A researcher who has written a book about the grant and fellowship review process describes how various disciplines fared on the panels she observed. Here’s English.
… Panelists who are in English literature perceive that their discipline has a “legitimization crisis.” Perhaps because of the influence of poststructuralism in the discipline, literary scholars are particularly aware that the standards of evaluation are intersubjective, resulting from the interaction of panelists. They’re ambivalent about how successful a peer-review panel can be. Asked whether “the cream rises to the top,” they emphasize that doesn’t necessarily happen. Some are unsure whether “quality” exists.
Even if you didn’t have such relativistic views of excellence, the question of how to evaluate literary studies remains open. At one point, there was agreement on mastery of close reading, how language works. But three trends have undermined that consensus: critique of canonization and of privileging the written text; a widening of interest to include history, anthropology and the social context in which a text is written; and challenges — whether from Marxism, psychoanalysis, poststructuralism — to the whole idea of “representation.”
One result is that literature proposals don’t do as well in multidisciplinary panels. One panelist told me, “At some point, somebody said, ‘Gosh, we’re giving all the awards to historians.’ And I remember thinking, ‘That’s not surprising.’…
April 4th, 2009 at 11:34AM
I’m holding out (probably too much) hope for the new trend in criticism called new ethics, which attempts to tackle the question of what literature–the novel in particular–does to our ability to perceive the world and the different ways people think about it. It started, maybe, in postcolonial studies, but I think people are realizing that it has implications outside some hazy idea of an ethnic Other. About half of my first year cohort at Berkeley seems interested in the new ethics (I’m reading Martha Nussbaum right now), which differs from a lot of this structuralist-poststructuralist nonsense in that it posits a world outside the text that can and should be represented. It’s not in the least bit relativistic, which is comforting. I have some reservations about subordinating a more aesthetic approach to philosophy because I’m suspicious about interdisciplinarity in general, but I’m willing to think positively about this development.
April 6th, 2009 at 1:41PM
" One panelist told me, “At some point, somebody said, ‘Gosh, we’re giving all the awards to historians.’ And I remember thinking, ‘That’s not surprising.’… "
Well, at least one good piece of news for the historians out there.
As someone on the border between American History and Lit, I sometimes feel like I’m squeezed within two fields collapsing in on one another.
April 6th, 2009 at 1:49PM
Crimson05er: Funny!