Where are we meeting for class today?
If I know where, I can bring along a Mexican extravaganza.....
s
Jennifer,
I have learned SO much from reading your paper, "The Poet and the University--Strange Bedfellows?" What I wanted to share with you here, though, is not evidence of my learning per se but signs that indicate how carefully I was reading your draft.
Despite what your outline tells me, I see another macro-strcuture at work in this draft. As I was reading your very thorough inquiry into the matter of the "institutionalizing" art, I got to thinking about the ways you were "defininng" for me the concept of "institution."
As a result, I seized immediately on the term "insitution" and found myself wanting you to tweak the overall struture of this draft to conform to 3 big sections. From what I read, you "atomize" the term institution by breaking down the concept into 1) teachers (as institutional agents), 2) course/curriculum (instituional venues that create workshopping spaces for art-in-progress), and 3) scholarship (institutional discourse written by instituional agents/researchers, including J's interviews).
I found this struture burbling to the surface only after having read the entire draft. And, so, when I returned to the bottom of p. 3, I was thinking there's an alternate (if not duller!) statement about how you approach this topic: that statement might anticpate the ways you have considerd how art can be instituionalized.
That doesn't mean your article doesn't do what you say at the bottom of p. 3: it does offer a "personal and critical exploration of the value of teaching and learning creative writing within the Academy." But I think the paper does that within the larger framework of "institutionalizing art."
From this point of view, it seems that you look into a range of
teacher models (Kurt, the nameless instructor, and you)
curricular models (there are 4 workshop spaces you describe: Kurt's, the "awry" workshop, the grad workshop you took "seveal years ago" on p. 9, and the current workshoop you break into at the top of p. 11)
scholarship (which might be reorganized by beginning with the arcing history with the Elephants, p. 16-21; then to the more recent history centered around the convo that Gioia started, p.14-16; and finally the ethnograpic research (interviews) that you've created.
There's no real "revising" implied in my suggestions. The text you've crafted is lucid and, as I say, informative. But moving a few sections around (and changing a bit the section headings) and rewording your para at the bottom of p. 3 to reflect better how the paper is strcutured would really tighten up this long, in-depth, and important study. Thanks for letting me read it!