Four Features 

Kit Nicholls
with Bill Germano

February 2025
Issue 1

Germano (HSS) “Every semester that I teach, I try to get closer to what I imagine I should be doing with my students”: A Conversation with Prof. William Germano on where books, ideas, and learning come from.

Kit:
When you think about the authors you've worked with—many of whom are these really important figures in critical theory, cultural studies—they wind up feeling like these kind of iconoclastic figures, right? You think about someone like Bell Hooks, and we now imagine bell hooks through this power, the power of the books that are finished…but a manuscript in progress is a different thing. And I'm just wondering if there are any anecdotes that grab hold of the reality that making writing is often a slog, and that the finished thing is always just kind of a thing that's in the state it was in when you supposedly got it done.


Bill:
Bell Hooks—in many ways she's not a useful example because she was such a strong-willed person. I felt somehow that she picked me out and decided that, okay, this is the guy who's gonna do my next set of books. And we negotiated a contract. She signed and that was it. But in terms of the manuscript, she would have a complete manuscript that was, I don't know whether they were all previously written essays, if not necessarily previously published, but every one of the, I don't know, five or six books I published with Bell: she had the title. She had all the organization. I don't think she was really open to any wholesale reorganization. I don't think she was open to eliminating an essay. I think my job was to kind of make sure that the books got out there.
 
But thinking about scholars and what they have to do to get something in print: I don't think of any part of the writing process as trivial. That is, all the pieces are important, and you can make them more important if you choose to, but nothing is unimportant. The sequencing of the pieces is part of the game. You have to write as if someone's going to read you from the beginning to the end, even in your heart of hearts, you know they're gonna skip through or they may read it to look for certain things. But you can't be distracted by that.

There is no alternative to writing as if someone's beginning at the beginning and ending at the end. And if people choose to violate that, that's on them. But you can't foresee them doing that and try to make it easier for them—
 

Kit:
I mean, in fiction, I guess you've got exceptions like Cortázar’s Hopscotch. Or you have Benjamin’s Arcades Project, but those are like really exceptional, calling attention to their non-narrative quality—
 

Bill:
I've wondered whether there is a kind of radical rereading of Cortázar in which you reorganize the text yourself—so it's all actually in one chronological form. Film does this all the time where you're given flashbacks. The whole notion of the flashback, of the temporally disjunctive narrative is a filmic one, I think. And it gets imported into fiction as successfully as it does because we've learned it from the movies. I don't think it's the other way around, although  historians might tell me I'm wrong, but that's okay.
 
Titles feel like the least important thing. My position is come up with your title right away and then play against that title or with that title.

For many of the people I worked with in scholarly publishing, many of them were big giant heads, but that doesn't mean they knew what to call what they were producing. So they were really good at the inside of the book. They were not so good on the outside of the book, including what to call it. And I think the thing I was most useful to them for was figuring out a title for what they were working on. 

I mean, I did other things, but figuring out a title was something that came up over and over again. That and cutting manuscripts; something like Donna Haraway's Primate Visions. I think I cut 400 pages from it. And it's still very long, but it was an enormous book. 

But I want to keep thinking about titles. Mark Anthony Neal—the Black scholar at Duke who’s been very successful—I was able to work on his first book, and I don't remember what he wanted to call it. It was about Black popular culture and music. And maybe because I was reading T.S. Eliot at that time, I said, “okay, what, how about What the Music Said?” And he liked that. I forget what the subtitle is, but that's what we called it.  

I did a book with, Anne K Mellor at UCLA—her biography of Mary Shelley. And I think I said to her, how about this? Mary Shelly: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters. So, all of this feels really superficial, and yet it's not because it's the sign you're showing the outside world. And it also becomes an organizing trope. But once you know what your book is going to be called, you look at your manuscript in an entirely different way.

I get this awful sinking feeling when people say my project is untitled. I haven't worked out a title yet. For me that means you haven't worked the focus out yet. And I would say that for an end of semester student project as well, figure out what you wanna call it. Even if you haven't done anything more than develop some vague idea that it's gonna be about, say, African American quilting—fine, come up with a title because once you put a title down, you've given yourself something to work with. 

I guess what I'm saying is you want to get as far away from your subject as possible and try to look at it as if it's not you. I think that's what titles are for. 
 

Kit:
That's really striking, Bill, because I don't know about you, but I so often get papers that don't have a title or where the title is just incredibly dry. Or not even dry in the academic way—the classic “I’m going to pull a slightly evocative three or four words from the text I'm writing about, then a colon, then a set of theoretical concepts.” But dry as in the most direct, simple description of what's going to be inside of this document.

It's just a label on a container rather than a little miniature poem, which is kind of what a good title is. 
 

Bill:
Well, so you're pointing to the distinction between STEM journal publication and data-driven social science publication and work in that thing we call the humanities.
 

Kit:
But I also don't know how much time our art students spend thinking about what they're going to title their work. That intersection of language and the object seems so critical, but I don't find that there's that much conversation across the college. At least I would think it would come into the humanities classroom more than it does.



Bill:
We don't really spend enough time talking about titles just because there's so little time to do all the things we're expected to do. I'm sympathetic to the view that the title is trivial compared to the content, but I also think that that distinction is way overplayed. Certainly for book publication, the title is critical because that may be all that's picked up. It's metadata and it's metadata that needs to be disseminated through systems that work with titles and frequently with subtitles.

But student papers is a somewhat different issue for us. Having names for the work feels super helpful. What are you writing about? The answer should not be, well, if you read my paper, you'll know.
 

Kit:
As you speak, Bill, I'm bringing up Bing, which is the new GPT-4-enhanced search engine, which Microsoft has tried to recover from being a sort of laughing stock among search engines—the Zune of search engines—into actually a quite controversial and complicated new technology story. And I'm just thinking, can I ask it to give me a title for something? If I were to feed it a paragraph or two of text, what kind of title will it give me?

Because I think there's an interesting cause and effect problem that you're bringing up in that very often people will imagine the title comes last. You're suggesting the title's part of a writing process. And I'm just wondering—through your own writing practice or through what you've seen for other people—how the title sometimes actually might wind up driving the process of getting words on the page and of figuring out a shape for a finished piece.
 

Bill:
I think for many academics, I can't say most, for many academics, there is a seed chapter or a seed essay. It may be the thing that attracted the attention of an editor at a publishing house. “I read your piece in Signs. Are you thinking of writing a book on this? This is really exciting. I can see the readership for it.” And by the way, ”it is really exciting” means I can see a readership for it.

So that essay or chapter immediately becomes the thing that has post position in this little race. It'll be the mini engine that drives the creation of that text. And it may well be that the author will take it and say, well, you know what I'm gonna do? I'm gonna put together a bunch of essays, so let's call this blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and other essays, which is a move you can only get away with if you're really well known or if the essay is so important that it’s able to drive it. 

I did this book with Stephen Greenblatt, and I had read his essay on The Tempest called “Learning to Curse,” and asked him if he would put some essays together. I knew I couldn't get a full, newly composed essay out of him, but I also knew there were enough pieces and I could identify them. So we worked together and pulled together a bunch of essays just called Learning to Curse with the exciting subtitle “Essays in Early Modern Culture.” If you're Stephen Greenblatt, or if you're Bell Hooks or you're Cornell West, you can do that kind of thing. It's not usually a good move if you’re early career because it rides very much on reputation and recognizability—
 

Kit:
So to be fair to GPT, I didn't give it much to work with here because I found that I couldn't copy and paste in this app. Probably if I mess around more, I can figure it out. But I asked it to write a title for an essay about college teaching in the era of GPT and inequality. And it gave me a list.
 
The list is this:
“The Challenges and Opportunities of College Teaching in the Age of GPT and Inequality.” “How GPT and Inequality Are Transforming College Teaching and Learning.”
“College Teaching in the 21st Century: Navigating GPT and Inequality.”

They're so incredibly banal, and this is in creative mode, by the way. You can actually tell it to be more creative or less creative. And I told it to be creative, and this is what it gave me. Again, I gave it very little to work with, but I'm kind of fascinated by the fact that it's not “hallucinating” even a little bit, because actually hallucination would be useful in this case. Because there's nothing to light up the mind or suggest to the reader—or for that matter, to the writer—surprising places we could go.


Bill:
I feel as if I have to put on my publishing hat and say sometimes you want a descriptive title and you don't want the author messing with you. So Lukas Erne’s Shakespeare and the Book Trade is a book about Shakespeare and the book trade. We don't have to worry about that. Whereas the late Lauren Berlant’s On the Inconvenience of Other People is a title that would make your head spin if she weren't a much admired critic. And when the book came out, people like me bought it because they wanted to reread stuff of hers or read stuff of hers for the first time.

Getting back to the writing process, I like to write down lots of phrases that I think I'm gonna wind up making do work in the text, whether it's for an essay or whether it's not. I like to look at writing as having intermediate structures, which I then remove when I no longer need them. So it's scaffolding, but really with lexical scaffolds.

I will sometimes go as far as having a title for every paragraph, just as a way of reminding myself where I think these connections are, so that if I just look at those titles, I should be able to intuit what path I am expecting the reader to follow, even if there are shaggy dog stories and things that go sort of shamelessly away from the main idea. Because the point of making the shameless move is to bring the reader back, in some way that is both: “I can't believe I made that trip” and “ah, I see what that guy was doing by putting this together.”

And then when I go back through the text I can pull out as many of those as I need to. But I usually leave some subheads in an essay or in a chapter. Because they're like semicolons and they allow the reader to know that there’s a break in the text, but that it's not a full stop.
 

Kit:
I'm struck by how you're using the word ”scaffold” to describe a thing a writer does, when, of course, in teaching we use the word “scaffolding” to describe a thing a teacher does for students. And I'm wondering, you know, if you have any thoughts about how scaffolding in the context of the classroom moves from being a thing the teacher does to becoming a thing the student writer does?
 

Bill:
Boy, that's a good question.

 
Kit:
For that matter, how does scaffolding work for the student maker broadly conceived because, you know, in art practice, engineering design practice, all of these things require figuring out how the pieces fit together, naming them for yourself, and then eventually figuring out what the hole is, what’s missing. And as you suggested, sometimes you’ve got to pull the scaffolding away because you don't need it. You've managed to connect the pieces.
 

Bill:
I think that one of the challenges is getting students feeling safe enough about writing, that they're willing to put what they think is crap down on the page, because it's necessary to get stuff on the page in order to make it better. And the classic, “I know what I want to say, I just don't know how to say it” is such a familiar cry for help. I like to ask students to do a full length draft at midterm, and give them the tools with which to rethink and revise that draft to produce the 2.0 that you really hoped for. Every semester that I teach, I try to get closer to what I imagine I should be doing with my students.