Afterwords to Braddock Award Essays

As rigorous and enlightening as are the two Braddock Award Essays that we have read, I found myself paying particular critical attention to the Afterwords. As essentially self-reflective, they represent of course a real opportunity for each writer to boost their ethos. I am intrigued by these parts of scholarly works that often get overlooked or that most readers view as simply formulaic: dedications, prefaces, acknowledgements. Usually they are indeed formulaic and, in the case of acknowledgements, can be headbangingly boring. But why is this? It's ironic that those parts of the book that are supposed to be a kind of cybernetic device merging the ink of the text with the flesh and bones of real people are often the part that readers--admittedly, usually justifiably--skip over; I guess it just shows how academics can take the life out of anything and turn it into routine! Of course Cushman's essay itself contains lots of snippets from her life, but her Afterword I found pretty routine and insincere. I enjoyed Connors' Afterword, though. I really liked the real dialogue that Connors recalls surrounding both his writing of the essay and his reception of the award: "Okay, sure, I'll give it a shot." "Is this a joke?" It was almost like a Raymond Carver story. I wish he would have told us about the celebration at the restaurant after he got the award and got drunk on whiskey sours and made a pass at his colleague's wife. It's strange. I have an incredibly prurient interest in the private lives of famous and semi-famous critics and scholars, much more so than in authors or artists, precisely because we hear so little about them. There are hundreds of biographies of Ernest Hemingway, but what about a biography of James McCrimmon or J. M. Steadman! You say, because their lives are boring. I say, maybe they're not boring at all, just that the interesting parts are more subtle, more internal.