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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   26530 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.

I am firmly of the opinion that there very much should be English literature faculties in the Anglosphere. There should be perhaps 12 in total. Oxford, Cambridge, the Ivy League, Stanford, Berkeley. That is sufficient. Each should have the full complement of specialists, modern literature, Shakespeareans, so on, maybe thirty or forty academics each. That is enough.

The same is true for academic philosophy. The same is true for anthropology, Latin, Ancient Greek, Egyptology and so on. These are all worthwhile fields. There is nothing wrong with an advanced civilization having a couple hundred academics who specialize in niche fields within the humanities. Let us have our Chaucer experts and our Hume biographers and our hieroglyphics translators and so on.

But the idea of thousands of English literature or philosophy professors? This is wholly unnecessary. The best, the 99.99th percentile verbal IQ people who also want to be academics (rather than entertainers or salespeople or whatever) can do these jobs at a handful of elite research universities. Nobody else needs to. Nobody else should.

I think there is value in a humanities education (though I suspect not as currently subjugated to one political cause). It was always intended as a finishing school and there is actual value in that. I don’t regret my English degree, paid for by in-state tuition at a public ivy. The price was tolerable, there. I was fortunate to get mine in the Aughts and things weren’t quite so critical-theory heavy.

And, I’ve got a comfortable career in finserv. Far from being a barista.

While I agree there is an overproduction of PhDs, I disagree that the general undergraduate population doesn’t benefit from exposure if not from gen-ed courses, alone, and think we’d be much poorer, culturally, as a society, were college purely a mercenary pursuit. Let us at least produce enough professors for the latter. It can’t all be a procession of unmitigated STEM sperges and unmoderated B-school sociopaths.

I disagree that the general undergraduate population doesn’t benefit from exposure if not from gen-ed courses

That's literally why there's high school.

The fact that US high schools aren't up to that is no reason to waste a university education on that stuff (except for the small minority who're rich enough to study just for leisure).

I mean, it makes sense to require eg engineering students to take some English and history classes for gen-ed reasons. To the extend that 'they should have done this in high school' is true, it's mostly an argument for moving engineering, computer science, medicine, etc out of a university setting and into their own institutions- that is, trade schools.

Like, universities originated for the study of the liberal arts. The entire reason job tracks(with a few exceptions like teaching and law) go through university is so that they can have gen ed requirements attached, and I suspect that getting rid of gen ed requirements would be a nail in the coffin of the university's prestige over trade schools.

The entire reason job tracks(with a few exceptions like teaching and law) go through university is so that they can have gen ed requirements attached

"Gen ed requirement" is distinctly a US feature, found mostly in US universities and universities influenced by the US model. In the UK and continental Europe, you get to pick a specialization and perhaps may pick an elective or minor, but no always.

it makes sense to require eg engineering students to take some English and history classes for gen-ed reasons.

Snarkly, I think it makes sense for humanities students to take some math and physics classes for gen-ed reasons. I see lots of pontificating from the self-declared "educated" classes that clearly lack an understanding of calculus and other entry-level numeracy concepts.

I am entirely in agreement. When my GED gives me a better understanding of statistics than you you shouldn't be allowed to graduate from college is my attitude, even if it's a degree in psychology or communications or some other kind of bullshit that came out of someone's ass.

This but unironically. When STEM students take humanities distribution classes, they take the same lower-level classes students of the humanities take themselves. When humanities students take distribution classes, they take dumbed-down "math for English majors" classes which the STEM majors can't take for degree progression. We should eliminate that and until it's eliminated, ignore all calls for well-roundedness of STEM majors.

The idea is that virtually everyone, as a free and politically engaged liberal subject, will have to deal with questions of politics, culture, and ethics; but not everyone will have to deal with STEM in the sense of actually requiring technical knowledge. On this particular day, there were probably more people who had to engage with questions about transsexuality (and therefore might benefit from an understanding of the history and philosophy of the concepts of sex and gender) than questions about calculus or linear algebra (particularly if we exclude people who require that sort of knowledge for their professional work). The humanities are thought to contribute to the education of a "well-rounded" individual because the humanities are everywhere while STEM knowledge is primarily utilized by professionals (and is therefore closer to a type of vocational training).

I say this as someone who makes a living as a software engineer. Knowing how to code is obviously useful for making money, but I don't think it really makes someone "well-rounded" in the way that studying history or art does, and certainly not in the way that studying philosophy does.

This isn't really well-roundedness, then, it's humanities-supremacy.

Coming from the other side, I’d say that numeracy and clear logical reasoning is probably more important to creating the mythical “well rounded citizens” than humanities. The reason is that almost every decision made in policy or even discussion of policy positions requires logic and statistics. The idea that you can have a productive conversation about things like economics without understanding utility curves and statistics is crazy. Figuring out the percentages of trans people in a population and what the percentage of increase is kinda matters if you’re trying to make a case that the entire thing is biologically based. Algorithmic logic is extremely useful in learning to plan and communicate a plan precisely. And as far as understanding anything in science, understanding the statistics and how probabilities work and so on is critical to understanding what is going on.

Obviously, I think a well rounded person would know all of the above. The thing is though, that we’re actually nearly backwards where there’s more emphasis on exposing people to the humanities in ne form or another over and above giving people the tools to understand their very scientific and mathematical world. The results, as far as I can tell, is a world where people fall for conspiracy theories, but don’t understand science. They can’t understand science or technology because they re not forced to learn those things after high school, if they had much exposure in high school.

it makes sense to require eg engineering students to take some English and history classes for gen-ed reasons.

Why on earth would it? They've already taken those in high school.

Not in the UK, you study one subject all the way through.

Not totally familiar, but doesn't the UK have some system where not every high school diploma allows college admission(like elsewhere in Europe)?

I've never heard of that. The UK and European systems are pretty different. In the UK it basically boils down to your A-levels (usually you take 3-5 subjects). Any university can make you an offer, but whether they will depends on your grades. You can only apply to 5 universities, and only one of Oxford/Cambridge. So you put down one stretch goal, one safe choice, and then three you like.

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