Rita, friend and fellow blogger, sends UD a piece in The Nation that scrutinizes the Modern Language Association’s job list for this year and concludes — as UD did in an Inside Higher Ed piece awhile back — that the English department as a location for the serious study of serious literature is dying. Close to dead.
The writer notes that there are very few actual literature jobs on the list — it’s about film, ecology, creative writing… pretty much anything you can think of except the American novel, or British poetry, or Shakespeare. The writer describes the list as a
whatever-works grab bag: “Asian American literature, cultural theory, or visual/performance studies”; “literature of the immigrant experience, environmental writing/ecocriticism, literature and technology, and material culture”; “visual culture; cultural studies and theory; writing and writing across the curriculum; ethnicity, gender and sexuality studies.” The items on these lists are not just different things–apples and oranges–they’re different kinds of things, incommensurate categories flailing about in unrelated directions–apples, machine parts, sadness, the square root of two. There have always been trends in literary criticism, but the major trend now is trendiness itself, trendism, the desperate search for anything sexy. Contemporary lit, global lit, ethnic American lit; creative writing, film, ecocriticism–whatever. There are postings here for positions in science fiction, in fantasy literature, in children’s literature, even in something called “digital humanities.”
Ideological battles used to be ”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.”
March 17th, 2008 at 1:52PM
I find this kind of rant really tedious, because it unloads anti-intellectualism while pretending to high intellectual purpose.
First, a goodly percentage of the time I hear someone bemoaning the loss of high-cultural literary studies, and I ask, "So, why is that important?", I get little back besides, "It just is" or "If you have to ask, you’re an idiot". Or you get chestnuts like "Because we need a common high culture if we’re to remain a nation/civilization/the West". There are well-thought out, intellectually substantive arguments to be made about the distinction between serious literature and popular culture and about the importance of studying the latter, but they’re not easy arguments and shouldn’t simply be assumed to be gospel truth. I want to know why it is important that the study of English Literature be confined to a very specific and constrained canon of literary works.
Second, I find it annoying because the list of unserious topics is usually just a grab-bag of whatever the snob in question doesn’t like or knows nothing about. Take "global lit" as if it were the self-evidently unserious bullshit opposite of American or British literature. Or "ecocriticism": the name may be a jargonish neologism, but in substance, that might turn out to be little more than a classic kind of literary criticism focusing on images of nature, environment, ecology and so on–the kind of work that UD herself was just speaking to in an entry on Ireland. I get tired of this cherry-picking of course titles and MLA paper titles to fill out an unthoughtful jeremiad. I’d rather see someone with this complaint roll up their sleeves and read through some of the best scholarly work in cultural studies, or on Asian-American literature, or on children’s literature, or on science fiction and then go about making a substantive, reasoned, example-rich, theoretically informed argument about why the academy should either never study or teach about these topics at all, or why they are proper to study but in some other discipline or department besides English Literature. Someone could just as easily toss DeLillo in the grab bag of self-evidently unserious novelists, for example: then what? One coudl splutter and say, "But of course he’s serious". Well, so’s Samuel Delaney or Octavia Butler; Nadine Gordimer or Wole Soyinka or Amy Tan; Michael Joyce or Espen Aarseth.
March 17th, 2008 at 5:44PM
Tim’s argument strikes me as a bit of a straw man when he wishes someone would just argue "why the academy should either never study or teach about these topics at all, or why they are proper to study but in some other discipline or department besides English Literature." The original piece isn’t saying that no one should teach or study ethnic literature or film studies, but that more people should be teaching the heart of the discipline.
Back in grad school in history (one of the Ivies), a friend made what struck me as a cogent observation. At this high-end university, where students could be sure of a comfortable income regardless of undergrad concentration, history was the most popular major, far ahead of English. His explanation was that students who wanted a real sense of the development and dynamics of their own civilization could no longer get that from the English department. It was still possible in history.
March 17th, 2008 at 8:14PM
Since when have English departments been solely for the study of literature? Isn’t that idea at least 50 years out of date?
In my experience, which includes majoring in English at Lafayete College –you know, the place with the 1st major in English– and studying nearby disciplines in grad school at the University of Pennsylvania, among others [pardon the name-dropping], most colleges and universities could not afford the establishment of separate departments until fairly recently. Therefore, traditionally, English became the one-stop-shop for literature, rhetoric (and often speech), drama (and its performed aspect of theater), education, folklore studies, journalism and communication (including media studies, cultural studies, popular culture studies, film studies, and even TV studies), and a laundry list of other sub-majors, many of which had flung off into separate departments in the funding heyday of the 70s and 80s. Not every campus had such schisms, and not every campus supported such schisms easily.
I suspect some of this perceived distress over "Nobody wants a Shakespeare scholar" is a lot of "much ado about nothing." *nod to Bard*
I suspect that one who studies images of sexuality in Romeo & Juliet [yeah, I know, a really boring statement of study] is more than qualified to claim expertise in "gender and sexuality studies."
Someone with an Thoreau expertise should already be able to sell oneself as capable of teaching "environmental writing/ecocriticism." [Walden pond, anyone?]
And what’s with the disparagement of children’s literature? Hello–Louisa May Alcott? How about Judy Bloom? Mark Twain? So, maybe they *do* want someone interested in JK Rowling and capable of including something about Goosebumps in a syllabus. Children’s lit has a rather lengthy history as a viable English lit cred.
But, in this instance, I agree with Timothy Burke. It’s all cherry-picking just to whine about "the horrid state of the discipline"!
I’ve been in a [now close to death] discipline where this sort of crisis rocked it to its foundations. Believe me, English is safe. You people just need to re-package yourselves under a more viable statement of purpose and stop yelling that the sky is falling.
Don’t get me wrong: It *is* falling…just not exclusively on you.
March 17th, 2008 at 9:39PM
I wonder if Shakespeare would have bristled at the idea of his plays being ’serious literature.’ I always thought if he were alive today, he’d pretty much be Speilberg (sp? I never get it right).
March 18th, 2008 at 7:52AM
@dave stone re "The original piece isn’t saying that no one should teach or study ethnic literature or film studies, but that more people should be teaching the heart of the discipline." I don’t know about that. If that’s the issue, then the Job List is not at all the right evidence to make that argument. I bet a lot of those job ads, especially the ones the author really complains about that list three unrelated things, are coming from departments that have a Chaucerian, a Shakespearean, an 18th C prose, two specialists in poetry, a Victorianist, and a 20th C British and a 20th C Americanist on the books already.
Ditto to The Myth that a lot of these fields are new ways of looking at the same classics, or perhaps putting Thoreau with Annie Dillard instead of just working on Thoreau, or a Shakespearean with a sideline in film studies (which would make a *lot* of sense, to me).
I’m struck by the notion that teenagers are driving this. I don’t think that’s right, seems over-simplistic. Partially because of what Dave says about majors: "His explanation was that students who wanted a real sense of the development and dynamics of their own civilization could no longer get that from the English department. It was still possible in history." I think other things are driving it, globalization and absolutely the internal politics of the academy, not just the number of majors. Even if teenagers are driving it, I still think the author is too simplistic—it may be, for instance, that teaching is so bad students are not willing to put up with it on top of the difficulty of Shakespeare. It is very likely related to the loosening/expansion of the high school curriculum, such that colleges need to differentiate themselves by teaching books students haven’t already read. But I strongly doubt the change is in any way parallel to letting kids eat as much chocolate cake as they want.
I don’t particularly think that the development and dynamics of our own civilization should be the raison d’etre of an English dept, myself, but I think that’s the same notion that Timothy Burke is questioning.
March 18th, 2008 at 9:43AM
I’ll add another log to the fire. Let’s take "the digital humanities". In even the most traditional conception of an English Department, the development of print literature in successive forms was an absolutely core subject. That’s what you studied if you studied Beowulf or Chaucer. It’s what you studied if you studied Shakespeare. It’s what you studied if you studied Richardson and Fielding. It’s what you studied if you studied Dickens. It’s what you studied if you studied Joyce. You read closely, did the close work of interpretation, but you also looked at the history of the book, of publication, of annotation, of circulation. This is not a fancy new trendy concern. How could you read Beowulf in an English course and not ask about the connection between oral literature and writing? Shakespeare and the connection between Elizabethean theater and writing? Fielding and the development of the novel as a popular form? Dickens and serialization?
So we’re supposed to think about all that, even in the most traditionally composed, high-serious English Department we can imagine, and yet, thinking about what happens to print and literature in digital media is some trendy kind of catering to teenagers? What a vulgarian attitude: that’s someone who doesn’t understand a damn thing about literary study except that it’s supposed to be about Big Name Authors, who has no intellectual grasp on the practices they’re supposedly defending.
March 18th, 2008 at 7:21PM
"but that more people should be teaching the heart of the discipline."
Uh, I think that Timothy Burke was–among other things–asking what makes certain things the ‘heart of the discipline’ and not others.