First, let me pay tribute to a wonderful site which I have neglected lately but have just now restored as my home page in Firefox.
It’s a rare day when there isn’t some item of interest there, and it does cast a wide net across a range of views in many disciplines. Given that too many of us tend to read sites we agree with and ignore (or mock) those of a different view, making our web experience something of an echo chamber, that wide net is a bonus.
Indirectly, as you will see in a moment, AL Daily recently sent me to Professing Literature in 2008 in The Nation, that wonderful and venerable American leftish magazine. William Deresiewicz is responding to the reissue, after 20 years, of Professing Literature, Gerald Graff’s history of American English departments.
…Graff’s book brought a cooling sense of historical perspective to the inflamed passions of the moment. We’d been having the same arguments, it turned out, since universities started teaching English literature in the middle of the nineteenth century. The positions may have changed, but the issues had not. Classicists had been deposed by humanists, humanists by historians, historians by critics and now critics by theorists, but across the barricades of each revolution, the same accusations were flung: obfuscation, esotericism and overspecialization; naïveté, dilettantism and reaction. Teaching versus research, humane values versus methodological rigor, “literature itself” versus historical context…
What’s happened since? Graff’s new preface reaffirms his belief that the answer to the mutual isolation of competing critical schools is to “teach the conflicts,” but it doesn’t tell us what’s happened in the past twenty years (which happen to be the twenty years since I decided to go to graduate school). Broadly speaking, the past two decades have seen a move back toward historicism from the purely rhetorical realms of deconstruction: postcolonialism, New Historicism, cultural studies, history of the book…
[Commenting on trends revealed by studying academic job ads and course lists, Deresiewicz continues:]
…First, the number of students studying English literature appears to be in a steep, prolonged and apparently irreversible decline. In the past ten years, my department has gone from about 120 majors a year to about ninety a year. Fewer students mean fewer professors; during the same time, we’ve gone from about fifty-five full-time faculty positions to about forty-five. Student priorities are shifting to more “practical” majors like economics; university priorities are shifting to the sciences, which bring in a lot more money. In our new consumer-oriented model of higher education, schools compete for students, but so do departments within schools. The bleaker it looks for English departments, the more desperate they become to attract attention.
In other words, the profession’s intellectual agenda is being set by teenagers. This is also unprecedented. However bitter the ideological battles Graff described, they were driven by the profession’s internal dynamics, not by what our students wanted, or what they thought they wanted, or what we thought they thought they wanted. If grade schools behaved like this, every subject would be recess, and lunch would consist of chocolate cake.
The article listed in AL Daily that sent me to that is a “solution” proposed by Jonathan Gottschall in The Boston Globe.
Though the causes of the crisis are multiple and complex, I believe the dominant factor is easily identified: We literary scholars have mostly failed to generate surer and firmer knowledge about the things we study. While most other fields gradually accumulate new and durable understanding about the world, the great minds of literary studies have, over the past few decades, chiefly produced theories and speculation with little relevance to anyone but the scholars themselves. So instead of steadily building a body of solid knowledge about literature, culture, and the human condition, the field wanders in continuous circles, bending with fashions and the pronouncements of its charismatic leaders.
I think there is a clear solution to this problem. Literary studies should become more like the sciences. Literature professors should apply science’s research methods, its theories, its statistical tools, and its insistence on hypothesis and proof. Instead of philosophical despair about the possibility of knowledge, they should embrace science’s spirit of intellectual optimism. If they do, literary studies can be transformed into a discipline in which real understanding of literature and the human experience builds up along with all of the words.
This proposal may distress many of my colleagues, who may worry that adopting scientific methods would reduce literary study to a branch of the sciences. But if we are wise, we can admit that the sciences are doing many things better than we are, and gain from studying their successes, without abandoning the things that make literature special…
The changes I’m recommending would constitute a paradigm shift. They would require deep alterations in what literature departments teach and how students are trained. Of course, graduate students would still take the familiar courses on Shakespeare, Victorian novels, and 20th-century poetry, but they would also take courses covering scientific research methods, the basics of statistics and probability, and current thinking in the sciences of the mind.
As the field developed, it would build a methodological tool kit that retained an honored place for the old skills of close reading and careful reasoning, but also included new scientific tools of study design and statistical testing. Literary scholars would keep their long shelves of books and their habits of good scholarship, but would also avail themselves of sophisticated text-analysis software, the psychology lab, and collaboration with researchers from scientific fields…
I must be getting old, because I find myself unable to salivate over Gottschall’s recommendations. Perhaps part of me just wants to read books…
Even older than I is M H Abrams who is, believe it or not, still alive, as Jeffrey J Williams shows:
In literary studies, M.H. Abrams is an iconic name. It appeared as “general editor” for 40 years on nearly nine million copies of The Norton Anthology of English Literature, and has also, in a detail that only scholars would know, led the indexes of many a critical book for a half-century. (In fact, one scholar I know cited “Aarlef” just to avoid that custom.) In addition, Abrams, now 95, stamped the study of Romantic literature: His book The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (Oxford University Press, 1953) was ranked 25th in the Modern Library’s list of the 100 most important nonfiction books of the 20th century, and he was a prime participant in debates over literary theory, especially deconstruction, during the 1970s and 80s…
One of his innovations was to get help, gathering a group of seven editors who were experts in their fields — instead, says Abrams, of the usual “single editor or two trying to deal with everything from Beowulf to Thomas Hardy.” Remarkably, the editors did not meet as a group until after the anthology came out, which was the secret to its efficient completion, according to Abrams: “None of us expected the success of the thing when it finally, after four or five years, hit the market.”
Another innovation was that it “eliminated the snippet representations” in favor of complete works and incorporated introductions to each literary figure, “so that in the anthology, you had the equivalent of a short history of English literature.” And it was all portable, printed on a normal rather than an oversize, double-columned page, and on onionskin to keep it light. For Abrams, the key “was not to force people to teach what you wanted them to teach, but give them the equivalent of a small library from which they could select what they would want to teach.”
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Abrams’s career is that he has kept up for more than 60 years. Through the 1970s and 80s, he sorted through and questioned new schools of literary theory like deconstruction and theorists like Stanley Fish and Jacques Derrida, whom he found compelling but disagreed with. He adds, “I’ve been skeptical from the beginning of attempts to show that for hundreds of years people have missed the real point,” his chief quarrel with contemporary theory. While affable, Abrams doesn’t shy from debate, even with his former student, Harold Bloom, saying, “I enjoy a good intellectual fight, with somebody I disagree with, about what seem to be fundamental matters.”
Today he is more interested in ecology but still works on the Norton and revises his best-selling Glossary of Literary Terms (Rinehart, 1957) every few years. Looking back, he says, “I didn’t expect the success of The Mirror and the Lamp, I didn’t expect the success of the Norton anthology, I didn’t the success of the glossary, [but] I must confess, if I take down one of my essays now, it still seems to me good, and that I find a source of gratification.”
I still use the Glossary of Literary Terms…
