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Saturday, January 08, 2005
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UD DOES NOT THINK WE ARE READY
“Are we ready?”asks Stanley Fish in the latest Chronicle of Higher Education. Are we literary academics ready for the next big thing, which turns out to be, says Fish, religion? “We had better be, because that is now where the action is. When Jacques Derrida died I was called by a reporter who wanted to know what would succeed high theory and the triumvirate of race, gender, and class as the center of intellectual energy in the academy. I answered like a shot: religion.” UD does not think we are ready. She suggested as much in an earlier entry on this weblog (February 1, 2004), from which she will now quote: Sounding every inch the fundamentalist, Jonathan Culler, in a 1986 essay called “Comparative Literature and the Pieties [Culler, Jonathan. "Comparative Literature and the Pieties." Profession 1986: The Modern Language Association of America (1986): 30-32] warns that for the “sake of the political and intellectual health of our nation,” university teachers must incorporate a thoroughgoing critique of religion into their classes. In practice, this would mean that when teaching Paradise Lost or the Inferno or the later poems of T.S. Eliot or Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory or fiction by Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, George Eliot, Charlotte Bronte, etc., humanities professors would be obliged to “compare Christianity with other mythologies [and] make the sadism and sexism of religious discourse an explicit object of discussion.” Professors in the humanities are particularly obliged to do this because, “almost alone in universities, we are the ones who explicate and decline to criticize religious conceptions, themes, and doctrines.... Instead of leading the critique of superstition, comparative literature is contributing to the legitimation of religious discourse.” Rather than critique religion in the way Culler suggests (UD figures the deal in the classroom would go something like this: “Just as some people believe witches eat people and poison wells, so Jane Eyre believes God brought Rochester back to her.”), humanities professors collude with repressive religious institutions: “The complicity of comparative literature with religion in our own day,” Culler writes, “is a subject that has scarcely been broached but that cries out for attention, not least because religion provides an ideological legitimation for many reactionary or repressive forces in America today and thus is arguably a greater danger than the ideological positions comparatists do spent their time attacking.” |
