of Toronto Press, 2016. 128 pp. As soon as I saw the title of Berg and Seeber's book, I breathed out, as if I were finishing a session of meditation. How wonderful would it be if I could slow my teaching life down? Not obsess over the pile of papers waiting to be responded to and graded. Not worry that my annual self-evaluation would ever get written. To actually read something for pleasure, something that caught my fancy and not something that had to be assessed, deadline attached. What kind of life would that be? A balanced one. A sane one. The truth is that many academics in the twenty-first century function on the edge of crazy. But our work-induced desperation is not a topic any of us broaches. Thus, in order to write this book, Berg and Seeber had to push beyond two boundaries: one was the complicit silence muffling the topic, and the other was disciplinary. As Berg and Seeber point out in their introduction, discussing mental health is taboo, even though a large body of research proves that faculty incur increasing stress and work-life imbalance as they take on more and more tasks to fulfill the mandates of the corporate university. Moreover, as Berg and Seeber state, the traditional profile of an academic, which includes "the ideals of mastery, self-sufficient individualism, and rationalism" (12), mitigates against speaking up or collective action. As they state, What began simply as helping each other became a sustained investigation of academia. We see our book as uncovering the secret life of the academic, revealing not only her pains but also her pleasures. Writing this book provoked the anxiety of speaking what is habitually left unspoken, and we continually needed to remind ourselves that the oscillation between private shame and the political landscape would prove fruitful. (12) [End Page 80] The corporatization of one's workplace and craft; the loss of health, collegiality, and pleasure in one's work; the increasing isolation of a digitally managed life—these are all big concerns we can discuss in any profession, but Berg and Seeber invite us to focus these concerns on the university. The authors' significant innovation is to apply principles of the Slow movement to academia. In fact, the title of Berg and Seeber's book pays homage to Carl Honoré's seminal text, In Praise of Slowness: Challenging the Cult of Speed. But to effect this application, Berg and Seeber had to move beyond their disciplinary boundary as literary critics—they're both professors in departments of English language and literature in Canadian universities—and engage interdisciplinary research and thinking in fields such as psychology, sociology, and management, represented by academic journal titles in the Works Cited pages such as Journal of Applied Social Psychology, Journal of Management Studies, and Administrative Science Quarterly, among others. Offering a succinct assessment of their project and the research required, Berg and Seeber state that "our book is more optimistic than works on the corporate university, more political and historicized than self-help, and more academically focused than those on stress and the Slow movement" (vii). Stepping out of one's disciplinary comfort zone is no little feat in a business that evaluates its employees on what they know rather on investigating what they don't know. And Berg and Seeber point to this shame and discomfort: "Ironically, our feelings of lack of productivity and not measuring up have not led us until now to 'read' the institution; our self-blame has played into corporate values" (12–13). Their project was not without pushback from colleagues, some of whom told Berg and Seeber "to wake up and get with the program" and that they were "simply too busy to slow down" (11). Berg and Seeber's diagnosis of the problem in their introduction is well worth the read. "Corporatization" is the villain, and the authors summarize the...
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