rejecta-rama
Music: The Mission: Children (1988)
Like most Commies, I'm current prepping for NCA this week in San Antonio. I echo Debbalicious' appreciation for her panelests! Thanks to my panel people getting their papers to me on time, I'm finished composing two responses . . . and a whole three days ahead of time. Woo-hoo.
I've also just finished my "script" for what will prove to be a fun time, "Manuscript Rejection Letters: A Reader's Theatre." It's a panel on Saturday at three, I think. I thought I'd share my script here, which I will preform in character for each different review. These are all real selections from manuscript reviews I have received in the past four years. And for the record, three of the four essays "rejected" below were eventually published somewhere (the other one is still in review). Enjoy!
A FAVORITE ONE-SENTENCE REVIEW:
I dislike the piece considerably with its tasteless approach to complementing a pseudo-analysis of [Nine-eleven] . . . .
AND NOW, A MEDLEY OF SOME OF MY REVIEWER'S GREATEST HITS:
I do not usually resort to quotations from movies when I write manuscript reviews, but my reaction to this manuscript was akin to Tom Hanks when he examined a toy: "I don't get it."
To be clear from the start, I am not a fan of either psychoanalytic theory as it is applied to, or performed via, rhetorical theory, nor am I convinced that the literature of deconstruction offers us anything particularly valuable that could not be found elsewhere. . . . this positions me at the outset as a skeptical reader.
This essay speaks with an unearned authority. . . . the essay, or rather the author, . . . throws into the trash bin---without what could be called a reasonable trace of discrimination---thinkers of diverse traditions . . . talents . . . and intellectual purposes. . . . To extend while also condensing, the author . . . seems as derivative as it is condescending with respect to secondary literatures . . . . At the end of the journey, this reader remains both unconvinced and annoyed at the price of admission relative to the show, and what a show it turns out to be! To conclude, then, the promise of a "demonstration" of critical precepts extracted from [Walter] Benjamin not only falls flat. It collapses into trivializing impressions of [Nine-eleven] that require as little thought as they reflect insight. At best, it's a poor footnote to an already cluttered reference sheet.
I fail to discern any contribution at all to the literature on [Huey P. Long]. Nor does the essay contribute to the much larger theoretical discussions of the rhetoric of demagoguery and/or charisma. Indeed, the essay's rendering of those two concepts is fundamentally a-rhetorical, even anti-rhetorical, locating their essence in "psychical structures" (whatever that means) . . . . [My essay on the subject] is completely overlooked, and other important works on . . . southern demagoguery . . . are also ignored or simply dismissed.
I think it is safe to say that you destroyed your initial credibility with at least two of these readers by the sloppy way you constructed the manuscript. Errors of spelling, grammar, sentence construction, and usage—not to mention tone—do count in scholarly writing. I urge you to proofread your essays before submitting them.
This is a good piece of scholarship on an interesting incident in cultural history. I find the essay well researched and skillfully written. However, I don't think the piece . . . has much chance of being widely read or cited; people are not going to find it all that interesting except as a piece of antiquarianism.
You stupid fuck! How can you submit to us an article with this incredibly stupid footnote? You obviously have not learned anything. . . . Keep playing around with Walter Benjamin and you will have a brilliant career among assholes such as yourself.
In your verbose reply you forgot to include an apology and an explanation. Do you know anything about . . . what we have published on the subject? Your arrogance is only matched by your ignorance. Before writing anything this stupid it would pay to read some of the relevant text. Your two contributions [to this journal in the past] were pretty mediocre and we had to edit out the nonsense. You should be grateful we took all that time to straighten out your incoherence and politically correct obsession with trying to reach the proper "Left" conclusions that do not follow. Enough with incompetent graduate students. Read more before making a fool of yourself.
You are a stupid fool to submit anything with so many errors and so many dubious assertions . . . Your nonverbals are just plain dumb.
Finally, just a word about the "explanatory power" of a "psychoanalytic theory of demagoguery" . . . . The analysis rests on the dubious, anti-historical assumption that we can't really understand [Huey P.] Long's "actual speech-craft" because it has been "filtered through contemporary symbolic structures." The analysis also rests on he controversial assumption of "posthumanist" theory—that we are obliged (because Biesecker said so back in 1992?) to "displace the solitary individual or agent" . . . . Those are hardly assumptions widely shared by rhetorical critics . . . . [and after them] the discussion begins to read like a parody of psychoanalytic jargon. I apologize if my judgments sound harsh. Perhaps I'm responding in kind to the whole tone of this essay, which I found remarkably self-indulgent and at times even arrogant and offensive. I personally rebel against authors who pontificate about "our charge" as rhetorical critics . . . as if, in their superior wisdom, they finally have discovered the "right" way to do rhetorical criticism. And I especially resist suggestions that we must all change our rhetorical thinking to embrace this sort of wacky, psychoanalytical approach.