Suzanne Bost, "Quiet Methodologies: Humility in the Humanities" (U Minnesota Press)

Summary

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Podcast Summary:

New Books Network: Suzanne Bost, "Quiet Methodologies: Humility in the Humanities" (U Minnesota Press) Host: Alex Beeston
Guest: Professor Suzanne Bost
Date: March 15, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode features an in-depth conversation with Professor Suzanne Bost, a literary scholar from Loyola University Chicago, about her book Quiet Methodologies: Humility in the Humanities (University of Minnesota Press). Unlike traditional scholarly works, Bost's book challenges business-as-usual approaches in the humanities, urging a turn toward alternative, “quiet” methodologies centered on humility, care, multiplicity, and an embrace of uncertainty. The discussion covers the book’s origins, critiques of scholarly argumentation, the practice of collage, archival research, the pressures of academic labor, and the role of love and care in scholarly and pedagogical practices.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Origins and Aims of Quiet Methodologies

[03:01–07:06]

• Multiple Origin Stories: Bost’s roles in both graduate English and feminist methodologies led her to question entrenched academic practices. She observed how knowledge is shaped by inherited ideas from colonialism and enlightenment humanism, resulting in repetitive and lifeless academic discourse.
• Status Quo Stories: Citing a critique by Ana Louise Keating, Bost describes academic scholarship as “riffing off other books I’ve read” and “everybody is saying the same words, but just in slightly different orders.” – [03:30]
• Seeking Alternatives: She becomes interested in nontraditional educational models, e.g., popular universities and local, non-institutional initiatives like the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, which foster non-hierarchical, cross-disciplinary learning.
• Provocative Question: “How would our minds and cultures fall apart if we didn’t have the same amount of conventional disciplines like history, writing and math? Do we need to have those things? Particularly now that we have AI doing everything for us?” – Bost [05:35]

2. What’s Wrong with Argument?

[07:06–11:54]

• Oppositional Argument: Bost critiques the ingrained academic impulse toward combative, binary argumentation: “What we’re trained to do is say, ‘I’m right, you’re wrong.’ And that seems like such a dying binary.” – Bost [08:35]
• Limits of Critical Discourse: She questions the real-world relevance of scholarly arguments amidst wider crises: “Why am I making arguments about someone else’s words? Why does this really matter when the world is falling down around us?” – Bost [08:35]
• Multiplicity over Mastery: Bost advocates for an embrace of simultaneous truths and diverse methods, inspired by collage—“It’s not about determining what’s right or what’s better. It’s about multiplicity and simultaneity.” – Bost [11:04]

3. The Model and Ethos of Collage

[11:54–13:53]

• Collage as Methodology: Bost’s attraction to collage stems from a desire to move beyond linear narratives. “I really wanted to be a visual artist. ... So I started just gluing things together and really got interested in noticing ironies.” – Bost [12:29]
• Aesthetic and Political Dimensions: She describes collage as a practice of rearrangement and multiple perspectives, channeling the chaos and beauty of complex realities (e.g., inspired by the Nick Cave exhibition).
• Collage in Writing: The book’s conclusion is deliberately inconclusive, rendered as a literary collage to reflect openness and the creative interplay of ideas.

4. Quotation and Scholarly Listening

[13:53–24:57]

• Relational Ethics: Bost revisits earlier work to apologize for forcing Ana Castillo’s fiction into a political paradigm—“I really had to give Ana Castillo a hug because I felt horrible that I had twisted ... her work of fiction into a particular political paradigm.” – Bost [16:33]
• Direct Quotation vs. Paraphrase: She insists on honoring the specificity and beauty of others’ words in her scholarship—“I want the author’s words to be in there so that people can ... see it in a different way as well.” – Bost [21:45]
• Method of Listening: Collaging quotes and conversation becomes itself a method of scholarly and ethical engagement, resisting the drive to extract and summarize ideas in favor of preserving their richness.

5. Vulnerability, Uncertainty, and the Archive

[26:27–41:46]

• Rejecting Certitude: Bost describes embracing vulnerability as both a personal and scholarly disposition—“I didn’t have to cultivate vulnerability, that I felt like I was always out of place.” – Bost [29:42]
• Archival Practice: She details her overwhelming but enriching experiences in the Gloria Anzaldúa archive, encountering deeply personal and non-linear materials that resist standard academic treatment. “It’s not possible to actually look at everything ... my sense of the archive is that it is not a discrete or bounded thing.” – Bost [34:34]
• Ethics of Editing: Working on Anzaldúa’s posthumous novel, Bost felt “like I was an invasive species in this text,” underscoring the impossibility and undesirability of mastery over such archives—“I still feel a little guilty somehow about having been involved in that project. ... You can’t claim mastery of this archive.” – Bost [39:24]

6. Institutional Pressures and Academic Labor

[45:45–52:36]

• Graduate Education Critique: Bost and Beeston reflect on institutional texts normalizing extreme overwork—“Being a scholar ... is the only end from a love of literature at an advanced level”—and the stifling effects of prioritizing stamina over creativity. – Bost [47:41]
• Graduate Student Voices: Bost’s last chapter foregrounds actual student experiences with precarity and frustration; “It was not optimistic or happy ... and a couple people were like, are you really going to send it out just like this? … That’s the point.” – Bost [49:09–49:37]
• Constraints of Administration: As department chair, Bost struggles to enact transformative leadership amid bureaucratic and financial structures—“Just the coldness of the structures ... We were just given so many spreadsheets, and it’s just not the way I think.” – Bost [50:50]

7. Love and Care as Scholarly and Pedagogical Ethics

[53:09–56:05]

• Ambivalent Love: Bost is drawn to “love” as an ethos but treats it carefully, aware of the risks of possessive or projectional love in teaching. She uses the metaphor of phosphorescent species (from Alexis Pauline Gumbs) as an inspiration for classroom encounters: “What would happen if my students lit up? ... I want to be there to be someone who can allow for light bulbs at least, if not some, you know, implicit care.” – Bost [55:26]
• Realistic Hope: The episode concludes on a note of “not false hope, but a sense of what’s possible even within ... cold [institutional] structures.” – Beeston [56:05]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On academic repetition & inertia:
  “Sometimes it feels like everybody is saying the same words, but just in slightly different orders. We are rewarded for showing how well we have learned the lessons of our predecessors.” — Bost [03:30]

• On critical argumentation:
  “And that seems like such a dying binary that has to be one or the other.” — Bost [08:35]
  “Why am I making arguments about someone else’s words? Why does this really matter when the world is falling down around us?” — Bost [08:35]

• On collage as method and metaphor:
  “I started just gluing things together and really got interested in noticing ironies.” — Bost [12:29]
  “There doesn’t need to be a linear narrative ... just notice a variety of things and a variety of different kinds of methods.” — Bost [11:04]

• On scholarly humility and revision:
  “Why am I this middle aged white lady critiquing identity politics? Like, why is that useful?” — Bost [16:33]
  “I guess feel like trying to infuse some care into my work ... particularly now, like, I don’t have to play by the rules at all.” — Bost [19:31]

• On the archive and authorship:
  “It’s not possible to actually look at everything. … my sense of the archive is that it is not a discrete or bounded thing.” — Bost [34:34]
  “You can’t claim mastery of this archive. But ... I had the care and the time with the archive that helped me feel more like I was a legitimate person involved in that editing process.” — Bost [39:24]

• On academic labor and creativity:
  “It rewards stamina more than creativity.” — Beeston referencing Bost’s book [45:59]
  “What if they never get to the stage where they’re actually doing something that they really love?” — Bost [48:34]

• On love and light in academia:
  “There’s a section in GUMS where she talks about how there’s certain species that light up in phosphorescence. And I was like, what would happen if my students lit up?” — Bost [55:26]

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• Book Origins & Status Quo Critique: [03:01–07:06]
• What's Wrong with Argument?: [07:06–11:54]
• Collage as Practice & Model: [11:54–13:53]
• Quotation & Listening in Scholarship: [13:53–24:57]
• Vulnerability & Academic Archives: [26:27–41:46]
• Institutional Labor & Graduate Study Critique: [45:45–52:36]
• The Ethic of Love & Care: [53:09–56:05]

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Structure & Flow

The episode follows a natural, conversational flow, moving from the origins of Bost’s interest in alternative methodologies, through key conceptual arguments and practical examples (collage, archival editing), to concrete institutional issues (graduate education, administrative labor), and ending with reflections on love and care in scholarly and pedagogical practices. Both host and guest foreground multiplicity, vulnerability, and humility rather than mastery or linear argumentation.

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Conclusion

Quiet Methodologies stands as both a challenge and a practical pathway to different forms of scholarship—forms guided by humility, creativity, and deep respect for the multiplicity of voices and experiences within and beyond the humanities. This episode threads the personal and the political, the theoretical and the practical, modeling an academic conversation that is itself an exemplar of the book's "quiet" ethos.

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Transcript

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[Alex Beeston]

welcome to New Books Network. I'm Alex Beeston, and today I'm joined by Professor Suzanne Bost, a literary scholar based at Loyola University Chicago. We're sitting down to discuss Suzanne's latest book, Quiet Humility in the Humanities, which was published by the University of Minnesota Press last year. Quiet Methodologies isn't a traditional work of literary scholarship. Instead, the book reaches towards alternative ways of thinking with and teaching literature. Grounded in speculation, conversation, and reciprocity. It asks scholars to reflect on their conventional ways of knowing and working, including as those ways of knowing and working receive from the legacies of colonialism. And it models a quiet kind of humanity's work, something more about asking questions than asserting answers, more about embracing uncertainty than claiming mastery. For all its quietness, then, Quiet Methodologies is quite a bold and challenging work, speaking to a moment of crisis within and beyond the academy. Its provocations and explorations will be of interest to scholars and students working across Humanities disciplines. So I'm really pleased to be able to discuss this book with you today. Suzanne, thank you so much for making the time to sit down with me.

[Professor Suzanne Bost]

Likewise.

[Alex Beeston]

So I wanted to begin by asking you a bit of the origin story for this book. I suppose. So how you came to write a book about methods in the humanities, and particularly methods that resist or reject scholarly business as usual. Was there one or more particular moment or experience that you can recall that really prompted you to think more critically about how colonialism shaped scholarly labor institutions in the West?

[Professor Suzanne Bost]

So there's a couple of origin stories for this. One is that I teach our intro to Graduate studies in English sometimes. I also teach our Feminist Methodologies class in Women's studies and gender studies. So I'm doing like radically different things in some ways, but also using the same kind of radical questioning from either of the kinds of methodologies courses that I've been asked to look at. And I really do think that the knowledge that we get comes from what we've been taught to think is correct. And at this moment we are still stuck in this vein of colonialism and enlightenment humanism and these, I want to say, lifeless ways of thinking about what we're doing that we seem to be like we're just redoing the same things over and over again. I have in my notes here that it seems that every scholarly book I read is riffing off other books I've read. Sometimes it feels like everybody is saying the same words, but just in slightly different orders. We are rewarded for showing how well we have learned the lessons of of our predecessors. One of my colleagues and collaborators, Ana Louise Keating, has this critique of what she calls status quo stories that we keep saying the same things over and over again, the same limits of epistemology, the same limits of reality. Status quo stories lead me to thinking about different ways of doing education. And when this is for I wrote this was in the last chapter of my book. But I was really struck by how similar education looks in the humanities across the board. And so I went down these rabbit holes of finding different modes of education. And one of them is the popular university social movement school, which is a not based in an institution and it's non hierarchical. And it's about acknowledging the different kinds of knowing that various people have across a spectrum. And there's also like other, like more local. Like there's a Brooklyn, what's it called, the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, where they have grad students teaching and they're like hanging out in a coffee shop and they get, it's a different sort of accreditation, but they are learning in again, sort of like cross disciplinary, cross age groups of folks who have different perspectives, which I think I would really be excited to get involved in something like that sometime once, you know, if it becomes financially feasible. What I'm trying to figure out is how would our minds and cultures fall apart if we didn't have the same amount of conventional disciplines like history, writing and math? Do we need to have those things? Particularly now that we have AI doing everything for us? And also I'm looking at new ways of writing, new ways of making and new pathways for social justice. And I don't think that's always gonna be found in a book.

[Alex Beeston]

Totally. Yeah. It's interesting what you said about the status quo sort of narratives or ways of thinking. It's like there's a way that our scholarly institutions train us into those and then we're complicit in reproducing them by performing them better and better. I guess you really are trying to rethink some of the basic building blocks of sort of humanities research and teaching. And I think that the sense we get from your answer there about important pedagogy and these alternative modes of pedagogy speaks to the heart of the book, doesn't it, in terms of that sort of beyond the kind of classic institutions, I suppose, and beyond the classic ways of working. I wanted to ask you now though, about your approach to argument, or rather what you see as wrong with argument, if I can put it very bluntly. So the book isn't really trying to do something like a conventional form of scholarly argumentation. I mean, I guess there's a meta argument that is actually, actually quite strong, I think, about the need to do kind of non oppositional or like non combative modes of writing and thinking. But. So I wanted to ask you to explain a bit about what you see as the role of critical argument, perhaps as it props up the status quo of the humanities and also what kind of scholarly community or relationships it kind of presupposes or creates. So, yeah, what's wrong with argument? Why not argument? I guess?

[Professor Suzanne Bost]

And I think this goes back just to again, the traditional ways of knowing. And what we're trained to do is say, I'm right, you're wrong. And that seems like such a dying binary that has to be one or the other. And I reached a point maybe about 10 years ago where I'm like, why am I making arguments about someone else's words? Why does this really matter when the world is falling down around us, what can we do that will be actual structural, actually transformative? And it's probably not going to happen at MLA conferences. It's probably not going to happen in most of the elite routes for publishing journal articles. It's going to have to come from somewhere else. And it just seems. Yeah, the whole idea of arguing about literature and a lot of it I think I'm getting back from my students too, because they're, you know, their world is crumbling around them, probably more even than mine, just because I'm sort of inured here in the ivory tower, but that we need to do something other than what we're doing and expecting people to reproduce the same kinds of knowledge.

[Alex Beeston]

So it's very much about, like, the conditions, like the wider conditions of crisis and precarity within and beyond the academy. Yeah, that reminds me very much of, and I think you cite one of the essays from a special dossier of PMLA from a few years ago that was edited by my friend Pardi Stabashi. And I think in that it's very much for her as well, she's thinking about what she calls the loose garments of argument. Right. So holding the arguments, she still actually pretty. Sees value and utility in argument, but then talks about the ways that in a sort of scholarly environment where we can't assume that there is a kind of secure body of academics who have kind of proper employment, proper conditions to be doing their work, that that whole, like, environment and kind of community doesn't exist in the same way. And so it actually doesn't make sense for us to do argument in the same way. And that we need to hold our claims more loosely. And I think that there is kind of, as you gesture to in the book as well, like you're kind of gathering together a whole range of different scholars who are thinking differently about things like argument or things about the stakes of the work that we're doing, drawing on these kinds of questions of the conditions of our labor too.

[Professor Suzanne Bost]

But it's not about determining what's right or what's better. It's about multiplicity and simultaneity of things going on. And this is kind of part of my interest in collage as well, is that there doesn't need to be a linear narrative about what we should be learning and teaching or writing, but just to notice such a. Just to notice a variety of things and a variety of different kinds of methods and different, different disciplines enables these linear narratives of. I have been drawing on this tradition since enlightened humanism. And I'm going to defend to the death whatever people think about William Shakespeare, which I know that is a different kind of sport for many people, but it's not something that I'm really interested in.

[Alex Beeston]

Yeah, you mentioned collage and it is a really important touchstone in your work. So maybe I could ask you about that, about how you came to collage as a particular model for the kind of work that you're trying to do. So I take it it's kind of for you a practice of bringing things together, but also sort of keeping them in motion, keeping them open ended. And in fact the final non conclusion of your book is this inconclusive concluding chapter that is itself a collage. So how did you come to collage as a model and a practice and what does it offer to you as a scholar and a thinker?

[Professor Suzanne Bost]

It's not really a lofty origin story. I really wanted to be a visual artist and I imagined myself as a painter, but like my hands kind of shake and I can't ever like translate into ideas whatever is happening with my hands, I don't know. So I started just gluing things together and really got interested in noticing ironies. Like actually I have some collages in here. I have one that's like a Smurfette put in a coffin, covered over in paint with a dead flower. And then I have a coil shauki like shattered into pieces and things like that. And I think that those are all sort of process possible. Like people come like, what is this? What is this a leg? Is this an arm? Like moving things around on my shelves and stuff like that. So I like, I guess, rearrangement, looking at things from different angles, but also seeing multiple angles at the same time. And this is one of the things I got from the Nick Cave exhibition that I talk about is there's noise and light and all of the dimensions are happening at once. And it's cacophony. And it's also beautiful in its own way, but also instructive of the ways that the world is falling down around us at the same time.

[Alex Beeston]

Right, yeah. So it kind of has a logic that's connected to the world, but it's also about pushing back against that kind of impulse towards linearity and there being one way forward, I suppose. Yeah, right. Yeah, that makes total sense. Yeah, but I guess that seems. So it's about collage is about rearrangement. It's also about taking things from the world and then kind of putting them in new kind of Organization, I suppose. And that seems to connect, I guess, very deeply to the project of Quiet Methodologies, which you set up very explicitly as a different kind of scholarly object. Obviously, the fact, as we've even described, that the conclusion is rendered as a collage in words is already kind of signaling, as you said, different kind of creative ways of doing scholarly writing, I suppose. And you also kind of explicitly state that this is not some act of one way transmission for you, or you're hoping you can kind of retool the scholarly book as something more like a medium for exploration or something like that. Right. So an attempt to listen as well as to speak, kind of gathering up and attending to other writers and scholars and thinkers. And therefore then the book becomes not so much a prop of your own expertise or sort of something that's about your particular kind of vantage on the world, except to the extent that you're the kind of syntax, you're bringing together all of these things. But I guess there's so many different aspects of your book that are really intriguing in this regard. Right. You have this propensity across the chapters to ask questions without rushing to answers. You frame a lot of your chapters in terms of dialogue or conversation, and also, in fact, integrate great actual conversations as well between yourself and other scholars or among your students, for instance. But I wanted to ask you, and this is where it connects to collage, is that there's something really important going on with quotation here and the way that you integrate the work of other writers and scholars. So both direct quotation, which is really important to you and is, I think, a way of kind of collage, kind of ethos and kind of bringing to bear these things from the world, but also summary of other people's ideas too. So if the aim isn't making a new art argument that is better than all the other arguments about bringing together the things that already exist in the world and sort of letting them refract each other or something. So I wanted to ask you about this, you know, how you came to this approach and what you're hoping to get out of the way that you engage with other scholars and writers. And also, I mean, that seems really connected to your own sense of what a method of listening could be as well. So I'd love to hear you reflect on that a bit more. Suzanne.

[Professor Suzanne Bost]

Yeah, that's a love, all right. But I think that that's exactly like what it is that I'm trying to do. And I really appreciate that you hear that and see it, but maybe let's start with talking about chapter three. And that's the one where I'm writing back to Ana Castillo. And it's a revision of something I wrote like 15 years before. And literally I just, I picked up my book. Incarnation was the book that it was, that was published in originally. And I'm like, why am I this like middle aged white lady critiquing identity politics? Like, why is that useful? And it was really, it's another one of those things that, that was the discourse of that moment and people were taking the same words and shifting them around. And I came back to looking at it. I'm like, oh my gosh. Like, I felt like I really had to give Ana Castillo a hug because I felt horrible that I had twisted, I don't wanna say twisted her words. Cause that's the kind of thing that my students would say, but that I was forcing her work of fiction into a particular political paradigm. And that seems to be a really useless and dead end way of thinking. And so the chapter three, which nobody wanted to publish, was the, like, it was a revision. And part of the reason they didn't want to publish it was because it didn't look. They couldn't make it look the way that I wanted it to look on the page was not footnotes, it was revision. But that's what they looked like because that's how it turned out on the page. But I wrote letters to both in the midst of this chapter to both Ana Castillo, the fiction writer, who I've always really felt close to because she is from Chicago, as am I, and spends a lot of time in New Mexico, which is where I grew up. I've seen her read several different times. And so it felt like it was a little personal and that I wanted to say I'm really sorry for doing this to you. And I also responded to Wendy Brown, who is one of the proponents of identity politics and basically said, thank you for all of these interesting ideas. Now you've given me a larger menu of things to thinking about what it means to be an individual or what it means to be part of a community. And yeah, I just, I guess feel like trying to infuse some care into my work rather than, you know, Encarnacion is the book that probably got me off the ground. And I did it by playing by the rules. And particularly now, like, I don't have to play by the rules at all.

[Alex Beeston]

Totally. Yeah.

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[Alex Beeston]

So there's a way that you're kind of positioning yourself differently, I guess, like even in the way that you relate to this other earlier iteration of yourself on the page. There's a certain sort of, as you say, humility is obviously a key term for your book, but a way of positioning yourself in response to others as well is having relationships with them, where care or responsibility is a kind of operative sort of framework. There's also ways you do kind of make quite a claim for the ways that integrating other people's actual writing and not just paraphrasing it, but actually sort of sitting with it is really important for you. Would you talk a little bit about the stakes of that decision for you?

[Professor Suzanne Bost]

Yeah, I think I've been maybe dodging that question a little bit. And part of it is just because of my training as a literary critic. And what we do is we look at the words themselves and think about the implications or what unfolds from the individual word, which is not everybody's cup of tea, but just the distinction between say, like a sociological approach where they will just say the date and the author of the source that is coming from. I feel like, what is that all that is? Are we referring to an entire book? What is being accounted for in that citation and so, yeah, I guess I really do feel like I want the author's words to be in there so that people can, first of all, see what they're doing, but also to see it in a different way as well. Whereas if you just get author date, you don't get the details, the things that matter to the writer.

[Alex Beeston]

Yeah, yeah. I suppose it's like. And there's a way that by insisting on direct quotation or extended quotation of other people's work or the things that have come before you or whatever, there's a way that it becomes possible to think about what you're doing as not overriding or even necessarily extending, but kind of moving around something that already exists on the page, I suppose, and in the world. Is that part of what you were thinking as well?

[Professor Suzanne Bost]

Yeah, I think so. And just that, I guess I still think of literature as related to the visual arts in some ways, and that there's a specificity there, and there's a way you pause over it and, you know, notice things more in depth the longer you look at it. And so, yeah, I kind of geek out on that a little bit. But also, I want to honor, like, I'm right now really obsessed with Alexis, Pauline Gumm's work, and she's actually coming to Loyola next month, and I'm sort of, like, already getting, like, my heart racing. But the. Her ways of describing things are very particular and very distinct from what most people are used to looking for. Like, she describes herself as a marine mammal in training, and she's trying to find new kinds of pods and communities and sharing resources and things like that. But it's so compelling with, like, the coming from the individual species and their patterns and their rituals and all these things underwater that we can't really see, but they're going on, and they're intricate and they're affecting our environment, and we're infecting theirs. I meant to say affecting, but I said infecting. That's interesting. Anyway, I want to honor this very peculiar way of writing that she has that is not, like, what she's saying is impossible, and she's saying it anyway. And I think that that's. That has. That moves me.

[Alex Beeston]

Yeah. And it sort of, like, short circuits the will to sort of, like, extract the idea from the writing, I suppose, which, like, as in they're so intertwined, the way of writing and what the ideas, I guess, like, especially with guns. But I think in general, the kinds of scholarly writing I like and the thing I really value, humanities research for is the way that you can geek out on those details. And also when scholarly writing is really good for me, it's really beautiful in a way that kind of does sort of break down those conventional distinctions between creative writing and the scholarly writing or whatever. And GUMS does that for sure. But I think there's something really cool about the way your book is approaching these in a literary way. Right. Like is approaching scholarship in a literary. Both in the way that you're practicing it and also the kinds of qualities that you're recognizing are both theoretical qualities and ideas as well as the way those ideas have been phrased and kind of insisting that actually those things aren't unrelated and can't be extricated from each other or something like that. Yeah.

[Professor Suzanne Bost]

There's also another one of my influences is yoga and I wrote a series of poems about yoga and the specificity of what bodies are doing and the kinds of ways that we are in community and moving differently. Anyway, I feel like they all overlap.

[Alex Beeston]

Yeah. I wanted to ask you another question actually, about the chapter where you staged this revision of an earlier essay, I think, because it's interesting how that chapter in particular gets to a certain tension that I see you navigating. And I wonder if this is something you felt as well in your project between thinking about quietness and speech in relation to the written word. And this in here is exactly on what we've just been talking about. Right. How do you use the page to sort of not just diatribe at your reader or whatever. And a direct quotation is one of the ways I think you're trying to kind of push against that imperative. But you know, as you've already mentioned in this conversation, and it's clear in the book that you do have an acute sense of the privilege of being a mid career academic with a measure of professional security and then the ethical necessity that flows from that to find ways of kind of communicating without talking over others or extracting from them, that kind of thing. And so, yeah, again, humility is one of the important ways that you walk that tightrope, I suppose. And you call it like an emphatic rejection of certitude. So this idea that this is what I mean about it is very argumentative book, actually, I would say. And there's moments like this, but it's happening at the level of the meta argument. But you kind of suggest that certitude is itself an illusion of sort of mastery and authority. And so, yeah, in this chapter where you return to and revise your earlier work. I think this is really clear, right? This kind of unreading where you're performing. Kind of the mutability and the multivalence of scholarly ideas, even after publication, gives it a false sense of an ending, I guess. And so what I wanted to ask you, though, is about what it feels like or what kind of emotional and scholarly labor is involved in rejecting certitude. Because it strikes me that that's a very vulnerable place to be in and potentially also quite thrilling in that they're quite liberating to kind of turn away from this idea of performing mastery. And actually, I'm interested that you had trouble publishing this particular chapter, because there's a whole book that's formed exactly in this kind of conceit. So Jonathan Eburns Exploded Views. Have you read that book?

[Professor Suzanne Bost]

No, I haven't.

[Alex Beeston]

It's from Minnesota as well, like last year of 2024. And the whole book is. Each chapter he returns to a failed unfinished essay of his and rewrites it. So I think there's kind of a gathering precedent for this kind of really interesting core work and finding the ways to make that happen on the printed page. And Minnesota seems to be the place to do it. But. So I was. Anyway, I just wanted to ask you, though, about, like, that feeling of vulnerability or what it does feel like, I suppose, to return to your older work with this sort of critical lens and to kind of make that plain to the reader the way you're doing that, perform that experience. Is this something you've had to kind of work on for yourself? You know, to cultivate a way of doing, like, literary work or archival work that has that sense of vulnerability and of the potential to be wrong and to recognize the way we can be wrong, if that makes sense.

[Professor Suzanne Bost]

I think that for me, the vulnerability came first. My parents were not academics. I liked to write poetry and somehow, like, stumbled my way into an English department and was able to mimic the discourse of the graduate classroom. When I got to that level and did enough that I got published and promoted and whatever. But I feel like that was just a necessary step in being able to actually do something that I had to prove that I could write a dissertation and then move on and do something that I really want to do, I feel like I didn't have to cultivate vulnerability, that I felt like I was always out of place, that I like. My first day in graduate school, I sat down in a chair around the seminar table. It was a Milton class. And the professor said, you are sitting in my Chair. And so, like, my first moment of grad school was being forced to move to a different space in the classroom. And, yeah, I feel like that's what I was always scrambling at, just to get there and then to realize now that, like, gosh, things could be a lot more fun than what I was doing before. I felt like I was always on the outside and maybe in some ways, coming to a Jesuit university where we're allowed to be a little bit messy and really talk about transforming the world and really infusing care and transformation, like we're supposed to set the world on fire is our motto. And I think that that's been helpful for me. I guess the other thing I would say in terms of mastery is that I don't lecture unless it's like, somebody is like, I have no idea what deconstruction is, and could you please help me understand it? We'll do that. But otherwise, I don't see there being any need for me to pass on information that other people really don't need.

[Alex Beeston]

Right. So there's a kind of way that you feel that, you know, if anything coming to this way of working is kind of more comfortable for you in a certain way because of your particular status in the academy. Oh, yeah, Susan. The experiments that you. Actually, that's interesting because we tend these things that we do significantly, and that will be stretching and like, perhaps also there's ways research kind of builders of the academy at particular, they've already been constrained right away. That comes with doing something different. I wondered if you would share a little bit about this particular archive, you know, its shape, its effects, and how that's helped you to rethink some of the questions of scholarly responsibility and process that you're working through in this book, and whether there are ways that that particular archive has encouraged you to kind of shift away from something like a strict form of empiricism towards imagination, play, speculation, that kind of thing.

[Professor Suzanne Bost]

Yes. So I love going to archives, and I've been to a variety of them, from the National Archives in Mexico City to University of Texas at Austin, where Gloria Anseldua's archive is. And actually, it's kind of funny, I realized that there's armed guards at the museum at the archive in Mexico City, and there are guns allowed in the archive at the University of Texas at Austin, which is kind of. Anyway, that's aside from that. So I guess I was a little scared of archives initially, and particularly by the experience of looking at things written all in Spanish and handwriting that was really difficult. And I realized that anthropologists are trained to do these things. And so it was one of those moments where, like, okay, well, maybe I'll just find the anthropologists and see what they can tell me. Whatever I need to know. But when the. So I. I'm friends with Ana Louise Keating, who is the executor of the estate. And she let, you know. Let us let me know when materials were available. And I got there and it's 40 file boxes full of stuff. And it's not all manuscript stuff. It's like T shirt collections, ticket stubs, doorknob placards from hotel rooms. Just a bizarre combination of things that felt very much more personal than intellectual in some levels. And I guess I wanted to add that there's also, like, we have her glucose logs because she was diabetic and that's what actually ended her life. And we have, you know, her T shirt collections and her own books with her marginalia written in them. So it's very personal and it's overwhelming. Like, it's not possible to actually look at everything. And even if you're focusing only on manuscripts, they exist in, you know, four to 25 distinct drafts that have been revised over and over and over again. And sometimes she will publish something as she will revise something after publishing it, and, you know, just keeps going back in this recursive way. And it was so exciting to realize. And also, like, a lot of these texts interpenetrate each other. Like, I found a memoir in the archive that actually brought in, like, direct passages from Borderlands or from Haciendo Carras or something like that. So it was not even, like, from her. I guess my sense of the archive is that it is not a discrete or bounded thing, that it's still. They're still getting more things. There's also, you know, there's. The altars are all in Santa Cruz and are set up there in a way that's, like, manipulable in some ways. I guess they probably don't really want you touching them. But, like, theoretically, you could, and you could pray before it or whatever, that it's not just conventional academic work. It's a lot more of emotional work. I think.

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[Alex Beeston]

Do you think that that's, like. I wonder. Because I've done a fair bit of archival work as well. And I wonder if, like, that is sort of a property of all archives, even when they're not so obviously, like, this miscellany of a person's material life. I'm just thinking about the way, like, archives themselves have this really interesting, like, you know what Caroline Steedman says? They're like. It's like seeing things that are not intended for your eyes, like reading any kind of draft material or letters that are, you know, private, private, quote, unquote documents or whatever. And that the archive has a generalized quality in that way that it always feels like something maybe I shouldn't be looking. Like there's a kind of illicitness to the quality of looking at an archive that the kind of formal way of accessioning materials only partially sort of modulates, I guess, if that makes sense.

[Professor Suzanne Bost]

You know, I think I've always felt like I'm an interloper, or what's the better word? A voyeur in Anseldua's works. And Laura Anseldua didn't want to be a legitimate. Well, maybe she did want to be a legitimate academic. I take that back. She wanted to be known. She saved all of her stuff. Like, she was expecting that she knew she was going to be important, and so she saved absolutely everything so that it could be there for the future.

[Alex Beeston]

Yeah, yeah. So it was like an investment on her future renown, I suppose. Like, that was kind of. It was predicated on that belief that this would be an important work. Yeah, totally. Totally. So there's a kind of bid for some form of legitimacy within an institution. But there's also a way that she was not working exactly within the conventions of, like. Even when you're describing the way she was revising and reworking things, that's already, like. It kind of messes with the kind of ideas we have about what it would mean to do, like, ethical editing of her writing, for instance. Because we have this idea of there being a privileged version, I suppose.

[Professor Suzanne Bost]

Yeah. And there's not.

[Alex Beeston]

Yeah.

[Professor Suzanne Bost]

One of the things that we've just. I've been working on recently in the Goran Saldua archive is that she wrote a novel and Stories, which was just published last fall by Suni. And that was a very, like, even more feeling like I was an invasive species in this text. Cause it wasn't my words. Fortunately, the manuscript was so close to being complete. Like, there'd be occasional notations like stop here or stop on the next page, or things like just, like, very. And it was very easy to solve. We would just include both notes so we could show what was still ambivalent or unresolved. But my job somehow became to be the translator. She did most of her own translations, but she'd been working on these stories for decades. So the glossaries didn't necessarily line up. And she specifically said she wanted this to be a text that would be accessible to everybody. That someone would just bump in a bookstore and find it on the shelf and grab it and read it. Which is also very interesting to me to think about a reader's first introduction to Gloria Ansaldua. To Be Prieta's Dreaming, which is the novel in stories, which is, like, very graphic, very sexual, very personal, and very metaphysical. Mystical things that weren't published during her lifetime. And we kept finding things that she said, I want to publish this before I die. But I still feel a little bit invasive of having been working around in her words. And we spent years on it. Because we didn't want there to be any mistakes or anything that, like, initially we started editing. Then we're like, no, no, we can't edit. That's not how she wanted this to be. It's not our words. So that was a very. I still feel a little guilty somehow about having been involved in that project. But I know I don't want to claim mastery. Because you can't claim mastery of this archive. But I feel like I had the care and the time with the archive that helped me feel more like I was a legitimate person involved in that editing process.

[Alex Beeston]

Yeah. I suppose that feeling of guilt or the ambivalence that you might have about that project feels like. Especially when it's with a work that the author, you know, is pretty clear that they would have wanted it out in the world. Like, where that's a pretty straightforward kind of thing to. I mean, that we can basically know then. I think that that's quite a Small cost to pay, isn't it, for getting the work out into the world, you know, with all. And then doing it in a kind of sensitive way that flags up the way it had been formed through an editing process. But I'm wondering, as you're talking, like, it seems to me that that that sense of being an invasive species, as you described it, is probably quite a good grounding for an ethical approach to an archive. And the opposite of that, that feeling of legitimacy of being at home in an archive could also be. Even if it's reasonable to feel that I'm thinking about, for instance, the child of an author, for instance, who has a different kind of relation to the materials, that there's also dangers with that kind of proximity as well.

[Professor Suzanne Bost]

Yeah. There was a lot of concerns about what poor Anceldua's sister would think with the publication of the book, because their family was not queer. She was the queer one. Yeah. I feel it's like delicate ground. The other thing that's funny, when we debuted the book people wanted us to do to sign it. I'm like, I'm not gonna sign this book. I didn't write this book. And then, like, the book is getting awards, which is, like, so gratifying that, like. I mean, but, you know, we helped bring it out there. But on the other hand, we shouldn't be getting the awards.

[Alex Beeston]

Right?

[Professor Suzanne Bost]

I mean, whatever. It will go to the estate anyway. But still, it's just like that.

[Alex Beeston]

Yeah, but I suppose what you're getting at there is that the kind of awards. The kind of awards economy, I guess, like, is actually very much part of that wider scholarly kind industry of rewarding, offering sort of prestige and imprimatur to certain types of scholars over other. This idea that there can only be some types of good work. And it's a system of valuation that's quite capitalistic and seems to be entirely opposed to the approach that you're taking in this book. I guess, to do a different type of work in the academy. You're always having to make all of these, like, small and large negotiations within a wider structure that has really fundamentally different kind of sense of what it looks like to do the work that you're doing. Yeah, I mean, I guess that takes us actually to another aspect of your book, which is about the future of graduate study and about the institutional kind of context for the work that you're doing and advocating for as well. So perhaps we could talk a little bit about that. So your last chapter is specifically about graduate study, and it incorporates As I said earlier, a conversation among some of your graduate students. So you kind of offer over some space in that chapter to these other voices. And I really did like this aspect of your book, Suzanne. I love the way it's like putting, I mean, it's similar to what you've just described, actually putting pressure on the idea of the single author that is dominant within the humanities. And so there's a way that there's a whole tapestry of voices that have been necessary to the construction of this book. As with all books, it's just, that's not, not always made so obvious. And indeed with the edited book that you did too, it's the same kind of tension. But I was reading your chapter and I didn't study in the US and I have to say I was quite shocked actually to read you talk about a commonly used guidebook for graduate students that basically says in no uncertain terms that it is both normal and necessary for academics to work 10 hour days and then every weekend do also extra work, and that's just what's necessary.

[Professor Suzanne Bost]

And don't travel home for weddings or whatever. It's still, I don't think anyone I know now teaches it, but when I first got here, it was considered to be one of the required texts for the intro to Graduate Studies in English.

[Alex Beeston]

Right. And I'm obviously very familiar with the kind of imperative to overwork that of sort, that's the case in the UK as well and in Australia where I trained too. But I don't know if it's normally stated so boldly. So I just found it quite kind of striking and interesting in that way. And I think this jumped out at me because I've been on something of a personal mission over the last few years to basically resist that requirement to work too much. And I'm also really actively evangelizing others against this kind of academic kind of status quo that, as you say in the book, and I really like the way you put this, that it rewards stamina more than creativity. Right. It's a whole system that does that. And I was reflecting that as I've sort of really deliberately extricated my time from the institution that employs me, I've sort of come to think that a lot of the time stamina and creativity are in fact antithetical. Like they're really at odds with each other in lots of contexts. And another way of saying this would be that as I've sort of stopped working too much, I've basically felt like I've suddenly had the headspace and the energy to be able to more fully interrogate scholarly norms, to be more critical, I guess, and also to find more creative and experimental ways to do my scholarship and my writing. And so I just wanted to ask you if your experience of this has been a bit similar or if you have any other reflections on the conditions that are needed, the institutional conditions that are needed for doing the kind of work that you're advocating for and modeling in this book.

[Professor Suzanne Bost]

Yeah. So the guidebook that I'm referring to implies that being a scholar of literature and a professor, a researcher, is the only end from a love of literature at an advanced level. And it's not all about cruelty, but it's like, here's how you write a cover letter. Here is how you write a conference paper, which is, I suppose, helpful, but I think maybe also antithetical to the creativity of the grad students themselves. That I know that when they submit an abstract, that there'll be certain expectations that people will want to find. But I don't know, it just seems so stifling that what if they never get to the stage where they're actually doing something that they really love?

[Alex Beeston]

Totally. Because I can see how some institutions, one of the ways that it can be an issue of access and people being able to know how to navigate these norms. If you don't teach graduate students how to perform within these certain genres, that can be a real differential between the haves and the haves. Not. Right. But also there's a way that you are sort of curtailing other pathways for the work itself. Because form, I mean, we're literary scholars. We know, like, form is very important. You know, form kind of gives you patterns that you can and can't work with. I guess, yeah.

[Professor Suzanne Bost]

And this same chapter that we've been talking about is the one with the grad students discussing their experience. And it was not optimistic or happy or anything like that. And a couple people were like, are you really going to send it out just like this? And I was like, like, that's the point. Right. These are the people who are going through this experience right now. And I want, you know. And they were very generous to share their experiences and.

[Alex Beeston]

Yeah.

[Professor Suzanne Bost]

What they didn't know and what they wish they knew.

[Alex Beeston]

Yeah. I suppose that's material to your point in this book. Right. That, like, it doesn't make sense for us to just continue as usual within these kinds of conditions, that a new world order requires a new kind of scholarly work. Work and a new way to approach it. I guess. Are there other ways You've seen this within your institution where you. Kind of different types of parts of your job as an academic, I suppose, where it's felt like there's a tension there between the type of work that might be necessary and the type of work that's required of you.

[Professor Suzanne Bost]

Yeah. So I'm at this weird juncture. I have two kids who are about to go off to college and trying to get some extra money, I decided to be chair of the Department of English also because I really care about my colleagues and our students. And I think that, you know, they're all really amazing, and I want them all to thrive, but it's definitely been at the expense of my own thriving. Like, when I finally agreed to run for chair, I immediately stubbed my toe and broke it. And then I, like, got a floor.

[Alex Beeston]

Your body rebelled.

[Professor Suzanne Bost]

Exactly. And I'm still not sure. I know that there's some things that I can do and that I do care about the faculty and the students, and I know them and I talk to them, but just the coldness of the structures and the tearing down of buildings and building new buildings and the reevaluation of our curriculum, and we're having to, like, justify how our department fits with the mission. And we were just given so many spreadsheets, and it's just not the way I think. Even, like, I don't think in those kinds of linear ways. So I'm trying, hoping that maybe I can think about a transformative mode of administration. So far, all I've been able to do is just be really loud and critical, which is, like, exactly what I don't want to do, what I usually think of myself as being. So my task for this summer is going to be to reimagine what it would be to be a supportive and transformative chair. And it might be completely beyond my. My abilities, because whenever I try to ask for something important for one of my faculty, they always seem to say no. And I'm the one who has to then pass on the no.

[Alex Beeston]

Yeah, yeah, totally. Yeah. And it's a question of, like, what can be achieved within a certain system and what can't be. I mean, the examples you gave earlier of forms of education that happen outside of universities, for instance, would suggest that there are some types of things that you actually do need to go outside of the established sort of institutions. Yeah.

[Professor Suzanne Bost]

And, you know, at least being at a place where we have, like, engaged learning and community education and, you know, multilingual tutoring and, you know, there is some at least official sense of care involved at this university. But honestly, the people who are the top, top two administrators are just. They're just finance people and they really don't know what we do, maybe really don't even care.

[Alex Beeston]

Yeah. And that's become generalized right. Across all sorts of institutions and not just in the US as well. That. Yeah. There's a kind of fundamental question about what the mission of the university is, why it exists. Absolutely. I mean, this makes me think, actually. And this is maybe the final question I wanted to ask you today, Suzanne, but you mentioned care there, and that's a term that's come up for you a few times. The other term that really jumped out at me when I was reading your book is the term love. And I really wanted to ask you about love as a sort of scholarly practice or affect. And maybe this also sits with the administrative work you've been doing, too. But there are moments across the book where you tell the reader that you love or are even in love with certain ideas or practices. And you also flag up at different moments, your favourite parts of certain scholarly works, which I really liked as well, or literary works, too. But then you also. And I think this has come out in this conversation very alive to the risks of discourses of love in relation to others. So, for instance, in the classroom, where a declaration of loving one's students can also very easily shade into possessive or an act of projection. So this kind of possessive or coercive gesture, you talk a little bit more about the role of love in the project of quiet methodologies.

[Professor Suzanne Bost]

So I know several faculty members who describe their classrooms as a beloved community. And they share meditations, they share movements, and I think there is a kind of care that comes through, but there's also a whole lot of vulnerability and, you know, so many things to get in the way between the faculty person and a student. Like, so many ways to have care being misrepresented. And so, you know, I guess there's love. Like, I feel. Yeah, I feel like I do love Alexis Pauline Gumb's words, and I will continue to love them probably for a while. While I love certain gestures that I see brave scholars making, there's a section in GUMS where she talks about how there's certain species that light up in phosphorescence. And I was like, what would happen if my students lit up? Like, what would that even look like? Could it just be, like, light bulbs coming off in everybody's head in different directions? Or. I don't know, But I want to be there to be someone who can allow for light bulbs at least, if not some, you know, implicit care.

[Alex Beeston]

That's beautiful. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's a lovely place to end. Not with false hope, but a sense of what's possible even within these institutions that are so, as you say, cold in lots of ways. But I've really enjoyed this conversation today. Thank you so much for your time, Suzanne. I'm sure listeners will be excited to read a copy of your book, which is out now from the University of Minnesota Press. It's called Quiet Methodologies. And it's a really rich tapestry of voices, as we've kind of suggested that Suzanne has sort of shepherded together. I'm Alex Beeston. I hope you'll join me next time.

[Professor Suzanne Bost]

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