How to read “how to get published”¹

With apologies to Dorfman and Mattelart. How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic. We are fully aware of the irreverence of comparing a comic book to ajournai article, but we note with approval and accord Dorfman and Mattelarfs observation in “Apology for Duckology,” near the beginning of How To Read Donald: “In order to attain knowledge, which is a form of power, we cannot continue to endorse, with blinded vision and stilted jargon, the initiation rituals with which our high priests seek to legitimize and protect their exclusive privileges of thought and expression”; (25).

This essay is a rhetorical/ideological reading of the 1993 article, “How to Get Published,” by James W. Chesebro. The authors argue that that essay is a disciplinary manifesto advancing particular values of professional community as well as of research. “How to Get Published,” they suggest, reveals militantly conventionalizing aspects of the disciplinary community's authority structure, sense of history, material conditions of labor, and socialization patterns. By promoting these in a normative, prescriptive, “helping” document, “How to Get Published” works against, not for, the interests of those attempting to “get published.”

Key concepts:

• Academic practices
• criticism
• discipline
• ideology
• publication practices

Notes

With apologies to Dorfman and Mattelart. How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic. We are fully aware of the irreverence of comparing a comic book to ajournai article, but we note with approval and accord Dorfman and Mattelarfs observation in “Apology for Duckology,” near the beginning of How To Read Donald: “In order to attain knowledge, which is a form of power, we cannot continue to endorse, with blinded vision and stilted jargon, the initiation rituals with which our high priests seek to legitimize and protect their exclusive privileges of thought and expression”; (25).