The Post-Doc Complex

Posted on 02/10/2013 by clembeauvais

On my long journey towards maturity, I have reached the stage where I can now identify fully with the existential plight famously analysed and narrated by that great prober of human crises that is Britney Spears.

Or rather, ‘I’m not a PhD student, not yet a lecturer’. Ms Spears, shrewdly identifying the specific requirements for this predicament to end, further argues:

All I need is time

A moment that is mine

While I’m in-between

Or rather:

All I need is grants

For conferences in France

While I’m in-between…

(or: / All I need is more

Free access to JSTOR

/ All I need for sure

Is to give a lecture

/ All I need is three

New lines on my CV

/ All I need is you [looking intently at venerable prof]

To give me peer-review

Etc.)

Not being endowed with the same curves as the inspirational figure of my early teenage years, I’m not sure writhing half-naked on a mountaintop would alleviate my own concerns: what is this no man’s land of limboey in-betweenness that they call post-doc?

Not being a student anymore is, I would like to point out first and foremost, an absurd situation for anyone to come to terms with. I have twenty-four years of studenthood behind me (before you object that I must have been a baby for at least some of that time, I will specify that my mother, who doesn’t care much for non-adults, spent most of that time trying to make me quit that bad habit as fast as possible).

All of a sudden, I’m not a student. It all happened very unexpectedly, on my PhD viva day. Just when I thought everything was going well, my examiner said congratulations, and then:

From this day onwards, you are not a student anymore, and you will never be a student ever again. Well, unless you decide to study something entirely different at some point later in your life.

I couldn’t possibly have prepared for it; I wasn’t ready. Immediately the panic generated by the first sentence was replaced by feverish imaginings of what I could study next. An undergraduate course in Klingon could be followed by an MPhil in Advanced Crocheting? But it was too late, my supervisor came up to me and cut off my tiny Padawan braid, and it was the end of my student life.

I am now in the strange situation of having to answer to no one. Lecturers and professors always seem to have someone above them telling them what they’re doing right or wrong, usually with the help of statistical diagrams and numbers preceded by pound signs. My own post-doc contract (a very Oxbridgey Junior Research Fellowship, to be precise) doesn’t come with any particular demands that I should do anything concrete in the next three years.

It is implicit in the wording, I guess, that I shall not use them to improve my skills at dodging banana skins on Mario Kart, but there’s no precise to-do-list. I don’t ‘have to’ publish a book, write a certain number of articles, do a number of hours of teaching, present conference papers. I just have to get on with my research, and because I had an interview where they assessed that I wasn’t career-suicidal, they are simply assuming that I will do my best to improve my CV in those three years in the ways I see most fit.

Not this.

So here I am, beginning a three-year job where I don’t have a boss, or externally-defined objectives, or a possibility of being fired (as far as I know), but where I can decide exactly how to organise my days and/or nights, what to refuse and what to accept in terms of teaching, and what to do in my spare time. Even in my most lucid dreams I didn’t think you could upgrade to that level of adult independence until you retired, and I’m not even long-sighted yet.

But at the same time as having all this freedom at my disposal, I will also be frantically applying, in those years, for all the jobs in the world, hundreds of much less comfortable positions but more durable ones, which will drag me into a whirlpool of admin, CV-writing, referee-bribing-with-macarons-from-Ladurée, and anguished monthly transfers to my savings account. I will be writing articles I don’t want to write but that might have a better chance of getting published than the ones I do want to write.

The bribery that always works.

So I’m barely beginning my career as a researchling and I’m not sure if I should try to enjoy the most luxurious three years of my life because this is pretty much as free as it gets, or grimly memento-morise: this job is just a formidably lovely transition chamber towards a terrifying academic job market, where proper academic positions are melting away faster than the North Pole, and dancing on a bare mountain in ripped jeans begins to seem like a very reasonable option to keep at bay the weird despair of in-betweenness.

Towards Frenglish Research in Children’s Literature?

Posted on 30/11/2012 by clembeauvais

A long time ago I was an exemplary (i.e. completely stressed-out) student at the prestigious Lycée Henri-IV in Paris, and I hated it. Desperate to escape the constant humiliations, threats, existential worries and intellectual rigidity imparted by the French university system, I ended up ~~setting up my own wicker-basket-business~~ ~~backpacking up Mount Annapurna~~ ~~becoming a horse-whisperer~~ studying at Cambridge. Ironic, I know, but happiness levels rocketed.

Me, before moving to the UK.

Anyway, as a result of adolescent trauma, until very recently I’d never really tried to get in touch with French researchers in children’s literature, even though I use a ton of French philosophers in my own work. There’s so much research in English already, and so little time, and of course I suspected that it would be done quite differently across the Channel.

But last year, as I was browsing the Internet, I stumbled upon the blog of children’s literature lecturer and researcher Cécile Boulaire, from the University François-Rabelais of Tours. I left a comment, and got an email in return. Our correspondence resulted in my inviting her, and other French researchers, to a day symposium at our Research Centre in Cambridge. The symposium took place last week.

Our five guests were members of the Afreloce (French Association for Research on Books and Cultural Objects pertaining to Childhood): Cécile Boulaire, Laurence Chaffin, Matthieu Letourneux, Mathilde Lévêque and Christophe Meunier. They happened to be much less terrifying than my past teachers.

Me, not terrified.

The main purpose of the symposium was to present and compare theoretical perspectives and methodologies in children’s literature research in France and in English-speaking countries. The programme was as follows:

Current Francophone and Anglo-American Research

in Children’s and Young Adult Literature

Session 1. History and the Children’s Book.

9.30-10.00. Kate Wakely-Mulroney (University of Cambridge)

· The conventions of nonsense in Charles Dodgson’s correspondence.

10.00-10.30. Laurence Chaffin (University of Caen)

· Literature for girls in the 19^th century.

Session 2. Geographies of Childhood and Adolescence.

11.00-11.30. Erin Spring (University of Cambridge)

· Answering ‘Who am I?’ by asking ‘Where am I from?’: Constructions of place-based identity through young adult fiction.

11.30-12.00. Christophe Meunier (Ecole Normale Supérieure, Lyon)

· Children’s picturebooks : actors of spatiality, generators of spaces.

Session 3. Reading Words and Pictures.

13.30-14.00.Cécile Boulaire (University François Rabelais, Tours)

· Poetics of picturebooks.

14.00-14.30. Yi-Shan Tsai (University of Cambridge)

· Young readers’ critical responses to manga.

Session 4. New Theoretical Perspectives and Territories of Research

14.30-15.00. Professor Maria Nikolajeva (University of Cambridge)

· Memory of the present: empathy and identity in young adult fiction.

15.00-15.30. Matthieu Letourneux (University Paris Ouest/ Nanterre)

· Youth literature: series logic and cultural series.

15.30-16.00. Clémentine Beauvais (University of Cambridge)

· Desire and didacticism in the children’s book.

16.30-17.30. Round Table. Chair: Clémentine Beauvais.

· National and International Trends in Children’s Literature Research.

The day, and especially the round table at the end (which was square, as an unplanned tribute to Descartes) confirmed some of my assumptions and invalidated others concerning the differences between children’s literature studies in France and in the UK/US. Here’s a quick overview:

Children’s literature research in English-speaking countries is much more driven by power theory. The children’s book is perceived as a space of adult (and sometimes child) powers – indeed it is the object of my thesis. In France, as Cécile and Matthieu confirmed, it isn’t a recurring question at all. Paradoxical, of course, since it’s a very Foucauldian analysis. Which brings me to my next point…
The French don’t do ‘French Theory’. Foucault is apparently studied quite a bit still, but Deleuze, Derrida, Kristeva, Bourdieu and all the thinkers cheerfully grouped under the magic ‘French Theory’ umbrella by anglophone researchers seem to be much more rarely found in France than abroad.
French researchers study children’s literature mostly ‘as literature.’ I know this may sound very strange, but it’s far from being always the case here. Personally, I don’t see myself as studying children’s literature as literature. The child in the book isn’t necessarily the focus for French researchers- aesthetic criticism of children’s books ‘as literature’, ‘as works of art’, regardless of the audience, seems to be prominent.
The Anglo-Saxon approach seems currently more theoretical, the French one more aesthetic and historicist. Of course, this has to be nuanced to a great deal – a lot of UK/US researchers do historical criticism. But the theoretical effort which underscores current publications in English – definitions, axioms, ‘towards a theory of children’s literature’, etc – doesn’t seem to have a French equivalent. This is counterbalanced by a very high level of detail, in French research, of aesthetic analyses and of contextualisation.
But we also have a lot in common. As one of the sessions (on geography/ecocriticism in children’s books) showed, emerging fields of research are concomitant in both ‘bubbles’. And we’re asking the same questions – how do picturebooks work? What’s a children’s series, and what can it tell us about the sociocultural contexts of its creation and distribution? And of course, what is children’s literature?

But a haunting question remains, one which Maria Nikolajeva develops on her blog: what can we do to develop research partnerships, to overcome the language barrier, to be aware of what other research centres abroad are doing? The Internet helps, but without regular and sustained interaction between different countries we might be condemned, in the Arts & Humanities, to reinventing the wheel terrifyingly often.

For French-speakers: Mathilde Lévêque wrote a blog post on this symposium, and so did Cécile Boulaire.

Note: I am very grateful to the Research Centre and to Christ’s College for funding this event.

Than are dreamt of in your philosophy

Posted on 08/07/2012 by clembeauvais

Doing ‘research’ to write fiction, especially whimsical fiction for 9-year-olds, means you end up with a very strange browsing history. According to mine, this is what I’ve been asking Google recently (and yes, I treat Google like a real person when it comes to asking questions):

taking fingerprints on glass
when is hornet season
what’s the name of white fluff falling off trees
difference between cider and perry [for a French book]
do gargoyles often need to be repaired
horses falling off the rock of Solutré [French book again]
dormouse sleeping patterns
medicine to calm children down
weight of normal 9 year old girl
what time is evensong

and last but not least (though I should probably have chosen Bing for that one):

is google allowed to spy on you

Added to these are, of course, endless searches on these two Ali-Baba’s caves of infinite knowledge which I could not live without, Thesaurus.com and Urban Dictionary.

I quite like the idea that Google is getting a completely bizarre and incoherent idea of me due to my inexplicable browsing decisions, but unfortunately I’m sure it’s cleverer than that and has clocked that I’m a writer.

Anyway, once in a while you type in a seemingly innocuous little question and end up navigating a whole underground world the existence of which you’d never suspected. One such fine discovery happened to me when I started researching people who climb up buildings, specifically Cambridge and Oxford buildings. These people, my friends, are not only the hidden modern superheroes of our quiet little university towns, they also have a whole community on and offline, with its codes, handbooks and specific discourse.

I ended up buying this incredible little book which is always in the ‘Cambridge’ section of Waterstones in Cambridge and which I’d never thought would be of any interest to me: The Night Climbers of Cambridge. It has its own Wikipedia page, and so it should. Written in the 1930s by Noel Symington, who is now dead, it is no less than a handbook on roof-climbing in Cambridge.

You will learn how to climb up a pipe (with photographic examples) – don’t bother with square pipes, they’re no good. You will learn how to reach the top of King’s College Chapel (once again, fabulous pics); if you fall, you still have three seconds of life, so enjoy them. You will learn how to do ‘the leap’ between Gonville & Caius College and the Senate House. It really is quite simple, but some chaps get cold feet when they could easily jump such a distance if there wasn’t an abyss underneath!

The best thing about this delightful book is the jolly P.G. Wodehousey tone of it all, which takes you back in time almost a century ago in a Cambridge where all Porters still wore bowler hats, where the girls were confined to just a few colleges and where roof-climbing was a necessity in the middle of the night if you’d missed the time when the college closed down.

Anyway, not sure how much of this exquisite read is going to end up in Sesame Seade, but here are a few passages just to give you an idea of it:

‘On the other hand, consider those pipes in the New Court of St John’s, over the river. We know of no-one who has climbed any of the pipes on the outer north wall of the same court. They are the most forbidding pipes in Cambridge.’

‘On the north side a buttress leaves a recess into which a man’s body fits nicely. The chimney is too broad for comfort, and a very short man might find it impossible to reach the opposite wall, with his feet flapping disconsolately in space like an elephant’s uvula.’

‘Much more could be written about Pembroke if we had the information. Its stone is good, its climbs legion, and we can thoroughly recommend any night climber to pay a few visits to it. Its hospitality is lavish and sincere, and it breeds those strong, silent Englishmen who suck pipes in the Malayan jungle but do not pass exams.’

‘And so, with a good night’s work behind us, we go home to college or lodgings, telling ourselves that perhaps after all we will not attend that nine o’clock lecture to-morrow morning.’

That last one, of course, could have been written yesterday.

Clem x