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Wednesday, July 06, 2005
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STORMING THE TEMPEL Think of it as the July Fourth Deep Impact probe crashing into Comet Tempel 1. The collision shot the thing’s nucleus out and sent radiant debris into space. Scholars are now huddling around the data: "We don't know exactly what we kicked up yet," one of them says. Think of the pulverization of the study of literature in colleges in this way. If you do, you begin to understand a recent opinion piece in Inside Higher Ed whose author announces with satisfaction the death of English departments. “I propose that the discipline is dead, that we willingly killed it and that we now decide as serious scholars and committed intellectuals what should replace it in this new world of anti-intellectual backlash and religious fundamentalism.” Unlike Tempel 1, which just occurred, the temple of literature was stormed awhile back. Decades ago. But, as this author points out, while people sheltered in English and Comparative Lit departments have as a result been writing and reading apres le deluge for quite awhile, they haven‘t yet officially and institutionally acknowledged the absurdity of continuing to call what they do “English” or “Comparative Literature.” Few of the professors anachronistically housed in English departments any longer restrict their scholarly and pedagogical activities to novels, plays, poems, and secondary works about those things; they’ve been reading and teaching any and all texts for years, not merely those which (for purely political reasons, they argue), have historically been given the imprimatur “literature.” These new texts include all conceivable non-written materials: television shows, walls with graffiti on them, menstrual blood, space chimps. Still fewer of these professors bother consulting any canons, or any standards of aesthetic value, when assigning texts. Surface complexity makes getting to the political stuff harder. What matters is delivering the correct social content to your students, and you can do that faster with didactic novels, preachy essays, video documentaries…. James Wood gets the separation between people interested in aesthetic value and people who’ve become university professors exactly right: Value follows intention. There is no greater mark of the gap that separates writers and English departments than the question of value. The very thing that most matters to writers, the first question they ask of a work - is it any good? - is often largely irrelevant to university teachers. …Writers are intensely interested in what might be called aesthetic success: they have to be, because in order to create something successful one must learn about other people's successful creations.[I found this quoted on Maud Newton's blog.] Readers are interested in aesthetic success, too, until they’re convinced in graduate school that it’s an elitist ruse. As undergraduates they have the same impulse most of us do to try to account for the power of literary art over us. In graduate school they learn that this fascination with the power of aesthetic experience is just tricked up religion (the IHE essayist complains steadily about America being a religious country). They learn how to say this sort of thing (taken from a comment thread at The Valve) with confidence: [F]ormalist definitions of the “intrinsic” properties of literary language inevitably wind up in one of two places. Either they turn into simple tautologies (literature affords reading experiences of a distinct kind, and reading experiences of a distinct kind can only be induced by literature), or they involve their proponents in angels-dancing-on-pins exercises, like trying to determine how the sentence “Twenty minutes later we were in the car” can be nonliterary in a journal or diary, but literary when it appears on page 119 of DeLillo’s White Noise. It’s good we’re only hearing about this now. Imagine how discouraged William James would have been to be told that the whole “varieties of religious experience” thing is either a tautology or a pin dance… Anyway. Used to be the only thing you had in common with other members of an English department was a shared valuing of a reasonably stable set of literary works. Those works were all over the political, religious, and philosophical spectrum, so the commonality had nothing to do with shared attitudes toward content. It had to do with shared attitudes about the distinctive value of literary art -- with what a novel could do that a philosophical essay could not do. You had a strong Department of English Literature as long as you had a strong sense of differentiation between literature and other things. Nowadays (UD spits some tobacco into a pail, scratches her armpit, leans back in her rocker) in these here … Studies Agglomerations, you need to pledge allegiance to certain political propositions before they’ll let you agglomerate. That’s why Studies Agglomerations are ground zero in the intellectually non-diverse academy. They are what people have in mind when they complain about monolithic liberalism in universities. Yet although most of the agglomerated share a politics, they have little else in common. Everyone’s racing down a different rabbit hole after something that hasn’t been decoded. So post-English departments have done two things -- they’ve dismissed literature as such from the literature department; and they have balkanized into smaller and more obscure units. “I find humanities scholars lovely people, but I don't have fuck all of an idea of what they are talking about,” writes a commenter at Butterflies and Wheels. He’s not the only one. For all of these reasons and more, post-English departments have become moving objects irresistibly attractive to academic downsizer probes. These departments are suffering, the IHE writer notes, "massive declines in enrollment." They risk being cost-cut right out of the university. Comet Tempel 1 is a tough piece of work. It has lost a bit of radiance, but it’ll recover. Those of us huddling around the radiant debris of what used to be the English department hope it’ll recover too. A discipline is a terrible thing to waste. |