John Holbo has begun a fascinating thread at Crooked Timber about how and whether blogs can help to revive the moribund field of academic literary study. Along the way, he makes a number of astute observations: that the best literary commentary to be found on blogs is written by non-academics; that as pedagogical and scholarly tools, blogs are underused in the academic humanities; that academic literary blogging could help jumpstart the discipline out of its "shame-spiral of doubt and anxiety"; that blogging could also allow literary studies to sidestep the rate-limiting problem of its present publishing crisis by enabling people to publish their work independent of university presses, with their shrinking lit lists, their protracted publication timetables, and their strangulating gatekeeping powers.

Holbo gets flamed a lot in the comments for his troubles, but that's just symptomatic of the problems he outlines. Academic literary study has got to be one of the most defensive (and defensively self-destructive) fields out there. As a philosopher, Holbo is an outsider who, in daring to comment on the state of the field, opens himself to the sort of regulatory condescension and wagon-circling hostility that is endemic within it. I for one am glad he is undeterred; he has much to say, and it seems highly significant to me that someone without an immediate stake in whether lit departments live or die is the one who is saying it. A particularly nice observation from Holbo, in response to some less-than-friendly comments:

Literary studies is a leviathan with poor circulation, if you will. You need to rub the giant limbs vigorously to get any worthwhile, large-scale activity out of the thing. And that sort of rubbing is: bookchat, frankly. There needs to be some constant buzz of low-level literary energy entering the system and zapping about. That is totally lacking at present, for a variety of institutional and cultural reasons. The journals, as they exist, are poor at it. (Well, this is a big one. Iíll talk about it later.) Now Iím not inclined to make apologies for bookchat, or grant the point that academic literary studies is in any way shape or form more sophisticated than good literary journalism. I fail to see the reasonable benchmark according to which it turns out that academics know things that smart journalists and other serious, devoted bookhounds donít. But it seems to me that even if you thought this was low-grade stuff to be academically disdained, you would still admit that it is an indispensable catalyzing precondition for anything much happening higher up. If you donít rub the giant limbs, getting the fannish blood flowing, the big guy wonít get up and run around the block. So if you think only mighty activities are worthy of us it ought to come to the same in the end, prescription-wise.

Which brings me to my reservations about whether the blog-induced revival Holbo envisions is possible, given academic literary studies' attitudes toward technology and transparency.

One phenomenon Holbo does not note: the hostility many academic humanists have toward technology (it's the thing that is going to destroy the Book, after all), the technophobia that goes hand in hand with that, and the manner in which that essentially irresponsible and ostrichlike fear of the unknown gets elevated to a moral good, a form of counterhegemonic resistance that grows more and more necessary every day. The number of established academic humanists who refuse to use email, or who think it is some kind of political statement not to be able to send or open an attachment, or who regard the web (when they are not shopping on it) as an inferior form of distraction rather than as a revolutionary research and communication tool is surprisingly high. This would not matter so much if it weren't for the fact that these people are the ones setting standards (and, equally important in a discipline with no clear quantitative measures of competence, fashions). They pass their stylish resistances along to their students, sending the clear message that a cultivated ignorance of computers is not only acceptable among "artsy" humanist types, but a badge of belonging. Those of us who have attempted to impose even the most basic technological requirements on students have seen this particular professional pathology in all its glorious colors: undergrads do better than grad students do better than junior faculty do better than senior, but at all levels there are those who proudly declare their studied ludditism as a professional qualification, a sign of their uniquely refined critical sensibilities. As long as technological illiteracy is widely licensed by the rhetoric of intellectual exceptionalism, blogging will not come readily into literary studies.

Even more to the point: literary scholars' collective hostility toward technology, especially as it expresses membership in a self-described cultural elite and a discipline-specific condescension to those outside it with pretenses to know or understand literature and culture, is closely connected to a deep suspicion of accessibility. Holbo is right that literary studies is one discipline that should be aiming at a wide audience and whose health may be measured in terms of its ability to connect with a public that is larger than its overspecialized self. He is right, too, that one sign of the systemic disorder of literature departments today is that their members are positively hostile to the idea that their relevance may and should be assessed by--horror of horrors--uncredentialled laypersons, the great nonacademic unwashed.

You don't have to be a superprogrammer to use blogger or Movable Type. But you do have to accept the premise that the web is a wonderful means of disseminating information and of spurring truly inclusive discussion, and you do have to accept that such discussion is, or ought to be, a goal of professional literary study. I don't think too many academic humanists buy these premises (not enough to practice them, anyhow). Blogging also requires you to put your intellect on the line--which in practice means putting the cheap metonymic authority of your Institutional Affiliation in the trash where it belongs, and earning whatever new authority you can by subjecting your thoughts to the brutal natural selection processes of the virtual marketplace of ideas. You can count the number of literary scholars who are willing to do that on Crooked Timber's blogroll. You can also count the number who are willing to do that while signing their names to what they are doing.

But I agree with Holbo that one really cracking group blog could do a huge amount to change things. My own feeling is that such a blog would ideally draw its writers from within and without academe, that part of its mission would be to form a working conversational bridge across zones that tend to be too separate from one another. I also feel that like Crooked Timber and Cliopatria, and unlike the highly controlled Volokh Conspiracy, such a blog should absolutely have comments enabled. The point, after all, of such an endeavor would not be to display critical brilliance (or cheap imitations thereof, as the case may be) before a muted readership, but to facilitate a genuinely thoughtful exchange that is open to all comers.

So who would launch such a blog? And who would write for it? And what would it be called? All thoughts welcome.

There are all sorts of blogs on all sorts of subjects. Certainly there are now highly commercial blogs like Wonkette that seem to resemble conventional media enterprises. And previously pathfinding blogs like Instapundit seem to be going mainstream with ads. Some of the highest-rated blogs on places like The Truth Laid Bear are simply mouthpieces for hackneyed political opinions of any stripe.

So the blog medium per se isn't necessarily an assurance of creativity, newness, or independence. So far, it seems to me that conventional publishing has such high overhead that the decision to fund a new project of any sort has to pass through too many filters of conventional viability wisdom to allow new creative effort to flourish. The advantage of a blog is extremely low overhead. I reach 500 people a week, it costs me my ISP charge, since Blogger is free. Other blogs reach more people with roughly the same costs. I write what I please.

But if you add the various filters that result, first, in a Ph.D. being awarded, and second, that Ph.D. getting a tenure-track appointment, you're also adding another minimizing factor in newness and creativity. Combine academic success with the traditional publishing industry, and it's correct that statistically you're not going to get too many independent thinkers or non-conformists.

But blogs in themselves won't cure this. I liked Daniel Drezner's blog for a while, for instance, but the appeal of a convenional academic career seems to mean that he posts less often, and more of the posts are on how he's going to his next big-deal conference. If anything, the blog has simply fed his conventional career at the margins.

In addition, a blog per se in fact is not a long-term good economic activity, since you're giving stuff away for free. At some point you've got to find a way to make money off the free samples. Even if you're independently wealthy, self-esteem requires that you find a way to attach social value to your product.

So blogs are a provisional answer to part of the problem,, at the margin, but nothing about blogs will solve the real problems of the publishing industry or the artistic and academic communities.

Erin, concerning the negativism toward Internet technology...weren't there similar reactions toward printing from traditional scholars in the immediate post-Gutenberg era? (And, going back even further, didn't Plato and/or Socrates make some snide comments about the new technology known as "writing?")

John, I'm not sure I agree with the point about blogs and economic activity. For academics and writers, time spent on a highly-regarded blog like the one being proposed should be career-enhancing, once the prejudices have been overcome. And for non-academics...people do all sorts of things for fun that don't have economic return, indeed that often have pretty high costs. They climb mountains, ride horses, fly airplanes, play musical instruments...why wouldn't there be 5-10% of the population who would contribute to intellectual and political discussions, for the same reasons of self-satisfaction?

I may do hang gliding or ride horseback for fun. I may even write lapidary poems for little magazines for fun -- but I think a "serious" artistic or literary effort has to be self-sustaining, and that with only a few exceptions like Emily Dickinson. I believe Samuel Johnson said something roughly like, "Sir, the man who does not write for money is a fool." It is an important form of feedback as well as validation. This is not to say you should get rich at writing, but that it should be in some manner sustaining at whatever low level. Henry James and Joseph Conrad were at the edge of poverty most of their lives, but they did get paid.

The issue with the web is how the artist chooses to use it. No question that people like Daniel Drezner can use it to enhance what looks to be a very successful career made with otherwise conventional choices.

Maybe there's an analogy to open-source software...who would have guessed that people would write operating systems just for the fun of it, and then contribute the code to the public domain...

A major service literary blogs might provide is what I call 'academic light journalism.' We could represent what happens inside the ivory tower for each other, as well as for people who are not academics. For instance, bloggers could report on academic conferences, readings, or other interesting events on or off campus -- especially when writers can find that rare nugget or telling moment that cuts through the jargon and the B.S.

More literary blogging might also help fight the tendency to anti-intellectualism one sees in much of the blogosphere. We can help generate awareness of the kind of work we do, and defend its importance publicly (this will become even more necessary if HR 3077 becomes law).

Final thought: wouldn't it be cool if online journal services like Project Muse started to allow comment boards? That might be another way to stimulate conversations, albeit somewhat more formally.

Comments are a two-edged sword. Many blogs get bogged down in them. F'r'example, LittleGreenFootfalls, which may attract 100 or more comments on a single post.

One model that I think is a good one is the National Review's Corner:

http://nationalreview.com/thecorner/corner.asp

It's a bit of an Algonquin Circle, but more informal and a bit more conservative.

The control in Volokh may lead to a narrower view, but I think it does keep a lot of chaos at bay.

Amardeep Singh's ideas are good, and appealing to me as an outsider.

On the hostility towards technonogy: Could it come from an aversion to the light of day? The computer is the gateway to the marketplace, the Agora, where philosophers used to talk in public. And, looking back, what was it that the book was going to destroy?

Who would write for such a blog? I would. Right now I'm only doing short reviews of my recent reading, because frankly I need the practice, but I would certainly be happy to be doing more in-depth analysis online. Moreover, my preferred area for such analysis would be in genre fiction (horrors!) - fantasy, mysteries, science fiction, and horror. The groups of fiction separated out by those distinctions have languished under a misapprehension that they are not as "worthy" as "fine literature"... well, I work in a bookstore and I can tell you that the distinction between "literature" and "genre fiction" is no more than a marketing technique, and says nothing about the quality of the books involved...

Whoa. Sorry about the tangent. But I just want to affirm that even if I were not to write for such a blog, I would be happy to read it.

One factor that may make a difference in the acceptance of on-line publishing in academia is the emergence of a decent way to read large on-line documents...at present, your only choices are to read it on the screen, which isn't really all that pleasant or convenient, or to print it out, which is a pain in the neck. Electronic paper technology, which addresses these issues, is about to hit the marketplace, and I think it offers the potential of driving real structural change in publishing. More on this at my blog.

Possible titles for a lit-crit group blog:

'Bookchat'
(since the term seems to have taken on a life of its own. Downside: sounds a little like 'Bookslut')

'13 Ways'
(A reference to Wallace Stevens; suggests an openness to multiple perspectives)

'Fastidious Ant'
(from Marianne Moore's "Critics and Connoisseurs": "Happening to stand / by an ant-hill, I have / seen a fastidious ant carrying a stick north, south, / east, west, till it turned on / itself, struck out from the flower bed into the lawn, / and returned to the point." )

"All That Is Solid"
(...melts into air. Can mark the resistance to jargon [air], or it can be self-deprecating acceptance of airiness)

"Post:MLA"
(suggests that the bloggers are 'over' MLA, its conventions, and its journal, in the fashion of postmodernism, etc.; also alludes to the structure of a blog, where one 'posts')

"Surprised by Sincerity"
(ok, I just like the title... probably not a realistic suggestion)

A group lit-crit blog strikes me as an excellent idea -- not only because more and more vibrant literary criticism is always a good thing in my book, but also because a *group* blog where some of the posters aren't academics will allow for the seasonal ebb and flow of academic responsibilities. (So, for instance, I'd love to blog about this discussion, but will have to wait until the weekend, since my classes are wrapping up in a few weeks and I must catch up with my grading first.)

Practically speaking, I would blog more frequently and in more detail if I could get the tiniest bit of tenure credit for the work I put in. As it stands, my blog is a hobby and a small communal responsibility, but not much more, which is a pity -- it *could* be a lot more.

Who would write for such a blog? I would, for one. If it went the populist route and included non-academics.