Commentary: Next Times: The Futures of American Studies Today
2012; Oxford University Press; Volume: 25; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1093/alh/ajs064
ISSN1468-4365
Autores Tópico(s)Political Science Research and Education
ResumoLove is lovelier the second time around, Still wonderful with both feet on the ground. I must be getting old when I start mooning about with Bing Crosby's and Frank Sinatra's renditions of that old 1960s favorite, “The Second Time Around,” but the 16 essays in this issue about their authors' second book projects make me grow nostalgic. Once upon a time, you awoke from the nightmare of the tenure-and-promotion trauma, smiled briefly, and then were clutched by cold fear. “What am I going to do now?” was probably never uttered, because it was utterly rhetorical. “Write your second book, genius,” some internal devil sneered. “Oh, time, cash, and patience,” Herman Melville complains in Moby-Dick; if we could just find a little of all three, then we could write the second book, earn our promotion to professor, and forget about that morning after. Today, of course, the situation is far more complicated. Will books still be published five or six years from now, when I finish this project? Will there be any professorships left, especially in the liberal arts, once the corporatization of higher education has replaced us with recorded modules in the Distance Learning Campus, located in Utopia, The Cloud? Forgetting all those woes, will I have anyone able to afford my $275 tome (but “free shipping!”), much less literate enough in my microspecialization to be able to read it? Rule out my parents, neighbors, nonacademic friends, and even colleagues in other departments at my own university. “How do you make any money out of that?” my neighbor said contemptuously of my new book project, which I was crazy enough to describe to him.
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