tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36212542.post2659396812286575722..comments2024-03-09T03:20:20.004-05:00Comments on Tenured Radical: Giving Thanks: An Essay On AcknowledgmentsTenured Radicalhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05703980598547163290noreply@blogger.comBlogger3125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36212542.post-46310738365587101982006-11-25T16:32:00.000-05:002006-11-25T16:32:00.000-05:00Two great responses: obviously I am more fascinat...Two great responses: obviously I am more fascinated than repelled by acknowledgements too, and I always read them first for their prurient value, and of course, to put off thinking for as long as possible. And seriously -- when I am teaching sudents to actually *read,* as opposed to just read, I point them to acknowledgements to get a sense of the web of intellectual connections between books and authors. <br /><br />Flavia, I am with you on the wedding announcements. I am also a big fan of obituaries. I am particularly interested in the shift in the last five to ten years of both gay/lesbuan people doing announcements and older couples who are often on a second or third marriage. Some of these couples have taken to a narrative form -- since no one cares who their parents are or where they went to college -- and do a mini-Modern Love column on how they met, why they decided to get married instead of llive in sin, yada, yada. And of course I love to pry -- I am a historian. If I liked to pry any more, I'd be a sociologist.<br /><br />And Tony -- thanks for your good additions, and I can't tell you how much it pleases me that this little essay was read by a man who wrote a whole book on The Footnote. Let's hear it for the study of the book! I had forgotten the editors in all this. I think the admittedly short period where wives were typing manuscripts are particularly precious, though: makes me think the personal computer was secretly invented by a woman.Tenured Radicalhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05703980598547163290noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36212542.post-21386359212283791212006-11-25T09:12:00.000-05:002006-11-25T09:12:00.000-05:00Thanks for this excellent post. It seems to me tha...Thanks for this excellent post. It seems to me that more than one factor has been at work in the explosion of acknowledgements. The rise of research fellowships and centers--beginning, in the humanities, with the Guggenheim Fellowships and the Institute for Advanced Study--and of competitive fellowships for graduate work--starting, perhaps, with the Woodrow Wilson program after World War II, and the Fulbright-Hays grants--gave scholars opportunities that earlier generations lacked, or had to pay for out of their own resources. The only currency in which these could be paid back was thanks. To the best of my recollection, by the late 1960s, when I was an undergraduate, most works of history published by university presses or serious trade houses came with authorial thanks to funding agencies. <br /><br />In addition, a number of publishers in the expansive post-war years employed great editors and copy-editors, who materially improved many of the books entrusted to them--and were also being thanked in public by the 1960s (for example, Miriam Brokaw of the Princeton University Press, and in a later generation Aida Donald). In their case too, authors had nothing but thanks to offer for services that American presses had rarely performed in the past. New occasions, in other words, brought new duties.<br /><br />Even then, in the decorous fifties, some scholars were beginning to thank relatives, pets, and Great Intellectual Influences as well as funders, editors, and teachers. I don't know when this started in history. But by the time Frederiock Crews published his parody of 50s and 60s lit crit, The Pooh Perplex, he could make fun of this sort of preface and expect a large audience to understand his humor.<br /><br />I'm sure Tenured Radical is right: the show-it-all culture we live in now has elicited a tidal wave of cringing-making thanks, acknowledgements that tell us much more than we need or want to know. Scholarly books would be improved by a policy of some restraint in this realm. <br /><br />But I think Flavia has a strong point too. Acknowledgements can teach us things that other parts of the book don't. Remember what happened to Lucky Jim when he saved time by skipping the acknowledgments of a book on the enclosure movement . . .<br /><br />Tony Graftonanthony graftonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05588520143876853373noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36212542.post-43529791356847970652006-11-23T12:52:00.000-05:002006-11-23T12:52:00.000-05:00I've been thinking about this post for the past da...I've been thinking about this post for the past day or two, and I'm of two minds about it. On the one hand, I think you're entirely right about the excessiveness of so many acknowledgements sections (and your patient explanations as to WHY one should not thank one's dog, masseuse, pre-verbal child, etc. are very funny).<br /><br />But part of what I love about acknowledgements, as a genre, is precisely how excessive and self-promoting they are. I <i>always</i> read them--even in my part-time jobs in academic publishing, when I was dealing with books in, say, the behavioral sciences (in other words, books where I was unlikely to know any of the people being thanked), I turned to the acknowledgements first and read them straight through. It's like reading the wedding announcements, or those horrible Christmas newsletters that many people send out--often awful, but still, somehow, compelling.<br /><br />My interest in acknowledgements (and wedding annoucements, etc.) is probably partly just a gossipy interest in other people's private lives--but it's also, I think, that I'm interested in how people <i>construct</i> those lives within a public and relatively formal genre like the acknowledgements section. <br /><br />I think you're absolutely correct in seeing a reality-show element in all of this--I do believe that there's a confessional urge to display oneself and one's accomplishments (scholarly, familial, recreational). . . although whether that's to give the scholarship that follows some kind of authenticity, or the writer a human face, or just to brag isn't always clear.<br /><br />Because really, when it comes down to it, what I love most is how un-self-aware most acknowledgers are, and how badly and smugly they wind up presenting themselves. (There's a message there, surely.)Flaviahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17832765671541392835noreply@blogger.com