MFAs etc. (24 Nov 2010)

Slate excerpted an article by Chad Harbach from the new n+1 about the academic institutionalization of MFAs. The general idea is that there are now two literary cultures, one that orbits the academic MFA world and a disappearing one in the shrinking milieu of New York publishing -- the world of book parties and Brooklyn apartments. In MFA land, you can with relative ease publish books no one reads, let alone buys, to get academic appointments, just like the other professors throughout English departments. In New York publishing, no one prints your book unless they think it will make money, which means different standards are applied and a different sort of effort is made by writers to make their work enticing. For institutional reasons MFAers tend to write short stories, whereas people trying to make it as professional writers tend to write novels and hope to sell film options.

Harbach suggests MFA programs are "an ingenious partial solution to an eminent American problem: how to extend our already protracted adolescence past 22 and toward 30, in order to cope with an oversupplied labor market." The put writers on the path of semitenured intellectualism, a "lifelong engagement with the university" as opposed with readers at large. This reminded me of Scott McLemee's Bookforum essay about Russell Jacoby's The Last Intellectuals. Describing academics in the mid 20th century who evaded bohemian anomie and the nagging threat of poverty, McLemee writes,

If the writers and critics working in the ’50s did not serve as models for those who came after, that was because the conditions that fostered them—affordable rent, an abundance of magazines open to certain kinds of reviewing and essay writing, and the tendency of society to produce “surplus intellectuals” unable to find employment in well-established institutions— were already disappearing. Or rather, new and altogether more comfortable circumstances were emerging.

Perhaps those circumstances -- an expanded marketplace for a certain kind of credentialed intellectual labor -- have reemerged for MFAs. Writes Harbach: "There were 79 degree-granting programs in creative writing in 1975; today, there are 854! This explosion has created a huge source of financial support for working writers, not just in the form of lecture fees, adjunctships, and temporary appointments—though these abound—but honest-to-goodness jobs." I wonder if any of the MFAs would describe their prospects so optimistically. I always thought the MFA world was very dog-eat-dog, where getting ahead depended on the personal relationships one had with people in positions to help one's career, since writing talent was pretty much equalized across the board systematically by the efficacy of writing programs themselves. (I was deeply troubled when I realized it wasn't so different for literature PhDs.)

The excerpt concludes with Harbach theorizing that professional creative writers may disappear, as they will all be teachers. "The lit-lovers who used to become editors and agents will direct MFA programs instead." At that point, they should want everyone to fulfill the wildest promises of Web 2.0 and aspire to become creative writers too. This at least will keep the MFAs in paying jobs as creativity trainers. I guess this doesn't bother me much; I'm not sure what ever taught me and my generation to expect to be paid for expressing ourselves.

Novel in a Month Backlash (5 Nov 2010)

Longtime readers of this blog (I hope there are some!) may remember that I once wrote a novel in a month in November as part of NaNoWriMo. I didn't think the experience was a waste of time, but it didn't really open up my horizons as a writer either. It was rewarding for the sake of the time spent writing, of pushing necessarily into a state of flow; in that way it was its own reward.

Laura Miller, Salon's book critic, thinks everyone participating in NaNoWriMo should find something better to do, like perhaps read books written by legitimate authors who get published by a "major" house.

While there's no shortage of good novels out there, there is a shortage of readers for these books. Even authors who achieve what probably seems like Nirvana to the average NaNoWriMo participant -- publication by a major house -- will, for the most part, soon learn this dispiriting truth: Hardly anyone will read their books and next to no one will buy them.

I can't say that Miller's condescension makes me feel any sorrier for the plight of published novelists. It doesn't make me want to rush out to scour the bookstores (weirdly described by Miller as "cultural spaces once dedicated to the selfless art of reading" -- really? aren't they in fact dedicated to the selfish art of selling stuff?) for more fiction to buy.

Miller seems to suggest that it's wrong to encourage the idea that everybody can and should write (particularly, she argues, since writers will insist on doing it anyway), but by that logic you may as well not encourage everyone to read either. That was received wisdom of much of Miller's counterparts in the pundit class of the 18th century, when it was widely believed that dimwit readers and their vulgar tastes were leading to the destruction of the world of letters. She instead wants to extricate reading from writing, as if they weren't symbiotic pursuits, and promote the former at the expense of the latter. We should worry about getting more people to read, because their writing is basically a waste of time since there are already so many books lying around.

Isn't writing just a selfish demand for attention anyway? "Why does giving yourself permission to write a lot of crap so often seem to segue into the insistence that other people read it?" Miller asks. Yes, shame on you; you think you deserve attention because you bothered to work on something. And worse, you might even distract literary agents from their holy endeavors: "editors and agents are already flinching in anticipation of the slapdash manuscripts they'll shortly receive." Oh, no! What about the agents? No one thinks of the agents! It's not as though they chose for themselves the role in life of rejecting some people's work and trying to pick winners. Heaven forbid they should have to do their job!

Wouldn't it be a better world if only the people with the proper grooming and pedigree bothered to make things? Certainly we don't do enough as a society to discourage the artistic ambitions of ordinary people. Sapping it off in crypto-participatory co-creation branding schemes only goes so far. Miller is troubled by the possibility that books about how to write fiction could be more popular than fiction itself, but she regards that as the audience's fault rather than the authors'. It may be that the manual writers are catering to a fantasy that is currently more powerful than what fiction writers can conjure -- that people would rather vicariously be an author, a creator, imagine themselves creating, than imagine themselves in someone else's fictional world, becoming someone else, being at their mercy.

The implication seems to be that reading is rightly self-abnegating and masochistic; correspondingly, Miller derides encouraging the fantasy of readers writing for themselves as "narcissistic commerce" that prompts self-centeredness (like basically just about every other kind of consumer good in our culture, sold as part of a lifestyle package). The right thing for the nobodies to do is to efface themselves and consume more, and become "the bedrock" of literary culture (i.e. nonparticipants who fund it and fuel writer egos). Reading should teach them to never put themselves forward, to never "misplace" their creative energy by preventing them from generating it in the first place. We should as a society label their ability to consume as creativity. We should personally use our energy the way Miller's champ reader used it: "Instead of locking herself up in a room to crank out 50,000 words of crap, she learned new things and 'expanded my reading world.' " Reading should lead to more reading, nothing else. What else is there?

Anyway, on to my requisite social-media point: Considering how much quasi-fictionalizing of the self must go on in social media, it's no wonder the how-to manuals appeal -- they have real practical value. Social media reinforces the value of trying to imagine oneself as more creative, as sharing more. Whereas for novels, beyond escapism and those fleeting moments of sympathetic insight, their practical value lies mainly in the social capital that comes from being able to say you've read them and can discuss them. Miller would like us to work on enhancing that social capital and cheer the formation of more book groups (is there really a shortage of them? Are more people really participating in NaNoWriMo than in reading groups of some form or another?). I don't see why one couldn't do both -- it's not zero sum. Amateur writers and readers can all be the "real heroes." I also don't see why people couldn't get together and read one another's work, even if it is "bad" by professional standards. I have been to see enough of my friends' bands, and they have been generous enough to come see me play and certainly none of us are ever going to be putting out records on major labels. Reading and writing both are lonely, solitary activities by necessity; people often adopt them and become passionate about them because social interaction is for them far more taxing and far less rewarding. Anything that injects a hint of sociality into either process probably won't make for better writing or reading, but it might make for people who feel less isolated by their own passions.

Death of the Author? (5 Aug 2010)

I've thought this over a bit today and basically agree with Matt Yglesias, that the claim Trip Gabriel reports in this NYT article that the ethos of the internet is prompting kids to plagiarize more than they used to is pretty dubious. Here's the core of Gabriel's article:

Professors used to deal with plagiarism by admonishing students to give credit to others and to follow the style guide for citations, and pretty much left it at that.

But these cases — typical ones, according to writing tutors and officials responsible for discipline at the three schools who described the plagiarism — suggest that many students simply do not grasp that using words they did not write is a serious misdeed.

It is a disconnect that is growing in the Internet age as concepts of intellectual property, copyright and originality are under assault in the unbridled exchange of online information, say educators who study plagiarism.

Digital technology makes copying and pasting easy, of course. But that is the least of it. The Internet may also be redefining how students — who came of age with music file-sharing, Wikipedia and Web-linking — understand the concept of authorship and the singularity of any text or image.

Gabriel's article seems like misplaced anxiety; the stakes are pretty low with plagiarism: students are basically only "hurting themselves" by cheating on their homework, as the proverb goes, and it's not like the papers are up for publication. These cheaters are not David Shields or Jonathan Lethem. The idea that students suddenly don't understand the concept of authorship reminds me of the worst nightmares of the fuddy-duddy professors who would fulminate about Barthes and Foucault and "this so-called textuality" when I was a graduate student. Where was the proper respect for Genius?

Gabriel interviews anthropologist Susan Blum, who seems like this species of worrywart.

In an interview, she said the idea of an author whose singular effort creates an original work is rooted in Enlightenment ideas of the individual. It is buttressed by the Western concept of intellectual property rights as secured by copyright law. But both traditions are being challenged.

“Our notion of authorship and originality was born, it flourished, and it may be waning,” Ms. Blum said.

She contends that undergraduates are less interested in cultivating a unique and authentic identity — as their 1960s counterparts were — than in trying on many different personas, which the Web enables with social networking.

Obviously she hasn't hurt Mark Zuckerberg lecture about integrity and a single online identity. I'd be surprised too to find that students are uninterested in authenticity and unique identity and are seeking to merge with the multitude in a gesture of postmodern antisubjectivity. Self-broadcasting mediums and Web 2.0 seem to emphasize the value of a unique identity, not dissolve it.

Students, I suspect, don't take attribution seriously because the work they are being asked to do is not serious to them. They don't have much of a sense of scholarship as a collective enterprise, or of what they do in college as scholarship. With gen-ed classes, they know they are just marking time and doing busy work for the most part. They are right to think that plagiarism is not "a serious misdeed" that is somehow different from any other form of academic dishonesty. To pretend otherwise is to serve the ideological bidding of the lords of intellectual property.

The implication of plagiarism hysteria is that scholarship is a process of claiming ownership of proprietary information, an exceedingly unnatural attitude that students have always needed to be indoctrinated into, particularly if they want an academic career. This usually involves a series of ritualized genuflections in the form of citations of the recognized masters of a particular discipline as part of a student's professionalization into the academy.


Yglesias notes that the Web prioritizes the association of data with its metadata -- song files with the artists, etc. -- and thus generally organizes information so that it is easier to deduce where it originated if you are so inclined. It's never been easier to catch cheaters, he points out, something that was true even when I last taught college courses, in 2001.

I am inclined to think that the ubiquity of material available for appropriation and the ease of cutting and pasting itself explains most of the alleged rise in plagiarism. In my experience, most students who were inclined to cheat were way too lazy to retype passages out of a book.

The meaning of human capital and the future of the humanities (28 March 2010)

Is college just for the credential, or do people actually learn anything? What improves the college graduates "human capital": what they learned in class or the mere fact of the diploma? Considering the policy of lax grading, just getting in to the "elite" schools seems to function as proof that a student deserve a permanent competitive advantage in the labor market. But that would seem to make the entire edifice of secondary education a big charade, and the professors who are involved with it clearly aren't that cynical or in such colossal bad faith. And motivated students seem to appreciate learning for its own sake, whether or not that helps them gain an economic footing in society. But if we learn for the sake of fulfilling our human potential, but the economy denies us a way of making that fulfillment socially meaningful, we become drop-outs of a different sort, free-loading off society pursuing our own esoterica while contributing nothing. Or the alternative is that we are being trained into a condition of inevitable frustration, "overqualified" for whatever socially necessary but soul-crushingly dull tasks fall our way.

So what is the deal with higher education under capitalism? Is it a consumer good (entertainment for students) or a raw material of production (inchoate knowledge transmitted and transformed into human capital to be applied practically in the economy at large)? Is it a mandatory furlough period to ease job market pressures? A way to stock individuals with useful modes of information processing and a diverse base of more or less random learning that may or may not yield surprising ideas for innovation? A period during which the critical networking skills for the "social factory" are honed? Is it a way of sorting workers into their various destinies based on their ability to figure out the game of capitalism (how to acquire status that can masquerade as hard capital) and master its strategy (figure out who is worth knowing and how to manipulate them into helping you)?

Mark Thoma linked to this post by Frances Woolley, which questions whether human capital is a myth, and highlights what is at stake.

For example, if what is taught at universities actually makes people more productive, then simply taking university courses should be enough increase earnings. In fact, to get much of a payoff from university education, you have to finish your degree (the “sheepskin effect” ). One reason education pays is that completing a degree “signals” your ability, determination, competence and general stick-with-it-ness.
Perhaps we should think of human capital as a fairy tale, a reassuring bedside story. But the power of fairy tales is that they reflect certain elemental truths about the human condition. People who teach economics may find it deeply comforting to think that their pay is justified by their high levels of human capital.
But human capital is more than a comforting story – it is a myth that shapes our understanding of the world and thus public policy. Ontario’s government is urging universities to increase retention rates, so everyone who starts university completes a degree. If the human capital theory is true, then this is sound policy: more students completing university means more human capital means a more productive economy. If, however, the value of university education is as a signal of ability, then one of the most important things that universities do is fail students. Unless some students fail, the ability to complete a university degree confers no special distinction on the graduate.
Whether or not human capital theory is true determines the best response to the demographic challenges ... If education makes people more productive, then more education can increase the productivity of our economy – possibly enough so that fewer workers are able to support the large number of pensioners. If, however, education is basically about sorting workers – if people are getting more and more degrees in hope of eventually capturing that one elusive stable professional job with benefits – then the best way of responding to the demographic crisis is to scale back post-secondary education. Doing so would effectively increase the size of the working age population substantially, easing demographic problems.

Scaling back education is hard to accept from that utopian point of view that it enriches human potential independent of its social benefits -- it helps people live richer lives. Thoma's autobiographical anecdote in his response to Woolley is a pretty good example of that. He defends education for its own sake rather than for productivity, and concludes: "I believe education is the key to a better future and I will not give up trying to increase access to as many people as possible. I don't care at all if it dilutes the signal to employers, they'll just have to figure out some other way to cull the herd."

That echoes a point Marcuse makes in Eros and Civilization:

Productivity ... expresses perhaps more than any other idea the existential attitude in industrial civilization; it permeates the philosophical definition of the subject in terms of the ever transcending ego. Man is evaluated according to his ability to make, augment, and improve socially useful things. Productivity thus denigrates the degree of the mastery and transformation of nature: the progressive replacement of an uncontrolled natural environment by a controlled technological environment. However, the more the division of labor was geared to utility for the established productive apparatus rather than for the individuals -- in other words the more the social need deviated from the individual need -- the more productivity tended to contradict the pleasure principle and to become an end in itself.

But, he argues, historical conditions are so improved by productivity that individuals can begin to see the way back to their own needs, afforded enough leisure to conceive strategies for ending "the subjugation of man to his labor." Education begins to push in two contradictory directions, honing productivity while teaching people not to waste that productivity on meaningless work and channel it instead into their own potential.

At its heart, Eros and Civilization celebrates education for its own sake and not as preparation to reproduce the existing social order. When you strip away the Freudian claptrap, Marcuse's argument is basically that we misapprehend the needs of the system for our own wants and needs. In other words, we become convinced that we need to go to college to get a job rather than to learn, that the job market will reveal to us what we should do with our lives and our time. This he calls "surplus repression," as it directs us toward alienated labor (working for somebody else and not on something that we are personally invested in) that is not really necessary any longer for survival (at least in developed nations -- whether we are obligated to perpetuate capitalism in the West so its benefits can trickle down and liberate the poorer countries is a different question). Marcuse: "The elimination of surplus repression would per se tend to eliminate not labor but the organization of the human existence into an instrument of labor." That is basically what's at stake in defining the purpose of higher education: either it is worker training and sorting, supported by capital and carried out for its benefit, or it is a refuge from that organizing logic, a place where one learns what it can mean to be a human. (Hence, the humanities.)

Graduate school as trap (10 Feb 2010)

Thomas H. Benton, who has written several articles attempting to demystify graduate school, takes his critique about as far as it can go in his most recent installment (via MR).

Graduate school in the humanities is a trap. It is designed that way. It is structurally based on limiting the options of students and socializing them into believing that it is shameful to abandon "the life of the mind." That's why most graduate programs resist reducing the numbers of admitted students or providing them with skills and networks that could enable them to do anything but join the ever-growing ranks of impoverished, demoralized, and damaged graduate students and adjuncts for whom most of academe denies any responsibility.

That's pretty explosive rhetoric, but having been in that trap and perhaps still feeling its effects, I can't dispute any of it. I guess I would say don't go to graduate school unless you already have a job and your company is paying for it.

It's useful to read Benton's article in conjunction with the Eurozine essay by Christopher Newfield about the "cognitariat." His argument is that there is a hierarchy among knowledge workers, with most them vulnerable to exploitation, thanks to globalization-era management techniques that do away with loyalty. This plays out at the university level, where those who do work funded by corporations are treated preferentially. Naturally whatever value the humanities provide are undercompensated. I thought this passage pertained directly to the situation of the humanties grad student:

There is indeed a conflict between the modes in which knowledge is produced and owned within cognitive capitalism. But this does not translate into a political conflict of the kind Gorz calls class war. Analysts often suggest that two general phenomenon can undermine a productive contradiction like that of cognitive capitalism. The first is immiseration, in which bad conditions force a revolt. The second is inefficiency, in which elites tire of wasting money controlling people and not getting that last 20 per cent out of knowledge workers made sullen by mediocre treatment. Neither of these function in the case of knowledge economies, where the knowledge worker masses are still middle class on a world scale, and where a sense of professional duty produces good enough efficiency in nearly all cases (and threats of layoffs and closure where it does not).

Benton argues that the "life of the mind" ruse masks immiseration while the cheap teaching labor extracted prevents "inefficiency" from ending the situation.

Journalism vs. theory (28 Dec 2009)

I make fun of awkward academic writing as much as anyone, but this crack by Christopher Shea in the Boston Globe Ideas blog about something Matt Yglesias wrote about Avatar annoyed me nonetheless. The post is titled "Someone Remembers His Theory Classes!" and gently mocks Yglesias for this sentence: "The Avatar narrative starts with a form of reactionary anti-capitalism and thus ends [up] re-inscribing the logic of colonialism inside an ostensibly anti-imperialist story."

In keeping with the blog's mission, Shea probably wants to call attention to the idea behind that Yglesias's sentence and maybe even champion it. But he still feels obliged to write as though the main thing the sentence connotes is "I've read political theory." This reduces ideas to the level of a personality game, to a matter of peacocking cultural capital. Ideas, from that point of view, are merely counters that all signify the same thing, ultimately: status.

This is what media and mediatization has become. It's no longer about information dissemination so much as it about systemizing information, reducing its significance to a single dimension. Everything is reduced to a play of identity signifiers, making everything a posture, rendering all ideas into gestures of identity creation, attempts at ego projection and nothing more. That's what I argue in this essay, at any rate, drawing from Baudrillard's "Requiem for the Media" (pdf).

It's not as though Yglesias's point is obscure or difficult to grasp as he phrases it. "Inscribe" is critical-theory jargon, but even so the word has not been twisted or distorted from its ordinary meaning. Avatar pretends to be against capitalism and environmental destruction and for indigenous claims and thus against "evil empires", but in the end the film is so patronizing to the natives it invents for its plot that it retells the same old imperialist "White Man's Burden" tale. (More on that to come in my next post.) But Shea acts as though he has made that point simultaneously obscure and flashy. I think this is a bias that is endemic in journalism. Journalists seem unable to resist the impulse to feign ignorance or impatience with certain semi-erudite expressions in order to curry favor with an audience they presume is equally impatient and ignorant. But it is not theoretical language that's obtuse. If journalists assume readers don't want to hear about "imperialism," readers never will, and journalists will accordingly be open to the accusation that they are that empire's most effective flunkies: they hide the fact that the empire even exists.

Weak reading (20 March 2009)

In a footnote to a post at The Valve about "weak reading," English professor Rohan Maitzen adds a footnote that well sums up the problem with academic literary criticism. It's a bit long, possibly longer than the post itself, but it warrants quoting in full

One phenomenon with which anyone in literary studies is certainly familiar, for instance, is the interpretive strategy by which something seemingly incidental in the text is seized upon and ‘discovered’ to have great interpretive significance -- usually because it can be read symptomatically, helping turn the text, as Attridge says, into an “illustration of historical conditions or ideological formations." Here’s a mildly parodic (but fairly accurate) example of how it works. Suppose the text is a 19th-century realist novel -- say, Barchester Towers, which I happen to be reading now. Imagine there’s a scene with a dinner party at which pickles are served. Now, the immediate action of Barchester Towers has everything to do with the internecine rivalries of English clergyman and the moral and social crises flowing from them, and nothing to do with pickles, but now that we have noticed the pickles, it becomes irresistible to follow up on them. Lo and behold, nobody has done pickles yet (though I could give you quite a list of what has been done). So we produce a pickled reading. What are the cultural implications of pickles? Who could afford them, and who could not? Were pickling techniques perhaps learned abroad, maybe in the chutney-producing regions of the eastern empire? Or maybe pickling was once a cottage industry and has now been industrialized. We learn all about these issues and make that jar on the table resonate with all the socio-economic and cultural meanings we have uncovered. Though the pickles seemed so incidental, now we realize how much work they are doing, sitting there on the table. (Who among us has not heard or read or written umpteen versions of this paper?) And perhaps we are right to bring this out--after all, for whatever known or felt reason, Trollope saw fit to put pickles there and not, say, oysters or potatoes. But do we really understand more about Barchester Towers, or just more about pickles -- not in themselves, but as symptoms of industrialism, colonialism, or bourgeois taste in condiments? It’s not that our pickle paper might not be interesting or, indeed, accurate in all the conclusions it draws about the symptomatic or semiotic or other significance of the pickles. But it’s hard not to feel somehow that such an analysis misses the point of the book and thus has a certain intrinsic irrelevance.

The point here, I think, is that you don't really need Barchester Towers to write that historical study of pickles, which is more interesting than Trollope, in a way. What more is there to understand about Barchester Towers? Why privilege it? Why not say Barchester Towers (which by the way is a very funny book worth reading) is intrinsically irrelevant to pickles, rather than vice versa? As objects for historical study, Trollope is no more important an object than pickles are. It's just that most universities don't have a food studies department, whereas they do have literature departments.

What are the reasons for that? Part of the point of having English departments, the argument goes, was to codify national greatness. This is especially obvious in classes dealing with American writers, which often adopt the theme of American exceptionalism as an important point of class discussion. Literature classes also serve as lectures in secular moralism, with English professors resolving ethical problems in texts to show both how the authors were deep, insightful souls and we the readers have become nearly as deep and insightful by reading those authors carefully. I find that dubious. In the main body of the post, Maitzen quotes from this exchange between scholars Derek Attridge and Henry Staten about this kind of reading.

The notion that it is smarter to read “against the grain” rather than to do what one can to respond accurately and affirmatively to the singularity of the work can compound this disregard of what is truly important. This is not to say that the use of literary works as illustrations of historical conditions or ideological formations (including abhorrent ones) is invalid or reprehensible; just that to do so is not to treat the works in question as literature.

Somewhere Pierre Macherey is groaning. In A Theory of Literary Production, he argued that we should read for what texts specifically can't say. The point of analysis is to determine what conditions make the work and its reception possible. "The real critical question is not: What is literature? (What does one do when one writes, or reads?) The question is: What kind of necessity determines the work? What is it really made from? The critical question should concern the material being used and the implements so employed."

That's a bit extreme, but Attridge and Staten veer in the wrong direction, I think, when they suggest one can define the "literary" for its own sake, as a transcendent quality worthy of study rather than a political tactic. Deeming something to be literature is only interesting in so far as we know what that dignified status accomplishes for those involved in articulating it. In itself, who cares what is literary?

As much as I am inclined to agree with Attridge and Staten and find clever counterintuitive, beside-the-point analyses of tangential elements in texts tiresome, their definition of "weak reading" has problems, some of which Maitzen points out. Namely, as she writes, that "a text’s own 'theme' is rarely obvious" and what is obvious to any given reader is "very much a result of one’s experience and preparation." These differences in preparation and experience measure a specific kind of cultural capital -- and bringing up poems presents an occasion for those with greater experience to realize that capital. In discussions about literature (another term that presents definitional problems, to say the least), literature professors get to dictate (for once) what is "truly important."

What's at stake for literature professors is maintaining control over the definition of what counts as literature, and maintaining the authority to impose that definition -- the source of their capital -- on everyone else. They tend to disguise this by maintaining that a concern for literature is a concern for the deep soundings of the human spirit -- hence their tendency to generate ersatz moral philosophy. The pickle-centric sort of readings of texts go half the way toward dispensing with literature qua literature, but they still nod to the necessity of a literary occasion for launching into a study of material culture. But in these cases, the literary occasion serves as an excuse for doing history or anthropology without the same sort of rigor that historians and anthropologists might require from one another. This drives literary studies into further disrepute in the academy, which only then intensifies the calls from within the discipline for a return to a concern for "literature" to redeem the field. It devolves into what appears from the outside to be a racket, a self-protective fog of vague language and unfalsifiable assertions about "literariness," which justifies the continued existence of literary scholars within universities which have become corporatized, instrumentalist.

Against studying novelistic merit (12 Nov 2008)

In my former life in academia, the topic debated in these two posts at the Valve would exercise me greatly: Is artistic merit a matter for literary study? As someone who aspired to make unreadable books -- late 18th century commercial fiction -- relevant again, I certainly didn't think aesthetic quality was a prerequisite for what I study as a degree-seeker in literature, and I came to think that setting literature on a pedestal for special attention did a disservice to the more important task of understanding social history. The preachers of artistic merit, besides being paternalistic (urging unsuspecting students to "improve" themselves by teaching them literary appreciation and fostering their exposure to Great Art, the right art), tended to mistake their tastes for universal truths, which had the subtle and troubling effect of making contemporary academic tastes trans-normative while obliterating our ability to perceive the norms of earlier eras. Preserving those norms and getting inside them seemed the most important thing about studying literature to me; it gives us a palpable sense of how what Raymond Williams called "structures of feeling" -- can change over time. That gives hope that the current consumerist era we are mired in is not permanent. So I agree with Rohan Maitzen's pedagogical approach:

One of the key features of this approach is working with a text on its own terms--trying to understand how to read it so that it best fulfills its own potential. This means not holding it up to a particular, preconceived standard of excellence ("good novels do this“), whether that standard is formal or ideological. Now, depending on the occasion, there may be a second phase in which you move back from internally-generated norms and question them against external ideas; often, in teaching, this kind of questioning arises just from moving to the next book on the syllabus and discovering that its norms differ widely from--and thus, implicitly or explicitly, challenge--the ones we’ve just left behind (reading North and South right after Hard Times, or Jane Eyre soon after Pride and Prejudice, for instance, will certainly have this effect). But it’s difficult to see either a method or a reason for evaluating, say, Pride and Prejudice, as better or worse than Jane Eyre. It’s only if you have a set notion of what makes good fiction in general that you could fault either one for not measuring up.

In moving from book to book, and in noticing the shifting norms, one ideally draws in work in other disciplines that can help articulate that shift and allow one to theorize its causes. A certain amount of the shift has to do with the writers themselves, but to me, that's the ineffable, ultimately inexplicable and irrelevant aspect we should strive to strain out. Those concerned with artistic merit (and who are not teaching creative writing as opposed to literature) seem to want to focus only on that individual "genius," with the effect of ultimately invalidating truly critical insight -- namely insight into what shifts social norms with regard to how readers take their entertainment, and what those modes of entertainment say about the society those readers lived in and that we have in part inherited. My suspicion is that reified entertainment -- books being one of the first instances of this -- is a crucial component of capitalist society and the nature of our enjoyment of such things has changed as capitalism has entrenched itself more deeply, in the material structure of our society and in the inner workings of our psyche as well, shaping how we discover pleasure and from what, shaping the methods by which we internalize mores and develop ambitions and aspirations. These are the inner, individual mental structures that ultimately sustain socioeconomic formations.

Dan Green's retort to Maitzen seems unduly preoccupied with a literary work's value in and of itself - - an irreducible matter of personal taste :

While it is true that a literary criticism not bound to academe might still give attention to “philosophizing,” et.al., it is hard to imagine that such criticism would so willingly apologize for aesthetically inferior work as academic criticism in its current guise is forced to do. It’s possible that literary criticism might one day free itself from the pedagogical imperatives with which the academy has burdened it. When that happens, “artistic merit” might not be as dispensable as many academic critics want to find it.

This statement immediately makes me wonder who gets to decide what is "aesthetically inferior" and on what grounds. Also, I wonder whether literary criticism even exists outside of academia. Literature, as a concept, is an academic construction. Criticism that hones that definition is an academic exercise. Outside of the academy, people who write about books are reviewers, not critics.

In short, whether or not a novel is "good" shouldn't matter to people who study them; that only matters to people who want to read them for pleasure. What would make a typical reader of a particular time choose a certain novel for pleasure, however, may be the most important question of all. To answer that, we have to disregard what we think that reader should prefer.

Evaluative criticism (9 June 2009)

Ronan McDonald's recent book, The Death of the Critic, which argues that literary criticism should be evaluative so that it can reach a broad audience and therefore be relevant, has prompted some discussion at The Valve and Salon. Writes McDonald, in a passage excerpted by professor Rohan Maitzen here, "Perhaps the critic is not dead, but simply sidelined and slumbering. The first step in reviving him or her is to bring the idea of artistic merit back to the heart of academic criticism. ‘Judgment’ is the first meaning of kritos. If criticism is to be valued, if it is to reach a wide public, it needs to be evaluative."

McDonald appears to be serious in arguing that the academic study of literature should focus on whether works are good or bad, inviting a return to the "warm bath" approach to pedagogy that invites us to luxuriate in the Great Works and congratulate one another on how perceptive we are in appreciating them. But who establishes the terms of correct aesthetic judgment? It seems like a will to power is all that's required, and then the spread of one's aesthetic tenets serves no greater function than oppressing the world with your particular tastes. And if it's not simply egotism, usually a covert political agenda is being served -- the way the New Criticism tended to denigrate political works in favor of sterile formalism, which guaranteed quietism in the humanities. McDonald argues that true criticism was destroyed by cultural studies and its political agendas, but passing judgment is a political act. What is so hard to understand about that? You can't impose an aesthetic value system on the public without imposing at the same time an implied set of political views, usually conservative ones, since the very act of imposing your judgment on others is an elitist proposition. (Not surprisingly, McDonald doesn't like the democratization of criticism -- probably because he suspects democracy as a principle. What, all those rubes out there get to have their own opinion, and it should count in the social world we share?) An aesthetics is always political; otherwise it's merely solipsistic.

Speaking of solipsism, McDonald's concerns over the democratization of criticism prompts this blithe statement from Salon's Louis Bayard:

The problem with arguing for cultural gatekeepers is that, if you're a professional critic, you inevitably look self-serving -- "Hey, that's my job!" -- and yes, elitist -- "Don't try this at home, guys." I myself don't have any particular training or qualifications to be a reviewer, other than my own experience as a reader and writer, so I feel silly arguing that someone else isn't qualified to deliver an opinion. And believe it or not, I've learned things from Amazon reviews, from letters pages, from literary blogs, from all sorts of non-traditional outlets. The quality of writing is certainly variable, but then so is the quality of traditional journalism.

Believe it or not? Bayard's point is well-taken but is undermined utterly by that condescending interjection. Oh, is the great Louis Bayard to deign to find himself informed by the great illiterate mass of monkeys pounding away at their naive Amazon reviews and noncommercial blogs? I'm left with a sense of the mammoth amount of entitlement that critics seem to feel by their appointment to their prominent perches, and if that sort of critic is dying, I'd be happy to shovel the dirt on the grave. You have to hope he was being ironic in a way that is not coming across -- which itself is an index of the distrust between critics and readers (readers like me, anyway).

Maitzen's conclusion seems pertinent to the question of that distrust:

I share McDonald’s concern about the isolation of academic expertise from today’s reading culture more generally…I think, too, that he is right to be looking at questions of judgment and how they are understood and articulated as one of the flashpoints for misunderstanding or resentment between academics and other readers. I just don’t see how his prescription to be more evaluative is an adequate response, unless (at the minimum) it is accompanied by a commitment to showing why the question "Is it of any merit?" requires substantial complication before a worthwhile answer is possible. The responsibility here is not all ours: ideally, readers would want, not to be dictated to, but to be engaged in debate worthy of the books they are considering.

Criticism that prompts readers to become critics themselves in their own way would be healing the divide. That's why the flowering of millions of critics on the internet should be heralded as success, not failure or death.
If critics -- any critics, academic or otherwise -- deserve our attention, it seems that should be a matter of their being interesting in their own right, producing something compelling from their interaction with some other work that makes us want to think and talk about it too. Mere evaluation seems the least interesting outcome of such an interaction. At best, it prompts tautological arguments about taste.

McDonald believes that "If criticism forsakes evaluation, it also loses its connections with a wider public," but I'm not sure why that matters. Does criticism need to compete on the same turf as marketing, and should it really strive to become more like marketing (evaluative criticism of the most straightforward sort), because it happens to have an extremely wide public in our commercial society? McDonald apparently laments academic critics' loss of public influence, but I'm not sure why they would deserve it; surely it's better that critics are taking less of the attention away from the art they would, under McDonald's system, be judging? Academic critics in general write repetitive and aggressively unreadable prose; this is because the mechanics of the profession demand it. (Academics must prove their mastery of a field through tedious recounting of previous scholarship, then they must prove a mastery of the field's arcane lingo, which helps establish the discipline's authority.) Were they to write in a more accessible fashion -- for lay readers rather than their peers -- they would be undermining the credibility of their field, th epresumption that special training is required to perform the sort of analysis in which they have become specialized. If we don't think these specialized analyses are worth performing, better then to argue for the abolishment of literature departments, and turn literary analysis back over to the Virginia Woolfs of the world, the leisure-class dilettantes with the time and inclination to parse fictions.

Difficult theory (7 May 2008)

Larval Subjects, an academic blog, makes the case that difficult theoretical writing -- think Deleuze, or to cite the worst I can think of, Laclau and Mouffe -- is a "form of intellectual terrorism."

I have increasingly found myself suspicious of the “difficult work”. On the one hand, I read texts in the sciences that express extremely complex ideas in very basic prose. Somehow I’m just unwilling to concede that what Hegel is trying to talk about is any more difficult or complex than what the biologist, complexity theory, economic social theorist, ecologist, or quantum physicist is attempting to articulate. This leads to my concern. I wonder if terribly dense styles such as we find in figures like Deleuze, Lacan, Hegel, Derrida, etc., etc., etc., aren’t a form of intellectual terrorism. Please do not misunderstand me. I am not referring to the quality of their concepts or arguments. What I am referring to is a general writing strategy that demands so much work on the part of the reader in the art of interpretation, that by the time you’ve managed to make heads or tails of what Lacan is arguing or Hegel is seeking to articulate or Deleuze is seeking to theorize, you have so much invested that you simply cannot think critically about that figure.

Are social theorists so vain as to believe that their insights are so idiosyncratic that they must invent their own impenetrable and uneditable style to convey them? That was the sort of excuse I used to make for their unreadable prose when I was suffering from that compensatory overinvestment in what I read, what Adam Kotsko has called academic Stockholm syndrome. Then, I'd argue that the tedious hair-splitting and neologisms and abuse of erudite, Latinate vocabulary captures nuances otherwise inexpressible, rather than serving merely to scare away the skeptical. Clarity was, as far as I was concerned, a bourgeois comfort promoting intellectual laziness and capable only of expressing received wisdom and status-quo-preserving "truths." Even now I am tempted to argue that difficult books slow our rate of consumption and thereby serve as a de facto blow to consumerism, which is predicated on perpetually accelerating it, and leaving us in ever more need of further efficiencies. As the Larval Subjects blogger says at the end of the post, "We live, we work, we must integrate superhuman bodies of information. Perhaps a little consideration is in order." But why must we? Difficult texts that we must read at a page-per-5-minutes rate force us to consider that, at the very least in deciding whether to keep crawling along or instead switch to something faster -- like blogs on an RSS feed, where I initially read the LS post.

But in retrospect, I now think that I learned to love my critical-theory tormentors after being shut in with them for too long, and came to believe on faith the truth of their assertions to the degree that I tortured myself in trying to understand them. It was an sure way to resolve the cognitive dissonance that came from spending so much time trying to assimilate what in the end were some pretty basic concepts. "Truth is relative." "Concepts are often defined in terms of their opposites." "Needs can be as arbitrary as wants." "Education is a system of social control." Etc.

Chances are theorists are merely too lazy to find clearer ways to express themselves (or they have cowed all potential editors), especially when opacity also serves a beneficial end casting the aura of difficulty over their works to make it seem more profound, and the scholars that pursue it to comprehension more ascetic. With that in mind, it's worth remembering what Nietzsche said about asceticism in The Genealogy of Morals: "For a very long time the ascetic ideal serves the philosopher as the sole phenomenal guise under which he could exist qua philosopher." Writing difficult prose is a will to power in the face of impotence, futility, death, indifference. This can prompt a grandiloquent egotism: "Whoever, at any time, has undertaken to build a new heaven has found the strength for it in his own hell." Difficult prose may be just as difficult for the writer as it is for the reader, but necessarily so, because the ideas must seem tortuous to feel true. I am really a philosopher if I use words like noumenon and being-for-itself and velleity. "What, then, does the ascetic ideal betoken in a philosopher? … Asceticism provides him with the condition most favorable to the exercise of his intelligence. Far from denying 'existence' he affirms his existence, and his alone, perhaps even to the point of hubris."

And those following the "ascetic priest" are, as far as Nietzsche is concerned, a "vast flock of defeated, disgruntled sufferers and self-tormentors." Yes, that sounds familiar -- a lot like my graduate seminar in Critical Theory.

(Update: Carl Dyke touches on some of cultish and ascetic aspects of theory -- in a far more theoretical way -- here.)

Twilight of the English professors (19 March 2008)

One of the best personal decisions I've made was the one to give up on writing a dissertation in English Literature. It seemed silly to quit at the end, and only when the work got serious and needed to be professionalized, but there is such a thing as sunk costs, and at some point I had to write mine off. I didn't have any interest in being a professor. No dissertation, no matter how broad or theoretical or New Historicist, was going to make up for my deciding to study English instead of economics or even sociology, the subjects I was actually interested in. At some point, I was going to have to try to say something meaningful about literature as literature, and I didn't believe anymore that there was anything worth saying. This may have been my imaginative failing, but I was thinking that literature had only a faint impact on life as it was lived by most people, so to comment on it is to theorize about echoes when you could be wrangling with the real thing. It seems as though you are rejecting reality for the cave and the shadows. (I have a similar understanding of real news -- aka business news -- versus the personal-interest vicarious-fantasy material masquerading as news. Studying literature started to seem to me a way of affirming the latter over the former.)

Still, this Nation item depressed me completely. William Deresiewicz looks at the MLA job list and comes away with these impressions:

The most striking fact about this year's list is that the lion's share of positions is in rhetoric and composition. That is, not in a field of literature at all but in the teaching of expository writing, the "service" component of an English department's role within the university. Add communications and professional and technical writing, and you've got more than a third of the list. Another large fraction of openings, perhaps 15 percent, is in creative writing. Apparently, kids may not want to read anymore, but they all want to write. And watch. Forward-thinking English departments long ago decided to grab film studies before it got away, and the list continues to reflect that bit of subterfuge.

That's more than half the list, and we still haven't gotten to any, well, literature. When we do, we find that the largest share of what's left, nearly a third, is in American literature. Even more significant is the number of positions, again about a third, that call for particular expertise in literature of one or another identity group. "Subfields might include transnational, hemispheric, ethnic and queer literatures." "Postcolonial emphasis" is "required." "Additional expertise in African-American and/or ethnic American literature highly desirable." ...

This year's Job List confirms the picture of a profession suffering from an epochal loss of confidence. It's not just the fear you can smell in the postings. It's the fact that no major theoretical school has emerged in the 18 years since Judith Butler's Gender Trouble revolutionized gender studies. As Harvard professor Louis Menand said three years ago, our graduate students are writing the same dissertations, with the same tools, as they were in 1990. Nor has any major new star -- a Butler, an Edward Said, a Harold Bloom -- emerged since then to provide intellectual leadership, or even a sense of intellectual adventure. The job market's long-term depression has deepened the mood. Most professors I know discourage even their best students from going to graduate school; one actually refuses to talk to them about it. This is a profession that is losing its will to live.

Would that someone would have discouraged me. But the universities need writing teachers, and literature grad students can be impressed into teaching composition courses for meager wages as long as studying literature for a living can be dangled before them as enticement. In the English Department I was connected with, the rhetoric and composition folk formed a well-disciplined and highly professionalized cadre who were devoted to instrumentalizing the department's course offerings. They had the energy for this because their teaching and their studies weren't fatally split. They and their kind will inevitably inherit the shell of the English departments that are left when lit studies collapse completely. Perhaps they will be absorbed by Education departments, who share a similar fetish for pedagogy for pedagogy's sake.

On a related note, John Mullen, writing in the TLS, looks at Rónán McDonald's recent book The Death of the Critic and decides that English professors are ruining their own brand.