発熱

発熱・・・とはいえ、まだまだ動けるので厳重にマスク等をした上で研究室に。
研究日でよかった。今日人前で話せといわれたらちょっとつらい。
午後に一件面談があるけれど、あとは明日の3コマの仕度を。
今週末は早稲田英文学会もあるし、懇親会も最後までいなくちゃいけないから(幹事だし！）ちょっと体調をセーブせねば。明日は夜、組合の会議も入っている。

そういうわけで夏休みの終わりに読み始めて、2ヶ月近く放っておいたSarah Watersを再び手に取る。

Tipping The Velvet (Virago Modern Classics)

ずいぶん昔に読んだアンジェラ・カーターのThe Passion of New Eve (Virago Modern Classics)を思い出す。いや、ウォーターズは歴史小説だからジャンルとしてはかなり違うんだけれど、カーターの持つ性別移行だの、性別のみならず階級その他も含めた力関係だの、汚いものを全くあせらずに淡々と（というか、結構興味を持って？？？）書いている感じが、なんとなく。
Orlandoとあわせて読んでも面白いのかも。

それからTLS。Stefan Colliniが最近の大学補助金に関するイギリス政府の決定について。

As the phrases quoted above make clear, the guidelines explicitly exclude the kinds of impact generally considered of most immediate relevance to work in the humanities – namely, influence on the work of other scholars and influence on the content of teaching. (Those are said to be covered by the assessment of the publications themselves.) For the purposes of this part of the exercise, “impact” means “on research users outside universities”. General readers do not appear to count as such “research users”. So, 25 per cent of the assessment of the “excellence” of research in the humanities in British universities will depend on the evidence provided of “impact” understood in a rather particular way. What will this mean in practice?

Let us take a hypothetical case. Let us assume that I have a colleague at another university (not all colleagues are in one’s own department, despite the league-table competitiveness of these assessment exercises) who is a leading expert on Victorian poetry, and that over a number of years she works on a critical study of what we might call a three-star Victorian poet (“highly innovative but not quite groundbreaking”). The book is hailed by several expert reviewers as the best on the topic: it draws on deep familiarity not just with Victorian poetry, but with other kinds of poetry; it integrates a wealth of historical and biographical learning in ways that illuminate the verse; it is exact and scrupulous in adjudicating various textual complexities; and it clarifies, modifies, and animates the understanding of this poet’s work on the part of other critics and, through their writing and teaching, of future generations of students, as well as of interested general readers. It also, it is worth saying, exemplifies the general values of careful scholarship and reminds its readers of the qualities of responsiveness, judgement, and literary tact called upon by the best criticism. It is a model piece of “excellent” research in the humanities. And its “impact” is zero.

Home Page – The TLS

対岸の火事ではないよなあ。