Burger With the Works, Please! A Webjournal for Students of the Humanities www.8ung.at/burgerplease

Burger With the Works, Please? Is this supposed to be the nifty brand name of the latest fast-food chain, or a practical joke on the institutionalization of academic journals? It has to do with both, as Martin Zeilinger, editor and graduate student of Comparative Literature and American Studies at the University of Vienna, Austria, tells me.

Upon my first encounter with this intriguing experiment, launched in summer 2002, I had quite a hard time detecting the programmatic gist of its title. I imagined a 1950s-styled diner somewhere in smalltown America, but then remembered Bill Bryson's Notes on a Big Country, which laments the absence of this prototypical place in today's globalized, hyper-capitalized economic system. Thus, the focus was probably on works; but then you would have to ask if all those students of the humanities really were stubborn junk-food freaks? Martin has a different answer, thereby explaining the initial incentive for his project: metaphorically speaking, students' writings would often be considered as about as valuable as cheap hamburgers within the academic discourse system, while pro(fessorial) essays seem to be seen as haute cuisine in principle. On purpose, the analogy is a reminder of the great divide between High Culture and popular culture, a split that has long been abandoned by postmodern theory and Cultural Studies, but is still valid in much of the professional practice of slow-changing academic institutions.

Professional academic publishing has a high symbolic value in this system, and thus carries with it a load of symbolic gestures and masquerades. As Bourdieu showed in Homo Academicus, the more traditionally prestigious the institution, the harder it is to transgress hierarchical borders and to find inroads into a tightly knit academe. Consequently, if you have any academic aspirations whatsoever, it seems impossible to neglect competition for symbolic capital.

Burger With the Works, Please! does not accept this tricky game of competition and acquisition of symbolic capital, but tries to create an alternative mode of publication. Above all, Martin Zeilinger says, it should encourage undergrads and graduate students to reread and revise their work for publication, i.e. to make their essays accessible to an audience that goes beyond supervisors and teachers. "I experience that people shy away from publishing their stuff," he observes, "because the official publication procedure is just too scary and obscure. They are hardly ever encouraged or backed up by anybody during their studies, and if they are, there are rarely any platforms of publication accessible to them." The institutional reality of what Harold Bloom called "anxiety of influence" often results in a profound lack of self-esteem: as a student, you're just another burger in the university's home-owned fast-food chain.

As the articles already published since summer show, however, there is no need to hide for these critical texts. Topics range from film studies (e.g., "The dubious skill of remembering: Fellini's Amarcord and art cinema") and semiotics to literary and postmodern theory (Derrida's "Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences"), and analyses are on a high theoretical level. However, the essays are not considered "finished" works of criticism. They are open to revision and discussion likewise, as the journal's policy is to allow space for flux.

Another in flux-policy of the project is the omission of the authors' names, which is, for the time being, a "temporary deconstructive practice," as the editor puts it. The contributors' names can be found in an extra list, but not together with their articles, since "students have nothing to lose: they don't author anything in the original sense of the word, which means they don't really possess an authorizing voice of their own [which they could give up]," he says. Thus, the students' marginal position within the world of academics is used in order to draw attention to what is written and away from who is writing. This is a kind of guerilla tactic, although anonymity may not be useful beyond a certain point, since it is also clear that you cannot live outside the system of symbolic capitalism if you want to follow an academic career. "As long as the journal does not carry any 'symbolic capital,' we can continue this no-name policy," Martin argues, but acknowledges that "the project is work-in-progress, which means that policies can always be changed."

Although still in an experimental phase, Burger With the Works, Please! tries to act as a publishing voice for students of the Humanities. It is a platform of ego-boosting that the hierarchy-based practice of academic writing often does not want to provide before graduation. Again and again, both the government and universities here in Austria lament the dissatisfying standard of academic education and the lack of internationally renowned scholars. They usually just forget to care about their academic offspring; Burger With the Works, Please! does.

Submissions are always welcome. Please go to www.8ung.at/burgerplease for further details.

Alexandra Ganser