What's Wrong with Literary Studies?(chronicle.com)
chronicle.com
What's Wrong with Literary Studies?
http://www.chronicle.com/article/Whats-Wrong-With-Literary/238480?key=4RKr4qKcf4rcS4jgH7bQLkI1VfpssaW3_gvnZZsWLv4iGqEJPIeGd0g4ZKvUyI74ZWM4N2ZiX3U4QlhnLXBwZjFjMVdxcnpOMTJrUVVFd1FpSWZXQ0FtV2Nacw
6 comments
Have you ever read this old essay?
Masocriticism by Paul Mann: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3685366?seq=1#page_scan_tab_con...
Basically a meta-critique of the whole system you describe--saying the only reason one would engage in it at all is for sake of pure masochism. (It's meant to be both humorous and a serious critique of the seeming pointlessness that you described, but very deadpan.)
One of my profs recommended that one to me, years ago, while I was also studying literature as an undergrad, and it's always stuck with me.
Sidenote: Later, I made a career for myself writing software instead of essays. But I actually do think that my initial time spent studying literature was very beneficial--personally, professionally, intellectually, and so on.
Which brings me back to the original point--what's "wrong" with literary studies? Probably that the main focus has been studying literature for its own sake, rather than viewing how it can make a positive difference (for the most part). So I do very much appreciate what Felski is doing here. Interesting work.
Masocriticism by Paul Mann: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3685366?seq=1#page_scan_tab_con...
Basically a meta-critique of the whole system you describe--saying the only reason one would engage in it at all is for sake of pure masochism. (It's meant to be both humorous and a serious critique of the seeming pointlessness that you described, but very deadpan.)
One of my profs recommended that one to me, years ago, while I was also studying literature as an undergrad, and it's always stuck with me.
Sidenote: Later, I made a career for myself writing software instead of essays. But I actually do think that my initial time spent studying literature was very beneficial--personally, professionally, intellectually, and so on.
Which brings me back to the original point--what's "wrong" with literary studies? Probably that the main focus has been studying literature for its own sake, rather than viewing how it can make a positive difference (for the most part). So I do very much appreciate what Felski is doing here. Interesting work.
Seems like a system that promotes writing more absurd critiques on articles. If you have to come up with something new and innovative I cannot imagine there is enough substantial literary work created each year to provide for unique and meaningful critiques from the academic community. Kind of like what happens in the soft sciences, and is happening more in the hard sciences - partly because redoing experiments isn't as critical to universities.
> "I believe that the profession can’t really move forward until we shed our fear of saying and thinking things that colleagues would call ‘humanist.’ "
Why on Earth has humanism fallen into disrepute among literary studies majors?
Why on Earth has humanism fallen into disrepute among literary studies majors?
It hasn't, but if you say humanism you're exposing yourself to dual charges of cultural Marxism from the right and sneers of wasting money on a 'useless' degree from people who think education should serve vocation.
> education should serve vocation.
yes, it's commonly said, and it's politically supported as well with all the emphasis on promoting STEM subjects.
however...vocation and $dayjob are not the same thing and the conflation of them is, I think, one of the roots of a profound cultural problem we're currently facing.
I don't mean merely to argue the semantics of the word "vocation", which I know is frequently used as a reference to "vocational training" which is an unfortunately named term that refers to practical job skills training.
I'm arguing that the reason we make this mistake of semantics in the first place is because on a deeper level our culture has lost touch with the notion of what a vocation really is and really means. It means _calling_. Education really _should_ serve vocation, except that vocation and job aren't the same thing and now we have confused the two and so our education is confused as well and no longer but illuminates but instead obscures. Case in point: the difficulty of claiming to support "humanism", or want to study "the humanities".
yes, it's commonly said, and it's politically supported as well with all the emphasis on promoting STEM subjects.
however...vocation and $dayjob are not the same thing and the conflation of them is, I think, one of the roots of a profound cultural problem we're currently facing.
I don't mean merely to argue the semantics of the word "vocation", which I know is frequently used as a reference to "vocational training" which is an unfortunately named term that refers to practical job skills training.
I'm arguing that the reason we make this mistake of semantics in the first place is because on a deeper level our culture has lost touch with the notion of what a vocation really is and really means. It means _calling_. Education really _should_ serve vocation, except that vocation and job aren't the same thing and now we have confused the two and so our education is confused as well and no longer but illuminates but instead obscures. Case in point: the difficulty of claiming to support "humanism", or want to study "the humanities".
If we had a society where people could educate themselves/be educated for 20 years, work for 20 years, have a vocation for 20 years, it might be a better world. Presently such a lifestyle is available only to a minority in our society. You can't advocate such a thing more universally without being labeled a Fascist (Service Guarantees Citizenship!) or a Communist. Those ideologies certainly are problematic but they did offer a higher ideal to the people.
Many people in Western society feel bored, miserable and lost. That's what is behind many of these conversions to Islam. It is first and foremost, a crisis of higher purpose and if it cannot be turned to a productive output it will likely metathesize into something worse.
Many people in Western society feel bored, miserable and lost. That's what is behind many of these conversions to Islam. It is first and foremost, a crisis of higher purpose and if it cannot be turned to a productive output it will likely metathesize into something worse.
> we have confused the two
I don't see confusion so much as a desire for the two to be the same and a goal worth pursuing.
I don't see confusion so much as a desire for the two to be the same and a goal worth pursuing.
I think on the other hand that vocation is a think since only a few decade. In ancient time, your only option was to do the same thing that your parents. There weren't as many professions.
Vocation is a luxury. You gain money by serving other people's needs, not by following your vocation. It's a luxury humanity has been able to afford since only few decades (except aristocracy).
Vocation is a luxury. You gain money by serving other people's needs, not by following your vocation. It's a luxury humanity has been able to afford since only few decades (except aristocracy).
You've seen Sociology textbooks? Guilty as charged.
I don't mind people doing this at a private university, but I think it questionable that we accept this at public universities. Imagine most economic programs were taught by Moldbug about Ludwig von Mises's doctrines.
I don't mind people doing this at a private university, but I think it questionable that we accept this at public universities. Imagine most economic programs were taught by Moldbug about Ludwig von Mises's doctrines.
The 'technical critique' tricks felski is advocating against are also bad anthropology -- if literary critics deny the experience of the reader and deny an analysis of the writer's experience, background and techniques, we're not left with much.
Anthropologists have 'Verstehen', a term which has gone through a lot of iterations but used to mean that you should be careful interpreting the meaning of a ritual from an alien culture. Critics' rejection of the inner life of readers and writers alienates them from the art they analyze.
Anthropologists have 'Verstehen', a term which has gone through a lot of iterations but used to mean that you should be careful interpreting the meaning of a ritual from an alien culture. Critics' rejection of the inner life of readers and writers alienates them from the art they analyze.
This whole critique mindset is kind of a self-inflicted wound on literary studies. If you destroy the ability of literature to say what the author intended it to say. This hurts literary studies for two reasons:
1. It takes what is great about literature and replaces it with something less. Hamlet is better than any of the critiques or deconstructions of Hamlet. It's better than any of the criticism of Hamlet, too, but the new approach is worse. The old criticism tried to show how the work could have been written better; the new critique tries to make you try to ignore the author's point.
2. The critique approach destroys itself. If one applied the techniques of literary critique to any literary critique, what would survive? Almost nothing - certainly not the author's point.
Then why bother doing literary studies, if we're going to ignore what the authors are trying to say, and if we can also ignore what the papers published in literary studies say? What's the point? Why bother with the whole exercise?
[Edit: I read further, and...
> "Today’s anti-pedophile," Ruddick writes, summarizing the analysis, "perpetrates the ‘potential violence’ of ‘speaking on [children’s] behalf.’ " Such ideas violate scholars’ private convictions, Ruddick says, but they go unchallenged because they seem to mesh with the ideology of the group.
I try to avoid profanity, but: What the hell is wrong with these people? They see speaking on a child's behalf as "potential violence", but ignore the real violence that pedophilia does to the child? And that viewpoint meshes with the ideology of the literary studies establishment?
Words fail me. This is appalling.
Now, at least, "such ideas violate scholars' private convictions". Thank God for that much. But if they don't dare go against the seeming ideology of the group, which seems to be the ideology of the group because nobody else dares go against it either, that's getting pretty close to "systemic evil".]
1. It takes what is great about literature and replaces it with something less. Hamlet is better than any of the critiques or deconstructions of Hamlet. It's better than any of the criticism of Hamlet, too, but the new approach is worse. The old criticism tried to show how the work could have been written better; the new critique tries to make you try to ignore the author's point.
2. The critique approach destroys itself. If one applied the techniques of literary critique to any literary critique, what would survive? Almost nothing - certainly not the author's point.
Then why bother doing literary studies, if we're going to ignore what the authors are trying to say, and if we can also ignore what the papers published in literary studies say? What's the point? Why bother with the whole exercise?
[Edit: I read further, and...
> "Today’s anti-pedophile," Ruddick writes, summarizing the analysis, "perpetrates the ‘potential violence’ of ‘speaking on [children’s] behalf.’ " Such ideas violate scholars’ private convictions, Ruddick says, but they go unchallenged because they seem to mesh with the ideology of the group.
I try to avoid profanity, but: What the hell is wrong with these people? They see speaking on a child's behalf as "potential violence", but ignore the real violence that pedophilia does to the child? And that viewpoint meshes with the ideology of the literary studies establishment?
Words fail me. This is appalling.
Now, at least, "such ideas violate scholars' private convictions". Thank God for that much. But if they don't dare go against the seeming ideology of the group, which seems to be the ideology of the group because nobody else dares go against it either, that's getting pretty close to "systemic evil".]
>Felski attacks critique’s stature as the most radical form of thought. Here she draws on the work of Bruno Latour, a French anthropologist and sociologist. Latour questions the assumption that being suspicious and critical makes you a progressive thinker, in contrast to the purportedly credulous and complacent masses. He points out that conservative thinkers are now just as likely to draw on the forms of suspicious questioning associated with critique. Think of climate-change deniers, or all those Trump voters so deeply suspicious of elites.
Ah, I see one reason why this might be finding favor. Claim to have found the source of the Trump voter's paranoid way of thought, and you have everyone's attention. Claim you know how to defeat it, and the grants line up for you.
>Ruddick interviewed about 70 young academics, mostly Ph.D. students, at seven major research universities. She found that two types of scholars tended to be satisfied: those with a political commitment to an issue favored by the field of English, and those who, not especially stirred up by theory, study literary-historical questions
Literary history scholars being happier is interesting, but it seems potentially flawed to rely on self-reporting to determine political alignment. Two students, both committed Marxists. One is cynical, depressed, and hates his Ph.D program, the other is loving his program and life, and has enough energy to be an activist as well. Which one is going to tell you he's a Marxist? Hopefully it was more systematic than "interview" suggests.
I'll try and make the case of Felski's skeptics, based on my experience with post-critical academics in multiple disciplines.
The hopefully obvious counterpoint to Felski and others who seek to depoliticize criticism is that their supposedly apolitical stance is in itself political. By being "post-critical", you abandon a defined political reading and attempt to triangulate either the perspective of the author or what you perceive as the perspective of the casual reader, in order to avoid the messy, critique-y situation when your perspective and the author's perspective aren't compatible.
For example, and since I watched The Crying Game last night, a queer viewer could conceivably take issue with how Dil is written in "The Crying Game" because she sees the reality of the straight writer, not her own. The queer critic tries to deconstruct (sorry) the the elements of the script and why she believes it doesn't do a good job of showing how Dil experiences the story.
But if that viewer identified as a post-critical critic, she would shy away from diving too deep into the topic. The post-critical critic is trained to avoid the impulse to critique, and instead must search for a meaning that, to put it bluntly, won't offend anyone who loves The Crying Game and doesn't like anyone skeptically picking apart bits of it. The instinctual reaction to deconstruct (oops, did it again) an idea or representation that rings false or is just plain interesting is suppressed, because the post-critical mind must be along for the ride and try to derive ideas from the author's conclusions. It's interesting, but I wouldn't describe it as being liberated from "the barbed wire of suspicion".
This is only looking at one element of post-criticism that I particularly dislike, and of course their perspective has some value. I just wanted to push back on the idea that these people are the vanguard of intellectual freedom.
Ah, I see one reason why this might be finding favor. Claim to have found the source of the Trump voter's paranoid way of thought, and you have everyone's attention. Claim you know how to defeat it, and the grants line up for you.
>Ruddick interviewed about 70 young academics, mostly Ph.D. students, at seven major research universities. She found that two types of scholars tended to be satisfied: those with a political commitment to an issue favored by the field of English, and those who, not especially stirred up by theory, study literary-historical questions
Literary history scholars being happier is interesting, but it seems potentially flawed to rely on self-reporting to determine political alignment. Two students, both committed Marxists. One is cynical, depressed, and hates his Ph.D program, the other is loving his program and life, and has enough energy to be an activist as well. Which one is going to tell you he's a Marxist? Hopefully it was more systematic than "interview" suggests.
I'll try and make the case of Felski's skeptics, based on my experience with post-critical academics in multiple disciplines.
The hopefully obvious counterpoint to Felski and others who seek to depoliticize criticism is that their supposedly apolitical stance is in itself political. By being "post-critical", you abandon a defined political reading and attempt to triangulate either the perspective of the author or what you perceive as the perspective of the casual reader, in order to avoid the messy, critique-y situation when your perspective and the author's perspective aren't compatible.
For example, and since I watched The Crying Game last night, a queer viewer could conceivably take issue with how Dil is written in "The Crying Game" because she sees the reality of the straight writer, not her own. The queer critic tries to deconstruct (sorry) the the elements of the script and why she believes it doesn't do a good job of showing how Dil experiences the story.
But if that viewer identified as a post-critical critic, she would shy away from diving too deep into the topic. The post-critical critic is trained to avoid the impulse to critique, and instead must search for a meaning that, to put it bluntly, won't offend anyone who loves The Crying Game and doesn't like anyone skeptically picking apart bits of it. The instinctual reaction to deconstruct (oops, did it again) an idea or representation that rings false or is just plain interesting is suppressed, because the post-critical mind must be along for the ride and try to derive ideas from the author's conclusions. It's interesting, but I wouldn't describe it as being liberated from "the barbed wire of suspicion".
This is only looking at one element of post-criticism that I particularly dislike, and of course their perspective has some value. I just wanted to push back on the idea that these people are the vanguard of intellectual freedom.
When I was in grade school, I had an exam question regarding "The Outsiders" and why Dally told Ponyboy and Johnny to hide "in an abandoned church".
My response was that it was abandoned. I got marked off because "it represented a chance for salvation".
I was raised an atheist. Go figure.
My response was that it was abandoned. I got marked off because "it represented a chance for salvation".
I was raised an atheist. Go figure.
I'm not sure if you're being serious, but it seems that the teacher was asking you to interpret why the author had the characters hide in a church (i.e. symbolism). A similarly reductionist (to your) answer would be 'because that's what the author wrote'.
I must also say that your answer was more agnostic than atheistic; the atheistic answer should be 'because they were fools'.
I must also say that your answer was more agnostic than atheistic; the atheistic answer should be 'because they were fools'.
I wrote to S.E. Hinton to ask about the significance of the church. "Why an abandoned church?"
She responded and told me there was an abandoned church where she grew up. She liked to hang out in the building because it was a convenient place to read.
I have the letter stowed in a box somewhere in my parents' attic.
She responded and told me there was an abandoned church where she grew up. She liked to hang out in the building because it was a convenient place to read.
I have the letter stowed in a box somewhere in my parents' attic.
The author's intent is only one aspect of literary criticism; it's not the 'correct' answer. If enough people subscribe to some other explanation, then that will become the 'meaning' of a literary device for all practical purposes, regardless of what the original author had aimed to communicate. For that matter, I've frequently gone back to my own creative output and found myself reinterpreting stuff I wrote from a completely different point of view to the one I consciously had when I was writing it.
Your conscious reasoning is often a mere rationalization of some underlying subconscious drive whose object or direction may be obscure until later in life, if at all. When you hear people talk of 'literary novels' they're often speaking of work which addresses such questions. In such stories the stakes often seem low, and the disinterested reader easily gets bored because nothing much is happening besides the characters reacting dramatically to ordinary or even dull events, compared to genre fiction where the stakes are frequently life and death, and the characters are forced into rapid and highly consequential decision-making.
Your conscious reasoning is often a mere rationalization of some underlying subconscious drive whose object or direction may be obscure until later in life, if at all. When you hear people talk of 'literary novels' they're often speaking of work which addresses such questions. In such stories the stakes often seem low, and the disinterested reader easily gets bored because nothing much is happening besides the characters reacting dramatically to ordinary or even dull events, compared to genre fiction where the stakes are frequently life and death, and the characters are forced into rapid and highly consequential decision-making.
Tweet, tweet.
atheism means specifically "does not believe in God(s)". the "because they were fools" comment you made is a social/moral/political judgment independent of the stance of atheism.
in other words...Richard Dawkins is not the prototype of all atheists.
in other words...Richard Dawkins is not the prototype of all atheists.
You mean anti-theistic? In any case, I don't see how it's either. It's just a flippant non-answer.
One might imagine a Christian student ignoring that possibility because the building would presumably be de-sanctified.
Most of the things characters in normal stories do are going to be for practical reasons. Requiring that students find symbolic value in every detail is silly.
Most of the things characters in normal stories do are going to be for practical reasons. Requiring that students find symbolic value in every detail is silly.
When you're raised in an atheist environment, you "miss" all the references and other religious things which seem to permeate life and also permeate the critics of religion. To many it doesn't occur that some atheists just don't have the religious reference an ex-religious now atheist person has.
By the time I started to draft journal articles and map out my dissertation, I became frustrated by having to write articles no one else would read that had to cite other articles no one else would read in order to satisfy peer reviewers and engage in a process that seemed internally self-justified to fill CVs and have an academic career but didn’t have much effect." He found more satisfaction writing his blog, which reached readers around the world.
I write more here: https://jakeseliger.com/2012/09/22/the-stupidity-of-what-im-... and here: https://jakeseliger.com/2013/02/12/a-lot-of-academic-researc..., but academics in the humanities act like their peer-reviewed work doesn't matter at all. There are no pre-print services and no sense of urgency. Whether an article is published today or five years from today seems to be treated as if it's of little or no importance. The whole system is wildly dispiriting from an intellectual perspective.
Teaching, meanwhile, gets subordinated to the world of fake research, to the detriment of professors themselves and the students they're supposed to be teaching. Yet literary studies are, or should be, among the most accessible academic fields.