Talk:S. T. Joshi
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[edit] HorrorWikiProject
I added a link to the Horror WikiProject since Joshi is connected to H.P. Lovecraft and thus to horror. -Elizabennet 17:46, 10 August 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Question on Joshi
I recently paid a visit to Joshi's official website, and made the startling observation that it was last updated sometime in 2004. I was wondering wether anybody could explain the absence of any futher updates on his website, and what Joshi is actually doing. I would be deeply greatful if anybody could direct me to any other websites with an up-to-date news section on Joshi. Eam91 14:17 (GMT) 16th of April 07.
- You could always ask the man himself. His email address is somewhere on the website, I believe. PhilipC 22:39, 16 April 2007 (UTC)
[edit] Some thoughts... please feel free to voice opinions.
I don't want to just flame this guy or change the page just yet, but I would like to raise a voice of concern about Joshi being called a "scholar” which is dubious at best. I know it’s just semantics but here’s my logic.
1) Joshi does not have a PhD and is not a professor.
Not that this necessarily precludes him from the world we call “scholarship” but the entry for “scholar” (which redirects to Academia) says without hesitation:
“An academic is a person who works as a researcher (and usually teacher) at a university or similar institution in post-secondary (or tertiary) education. He or she is nearly always an advanced degree holder who does research. In the United States, the term academic is approximately synonymous with that of the job title professor.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scholar)
Whereas Joshi in his autobiography does not meet the above requirements.
"I had graduated from Brown University in 1980 (in the department of classics) and had gained a master's degree from Brown in 1982. I was accepted for a Ph.D. program at Princeton University, where I received the Paul Elmer More fellowship in classical philosophy, but left after two years there; I had come to believe that the academic arena was not where I belonged." (http://www.necropress.com/stjoshi/biography.html) According to the definition above of academic this would also preclude him as a “scholar.”
3) The nature of his writing.
This one is a little bit sticky as I am not worried about this enough to cite my sources. If anyone has actually sat down and read any of Joshi’s writing you will rapidly notice that most of it is deeply concerned with establishing a hierarchy of “good” and “bad.” He routinely judges stories or authors as “inferior” and spends great amounts of energy informing his reader which text is “best.” Last time I presented at an academic conference these are all strictly verboten and get you, at best, utterly shunned as a hack. Now I don’t want to try and undermine Joshi’s work—what he has done for Lovecraft, the genre, and it’s criticism is highly commendable—but I think enough dissertations have been written about Lovecraft that we need to, at the very least, reevaluate this new god of the Weird Tale. What does this mean? Well let’s look at is this way.
Is Joshi’s work still important and relevant. Certainly. Is Joshi a tremendous fan of the genre? Of course. Is Joshi a remarkably well informed and articulate historian? Absolutely. Does Joshi spend a lot of time “reviewing” texts and authors like it was for a book club? You bet. So is he a “scholar” in the way that modern English uses the word? Not really. Should we call any fan or book reviewer a "scholar" if they know their history and philosophy? I don't think so.
As much as we may like them, articulate fans and biographers are not scholars and play by different sets of rules than those within the academic community. Precision demands that the word "scholar" be removed from before Joshi's name in this article as his qualifications and style of writing do not fit the denotation or connotation of the word.
- See H. P. Lovecraft for a response.--Prosfilaes 17:55, 19 July 2007 (UTC)
I think this is a perfectly fair diagnosis - the gist of your argument appears to be that Joshi is a (very) qualified enthusiastic amature; an agreeable assessment but we must bear in mind that the field of the weird is very narrow, and recieves scant attention from the larger academic community, and Joshi handles it commendably - his diligent and perceptive work on Lovecraft is as good as any so-called 'proffesional scholar', as it were, could achieve - one need only read his biography of Lovecraft for comfirmation of this. I think we owe it to Joshi to label him 'scholar', his knowlege of his genre is surely formidable enough to merit him that title. -Eam91 22:25 GMT, 6 Nov. 07. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Eam91 (talk • contribs) 22:24, 6 November 2007 (UTC)
-
- This question is all based on a pretty dubious chain of thought anyway - that "academic" is some sort of precise concept, and that the even more general "scholar" is tied to it. A scholar (see any dictionary) is merely one who studies (with some rigour) a topic or topics. An academic may well be correctly enough described by the first part of the above definition, but there is no justification for linking "academic" - still less "scholar" - with the top academic rank of "Professor" - which is rightly scarce.
- None of this takes away, mind you, from the fact that Joshi's own words, as quoted, might suggest that he is not interested in the title of scholar. Skir77 18:26, 7 November 2007 (UTC)
