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June 20, 2003
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A bark that bites
My recent posts on the discomforts of academic relativism have led Captain Yips to reflect on the decadent degradation of the academic humanities:
It was around 1970 that I noticed changes in emphasis that I and others certainly found indigestible. We drifted from an emphasis on ìtext-and-contextî to an emphasis on, well, ME. This change was partly due to the relentless insistence on ìrelevance,î something I never quite got. It was my business to make myself relevant to Shakespeare, not Shakespeare to me, or so I thought. The politicization of the academy is another aspect; itís probably not possible to overemphasize the influence of a diluted Marxism in the 1970s academy.I also felt strongly a sense of exhaustion. It takes a good deal of effort to become a ìlearned person.î You have to value the effort and the goal. If youíre going to teach A Tale of Two Cities, you not only have to know the text back to front, but also have a good idea about how Dickens understood the French Revolution, how the book fit with Dickensí other work at the time of composition: a fairly elaborate preparation, not even considering pedagogic technique. Among my professors in the early 1970s, I detected a certain impatience. After 1970, we began to get courses that often strayed a long way from traditional curriculum. The same professor who was catatonia-inducing at noon on The 20th Century Novel shone teaching a non-credit course on film noir seven hours later. Can there be such a thing as a spirit of a profession? If there can be, it was tired of the rigors of scholarship in 1970, and found no joy in its rewards. New and exciting ideas had come into the room, colorfully dressed and flirting madly.
Well. The post modern tidal wave has passed; at least some people seem sick of theories in their various flavors, and some realize that there are other ways to be a scholar. I wonder if, as people of my generation retire, the younger men and women who replace them will collectively exhale and resume the patterns of scholarship that prevailed 40 years or more ago? I only hope that it doesnít come to the method of promotion formerly used at Terry Pratchettís Unseen University; assassination of the older professors by the younger. That would be untidy.
It was around 1970 that I was learning to talk--so I appreciate the longer view offered here. The point about "relevance" is right on: the increasing shrillness, snobbery, and grandiosity of so much humanist scholarship can be traced directly to the attempt to argue for the social, political, and cultural relevance of the arts. And of course they are relevant--they give meaning, depth, and texture to our lives in precious, priceless ways. But they are not relevant in the ways many scholars insist that they are. You cannot discern the ideology of imperialism from Jane Eyre--but there are scores of critics who say you can. You cannot detect a uniquely homosexual literary style in the work of a Walt Whitman or a Henry James--but there are critics who say you can. You cannot argue that a poem or story singlehandedly subverts patriarchal hegemony or that a novel or play may be read as a microcosm of the culture in which it was written. But critics do it all the time, and they do it because they want to make works of art into something they are not. Making exaggerated, often irrelevant claims about the relevance of particular works and making those claims stick: that is the work of the professional humanist today. By and large, it's what gets rewarded, it's what gets published, and it's what gets taught.
For that reason, I am not as hopeful as Captain Yips that the people of my generation will restore the academy to a less preposterous and more responsible frame of mind. To do that, you have to have the wider view he mentions--and we, by definition, do not. Many of us were not properly educated or adequately trained, and many of us do not even recognize this. Many of us would also never be open to such a recognition--there is simply too much pride at stake, not to mention too many jobs.
My feeling is that the humanistic side of the academy is on a massive unintentional suicide mission. I'd like for it to be otherwise, and would love to be wrong. But I've got a sinking feeling the patient may already be dead.
UPDATE: Johnny Two-Cents responds. For more examples of the sort of thing I've been talking about, check out this Washington Post piece on the latest academic vogue, "Whiteness Studies." Joanne Jacobs has more--the comments from her readers are marvelous.
