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Thursday, December 07, 2006
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A Threshold Moment In a special report, the Chronicle of Higher Ed announces the release of the MLA's publication, Task Force on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion. Its conclusions and recommendations are sensible and unsurprising. Enough already of the "tyranny of the book manuscript." And in a related development, departments "need to rethink not only the conception of the dissertation as a larval monograph but also, and more broadly, the entire graduate curriculum." They sure as hell do. Lots of grad students in the humanities seem tired of English departments that offer one has-been theory course after another -- the glories of Marxist thought, the glories of psychoanalytical thought, the personal identity politics that are so much more important than the common human values of great art -- as if these things weren't dead in the water, and as if they had much of anything to do with literature. Why, students want to know, is so much of what they read in these seminars -- essays as well as novels -- so shitty? Why is so much of it considered only politically, and unable to stand up to any aesthetic or more broadly philosophical prodding at all? You'll never get a job if you don't do theory! their professors warn. Really? Consider two young English professors a couple of decades ago who wrote a high-profile essay, "Against Theory," which infuriated everyone with its scornful dismissal of most of the theory with which PhDs in literature are still thrashed. What happened to these two contrarians? Did they destroy their careers? For quite awhile, one taught at Berkeley, and the other at Hopkins. One of them is one of the highest paid English professors in the country. The other is the incoming president of George Washington University. Instead of stomping out theories like a trained bear, write your convictions. While things in the humanities haven't yet become a "crisis," the MLA report concludes, we're definitely at a "threshold moment." |