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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   26531 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 25, 2024

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Recently in Compact Magazine: How Professors Killed Literature. Perhaps relevant given the other recent posts on contemporary media and writing:

English degrees have declined by almost half since their most recent peak in the 2005-2006 academic year, despite the student population having grown by a third during the same period. Romance languages—my area of specialty in a teaching career spanning more than two decades—have done little better. German departments are in free fall. Doctoral students from departments that used to concentrate on literary studies are confronted with a frightening absence of jobs.

In one common account, the responsibility for this collapse falls on the shifting preferences of students, who no longer want to read, and, by extension, on the shifting media landscape in which young people are now growing up. This explanation lets professors off the hook too easily. Students may be turning away from literature, but we abandoned it, too.

It's a fairly standard lament about the decline of the English major, the kind of which has been in circulation for at least a decade now. There were a few points in particular that I wanted to elaborate on and respond to.

[...]“The last time I taught The Scarlet Letter, I discovered that my students were struggling to understand the sentences as sentences—like, having trouble identifying the subject and the verb.”

Reading this statement, I was struck by the dispassion of the dean: Far from the horror with which similar things are uttered in private conversations, she is understanding of and even sympathetic to this surge of illiteracy on one of the most elite campuses in the world. Claybaugh seems jovially resigned to the fact that “different capacities” of her students don’t allow them to access those things to which she presumably devoted her life: literature as a practice, as a set of exceptional texts, as a tradition, as a celebration of language.

The assertion that the texts of the literary canon are "exceptional" is, of course, not an unassailable axiom that is beyond the purview of critical inquiry. I believe I have remarked here previously that the social prestige enjoyed by literature as such (that is, written narrative fiction, without the use of audiovisual elements, in something that at least resembles the form of the novel) is somewhat arbitrary, and in need of justification. I don't think there's anything intrinsic in the literary form that privileges it above film, video games, comic books, etc, in terms of its ability to accomplish the sorts of things that we generally want artistic works to accomplish. (For a critical examination of the institution of the "English major" from a leftist perspective, see here and here).

I don't think it will be a severe loss for humanity if undergraduates don't read The Scarlet Letter. Although the fact that they might find such a task difficult is concerning for independent reasons.

Three solutions were attempted in an earlier phase of this crisis, all guided by the assumption that students abhor the strange, the ancient, the remote, and like the familiar, the modern, and the close.

I believe I'm fully aligned with the author's sentiment here. If an education in the humanities means anything, then it has to involve exposure to the strange, the remote, and probably the ancient as well. Whatever specific form that might take.

Already in the 1990s, the standard graduate seminar in literature departments comprised several chapters of books or short essays of some of the new (primarily French) authorities that were summoned to provide the clues for another, generally smaller, list of poems, essays, or narratives. Back then, we called it “theory.” Often, in practice, it was philosophy read outside of its native disciplinary context and thus understood in somewhat nebulous terms. Derrida’s work was elaborated in dialogue with the great representatives of the phenomenological tradition: Husserl, Heidegger, Levinas. There is no reason to expect a doctoral student in literature to be able to reconstruct this lineage or adjudicate the complex debates between these figures.

Ironic that he calls out Derrida specifically here. In The Truth in Painting, his longest sustained treatise on art as such, Derrida raises the question of why the philosophical tradition has perpetually subjugated the image to the word, the poem, the logos - a gesture that the author of the current piece appears content to recapitulate.

Meanwhile, political talk largely edged out discussions about narrative structure, textual sources, or the sheer beauty of a given author’s prose. Faithful to an idea of the intellectual as overseer of social decency and as a moral tribune, literature professors took on the grand history of our time, the march of freedom incarnated in the struggles of one group or another, and the quest for emancipation and the resistance it met from reactionary forces.

At a basic level, there's nothing wrong with analyzing a literary text from an explicitly political angle. Politics is both very interesting and very important! Frequently, the politics of a work (both in terms of its immanent content, and in terms of the political context of its production) is one of the most interesting things about it. Questions of race are important, questions of gender are important, these are things that we can and should be thinking about when we talk about art.

The issue that we find ourselves confronted with today is that the very concept of "politics in art" has been colonized exclusively by one side of the political divide (I'm reminded of the joke about how presumptuous it was of the LGBT community to think that they could claim something as universal as "refracted light" all for themselves), and this side has the virtually unchallenged authority to enforce their point of view in academic institutions. A priori, we should be all for politics in art. But when "politics in art" comes to exclusively mean "going book by book, explaining how they were all written by evil white men to oppress women/browns/gays/etc, and thereby concluding that the way forward is puberty blockers and mass immigration", it's understandable why the right would want to throw in the towel on the whole discussion and retreat to a position of castrated neutrality.

A genuine, honest inquiry into the political nature of a work of art has to allow for multiple possible conclusions. Maybe the book is ultimately about how great white men are, and that's a bad thing. Or maybe it's about how great white men are, and that's a good thing! There's a certain repetitiveness to works of "critical theory": the conclusions are always predetermined in advance, the line of argument predictable, it always finds exactly what it set out to find. Which raises concerns about how "critical" it is in the first place. If you always know the answer in advance, then you're not actually engaged in critical inquiry; you're just grandstanding.

Which raises concerns about how "critical" it is in the first place.

"Critical" in English has a few surprisingly different meanings. After all this time, I've realized that "critical theory" is "critical" in the sense of "inclined to criticize severely and unfavorably", while I might have naively assumed it meant "of, relating to, or being a turning point or specifically important juncture" (both quotes from Merriam-Webster).

IMO we should find a new name for "critical thinking" that less strongly suggests it should be about tearing things down.

I'm pretty sure the "critical" in "critical theory" refers to "consisting of or involving criticism" i.e. "the art of evaluating or analyzing works of art or literature, also : writings expressing such evaluation or analysis"

I would believe its purveyors may claim that, but I've never seen "critical theory" come to a positive conclusion about any real pretty much anything. There is a lot of pontificating about how pretty much everyone suffers from pervasive, say, racism, but I don't think I've ever come across "actually, X is good enough" except about some perfect hypothetical. I don't really see much depth to the field (happy to consider otherwise) beyond tearing imperfect things down and wanting to replace them with nothing.

As someone raised Christian it pattern matches really well into "all have sinned and fallen short of the Glory of God" (true), but lacks the radical forgiveness that is supposed to accompany that phrase.

I don't really see much depth to the field (happy to consider otherwise) beyond tearing imperfect things down and wanting to replace them with nothing.

As soon as you try to build something you're no longer a critical theorist nag (one can do this with critical intent, but that's distinct from theory- "fine, I'll do it myself" is still productive).

it pattern matches really well into "all have sinned and fallen short of the Glory of God"

That's a weird framing. Nagging just to nag, nagging with the express purpose of building yourself up at the zero-sum expense of others, that's the sin.

So, back to the original wording, critical theory pattern matches really well into "all have sinned and fallen short of the Glory of God, so continue sinning because God can take it- that's the duty of the all-powerful, isn't it?".

As soon as you try to build something you're no longer a critical theorist nag

Well, yes, but that's the point to a certain extent. The philosopher is a professional nag - that's his job, ever since Socrates. So one can argue that critical theory is actually quite traditional in this regard. (Of course if you asked the classic Frankfurt school guys what they wanted to build, they would have unhesitatingly answered "communism", but that just moves the question back a step, as the content of that term is itself very ill-specified).

The Apology really should be required reading in schools. Socrates went to the statesmen, the poets, and the artisans, for he was told they were wise; but when pressed and questioned, their wisdom amounted to nothing. When the oracle at Delphi was asked who the true wisest man was, she answered that it was Socrates, for he knew that he knew nothing. And this is the ideal by which philosophy has attempted to conduct itself ever since (but, as with all ideals, mortals fall short).

The philosopher isn't in the business of building things; he's in the business of criticizing, poking holes, formulating problems but no solutions. He is the grim, persistent reminder that you might not know as much as you think you do. Understandably, people tend to find this frustrating (in the case of Socrates, frustrating enough that the Athenians put him to death).

The philosopher isn't in the business of building things; he's in the business of criticizing, poking holes, formulating problems but no solutions

As a matter of taste, I mostly disagree. Poking holes can be worthwhile, and is necessary to some level, but I think it's the lesser part of the work. One could say that philosophies are like houses: none are empirically perfect, all are flawed, but many are nevertheless inhabitable. Finding weak points is an important part of structural engineering, but that's because you want to build stronger, better structures in the future. It's totally valid to say 'yes, we know Benthamite utilitarianism produces distasteful results in circumstances X, Y, Z but we think it's a pretty good way for mathematically-inclined people to make large-scale decisions'.*

Likewise, sometimes you have to destroy old buildings because they're obviously defunct beyond repair and you need the space for something else. 'Ruling philosophies' can become impervious to criticism through arrogance and social pressure, to the point of forgetting that their assumptions are assumptions and losing sight of their weak points. Sometimes you need a bloody minded bastard to stand up and keep nagging. But I think it would be perverse to value the demolisher more than the builder.

*Like software programming, really. Loads of problems don't have an accepted perfect solution, but instead lots of standard imperfect solutions that you can select depending on how the tradeoffs stack up for your use case.

** Sorry for inserting random thoughts, perhaps it will help you understand where I'm coming from. When I read your quote: "Socrates went to the statesmen, the poets, and the artisans, for he was told they were wise; but when pressed and questioned, their wisdom amounted to nothing. When the oracle at Delphi was asked who the true wisest man was, she answered that it was Socrates, for he knew that he knew nothing" it just seems like sophism to me. Yes, you can't prove that anything except your own mind exists, and maybe not that. It's worth knowing, and I've met very unreflective people who could use the reminder. But there's not much you can do with that except say "whoa". Sooner or later, you have to do what we all do: accept that the world probably does exist and so does your need for nourishment, and go and make a bacon sandwich. I find the latter wiser and more admirable.

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