This is a great book to read on your own if you’re a literary studies person experiencing some existential angst, but it’s a really great book to read and discuss with a bunch of your colleagues in the humanities. I asked our Center for Faculty Excellence if we could have a reading group for it and they cheerfully bought us a bunch of copies and provided coffee and snacks. Maybe yours would too?
It feels more than a little arrogant to say this, but I can’t help but see this book as a natural companion piece to Reading Together — it is for writing what mine is for reading. It’s all about how our writing is world-forming, cultivating and participating in relationships to other people (and institutions), shaping the communities that we want to be a part of. There is also some more concrete advice about writing, and while it was great fun to discuss and debate those parts with my colleagues, what I really loved, and what really spoke to me, was the stuff about how writing feels. It inspired me to ask everyone in the group: what kind of writing are you doing? What kind of writing do you wish you could do? And we talked about our writing practices and routines, something that I really wish we all did more of, because it’s so helpful! (there was a great moment where someone from Econ said, ‘this stuff about where and how you write is so strange to me. Writing is a thing I have to do; it’s my job. I just…do it. I can’t be picky about my space or mug or whatever, it just has to get done’ and all the English Dept people were agog and a little embarrassed).
I think that what’s so useful about this book is the very candid and non-judgmental way that it invites you to grapple with what you really want — prestige, public acclaim, to contribute to producing knowledge, to make something beautiful, to feel like you’re right? And to understand how much our material conditions — the crisis of the humanities, the trauma of the job market, etc — shapes our practices and desires. Being honest with yourself about this stuff isn’t easy, but it’s tremendously clarifying, and it also really helps you actually do your writing. Reasons & Feelings is a tremendously clarifying and galvanizing read — exactly what so many of us need right now.
Kasia Reads 