Hannah Hecht's Blog

Sooo, I already wrote a lot of stuff about last week’s trip to UNL in my Bread Givers journal, but I did that journal on Tuesday before the assignment changed, so I’ll expand upon it some more. I wrote a lot earlier about listening to Kristen speak at the University of Nebraska Press, and, as a student looking to go into publishing, I found our conversation to be useful and informative. Sooo, let’s answer some questions.

• Did you have any “a-ha!” moments during these conversations? Did you find yourself making connections to academic or professional debates and issues we’ve touched on in class this semester?

One of the things that really surprised me from the conversations is the amount of sheer luck that goes into literary recovery. A person just happens to have an anthology in their home growing up, and just happens to find the only printed work of a little-known author and fall in love with it, which sparks the only true act of recovery for that author. When Dr. Page talked about his research on Miles Breuer, it reminded me of the foreword of Bread Givers, where the author talked about falling in love with Anzia Yezierska and wanting to find out more about her. Then, I was pretty amazed that Dr. Page was able to find that book with Breuer’s handwriting in the cover. If he had never found that, his work may have ended up fizzling out.

On a different subject, I thought it was interesting that Dr. Jewell said that it wasn’t his business to care whether Cather’s work ends up buried again or whether it ever ends up being part of the core canon. That idea went against a lot of the readings about the canon that we read earlier this semester. The readings seemed to imply that we ought to inject women’s and minority writings from earlier time periods into the canon to better exemplify the human experience of the time period. Dr. Jewell thought that you can’t control what people read, but you can make sure that certain works of inspiring literature and secondary texts are available to the public (through the Cather archives) and then see if the readership will come to it.

• What have you observed about the relationships between the various areas of academic research, writing, and publishing we learned about? How does one area inform the other? What economic, cultural, theoretical, or other factors seem to be shaping the present and future academic research, scholarship, and publishing?

From our experience last week, it seems as if the different areas of academic work, research, writing, and publishing, seem to have a lot of pull on each other. If you’re not going to write down and publish your research findings, then they are essentially irrelevant beyond adding to your personal knowledge. But, it’s hardly worth writing research (aside from in the pursuit of a degree) unless you can find a publisher for it. And then, once your stuff has been written, the publisher needs to contact other scholars to make sure that the research is viable. This is just a hypothesis, but I bet that it is a lot easier for scholars at UNL to find a publisher for their stuff since the press is connected to the university. However, I was astounded with the number of books the press puts out each year and the diversity of works that they publish. From the things that we heard, it sounds like new technology is making it possible for the press to put out a lot more books than they previously could, just because of things like word processing, email, and easy (or easier) online research.

• What questions are you left with? (Or, put another way, is there a question that has come to you since our trip that you now wish you had asked one of our speakers?)

As of right now, not really. Kristen answered most of the questions that I had about her job at the press.

• What are you most hopeful about when it comes to the future of academic publishing and/or digital humanities? What do you feel less optimistic about?

People often like to decry that publishing is dead, or at least, that seems to be the reaction that I get every time that I say that I’d like to work in editing, a reaction that promptly follows “Oh, you’re an English major, so you want to teach, right?” However, Kristen seemed to think that publishing, at least academic publishing, isn’t going anywhere. If anything, it seems as if new technology had helped them to increase their business and streamline it to make it more effective. As long as people are writing, they are going to have a need for someone to edit and fact-check their work, along with someone to work on advertising and marketing it, and (at least for the time being) someone to print and distribute it. I was really interested to hear that they only sell about 10 (or maybe it was 18) percent of their stuff in digital form. I would have expected the numbers to be a lot higher.  The thing that I’m least optimistic about is probably the ability of the lesser-known authors of the past to jump into the canon of today. Dr. Page even said that he only made like $250 on his book, which makes me wonder whether there really is a market for literary recovery. However, Dr. Jewell mentioned that Hollywood can be a big help with that. If a big name director decides to make a movie out of some lesser known piece of literature, that author’s work will skyrocket into the public eye. So, I guess that’s pretty cool.