The cursor blinks, yet does not move. Shoulders stiffen or lock, while attention glazes, flickers or slows. There is a reason it is called writer’s block: obstruction takes resolute shape across mind and body, social and institutional sites, and our lived relation with technology. As demands for productivity and efficiency have heightened at colleges and universities, so have academics’ experiences with writer’s block. Writing Through Writer’s Block unwinds this paradox of productivity, mapping unjust distributions of block and flow in the raced, classed and gendered terrain of academia.
Writing Through Writer’s Block builds on a history of rhetoricians’ work that exposes writing as at once a source of social violence and an artful practice of what Aristotle calls eudaemonia / εὐδαιμονία, or human flourishing. Scholars in critical university studies are powerfully critiquing the corporatization of the academy (Bousquet 2008, Ginsberg 2011, Newfield 2016). These urgent accounts of defunding, astronomical student debt, and precipitous drops in attainment and educational offerings, however, tend to gloss over the diverse, lived experiences of creating and teaching knowledge under new management practices. Faculty development literature on the other hand (Belcher 2009, Boice 2000, Lambert 2012), if it offers techniques that can be useful, has tended to sacrifice historical and socio-structural analysis for the sake of “tips” that can exacerbate the very challenges efficiency culture poses: do less! write more! prepare for class on a post-it note! calendar. every. second.
Bringing literary and rhetorical studies, institutional design and affect theory together with my work supporting over one thousand faculty members’ research as a writing coach, I offer detailed accounts of diverse experiences with knowledge creation in higher education’s destabilized and destabilizing climate. The book extends the method of mapping affective geographies I developed in my first book, On Sympathetic Grounds: Race, Gender and Affective Geographies in Nineteenth-Century North America. That book traces the intricacies attending Americans’ sentimental sense that bodies could merge and occupy the same space at the same time. Focusing on the experiences and perspectives of those whose bodies, labor and sovereignty have been occupied to ground others’ lives and world-making projects, On Sympathetic Grounds lays out sentimentalism’s usefulness to settler colonialism and the maintenance of racialized labor. It also carefully charts sentimentalism’s value as a means of resisting geographic displacement and physical and metaphysical dispossession.
The academy was founded on the expropriation of lands and enslaved labor, as well as the development of settler technologies and regimes, including the military tactics, large-scale agriculture and mechanic arts stipulated in the Morrill Land Grant Act. Writing Through Writer’s Block traces a critical genealogy of inquiry and discovery from the Morrill Act (1862) through the speed-up and digitalization of research life since the G.I. Bill (1944), and offers tested analytic practices and tools that support scholars and universities in coming closer to fulfilling their aims and missions.
Dear Sarah and Sarah ~
Thank you so much for considering my application to your seminar. I am hoping to workshop selections from my second book, Writing Through Writer’s Block, which contemplates the questions you pose in your seminar description—What are the environments that our writing, as 19th century Americanists, creates? In what environments can our writing thrive?
Tracing a critical genealogy of U.S. knowledge cultures, the project maps the under-examined yet deeply felt impact of academia's history on scholars’ experiences as writers and thinkers today. I ask how individuals and institutions can best support creativity and research, given academia’s history and legacy of institutionalized sexism, racism and settler colonialism.
The book is aimed at a broad audience—I am addressing academics as people and a public. (I mean, I know we are people! But we often address each other in our most specialized disciplinary discourses, and I am speaking with scholars as working human beings with projects that they care about.) Because the book looks at academic writing from the vantage of writer’s block, an alternately discomfiting, entrancing, depressing and illuminating subject, I am aiming to craft prose that is engaging in tone and voice—humorous at times, brutal in many of its accounts and also expansive, warm and pleasurable to read. I deeply admire each of your writing styles and your shared ability to bring rigorous, informed analysis together with witty, frank, compelling writing, and would be deeply grateful for the opportunity to reflect on and practice expanding forms in community with you and others at C19.
The book includes a variety of modes across platforms. These include autoethnographic writing; stories of faculty members whom I have worked with as a writing coach about writing struggles and breakthroughs; evidence-tested and research-based frameworks that support academic writing; and critical cultural histories of inquiry and academic life from the nineteenth century through the present. The first-person writing expands well outside my usual forms and genres. In this second book, and after tenure, I have been challenging myself to become more personal and personable in my writing, but doing so seems to entail some intensive unlearning.
This summer, I experimented with digital composition as one way to do this work, a mode that expands Writing Through Writer’s Block across printed and digital platforms. I am pasting the link to my first foray into this mode, “Storytelling Against Perfection," here ~ https://www.wevideo.com/view/934955945. My sense is that a playful, serious interview process— like an academic version of Vogue’s *73 Questions*—might document knowledge culture in new ways, potentially offering academic writers solidarity, inspiration and a sense of the contours of peoples’ work spaces, days and lives. Since graduate school, I have fantasized about making a documentary on faculty members’ work processes and histories—what draws us to our research? What do our desks and calendars and lab set-ups look like, and why?? I find myself in a situation, after learning digital editing, where crafting vignettes in this vein suddenly feels like a possibility in coordination with a Digital Bridges grant and this book.
Thank you for the time it takes to consider our applications for this seminar! With warmest wishes, NG
