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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   26526 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 we should accept that there are degrees that are primarily conspicuous leisure. Philosophy, literature, history - they are qualitatively different from STEM degrees or BA/Marketing/Accounting/Finance/Law.

The latter are, honestly, glorified trades. "Oh, you come from a class that has to work for a living? Here's a four-year course that will help you earn more or at the very least will reduce your occupational hazards to hemorrhoids." The former are for trust-fund kids and for those few who can't imagine any other future for themselves and are willing to sacrifice their economic prospects to study the agricultural practices of 18th century SEA peasants.

As long as we keep lumping them together into "find your true vocation", people will remain confused and angry: both the undergrads that were duped into getting a useless degree because Miss Doe the high school history teacher was their favorite and the professors that have been deluding themselves about their relative worth.

You're both overstating and understating the situation.

On one hand, it goes way beyond just literature and philosophy. Open up the STEM box and you'll find that it's only really the T and E parts that lead directly to careers. There might be more demand for PhD graduates in the sciences but the majority of students stop with a bachelors and there aren't really any more jobs that specifically need a degree in e.g. biology than those that need you to have studied history. High school teacher is basically the full list.

But on the other hand, you're missing the generic value of a degree. Pretty much all white collar jobs these days need you to have a degree and most aren't particularly picky about what you studied. Yes, maybe a lot of that is just signaling, but the signal is a real thing (earning a degree proves that you have some combination of intelligence and conscientiousness, which is also valuable to an employer) - so playing the game is rational for both students and companies.

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