Author Archives: Jessica Yood

About Jessica Yood

I am an Associate Professor of English at Lehman College, The City University of New York (CUNY). Composition and Rhetoric is my primary field and research into the history and emerging role of writing in our contemporary culture continues to broaden my definition of this discipline. Work for my book project takes me into the history of literary criticism in America, complexity theories, the culture wars and the intellectual crises of the 1990s, and the enduring complexity of first-year writing and writers.

Writer’s Block and this Unbelievable Coffee Shop

 The problem of writing: in order to designate something exactly, an exact expressions are utterly unavoidable.  No at all because it is a necessary step, or because one can only advance by approximation; on the contrary, it is the exact … Continue reading

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Like Being at an Academic Conference, This Post is All Over the Place

I am trying to figure out the meaning behind what could be the most significant ritual of academic life: the conference.  I’m mostly referring to the big national conferences,  like the MLA or the CCCC but regional conventions work for this cultural-rhetorical … Continue reading

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Beginning Again and the End of Teaching

What is teaching?  Is it conversation, community, correctness, conversion? Does it begin and end with the classroom, with students, with knowledge? In my parochial vision, I think of teaching in terms of the Humanities, a project that, in one scholar’s … Continue reading

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May

Psalms for David   He exists across an ocean of memory.  It is deep, almost frozen, and swimming with monsters.  Beowulf, on a dare, once swam across an icy sea in his suit of mail.  There were sea beasts–“fiend-corpses“–that tried … Continue reading

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Tactics, Topics, Threes

Five pages by 3pm.  Six hours on Tuesday.  Half a section before lunch.  These are proclamations towards progress, strategies to start and finish, ways to get it, writing, done. I remember when I first used these heuristics. In graduate school, … Continue reading

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Ideas, Innovation and Some Eczema

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Title Track

The title is provisional for this blog, for everything, really.  It comes from my “title” as a professional—“Associate Professor.”  Here is the gist of the Wikipedia entry for Associate Professor: “mid-level, usually tenured, professor.”  And here are the highlights from … Continue reading

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