Wednesday, May 25, 2005
(11:25 AM) | Brad:
Disciplinary Discourse as One Big Bitch-Fest
Well well ... the one and only Christopher Hitchens has decided to weigh in on the absurdity of the modern (American) literature departments. Is it just me, or is complaining about the lack of relevant discourse in volumes like The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory or conferences like the annual MLA circus akin to complaining that the political process as seen on C-Span is boring and ineffective?More to the point, though, so many of the criticisms of the literature departments seem to imagine a pedagogical world that I doubt ever existed -- keeping in mind that the study of literature, as an academic discipline, is a pretty new invention. In the later-'50s to mid-'60s, for example, you had the height of New Criticism, whose practitioners were told by the average reading populace that they read too much into things -- that Melville himself, for instance, didn't think as much about what he wrote as did the average literary critic. Prior to that, you had various source critics pouring over the classics. They were revered as being highly trained and doing something very important ... but, in the tweed-coated academic sense that intimidated the average reading populace. And now, post-'60s literary critics are poo-poo'd for reading everything but the texts in question, and, the elitists that they are (so says Hitchens), acting as though they are saying something about and for the average reading populace but not really doing so at all. Too often, the perspective of the popular press, when they (for example) attend the MLA conference, is that the study of literature should be on par with the reading rooms / parlors of old, where one could sit around and talk about great books and one's love of literature. Too often, the perspective fo the academic contrarian, when they sneer at the rhetoric of whatever is in vogue at the time in their discipline, is that the study of literature should be anything different than what currently is -- i.e., rather than doing something different, they spend far more time critiquing the status quo. If you have tenure, do something with it, I say!
But, then again, literature departments are not above reproach: a discipline not being, ahem, disciplined, is, um, no discipline at all. Just like a German is not truly a German unless s/he is really into scat. If literature departments were not doing what the average reading populace either did not understand or didn't like, or if there was not always a contrarian effort from within to take things a different direction, would they wither on the vine? That's not a rhetorical question ... I'm genuinely curious. If anybody has any recommendations re: the 'sociology' (right word?) of disciplinary development, I'd be interested to know.
