Academe: January 2008 Archives

So I read Erin O'Connor's remarks on Stanley Fish's attempt to "justify the humanities" by turning the entire discipline into a series of "intriguing intellectual puzzles."

Oh, dear God.  Not directed toward Erin - I think her essay is on the mark.

I have had it with academics who no longer have the temerity to stand up and basically say, "You know what?  We have thousands of years worth of human history and experience and artistic creation available to us--and some of the best examples are presented here, here and here.  Now you're free to ignore/mock/reject any or all of it, but frankly we think you do so at your peril.  Why?  Because people don't exist in a vacuum, and pretending that they do, or that somehow we've moved beyond the need to reflect on our past, on our humanity or on morality is completely ignorant. It doesn't matter what your day job is, you're going to struggle with the meaning of life, the universe, and everything, and guess what--you can find guidance or cautionary tales in the humanities that may make your life easier, or maybe you'll just find a story that gives you pleasure, and that's valuable too.  Bottom line - you're human, and the humanities are relevant to your life."

Yeah, I know.  It's all sincere and insufficiently ironic and if we keep on in this vein someone might bring up something icky and scary like RELIGION or the SOUL or LIFE HAVING MEANING beyond your net worth or the Daily Show's daily snark, and we're way too cool to talk about that stuff anymore, right?

You know, if this debate didn't sadden me so, I might get a kick out of the irony that after spending decades tearing down their own discipline, academics in the humanities are left staring at the wreckage in befuddlement and asking themselves what the hell happened.

How about this local race?

Run 2 miles from Bell Tower to local Krispy Kreme, eat one dozen donuts, run 2 miles back, and do it all in under an hour!

It's the Krispy Kreme challenge, and the vomiting is EPIC.

Yes, it was dreamed up by an undergrad student - what, you're surprised?  But this year we'll have 2,000 people running, eating, and yes, maybe throwing up all over Hillsborough Street.

After having blogged for coming up on 5 years now - good God, my ego apparently DOESN'T know any bounds - I know that it's difficult to come up with the pithy, or the funny, or the ranty, or all of the above on a daily basis.  But as I always say, "Better a blogger be silent than completely inane, dude!"

Okay, I've never even thought that before today, as you know if you've ever read this blog and its encountered its recurrent inanity, so I'll just be taking my ladder and getting over myself now.

But not before pointing you to this article in the Chronicle Review, the point of which seems to be that the author has appointed herself the Arbiter of Sartorial Vanity, or something.  Which would be fine on a personal blog, but seems a bit odd in the Chronicle, unless someone there has decided that what they really need to do is to become more like Inside Higher Ed.  Hope this isn't registration only - if so, here are a couple of pertinent paragraphs:

"After 30 minutes, 286 calories and a lot of ruminating on men, women, looks, age, vanity and college T-shirts, I reached the apodictic conclusion that my fellow urban fitness fanatic looked ludicrous wearing his Harvard T-shirt. Why is this, I wondered. After all, practically every man and maybe half the women huffing and puffing in the gym wear T-shirts with words printed on them, and many of those indicate a college or university. Outside my gym, any ride on a subway will treat you to a veritable parade of college T-shirts. The problem doesn't rest in the college T-shirt, I finally figured out, but in who does the wearing...."

"Isn't it enough that Harvard, Yale and Princeton graduates rule the world, and rule it rather badly? (Do the names McBundy, Rostow, Bush, or Alito ring a bell?)

"This is O.K. As Jimmy Carter (alumnus of the Naval Academy) famously said, "Life is not fair." But hold on. It is fair. If you did graduate from Harvard, Yale or Princeton, and more than 18 months after your graduation you're still into wearing your college T-shirt, you're as pretentious as ol' Wolf. If you don't know it, that woman sweating it up on the treadmill next to you in the gym certainly does."

So the argument boils down to - if you're a white dude who went Ivy, you can't sport a college t-shirt after graduation, because makes you pretentious.  And also, some white dudes who went Ivy are Republicans!  And they rule the world, so NO SHIRT FOR YOU, PRETENTIOUS MCSNOB!

Well okay then, Random!

Perhaps I'm just a glutton for punishment, but I've been perusing the blog entries and reporting from the MLA over at the Chronicle, and I've been pleasantly surprised to discover a bit of a recurring theme amongst some of the postings:  that perhaps professional anxiety about the worth of teaching literature is linked to the fact that no one is really emphasizing that literature can be pleasurable and personally meaningful to read.

In the blog review of the panel titled, "Why Teach Literature Anyway," we get the usual responses: 

All of them suggested that by teaching literature, scholars were performing an essential educational function: changing the way students see the world.

(I'll gloss over the unspoken addendum of "because students don't see the world properly" that sometimes unfortunately accompanies this attitude, or else this entry will become WAY bloated.) Then a theory professor added:

When she first began teaching, she said, she taught students to apply the close reading they had learned in their literature classes to theoretical texts. "But for more than a decade," she said, "students have come into class not having learned close reading at all."

How odd that it would fall to her to teach the habit of literary reading, she said. "I'm wondering, if they're not getting that training, why study literature anyway?"

But the last portion is the most telling:

After the panel one member of the audience asked why none of the speakers had said anything about pleasure.

"We're all for pleasure," Mr. Bromwich assured him. "We just took it for granted."

Yep, and that right there is a big part of the problem - the academic process in English has been so geared toward the "tools of theory" for so long that they've lost sight of the fact that the texts they're studying haven't been around for centuries or more because they provide a fabulous insight into the subjugation of the Other, but because folks kind of liked reading them and finding personal meaning within them. 

I think what gets lost, the longer someone stays in academe, is the knowledge that the majority of the kids they're teaching are coming from high school envrionments where they've (the kids, not necessarily the teachers - okay, Hublet?) treated reading as "that thing I have to do to pass the test, to write the essay, to get the high score on the SAT and to get into college" and then these students find themselves confronted with professors who lay texts before them like corpses to be dissected by a variety of theoretical scalpels - with the focus on the scalpel.  Somewhere along the way all the fun and relevance (in terms of personal discovery and relevance, not political or theoretical relevance) has been sucked right out of teaching literature.

Maybe it's because I taught intro courses, and never got that sense of removal, that I was reminded daily that most of the kids in these classes would have only a brief brush with "High-Toned College Literature," and that if part of my job was to encourage literacy in general, it was important that I convince them that - guess what?  Reading isn't just about slogging through hundreds of pages about a peg-legged obsessive and his stupid whale nemesis and then writing an essay on what that tells us about Marx in order to get an "A," it was also about discovering what you thought the author was doing and why, and what that might mean. And that making those discoveries could be kind of fun.

And there was a panel on just that at the MLA this year, too - "Pleasure Now!" 

After the recitation, four scholars delivered "provocations" to the audience, calling for do-it-yourself lifestyles and a return to the "pleasure of close reading."

They referred to the contemporary "speed up" in scholarly output and workloads as a prime pleasure-killing force. But they also hinted at another problem closer to home for leftist critics. Namely: Scholars who analyze literature as if they are performing autopsies on the workings of power can get pretty dreary.

Is something wrong when reading literature becomes a performance of displeasure? That seemed to be one of the guiding questions among the scholars at "Pleasure Now!"

Gee, ya think that spending a couple of decades viewing texts as nothing more than windows into the myriad ways that "(insert aggrieved populace) gets screwed, usually by the West, or Capitalism, or Men, or All Three Together in An Unholy Trinity of Evil!", might turn some folks off?

It sure sucked the fun out of reading for me, which is why I read mostly genre fiction or history now.

Well, that and the fact that the "serious" modern fiction being turned out by grads of the MFA programs in this country is just one continuous dreary crap-fest, but that's a rant for another day.