tag:blog.lib.umn.edu,2009-09-10:/tdeutsch/myblog//10840 2009-09-14T13:58:14Z Fall 2009 Movable Type Enterprise 4.31-en tag:blog.lib.umn.edu,2009:/tdeutsch/myblog//10840.190882 2009-09-14T13:49:29Z 2009-09-14T13:58:14Z

Tracey Deutsch http://blog.lib.umn.edu/cgi-bin/mt-cp.cgi?__mode=view&blog_id=10840&id=2880
Thank you everyone for contributing such thoughtful questions at our last meeting.  I've been thinking since then about Valentine's goal of learning how to do historical work.  It was funny, because I think of this seminar as being much more interdisciplinary than others I teach. (So I hope, Valentine, that this experience isn't disappointing!) 

What I love about the work of this seminar is the way that it pushes folks to do harder and more intense thinking about vital questions and themes.  There's no way that hard work happens outside of the methodologies we've all been trained in.  It's not as if we can or will suppress the knowledge we have already constructed.  (Indeed, those methdologies often reflect deep-seated proclivities to begin with.)  My experience is that people feel thrown not so much by having to write historically, but by the sorts of questions raised by literature on sex, gender, and political economy--literature that demands that we look at everything at once. 


The tricky balance is in keeping one's bearings in a particular time and place while also bearing witness in a reasonable and honest way, to the big questions, the enormous themes, that are part of that time and place.  That's a question that gets approached differently in different disciplines (and, for that matter, differently within disciplines) but it's not straightforward no matter what you do.  It requires lots of talking, lots of confrontation of difficult and knotty texts, and occasionally what my friend Sarah used to call "throwing yourself down on the floor a few times."  (I know I haven't made that sound all that attractive  but I imagine that you are all here because you're interested in this sort of work.)

  I very, very much look forward to talking about the particulars of what we're reading, as well as working out your own perspectives and approaches, over the semester.

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