May 14, 2008
literary science?
Not every literary scholar is so pessimistic, but most would agree that the field's vital signs are bad, and that major changes will be needed to set things right.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.
more from Boston Globe Ideas here.
Posted by Morgan Meis at 07:21 PM | Permalink
Comments
Why should literary studies become more scientific? What one needs to become clear on is what literary studies are about -- i.e. what their purpose is. And there are as many reasons to go into literary studies as there are to read literature -- i.e. to study literature is among other things to read books.
Now if students of literature can identify a specific question or questions *about* books one can also be sure that they will be able to identify what is the best method for answering them -- but I don't know what the complete set of questions relevant to literary studies *is*.
And part of the reason that literary studies goes backwards and forwards is because the questions students of literature are interested in considering are as variable as the material they consider.
We don't need a "more scientific" understanding of literature -- we simply need to get clearer with ourselves as to why we are interested in studying it and as to what role its study should play in a university education.
"Why have professors of literature?" Because it is desirable, among other things, to have about people who have read a great number of books.
Posted by: Alex Leibowitz | May 15, 2008 8:28:04 AM
Yes, Alex, but only if they know how to read! A book is a device for reaching out to or encountering another mind (the ingenious art of getting past the hard-wired deficit of not being able to read another's thoughts). I've recently participated on a panel where literary scholars were waxing as poetic as they can get about the glories of "historicizing" literature. Well, I doubt anyone, anyone today reads The Death of Ivan Ilych, for instance, because he or she is interested in the judicial system of late 19th century Russia. Instead, we read because another soul has been presented on the page who grapples reluctantly with approaching death, and we read out of empathy, self-interest and self-recognition, we read to hear spoken what is rarely spoken. Historicizing and theorizing as practices are too often leeches on the body of literature, draining it of lifeblood.
Posted by: Philip Graham | May 15, 2008 9:34:01 AM
The academic study of literature in one's own language (in English, at least) is a late-19th C. development that came about with the simultaneous rise of natural science in the university curriculum and the displacement of classics as its core. "EngLit" was (and is), as one of my professors used to say, a "sop to the humanities" for those unable or unwilling to learn classics.
Ever since then, EngLit professors have been trying to justify their existence. In the first half of the 20th C. this was done largely on the analogy to classics - lots of required study of Anglo-Saxon and philology, little or no attention to literature more recent than, say, Tennyson. Postwar the justification has taken on more of an analogy to philosophy, through the rise of "theory." Now perhaps we will try an analogy with science.
All of it is a little silly, whether it's Anglo-Saxon grammar, pseudo-philosophical theories of narrative, etc. etc. Eliminate all academic study of literature in one's own language, reduce English departments to instruction in composition, and let students with a literary bent learn another language, ancient or modern, including its literature. If they really care about literature, they'll find the spare time to read Dickens and Shakespeare on their own, just as scholars used to do.
Posted by: Stephen Potter | May 15, 2008 10:33:32 AM
As someone who makes his living in literary study, I have something of a stake in these sorts of arguments. First of all, two things should be said up front: 1) this article would be more convincing if the writer was not flogging his own book 2) prognoses about the death of literary studies are by no means new. Having said all that, the writer is on to something. There is a widely shared sense of torpor in the discipline, lots of crisis talk or even, yes, death talk. There are equal numbers of plans for rescuing the discipline, most of them consisting in latching it onto something else: science, history of the book, and media studies chief among them. Of all these options, I prefer science (especially cognitive science), because it's the most conceptually rich and because the discipline has such an appalling record in the area (e.g. the Sokal fiasco). Nevertheless, if literary studies is to survive it will have to be on the use its own resources and its own talent. Looking for help elsewhere always produces interesting results, and I'm eager to see where the recent preoccupation with science takes us. But we need to figure out what we can contribute on our own too.
Posted by: Jonathan | May 15, 2008 11:45:26 AM
I am also professionally grafted onto the literary body (although the body is rejecting me) and so these discussions concern me, or at least should concern me.
So, a question (which, if anyone is in the mood, I'd be thrilled to have answered):
What EXACTLY is meant by literary study becoming more like the sciences. Should we adopt the experimental method? More importantly, the "sciences" aren't a field, they're very many different fields of inquiry. So which science should we take as a role model? Should we be literary oncologists? Particle physicists of the public sphere?
I find Jonathan's suggestion that cognitive science is the best bet intriguing, particularly because I don't know which field would be subsumed into which. Will Cognitive science provide a methodology, or an object of inquiry for the field of the study of literary history, or will "literature and cognition" be a 2000 level course one can take in the Cog Sci dept?
My ignorant hunch is that the main thing literary scholars would like to assimilate from the "sciences" is their patina of self-certainty, tranquility, and justification in the eyes of financial administrators. A rather skewed, envious, middle-child fantasy of our overworked and underpaid colleagues on the other side of the campus. And, I might add, a fantasy that is more about ceasing to look so beleaguered than actually how one would go about doing anything that resembles one's own work.
Posted by: transleitor | May 15, 2008 3:18:26 PM
For the writer's new book to have the greatest meaning, those of us who read literature would have to assent to being present at a death-watch. Sorry, but that confession can't be wrenched from me -- I don't feel it's the truth, even if I am being tortured. Since I became an adult, painting has died, turntables have died, classical music has lost devastating market share, English majors have discovered speed-reading (or just not reading), dead white male writers have died their second and third deaths, and almost everyone who works in the humanities has been put on the defensive -- a prelude to being put on life-suport which can end only in offstage plug-pulling, soonish.
And yet. Painting and turntables have come back to life, classical music concert attendance is up, and the odd student is a deep reader. What we may need most of all is some other test of relevancy than how many people seem ardent and informed about literature. Just for fun, think of all the smart people who cannot tell you much about Max Planck, either. Doesn't mean he's left the building.
Posted by: Elatia Harris | May 15, 2008 10:01:46 PM
Hi Elatia,
Good to hear from you on this as on every topic. The article wasn't so much on the death of literature as on the (possible) death of academic literary studies and a (possible) reprieve from science. Two very different things. Even so, your skepticism is quite plausibly portable from the one to the other. That is, academic literary studies has had its death knell tolled on more than one occasion and yet still lumbers on. (Thankfully, or I'd be out of a job.) And yet the recent obsequies for my discipline do seem more meaningful now than in the past. So we'll see. Academic time is positively glacial. Check back with me in five or fifteen years.
Trans raises some really interesting points too. What would "scientific" literary study look like? Got me. The attempts to apply cog sci research to literary questions have mostly been interpretive/conceptual applications to readings. So the basic method of close reading remains the same, but the theoretical apparatus comes from, say, discussions of "theory of mind" rather than from Deleuze or Derrida.
Posted by: Jonathan | May 16, 2008 10:11:27 AM
"classical music has lost devastating market share"
All my life I have loved classical music. This puts me in a small minority, as does being an atheist, loving literature, being interested in science and philosophy and seeing through lies propogated by elites. Thanks to the availibility of recordings, those who are attracted to classical music will find it. The fact that it will never appeal to more than about 5% does not bother me at all.
Posted by: Jared | May 16, 2008 10:47:11 AM
"The fact that it will never appeal to more than about 5% does not bother me at all. "
You could actually take joy in it (as I do) that since it is relatively unpopular, once you find something you like, you are fairly sure of getting it more easily, and for less money than if you wanted, say, the latest hip-hop album.
Likewise in literature. The "dead boring person section" (a quote from a disgusted fellow-patron) at my library is manifestly more book-enhanced than the new releases, and (to me) infinitely more varied and representative.
Sometimes it is beneficial to not be of the majority opinion.
Posted by: reader | May 16, 2008 11:27:57 AM
I am dubious when I hear talk about incorporating scientific study into academic literary criticism. It seems to me that the author of the article is focusing on science not so much because of "science for science's sake," but for its demand within the university. Instead of asking "how can we make lit study more like science," we should be asking, "how can we fashion lit study in such a way as to increase student demand for it?" That said, I do think that English departments could benefit from some of the author's critiques of the methodology of literary scholars (i.e., literary critics should not base their books on assumptions which scientists have debunked decades ago.).
Posted by: Mike | May 16, 2008 1:03:01 PM
Just what we need, another academic discipline arguing that culture is inconsequential. Has Gottschall actually read "The Death of The Author"? Or any actual literary criticism whatsoever?
Here's what Gottschall writes in the conclusion of his author-reader study:
Why doesn't he just become an Evolutionary Psychologist and be done with it? Why do these people have to keep cannibalizing the humanities--isn't their playground big enough already?
Posted by: Chris Schoen | May 16, 2008 1:04:04 PM
Just a couple other things to throw into the mix:
This push toward a more scientific study of lit has happened before in the early twentieth c. with the New Criticism. But of course the New Critism was torn down with the onset of high theory and the culture wars, leading of course to the state of things in today's English departments. This new push for a scientifically-based study of lit might be worth thinking about in contrast to the earlier rejection of the New Criticism.
Also, it's worth noting that the sciences treat "equality" in terms entirely different than the humanities do. That is, "equality" in scientific quarters, although desired, is often times more problematic, more conflicted, than in English departments. Are English departments ready to allow scientific perceptions of equality into its classrooms, into its books, into its political work? Can it?
Posted by: Mike | May 16, 2008 1:16:52 PM
While I do hold to being confused and somewhat annoyed by the turn to "science" by literary studies, I don´t think it wise to take the crisis in literary departments so lightly. Two points on this.
The first is that, with respect, I find Jared's response extremely troubling. I really don't think critical reflection on literature (nor on the aesthetic in general for that matter) should be a predominantly private pursuit, entrenched and proud of its diminished status in public life. It sounds like a hobby one is all too happy to think other people are stupid not to enjoy.
Reading and writing is crucial for public discourse and for the creation of this very public that discusses. To make it into this solitary activity brings it closer to robbing it of its place in conversation (see the Geuss on Rorty this week). This is not a minor threat for literature, as it lives by being read and discussed, not privately enjoyed - and one of the crucial institutions where that discussion is fomented is literary academia (though not the only one certainly.)
Jonathan, thank you for your helpful response. Though, isn't the central problem with reading, writing, writing about reading and reading about writing always what language we use to describe the activity? I mean, close reading doesn't really mean much more that reading intently; the problem is how our understanding of "reading" or "writing" changes with a different set of terms. In this case, I don't see why the sciences should be privileged, as they have as much trouble with this task as we do. Could you point me in the direction of anyone writing on the "theory of mind" as laying a groundwork for a method of reading historical literary texts? I'd be very interested.
As a minor, final note, I would suggest that one of the central reasons for the collapse of the supposed existential justification of literary departments is that they lost what I can only think to describe as their original MORAL function (or ideological function if you will.) No one seems to be willing to argue THAT or WHY it's good for you to learn how to read critically and make this case to a wider public than the reduced, academic sphere. I'm not saying that they should or shouldn't, but it used to be the primary way in which they justified their existence to the institutions that funded them.
Posted by: Transleitor | May 16, 2008 1:44:20 PM
"The first is that, with respect, I find Jared's response extremely troubling. I really don't think critical reflection on literature (nor on the aesthetic in general for that matter) should be a predominantly private pursuit, entrenched and proud of its diminished status in public life. It sounds like a hobby one is all too happy to think other people are stupid not to enjoy."
A listener's response to music or a reader's response to a poem is always a private matter between the artist and an individual. No one can be taught to enjoy a kind of music or art that he or she does not respond to. No intermediation is needed between the listener and the music or the reader and the book. The proper place for public discussions of morality and values is philosophy and philosophy should remain at the core of the humanities.
Posted by: Jared | May 16, 2008 3:25:04 PM
I found particularly underwhelming the following endorsement of the use of stylometrics in literary analysis: "[S]tylometry has helped settle long, angry debates about whether or not Shakespeare wrote some of his plays with coauthors (the answer is that he very probably did)."
Is that the best Gottschall can muster? “Very probably”? I imagine the reason for the debate being so long and angry in the first place is that each side felt that they were "very probably" correct on the matter. I don't see how stylometry and literary science are going to settle anything if all they can offer is tentative, qualified semi-facts.
It is also disconcerting that most of the other examples Gottschall provides of successful "literary science" are actually sociological or anthropological observations. This must have something to do with his habit of conflating the study of literature with the study of “culture”, “the human condition,” and “the human experience.” He states that “stories represent our biggest and most preciously varied repository of information about human nature.” I wish he had bothered to prove this point by relying on facts instead of the swaggering authority of its asserter. It demonstrates that Gottschall makes the same mistake as so many of the contemporary literature critics from whom he wants to distance himself: if literature is the richest source of insight about what it means to be human, then the study of literature is free to become the study of basically everything.
Posted by: C. M. R. | May 16, 2008 3:34:38 PM
If literary studies are becoming irrelevant, it's because scholars have unfortunately forgotten what is emotionally relevant about what they study.
Two stories. First, I once took part in a panel (not the one mentioned in a previous post in this discussion) on "The Pleasures of Reading," which also included a poet and two scholars. Afterwards, the poet and I took notes on the proceedings, coming to the depressing observation that he and I were the only ones who'd actually mentioned and discussed actual works of literature we loved, and why we loved them. The two scholars had spoken of the nature of pleasure, and what philosophers and other critics had written about this. They seemed not to have understood that they had permission to be personal about their relationship to the books they read and study.
Second story. In all the years I have taught fiction writing workshops, I can count on the fingers of one hand how many times undergraduate students mention works of fiction from the literature courses they are taking. Sure, they can make a point about the craft or strategies or emotional impact of a story being workshopped by citing movies or TV, but not the books they're studying in other classes. Well, why not? Because Dickens has nothing to offer, nor James nor Woolf nor Melville? No, it's because those authors are being taught in literature classes as a means to elucidate a fine point of someone else's philosophy or literary theories, or as a work embedded in a larger cultural frame. Unless literary scholars get back to the pith of passion that makes works of literature still live (a serious subject that deserves serious thought), then their irrelevancy will continue, and deservedly so.
Posted by: Philip Graham | May 16, 2008 8:16:04 PM
Philip, I had someone warn me off taking the Greek Art course in college, on the basis that the teacher had ruined it for many. I took the hint, not the course, and am still more ignorant than I would like about the subject -- but I look at Greek art and think about it and experience awed pleasure in its presence. All because of missing the wrong teacher? Maybe. But I'd like to think the unmediated power of art has something to do with it, that in time it would have made even the wrong teacher irrelevant.
As Jonathan points out, the article that started this thread isn't about the private experience of literature -- dead or undead -- but about its professional study, and what new direction that might take. The two are related, however. Most people who get an undergraduate degree in literature will not go on to be professionally concerned with it inside academe, nor will most grad students, even those with a terminal degree. So that makes a lot of educated people who, like Jared, consider the private experience of literature very real -- or at a certain time of their lives, did. They are perhaps a spectral presence here? And on a lower tier? Thank God, they don't know it, and keep on reading.
If we are discussing the potential professional activities of the very, very few readers and writers who enter academic life, where one's Ph.D. thesis need not be of interest to more than 17 people, it seems to me we have to ask how powerful a grip these few -- whatever road they take -- are likely to get on the imaginations of a generation of students who are now about 11 years old. "Transleitor" points out that reading and writing are in the grandest sense a matter of public discourse, but that audience is not, proportionally, what it was in the 1920's -- is it? That leaves quite a lot of private experience out there -- maybe these "artisanal" readers shouldn't be trivialized.
An education enables a person to have a private experience of art, literature, and music that lives apart from high-toned chatter and professional vogues, that in fact outlives both. "But there is that within me
which shall tire torture and time and breathe when I expire;" Byron wrote. Perhaps whatever it was within him can outlast fevered applications of cog sci, too. The real trouble with the article we're all commenting on is that it seems to conflate what academics must do to make their reputations and what students of literature must be taught, the better to love literature more with every year of their lives, to find meaning constantly springing from the reading of their youth.
Posted by: Elatia Harris | May 17, 2008 12:53:24 AM
Thank goodness for the intelligent offerings of the 3 quarks comments section; gold from straw “science” in this case. Did anyone else dissolve into laughter at his refutation of Barthes? “Is this one of those squishy, unfalsifiable literary claims? No, it is also testable. Hijacking methods from psychology, Joseph Carroll, John Johnson, Dan Kruger, and I surveyed the emotional and analytic responses of 500 literary scholars and avid readers to characters from scores of 19th-century British novels. We wanted to determine how different their reading experiences truly were. Did reactions to characters vary profoundly from reader to reader? As we write in "Graphing Jane Austen," a book undergoing peer review, there were variations in what our readers thought and felt about literary characters, but it was expertly contained by the authors within narrow ranges. Our conclusion: rumors of the author's demise have been greatly exaggerated.”
Do you find Mr.Darcy
1.very humble?
2.somewhat humble?
3.proud?
4.very proud?
I think I’ll be tucking Howe and Trilling under my pillow tonight.
Posted by: Jesse | May 17, 2008 8:08:29 AM
Jared, I think when you write that reading is a private matter you take for granted the very substantial influence of others on how we read before we arrive at the title page. And it is certainly false that people cannot be taught to appreciate various works of art. It's true that we won't have much luck in changing other peoples tastes, but anyone with a halfway open mind can be taught to appreciate what is going on in a work of art that someone more untutored would find inscrutable. Don't we all have experiences like this to call upon?
Posted by: Chris Schoen | May 17, 2008 11:49:06 AM
"The real trouble with the article we're all commenting on is that it seems to conflate what academics must do to make their reputations and what students of literature must be taught, the better to love literature more with every year of their lives, to find meaning constantly springing from the reading of their youth."
Amen. Personally, I don't think they are the same goals at all, and it brings to mind a discussion I had recently with a good friend, heading off to graduate school for Clinical Psychology.
We had been discussing the differences between a teaching department and a research department; both of us agreeing that conflating the two aims into one whole made for some very hard decisions for people entering into a profession - do you choose the place with the best research reputation, to become allied with their program and learn from exposure to their current experiments, or do you choose the departments where the teaching takes primacy, in order to absorb the fundamental wisdom of your elders?
Of course it isn't black and white, one or the other, but the point remains that those two goals - research and teaching new inductees, are not necessarily, or perhaps even benificiently, related.
I escaped from the Lit track by the skin of my teeth (captured by a theatrical program), but I can easily see the same problems existing there, especially in the rarefied levels.
Sadly, the funding requirements in place nearly everywhere in the US seem designed to prevent any peacable resolution, leaving departments desperately considering alternate disciplines to absorb in the interests of bridging the gap.
Posted by: reader | May 17, 2008 12:08:42 PM
Thank you, Elatia. I think my main point is that the "private" experience of literature needs to be considered far more seriously in the professional study of literature. What benefits would accrue to my literature colleagues were that to happen, a true deathbed recovery!
Another story. I also do some teaching at a low-residency MFA program, and one of the components of that program is requiring 3rd semester students to write an extended critical thesis. I can't begin to tell you how much anxiety this requirement brings to many of our students (many of whom are in their 30s, 40s, 50s or 60s). Terrible memories of writing papers for English classes haunt them. Why haunt? Because of the remembered irrelevancy of the exercise, which is so far removed from the students' understanding of what truly matters to them as readers. This is not a good sign for how literature is taught.
Eschewing the personal is not "professional" in the study of literature, it is deadening. And there's much that isn't private about the experience of literature. First, it is immediately a conversation between author and reader. And anyone sitting by him or herself on a chair with a book may look as though he/she is alone ("if we agree, as we must, that appearance is not the same as reality"--Flannery O'Connor), but in fact that person is present at a party, filled with a panoply of characters, their histories and their internal lives. There is nothing simple about this, it's actually quite a complicated state, and worthy of open-hearted scholarly inquiry. A good place to start would be to consult P.N. Limerick's NYTimes essay, "Dancing with Professors: the Trouble with Academic Prose." http://trc.ucdavis.edu/bajaffee/NEM150/Course%20Content/dancing.htm
My literature colleagues are for the most part extraordinarily intelligent, funny, insightful folks, and in conversation many can speak with thrilling verve about books. Their discipline needs to find a way to allow them to translate this into their writing.
Posted by: Philip Graham | May 17, 2008 12:40:24 PM
Jesse, that was FUNNY.
Philip, I'll have to read your books. It would indeed juice the corpse if a large majority of academics found their way to Lit Crit because they loved to write -- and knew how. Whoever can do that is welcome to almost any angle they think they need.
Posted by: Elatia Harris | May 17, 2008 2:14:04 PM
The argument English Professors have forgotten to pay attention to the emotional experience or pleasure of reading is hardly new. Some version of the complaint has been around as long as there has been academic literary study. The truth of the matter is you simply can't run a discipline based on evaluation ("this is why something is good") or emotion ("this is what it makes you feel"). The criteria are hopelessly subjective ("You're wrong. It makes me feel differently" or "You're wrong. This poem is bad."). More than this, evaluation and emotion aren't really the basis for an *academic* discipline. They are the basis for journalism and creative writing. The logical extension of Philip's argument is ultimately that we shouldn't have English Departments, or at the very least, we needn't have English Professors. All we need are some good book reviewers and a bunch of novelists and poets to teach creative writing.
If English is to survive as a discipline, it must have an academic rationale. The need for English Departments and English PhDs should be no different from the need for Art Historians or Physicists or Sociologists.
Posted by: Jonathan | May 17, 2008 3:24:14 PM
Jonathan, the idea that subjectivity is not serious is also as old as the hills. And objectivity as an unmarked category for philosophical discourse has long since gone the way of, well, pick your own extinct or endangered creature.
True, subjectivity is messy. And challenging. And liberating, as a critical criteria. English Professors have much to teach (my intellectual and artistic life was forever changed after reading Mark Rose's Shakespearean Design, for example), but why must they erase themselves from what they devote their lives to?
Another story. Years ago at a dinner party I hosted, I listened to a distinguished scientist gently but firmly chastise a well-known writer for his reductionistic ideas about scientific enquiry. He said (and I'm paraphrasing here), that scientific research proceeds by intuition and guesswork, leaps of logic and mystery. Sounds just a little subjective, don't it?
Posted by: Philip Graham | May 17, 2008 6:03:39 PM
Scientific inquiry may well be intuitive, but scientific knowledge is not. By definition it is knowledge than can be objectively verified The question is, can literary “research” produce the same kind of knowledge? Its inability to do so seems to be what’s troubling Gottschall. The alternative is to say, as Philip Graham and several others here seem to, that objectivity does not matter in literary studies.
I would agree, to an extent. I am all for the rough and tumble of literary opinions and tastes being shaped, criticized, and evolving throughout an individual’s lifetime in a personal and non-objective way. My disagreement is that we need university departments of English to do this. The NYRB, or the newspaper book reviews, or the New Yorker, for instance, are all more influential than the PMLA, which is intelligible and interesting (if that) only to professors and grad students. Philip Graham cites a book that particularly influenced him, which I assume was written by an academic, but is there any reason a non-academic “man of letters,” as they used to be called, could not write such a book? Yes, he might have to grub a living through reviewing and essay-writing while he worked on his book, but professors are similarly burdened with their teaching loads. Nor is that analogy inapt, if you think of reviewing and essay-writing quite seriously as a form of instruction, one that reaches far beyond the university classroom.
My own view, as might be suggested by my original comment, is that universities should stick to disciplines that are, broadly speaking, “objective,” in which “right and wrong” answers do exist. It is entirely possible to have wrong notions of biology, or anthropology, or French, or, what is more likely, to simply be ignorant of the facts of such subjects. Students need coherent, orderly instruction in these. Do they need the same for English literature? Again, I don’t think so or, I might say, I don’t think it’s a priority. Once they can read English (which happens in primary school), they can always find, on their own (or by reading the journals and reviews!), the authors who speak the most to them. It will be much harder for them to enter these other disciplines in a similarly independent, unstructured fashion.
Posted by: Stephen Potter | May 17, 2008 7:00:35 PM
Presumably, devoting your professional life to something taking long study, for which you will certainly be underpaid and only possibly admired, implies a passion for the subject. Oh, I could be wrong. And it is one of the great riddles why people who live lives of real devotion to their disciplines often make toxic teachers. It can't simply be that a scholar is not necessarily an educator -- and vice versa. If passion is catching, the driest scholar should be able to set a few nearby young minds on fire. A student may also progress to the point of finding the best teacher he ever had an unimpressive scholar -- but this does nothing to efface gratitude. Because something important has happened -- something that changed everything for that student.
As you say, Jonathan -- studying literature is a discipline. I recognize that there is scholarship, and that its rules don't get schmaltzy because we are reading poetry rather than culturing bacteria. I think people have read without an accompanying thrill of intense pleasure poets accepted as very important -- William Langland, Robert Henryson, and on and on -- because they want to learn, they badly, deeply want to learn about our language before it became easily recognizable to the modern eye and ear. I don't believe anyone here is saying the passion to know and to understand is...some etiolated thing. But for the Humanities to have parity with the Sciences, they don't have to be just like them, or to morph into a subset of them, or to be seen anew through the lens of a branch of science. One thing we know for sure is that our present understanding of cog sci will someday -- perhaps soon -- look rather quaint. For that reason alone, perhaps turning it on George Eliot is wrong.
Sitting still for it while academics like Gottschall make the argument that cog sci could in certain circumstances goose up the relevance of English lit is to get into a defensive crouch already. As well to tell budding scientists they'll always lack for reality until they master poetry -- and that the curricula they're fondest of need to reflect that in order not to be second best, in order not to court under-funding. Maybe we need to go back to the notion that there are bound to be both talented and talent-free teachers -- in every discipline. And that, as Bernard Berenson said, every serious subject is infinite.
Posted by: Elatia Harris | May 17, 2008 7:31:51 PM
Stephen is of course right, scientific enquiry is built upon scientific knowledge. The study of literature is of course built upon a wide range of knowledge as well, whether it's grammatical (see Virginia Tufte's Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style) or deep studies of craft (David Jauss' forthcoming Alone With All That Could Happen: Rethinking Conventual Wisdom about the Craft of Fiction), and so on and so forth, make your own list.
But to what end--right or wrong answers? A cursory glance at the history of criticism shows what a quixotic adventure that will always be. How many paradigms has literary criticism gone through in recent decades? Finding a "right" answer to the meaning of the text spells the death of that text. Case closed, move on, please.
William James' novelist brother once said that the house of fiction has many windows. So does the house of criticism, I venture, offering provisional views of texts whose greatness is defined by their essential resistance to a single understanding.
Human beings are messy. The books they produce will reflect that existential messiness, however elegantly and artfully packaged. And what can critics most honestly accomplish, except grapple with such largeness, and put the stamp of their perspective upon it?
Posted by: Philip Graham | May 17, 2008 7:44:34 PM
Okay, Stephen P. -- I guess that makes you one-up. Careful I don't analyze your prose style for clues to other avatars.
Posted by: Elatia Harris | May 17, 2008 9:07:42 PM
Philip, Stephen and others confirm my point: the suspicion that literary study matters only to literature professors and graduate students is actually a suspicion about the existence of English as an academic field. Of course the NYRB has a wider influence than PMLA. That is neither shocking nor scandalous. Academic journals are as a matter of design addressed to professors and graduate students. Why this should be any different for English than for, say, Sociology, Philosophy, or Chemistry is beyond me. How many people here pick up a copy of the Philosophical Review and read articles by Ted Sider on meta-ontology? Do such articles have any interest for lay readers curious about "the meaning of life"? How would such readers make sense of a sentence like the following (by Sider, a brilliant philosopher, plucked from an article on the meta-ontology of personal identity): "Though it is strictly speaking false that a person walks, this is at least loosely speaking correct, for it is strictly true that a number of microscopic particles stand in a certain multigrade relation we might call the person-walking relation." Would a lay reader interested in the meaning of life get much from this sort of discussion? I double doubt it. But so what. The point is that academic discourse is written for other academics and there is nothing wrong with that.
Journalism, essays and book reviews do one thing. Academic writing does another. There are links between the two, for sure, and bad writing is bad writing. Nevertheless, for as long as there is an academic field called English Literature, it's main audience, as with all disciplines, will be professors and graduate students. That is, I believe, a good thing.
Posted by: Jonathan | May 18, 2008 11:13:37 AM
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