Scholarship in English has trended toward the ridiculous and irrelevant for a long time. I don't know what it's like in other disciplines, but I think part of the problem in English is that it is not even possible to pretend that there is an objective reality to which our scholarship points. Thus English scholarship is tautological: We study these texts because they are important, and they are important because we study them, and we need to do what we can to make the whole enterprise look difficult and specialized enough to justify our existence.
Back in the 19th Century, when it first occurred to people to make English literature a college discipline, many were appalled. Why, they wondered, should an educated person have to be instructed in the literature of his native language, which he was presumed to have read?
A case can be made for studying literature. Deep study of a work yields new insight, and having some notion of a book's cultural context can make it more intelligible. But intelligibility is hardly considered a desirable quality these days among lit scholars. Here's an example.
I've already mentioned a seminar I took in which visiting scholars figured prominently. As we were preparing for one visit, we met with a faculty member who was well-versed in psychoanalytic theory, which was the visiting scholar's area. We spent the entire three hours of the seminar trying to make sense of a footnote in the article the visiting scholar had asked us to read. By the end of the evening, many of us students were understandably frustrated and hostile. As I proposed possible meanings for the paragraph we were wrestling with, the faculty member accused me of "reading into it." I said, "How can I not read into it, when it's impossible to figure out what this woman is trying to say?"
The next week, when we met with the scholar, she was unable to answer any of our questions articulately. When we asked her to clarify a sentence or piece of jargon, she responded with fresh abstractions. Her public speech was impossible to follow; I remember looking around the room and waiting for someone to stand up and say, "This is gibberish! Get off the stage!" but it didn't happen. I've often regretted not standing and saying it myself.
My thesis advisor asked respectful questions during the Q&A, and then excoriated the visiting scholar in class later that week. My respect for him ticked down a couple of notches, but his behavior was typical. Most students and faculty, in my experience, will acknowledge privately and off the record that theory-driven literary scholarship is intellectually bankrupt, while publicly participating fully in the system.
When our regular professor came back to class, he'd had reports from both the other faculty member who'd met with us and the visiting scholar that we were resistant to the material. He lectured us for almost an hour: "You need to come to terms with this if you want to be serious scholars. You're complaining that this theory has nothing to do with reality, but it's theory, it doesn't need to have anything to do with reality."
I like that deft turning: if we are unwilling to engage with a scholar who writes such obfuscatory prose that in three hours of wrestling we can't understand three sentences, the problem is with us. This was the nadir of my graduate years. To be told in so many words that theory could be completely divorced from reality was appalling; to have this visiting scholar held up to us as a model was revolting.
And yet, I suspect that most of the students in that class have gone on to embrace empty theory. It's what you have to do, after all, to succeed. Theory is the focus of literary studies these days; books ("texts") are used to faciliatate the study of various theoretical perspectives, rather than literary theories existing to help us better read and understand books.
My final comment: I was teased by other students for being excited about books and classes. "You're eager," one woman told me, and heads nodded. I was eager, and to my mind the other students should have been, too. Instead they complained if they were asked to take a course or read a book outside of their narrow area of interest; one of my closest school friends, a fellowship winner, resented being asked to read anything written before 1990. When I went back to graduate school, I looked forward to meeting people who shared my wide-ranging intellectual curiosity. Unfortunately, none of them took the same classes I did.
Posted by Su Penn at July 4, 2003 09:40 AM | TrackBackI honestly can't say that theory is intellectually bankrupt. I followed a theoretical discipline in Comparative Literature for several years, and I was generally persuaded and enlightened by what my teachers and texts had to say. I even had a class where we read footnotes, but they took on crucial importance in inflecting the main argument of the text in question.
To embrace theory is not the Faustian bargain of academic success. The branch of theory in which I specialized was reviled, vituperated, and generally dismissed. Its students and teachers are now scattered over the country, in various states of non-tenurability. We weren't in it for the prestige; we were in it because we felt it led to the truth about texts.
Was it of any use? Did it have any connection to the real world? No more than literature itself is or does. The world I inhabit today is pragmatic beyond belief; even reading is viewed with considerable suspicion. In such an environment, I keep what I know to myself, but there is no doubt in my mind that what I learned was precious.
Posted by: jkcohen on July 5, 2003 04:17 AMWell, your experience was obviously different from mine, particularly with regard to footnotes! You say the theory had "no more [connection to the real world] than literature itself is or does," and I don't see we disagree there--I believe literature does have a relationship to the real world, and so should theory. I'd also say that theory is actually necessary if literature is going to be studied at all. My complaint about my experience in graduate school, which I do not think was aberrant, is that the balance between literature and theory was so badly out of whack and the theory was so ofen so very abstract and unconnected that it did not serve to illuminate the texts, or to "persuade and enlighten" students. Actually, that had a lot to do with how the theory was written; it's perfectly possible that the article I discussed in the original log entry had valuable content, but how could one be expected to know that when the meaning is buried so completely beneath incomprehensible jargon and abstraction? There can be no persuason or enlightenment where there is no understanding.
I admit, I am thinking about doing an additional post or two about the really good experiences I had in grad school. I liked a great many things about it, and if I hadn't had a baby I'd probably still be there.
Posted by: Su on July 5, 2003 08:06 AM