Whose Afraid of the MLA?
Who's Afraid of the MLA?
By Nick Gillespie : BIO | 27 Dec 2005
http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=122705A
No academic conference draws more smirks and bitch-slaps than the annual Modern Language Association convention. Held every December 27-30, the MLA convention pulls together upwards of 10,000 literary scholars ranging in status from rock-star professors feeling the love of their intellectual acolytes to starving, hysterical grad students desperate for any position in a perennially tight job market.
This year's meeting, which is taking place in Washington, D.C., features almost 800 panels and presentations, ranging from Tuesday's "Women and Devotional Writing in Early Middle English" (the first literature panel listed in a program as thick as a phone book) to Friday's finale, "Gypsies in European Literature, Culture, and the Arts."
In between are meetings of groups devoted to Andre Gide, Margaret Fuller, William Carlos Williams, and seemingly every other author with more than a haiku to his name; endless job interviews in which those nervous grad students throw off more flop sweat than Thomas Jefferson contemplating a just god; and, not uncoincidentally, more cash bars than there are in heaven (or at least Brooklyn).
Despite its preeminence within academic literary and cultural studies, the MLA convention is the Rodney Dangerfield of such confabs, getting little or no respect not just from right-wingers who reliably scoff at the unmistakable left-wing bent to the proceedings but from liberal mainstream media who eye the jargon-choked pronouncements of the professoriate with equal helpings of disdain, derision, and dismissiveness.
Indeed, the MLA has been a running joke since 1989, when The New York Times ran a story mocking the titles of some of the conference's papers, most memorably one called "Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl" (which on the face of it sounds far more interesting than the latest remake of Pride and Prejudice). Since then, the MLA's public image, to the extent that it has one, has been as a sort of a cruise ship of fools, where loony tenured radicals prattle on about defining "the Lacanian gaze," undermining the persistence of "late capitalism," and resisting commodity fetishism (while ostensibly embracing every other sort of fetishism), and more. Such postmodern antics caused the conservative journal The New Criterion to say "Farewell to the MLA" in a 1995 article. But the MLA's politically correct and arguably even more annoying obscurantist tendencies have also provided fertile ground for an annually repeated story in the Times and elsewhere, one every bit as worn out and tedious as an Art Buchwald holiday column.
Last year, for instance, the Times pooh-poohed what it dubbed "Eggheads' Naughty Word Games" and ran through a quick litany of silly-sounding titles (somehow, the paper of record never seems to stop chuckling long enough to get around to actually reading the essays in question), including "She's Just Like Alvy Singer! Kissing Jessica Stein and the Postethnic Jewish Lesbian"; "A Place for Giggling Field Hands: Queer Power and Social Equality in the Mid-20th-Century Plantation Myth"; "'Dude! Your Dress Is So Cute!' Patterns of Semantic Widening in 'Dude'"; and "A Pynch in Time: The Postmodernity of Prenational Philadelphia in Thomas Pynchon's Mason and Dixon and Mark Knopfler's 'Sailing to Philadelphia.'" Concluded the Times:
“What any of it has to do with teaching literature to America's college students remains as vexing a question to some today as it was a decade ago....The association has come to resemble a hyperactive child who, having interrupted the grownups' conversation by dancing on the coffee table, can't be made to stop.”
This is, to say the least, a peculiar way to frame coverage of a major academic conference in which leading scholars get together to discuss new research. As I've noted else where, beneath the mechanical reproduction of basically the same story every year is the buried presumption that literary scholarship properly should be about "teaching literature to America's college students." Does the Times worry about this same question when the annual chemistry conference comes to town?
As important, such a take misrepresents that vast bulk of MLA papers and panels which not only don't have laughable titles but are devoted to recognizable subject areas, historical periods, influential authors, and serious examination of new and old texts important to specialists. But panels called "American Neoclassicism," "John Donne and the Crises of His Times: Intellectual, Political, Religious," and "Troilus and Criseyde" (to name three from this year's offerings) just don't get the belly laughs. It's also worth pointing out that the assembled scholars do indeed spend time thinking about connections between their research and the classroom. Hence, panels such as "Iconicity and
Literature: Teaching Strategies;" "Teaching Indigenous and Foreign Languages"; and "How to Teach Prerevolutionary French Literature to Undergraduates and Why We Still Should."
None of this is to suggest that the MLA doesn't in many -- perhaps most -- ways live up to its reputation as one of the very most reliable bastions of political correctness. In 1999, for instance, the group passed a resolution opposing the "use of sweatshop, prison, and nonunion labor throughout the academic world," as if there are no meaningful distinctions to be drawn between, say, a convict working in a Chinese textile mill and a Fedex driver delivering packages at Harvard. At an annual convention in the recent past, French social critic Pierre Bourdieu, beamed in via satellite from Paris, exhorted the tweed-cloaked masses to join unions en masse. This year's conference features sessions on "Marxism and Globalization," "Marxist Theory: Between Aesthetics and Politics," and "Academic Work and the New McCarthyism," suggesting that Karl Marx remains more warmly remembered in U.S. literature departments than anywhere else in the world outside of Havana and Pyongyang. Similarly, this year's program leaves little doubt that the p.c. Holy Trinity of race, class, and gender will not go begging for attention.
But still, if you care about literature or culture, pat dismissals of the MLA are a shame. Despite its excesses, the annual convention comprises a State of the Union address when it comes to lit-crit studies. If it's true that we're in the midst of a culture boom -- a massive and ongoing expansion in art, music, print, video, and other forms of creative expression -- we'd be wise to keep up with analytical tools being created and perfected in the nation's universities. And, truth be told, the MLA is far less ideologically homogenous than one might think. Over the past several years, I even managed to organize special sessions on such market-friendly, libertarian topics as "The Economics of Culture: Non-Marxist Materialist Approaches to Literary and Cultural Studies" and "The Anti-Capitalist Mentality in Literary and Cultural Studies"; both sessions were well-attended and received. Hell, this year even boasts a luncheon arranged by the "Conference on Christianity and Literature." As with most things, there's surely more here than what you read about in The New York Times.
To that end, I'll be covering this year's MLA convention for TCS, filing dispatches on a daily basis through the week. I won't stint on reporting on ridiculous political excesses, but I'll also be on the lookout for new and interesting developments in lit-crit that might just all help us understand our text-soaked world a little better. And I'll be checking out those cash bars, too. Really, who could walk by something called "Romantics Cash Bar and Dinner," arranged by the Keats-Shelley Association of America, without stopping for a drink or two?
The Kids Are All Right, Dammit
WASHINGTON -- As the 2005 Modern Language Association annual convention officially got underway last night, attendees could choose from panels on "Travel Writing and Empire" (a growth field over the past decade or so, as "postcolonial studies" looking at the interplay between cultural artifacts and geopolitics has gained in popularity); "Contemporary Fiction and the Novel of Ideas" (featuring readings of books by Richard Powers, Tariq Ali, and Nicholas Mosley); and "Religion and Cultural Studies: Postmodern Approaches" (which included interesting-sounding papers on "Selling Religion and Literature in Cold War America" and "Georges Bataille's Yoga Practice" -- somehow I'm guessing the Surrealist author of several of the dirtiest books ever was into the Tantric variety); and much, much more.
I laid in with a panel called "English Studies and Political Literacy." As one of several "presidential forums," scattered throughout the week's proceedings, this crew not only tackled a big picture topic but pulled in scholars from outside traditional literature departments -- in this case a journalism professor and a political scientist.
In the end, the panel didn't really come up with any silver-bullet solutions to what all agreed was a stunning and troubling decline in student knowledge of and participation in not just partisan politics but civic engagement more broadly defined. But far more interesting than what they said was how they said it: Panelists alternated between recognizing that they had to change their teaching practices in order to connect with increasingly conservative students (see table 272) to invoking large-scale social, economic, and political forces and, in the words of one panelist, a "concerted effort" by "Goebbelsian" masters of rhetoric that have turned the country to the right over the past generation or so.
In other words, the panel accurately summed up the state of exasperation that many liberal and left-leaning academics feel not just about the kids these days but about American society more generally. More promising, perhaps, were the signs that such exasperation is leading to a moderation of ideological excess rather than a heightening of it. That is, faced with a choice between a sort of bitter righteousness and increasing irrelevance on the one hand and engaging students with more fair-minded argumentation and open-ended discussion, some academics are choosing the latter. That's certainly good news for kids stuck in freshman composition classes, those dreary required classes which are often little more than clumsy attempts at political indoctrination.
Political literacy, noted Emory University's Mark Bauerlein, matters because "of the heavy burden that democracy places on its citizens. Every government that is not watched closely slides into tyranny." If students don't know the basic facts of government and politics, they really have no role in the debates that will greatly affect their lives, he said. Among the signs of declining political literacy in college students, said the panelists, were lower rates of news consumption.
In 1972, said David Mindich, a journalism professor at St. Michael's College and author of Tuned Out: Why Americans Under 40 Don't Follow the News, half of all college students read a newspaper every day. Now the percentage is 21 percent. He and other panelists invoked a long-term decline in youth political participation, a trend which is at the very least complicated by the turnout in the 2004 election, in which, according to Pew Charitable Trusts, the youth vote surged more than any other group's. Indeed, with some notable exceptions, the notion of today's youth as disengaged is not particularly convincing.
Nonetheless, the panel's moderator, University of Tennessee's Donald Lazere, attributed political apathy largely to economic forces. Students from all socioeconomic backgrounds need to work outside jobs to pay for school and that financial squeeze leaves them less time for study. I'm not convinced that students are working more outside jobs in the past but if they are, that may be one of the prices paid to have more kids going directly to college after graduating high school. Since the mid-'90s, about two-thirds of graduating seniors go on to college, which is a sign of a strong higher education system (even if far fewer than 66 percent actually graduate). So is, for that matter, the amazing diversity of educational institutions -- indeed, one wishes that K-12 education offered up as many competing alternatives as you see in higher education.
And is working a job really antithetical to intellectual and political engagement? I never worked fewer than 30 hours a week during my undergraduate years and still I found plenty of time to kill in the library, engage in wee-hours bull sessions, and indulge in lost weekends.
Lazere, who identified himself openly as a "progressive," also noted that many students are simply "lacking the basic Hirschian cultural literacy" required for engagement in civic life. Adolph Reed, Jr., a political scientist at University of Pennsylvania, contributor to The Nation, and Labor Party stalwart, argued that "kids are sponges, they soak up what's around them." The past 25 years, he said, have been a period in which there's been "a concerted effort" to push the country to the right, to stifle left-wing political activity and dissent, and to create a consumer model of education in which the professor is really little more than glorified counter help. He singled out the rise of the for-profit University of Phoenix as a particularly reactionary trend (ironically, the University of Phoenix was created by billionaire John Sperling, a former political science professor, drug legalization advocate, and one of the biggest supporters of the Democratic Party). Such forces, concluded Reed, work to keep students from being politically conscious and engaged.
So what is to be done? Reed champions a plan for the federal government to fund tuition for any American that wants to go to college. Journalism professor Mindich argued half-heartedly for a non-binding national exam in current events and civics given to all 18-year-olds; he also called for a reinvigorated Federal Communications Commission to start forcing networks to show more news programming. Reed's plan is unlikely to ever be put in motion for any number of political and economic reasons. What's more, it is an unnecessary solution. There's no reason why middle- and upper-middle class students shouldn't pay for their education. Targeted aid programs, both privately and publicly funded, are already available to help lower-income students; what is probably more needed is not more money per se, but a spreading of social capital that will match students with no family experience of college with schools at which they will flourish. But that hardly necessitates a massive program that Reed likened to the G.I. Bill. (the remarkable self-interest of an academic arguing for essentially unlimited funding for higher education went uncommented upon). Mindich's exam seems ridiculous on the face of it -- and his view of the FCC as something other than a negative force on public discourse seems positively nostalgic.
Certainly, the last 20 years or so -- precisely the period in which cable and satellite services gave viewers a end-run around the FCC-regulated broadcast networks -- have seen a massive flourishing in all sorts of informational programming.
The University of Chicago's Kenneth Warren emphasized the role of pre-college education, even as he gently chided moderator Lazere for subtly equating "political literacy" with agreement on a particular political agenda. Lazere argued that instructors shouldn't shy away from politics in their classroom, because "literature can't be studied independent of political literacy." In fact, he said, they should bring in a wide array of sources, including The Nation and The Weekly Standard, where appropriate or relevant. That's all well and good. But Warren keyed into one of the unfortunate subtexts of any discussion of politics in academe (and, truth be told, everywhere else too). There's always a sense that a speaker thinks that once you understand things as clearly as he does, you'll of course agree completely with him. In this context, to be educated and smart strongly implies agreement on major issues. Which is one reason why the good faith of the classroom instructor is paramount: Students will turn off immediately if they realize they are being railroaded into agreement when discussing a topic.
Emory's Bauerlein -- who during a stint at the National Endowment for the Arts produced the widely discussed report "Reading at Risk" -- pushed the point of true ideological diversity. "We need more and wider perspectives," represented in the classroom, he said. "Bring in a little less Foucault and a little more Hayek. Some Whitaker Chambers to go along with Ralph Ellison." Bauerlein said to bring in a libertarian perspective, one that will upset longstanding Manichean right-left categories. One policy proposal with which I agreed wholeheartedly was his insistence that, along with The Nation and Weekly Standard, instructors should "bring in Reason magazine" (full disclosure: Bauerlein reviewed The Anti-Chomsky Reader for Reason earlier this year). In a more contentious moment, Bauerlein also pushed for instructors to provide students with an American identity that is positive. "Often the identity students get is too negative," he said. "We need not uncritical patriotism, but some line of argument about American history that students can espouse while criticizing other elements." That sort of positive feeling would, he argued, make it easier for students to want to become engaged politically and civically.
Arguably the most surprising presentation was offered up by Patricia Roberts-Miller, an associate professor of rhetoric and composition at the University of Texas at Austin. Roberts-Miller argued that in the classroom, "everyone's politics" -- including that of the professor's -- "should be open to change." She talked about the downsides of what she called "Calvinist political literacy," in which individuals, irrespective of ideology, look for reasons not to engage in political conversation. If Calvinism separates people into saints and sinners whose fates are predetermined and fixed forever, Calvinist political literacy means you don't have to argue with anyone with whom you disagree, because such interaction can only reveal differences rather than persuade.
Channeling radical education theorist Paolo Freire, she warned against thinking of students as "empty vessels" into which knowledge or enlightenment is poured. Rather, they need to be respected and taken seriously even and especially when they appear to be politically reactionary or obtuse.
Most of this is common sense, of course. But what is surprising is that it's coming from a composition theorist. When one digs into press accounts about the most tendentious classes in today's universities and colleges, they are often freshman comp classes. Over the past two decades or so, many of the designers of composition curricula have consciously seen those classes as the ideal place for political indoctrination to a sort of standard left-wing agenda. As one professor friend of mine told me, she's been in department meetings where comp doyennes have declared, "This is our best shot at getting into the minds of students."
So it's heartening to hear someone in Roberts-Miller's position talking the way she does. It suggests that one of the great virtues of higher education -- open-ended discussion -- is hardly a dead letter. Ironically, the beleaguered position of the left in contemporary America, if not the country's universities, may lead to its resurgence as it forced to engage and persuade indifferent -- or skeptical -- students.
When Darwin Meets Dickens
Editor’s note: This is the third installment of Nick Gillespie’s coverage of the Modern Language Association’s annual meeting.
One of the subtexts of this year's Modern Language Association conference -- and, truth be told, of most contemporary discussions of literary and cultural studies -- is the sense that lit-crit is in a prolonged lull. There's no question that a huge amount of interesting work is being done -- scholars of 17th-century British and Colonial American literature, for instance, are bringing to light all sorts of manuscripts and movements that are quietly revising our understanding of liberal political theory and gender roles -- and that certain fields -- postcolonial studies, say, and composition and rhetoric -- are hotter than others. But it's been years -- decades even -- since a major new way of thinking about literature has really taken the academic world by storm.
If lit-crit is always something of a roller-coaster ride, the car has been stuck at the top of the first big hill for a while now, waiting for some type of rollicking approach to kick in and get the blood pumping again. What's the next big thing going to be? The next first-order critical paradigm that -- like New Criticism in the 1940s and '50s; cultural studies in the '60s; French post-structural theory in the '70s, and New Historicism in the '80s -- really rocks faculty lounges? (Go here for summaries of these and other movements).
It was with this question in mind that I attended yesterday's panel on "Cognition, Emotion, and Sexuality," which was arranged by the discussion group on Cognitive Approaches to Literature and moderated by Nancy Easterlin of the University of New Orleans. Scholars working in this area use developments in cognitive psychology, neurophysiology, evolutionary psychology, and related fields to figure out not only how we process literature but, to borrow the title of a forthcoming book in the field, Why We Read Fiction.
Although there are important differences, cognitive approaches often overlap with evolutionary approaches, or what The New York Times earlier this year dubbed "The Literary Darwinists"; those latter critics, to quote the Times:
“...read books in search of innate patterns of human behavior: child bearing and rearing, efforts to acquire resources (money, property, influence) and competition and cooperation within families and communities. They say that it's impossible to fully appreciate and understand a literary text unless you keep in mind that humans behave in certain universal ways and do so because those behaviors are hard-wired into us. For them, the most effective and truest works of literature are those that reference or exemplify these basic facts.“
Both cognitive and evolutionary approaches to lit-crit have been gaining recognition and adherents over the past decade or so. Cognitive critics are less interested in recurring plots or specific themes in literature, but they share with the Darwinists an interest in using scientific advances to help explore the universally observed human tendency toward creative expression, or what the fascinating anthropologist Ellen Dissanayake called in Homo Aestheticus: Where Art Comes From and Why, “making special.”
This unironic -- though hardly uncritical -- interest in science represents a clear break with much of what might be called the postmodern orthodoxy, which views science less as a pure source of knowledge and more as a means of controlling and regulating discourse and power. The postmodern view has contributed to a keener appreciation of how appeals to science are often self-interested and obfuscating. In this, it was anticipated in many ways by libertarian analyses such as F.A. Hayek's The Counter-Revolution of Science: Studies on the Abuse of Reason (1952) and Thomas Szasz's The Myth of Mental Illness, which exposed a hidden agenda of social control behind the helper rhetoric of the medical establishment and, not uncoincidentally, appeared the same year as Michel Foucault's The Birth of the Clinic. (For more on connections between libertarian thought and postmodernism, go here and here.)
At the same time, the postmodern view of science as simply one discourse among many could be taken to pathetic and self-defeating extremes, as the Sokal Hoax, in which physicist Alan Sokal published a secret parody in a leading pomo journal, illustrated. Indeed, the status of science -- and perhaps especially evolution and theories of human cognition that proceed from it -- in literary studies is curious. On the one hand, a belief in evolution as opposed to creationism or Intelligent Design is considered by most scholars a sign of cosmopolitan sophistication and a clear point of difference with religious fundamentalists. On the other hand, there are elements of biological determinism implicit in evolution that cut against various left-wing agendas -- and against the postmodern assertions that all stories are equally (in)valid.
Yet if evolution is real in any sense of the word, it must have a profound effect on what we do as human beings when it comes to art and culture.
Which brings us back to the "Cognition, Emotions, and Sexuality" panel, which sought, pace most literary theory of the past few decades, to explore universal processes by which human beings produce and consume literature. That alone makes the cognitive approach a significant break with the status quo.
The first presenter was Alan Palmer, an independent scholar based in London and the author of the award-winning Fictional Minds. For Palmer, how we process fiction is effectively hardwired, though not without cultural emphases that depend on social and historical context; it also functions as a place where we can understand more clearly how we process the "real" world. After summarizing recent cognitive work that suggests "our ways of knowing the world are bound up in how we feel the world...that cognition and emotion are inseparable," he noted that the basic way we read stories is by attributing intentions, motives, and emotions to characters. "Narrative," he argued, "is in essence the description of fictional mental networks," in which characters impute and test meanings about the world.
He led the session through a close reading of a passage from Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49. The section in question was filled with discrepant emotions popping up even in the same short phrases. For instance, the female protagonist Oedipa Maas at one point hears in the voice of her husband "something between annoyance and agony." Palmer -- whose argument was incredibly complex and is hard to reproduce -- mapped out the ways in which both the character and the reader made sense of those distinct emotional states of mind. The result was a reading that, beyond digging deep into Pynchon, also helped make explicit the "folk psychology" Palmer says readers bring to texts -- and how we settle on meanings in the wake of unfamiliar emotional juxtapositions. As the panel's respondent, University of Connecticut's Elizabeth Hart, helpfully summarized, Palmers' reading greatly "complexified the passage" and was "richly descriptive" of the dynamics at play.
The second paper, by Auburn's Donald R. Wehrs, argued that infantile sexual experiences based around either the satisfaction of basic wants by mothers or proximity to maternal figures grounded the metaphors used by various philosophers of religious experience. Drawing on work that argues that consciousness emerges from the body's monitoring itself in relation to objects outside of it, Wehrs sketched a metaphoric continuum of images of religious fulfillment with St. Augustine at one end and Emmanuel Levinas on the other; he also briefly located the preacher Jonathan Edwards and Ralph Waldo Emerson on the continuum too. As Hart the respondent noted, Wehrs showed that there's "an emotional underwebbing to the history of ideas." That is, a set of diverse philosophers expressed a "common cognitive ground rooted in infantile erotic experience rather than practical reasoning."
Augustine, says Wehrs, conflates the divine and human and locates the origin of love and religious ecstasy with the stilling of appetite or desire. In essence, peace is understood as the absence of bad appetites, which accords with one basic infantile erotic or physical response to wants. Levinas, on the other hand, also draws on infantile experience but focuses not on ingestion but on proximity to the mother. Both of these reactions are basic cognitive realities that all humans experience as infants; together, they create a range of possible metaphors that recur in religious discussions. On the one hand, Augustine talks of being one with God (and the mother), of an inviolate bond that shows up in somewhat attenuated form in Jonathan Edward's imagery of being penetrated by God. On the other, Levinas stresses proximity to the Other, which mirrors infantile cognitive experience of closeness with the mother. This understanding, he said, is also reflected in Emerson's metaphors of resting and laying in Nature.
Will cognitive approaches become the next big thing in lit-crit? Or bio-criticism of the Darwinian brand? That probably won't happen, even as these approaches will, I think, continue to gain in reputation and standing. More to the point, as I argued in a 1998 article, these scholars who are linking Darwin and Dickens have helped challenge an intellectual orthodoxy that, however exciting it once was, seems pretty well played out. In his tour de force Mimesis and the Human Animal: On the Biogenetic Foundations of Literary Representation (1996), Temple's Robert Storey -- one of Nancy Easterlin's doctoral advisors -- warns:
“If [literary theory] continues on its present course, its reputation as a laughingstock among the scientific disciplines will come to be all but irreversible. Given the current state of scientific knowledge, it is still possible for literary theory to recover both seriousness and integrity and to be restored to legitimacy in the world at large.”
Ten years out, Storey's warning seems less pressing. The lure of the most arch forms of anti-scientific postmodernism has subsided, partly because of their own excesses and partly because of challenges such as Storey's. As important, the work being done by the cognitive scholars and others suggest that literature and science can both gain from ongoing collaboration.
http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=123005A
English Patients: Literature in the Digital Age
The final session I attended at the 2005 Modern Language Association convention -- "Taking It Digital: Teaching Literature in the 21st Century" -- wasn't just interesting in and of itself (though it was certainly that). It also opens up a broader discussion about the future of academic literary studies -- and suggests some ways that literature departments might turn around a long, slow decline in the number of students majoring in English and related fields.
Data from the Association of Departments of English are pretty grim. In 1950, English majors accounted for about four bachelor's degrees out of every 100 granted. That number rose steadily for about 20 years, peaking in 1971, when English degrees accounted for 7.66 degrees per 100 earned. Since then, it's been basically downhill (with the exception of a slight uptick in the late 1980s and early '90s). In 2003, English departments were back where they were in 1950, accounting for about four degrees per 100. The trends in foreign language degrees are similar, and you'll search in vain for a professor of foreign language who is not in an absolute panic over declines in student enrollment. These trends generally track with other disciplines in the humanities and social sciences and hold up when you control for gender, too (English has always been a more popular major for women than men but enrollments follow the same pattern for each).
Which is not to say that all is darkness, at least in terms of English departments. According to government data, in 2003 English was the 10th most popular major (the most popular by far was business; go here and check table 289 for a detailed breakdown). Still, the relative loss of undergraduate majors leads directly to a loss of institutional clout, which in turn leads to a loss of faculty resources ranging from tenure-track lines, research leaves, and more. A decline in majors hits humanities programs especially hard, since they have less opportunity than, say, most of the research sciences or professional schools to attract major grants from private industry or governments.
There's no simple accounting for the decline in English and foreign language enrollments. (Indeed, there's no simple accounting for their increase in the period from the end of World War II through the 1960s). Some of it is surely is due to the changing makeup of student populations. Despite the myths that surround the G.I. Bill, attending college only really became a mass phenomenon in the United States in the 1970s. (There has been a corresponding boom in the sheer number and variety of institutions of higher education, too. There are roughly 4,200 two- and four- year colleges and universities in the United States; in 1980, there were only 3,200.) It seems logical to expect that first-generation college students are more likely to focus on majors and courses of study that are more directly tied to job possibilities. I rush to say that I'm not fully convinced of this: I was among the first generation in my family to attend college and majored in English; my sister majored in French. Still, it might be that as college became more democratic, the perceived luxury of a lit degree seemed less appealing, especially as college costs have climbed. Part of it is surely economic in another sense. In terms of starting salaries, English majors actually do pretty well, but their immediate prospects are dwarfed by those taking degrees in fields such as electrical engineering, accounting, and economics.
Part of it is likely due to the changing nature of literary criticism. There's little doubt that over the past 30 years or so, academic literary criticism, as in every other field, has become more insular, segmented, and jargon-ridden. Some of this is inevitable--it represents an ever keener division of labor among scholars -- and much of it has resulted in work that is, ironically, fascinating to a broad reading public. For all the screeds -- which come from the left as well as the right -- decrying the rise of French theory and especially deconstruction -- it surely means something that the term deconstruction has entered the American vernacular. Sure, the common usage may have precious little to do with the precise way that Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man specified, but they more than most would recognize that concepts morph and change over time and circumstance. It's tempting to think that if all academic literary critics wrote like, say, the great Leslie Fiedler, that lit-crit would be packing in undergraduates like the carnival freak sideshows he wrote about so memorably.
Perhaps more important -- and this is something that Fiedler recognized in his excellent 1982 meditation on the changing nature of cultural consumption, production, and elite gate-keeping, What Was Literature? -- much of the work traditionally done by academics has seeped into the culture at large. In an age of cultural proliferation, where more of us can make and take whatever we want, whenever we want, Literature with a capital "l" -- doesn't command the same position it did even 30, much less 50, years ago (think of the difference in contemporaneous cultural standing, say, between Ernest Hemingway and Don DeLillo). The world we live in is not simply awash in an increasing amount of print, video, music, art, and other forms of creative expression; it's awash in an increasing number of critics of the same. Such a world is increasingly dispersed and decentralized and it is extremely hard for any single locus of power to exercise much control over what we consume or how we interpret what we consume. That used to be a role that academic literary studies could, if not quite dominate, lead. But no more. Ironically, a world filled with more culture may inevitably be one where the ostensible guardians of culture are less important than before.
So those are some -- and only some, for sure -- of the possible reasons literature departments have been losing students. And as Zachary Karabell argued in What's College For?: The Struggle to Define American Higher Education (1999), the loss of students eventually means the loss of institutional power at colleges and universities.
The presenters at the "Taking It Digital" panel suggest some interesting ways to rejuvenate the lit classroom. Olin Bjork, a graduate student at the University of Texas, described "The Tempest Multimedia Project," in which he and a fellow instructor had students build an extensive online compendium of all sorts of primary and secondary resources, including audio recordings of music used in various stagings of the Shakespeare play, period maps, and more. The students worked collaboratively and gained Web and organizational skills while they sharpened their critical faculties and gained deeper knowledge about a play whose theme and various interpretations remain vital to understanding conceptions of the New World. (Bjork said the project was still available online but I was unable to dig it up via Google.)
Mary Michele Bendel-Simso and Julianne Jasken, two professors at a small Maryland College, presented a summary of "The McDaniel College Short Story Project," in which students created extremely rich sites built around individual short stories by authors ranging from Sarah Orne Jewett to Kate Chopin to Mark Twain. The students worked with area high-school teachers to help create study guides and resources, as well, creating meaningful community ties between the college and nearby secondary schools.
The most interesting presentation was by Alain-Philippe Durand, who is an associate professor of French at the University of Rhode Island. He detailed his experiences with two "online seminars" he taught in 2001 and 2005. As a member of French department, Durand was especially cognizant of falling enrollments and he noted with pride that between 1999 and 2005, URI had upped its French majors from 35 students to 125, largely by trying to make its offerings more interesting and relevant--and focused on content and analysis rather than language instruction.
Following Foucault (mais oui), he noted that we live in an "epoch of juxtaposition...of the side by side" in which "networks rule." For his online seminars, he combined traditional classroom instruction with interactive Web forums in which students directly engaged some of the authors and filmmakers they were discussing as part of the course's requirements. He contacted the writers through their publishing houses and reported that most were not only willing to participate gratis but were energized by the direct connection with readers, especially those in a foreign country. The 2005 seminar forum is online here; one set of students also created an elaborate site built around the writer Marie Darrieussecq. Such exercises not only allowed students to hone their French skills but to explore more fully the way that tools of literary criticism and analysis function in a broad variety of settings. As Durand emphasized throughout his remarks, parents routinely insist on the "practicality" of their children's courses of study.
This isn't to suggest that the only way literary studies can or should survive is by teaching some mixture of Web skills and critical reading tools that might be applied outside of literary studies. Still, it's clear that in an information- and media-drenched world such as ours, critical reading and writing skills are at more of a premium than ever before. On this point, Durand cited Roland Barthes who once said, with characteristic overstatement, that if the university could teach only one subject it should be literature -- because literature includes all other disciplines. What is blogging if not literary criticism gone wild?
What each of these presentations had in common was an understanding of what University of Tulsa communication professor Joli Jensen has talked about as an "expressive view" of culture. That is, culture broadly defined "is a way that all of us, even those of us who are not in a special guardian class, understand and symbolically engage the world." This understanding puts art, music, literature, and other forms of creative expression, including political expression, at the very center of our individual and collective experience. Which means that lucid interpretation of the same is vital.
And it need not rely on cutting-edge multimedia technologies; in the end, the panel was less about "taking it digital" and more about engaging students in the creation of meaning. To the extent that literature professors can make it clear that what they do is central to what we all do -- engage and interpret the world within ever-changing and ever-evolving traditions and communities -- literary studies may well be poised for a great 21st century.
Nick Gillespie is Editor of Reason.
By Nick Gillespie : BIO | 27 Dec 2005
http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=122705A
No academic conference draws more smirks and bitch-slaps than the annual Modern Language Association convention. Held every December 27-30, the MLA convention pulls together upwards of 10,000 literary scholars ranging in status from rock-star professors feeling the love of their intellectual acolytes to starving, hysterical grad students desperate for any position in a perennially tight job market.
This year's meeting, which is taking place in Washington, D.C., features almost 800 panels and presentations, ranging from Tuesday's "Women and Devotional Writing in Early Middle English" (the first literature panel listed in a program as thick as a phone book) to Friday's finale, "Gypsies in European Literature, Culture, and the Arts."
In between are meetings of groups devoted to Andre Gide, Margaret Fuller, William Carlos Williams, and seemingly every other author with more than a haiku to his name; endless job interviews in which those nervous grad students throw off more flop sweat than Thomas Jefferson contemplating a just god; and, not uncoincidentally, more cash bars than there are in heaven (or at least Brooklyn).
Despite its preeminence within academic literary and cultural studies, the MLA convention is the Rodney Dangerfield of such confabs, getting little or no respect not just from right-wingers who reliably scoff at the unmistakable left-wing bent to the proceedings but from liberal mainstream media who eye the jargon-choked pronouncements of the professoriate with equal helpings of disdain, derision, and dismissiveness.
Indeed, the MLA has been a running joke since 1989, when The New York Times ran a story mocking the titles of some of the conference's papers, most memorably one called "Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl" (which on the face of it sounds far more interesting than the latest remake of Pride and Prejudice). Since then, the MLA's public image, to the extent that it has one, has been as a sort of a cruise ship of fools, where loony tenured radicals prattle on about defining "the Lacanian gaze," undermining the persistence of "late capitalism," and resisting commodity fetishism (while ostensibly embracing every other sort of fetishism), and more. Such postmodern antics caused the conservative journal The New Criterion to say "Farewell to the MLA" in a 1995 article. But the MLA's politically correct and arguably even more annoying obscurantist tendencies have also provided fertile ground for an annually repeated story in the Times and elsewhere, one every bit as worn out and tedious as an Art Buchwald holiday column.
Last year, for instance, the Times pooh-poohed what it dubbed "Eggheads' Naughty Word Games" and ran through a quick litany of silly-sounding titles (somehow, the paper of record never seems to stop chuckling long enough to get around to actually reading the essays in question), including "She's Just Like Alvy Singer! Kissing Jessica Stein and the Postethnic Jewish Lesbian"; "A Place for Giggling Field Hands: Queer Power and Social Equality in the Mid-20th-Century Plantation Myth"; "'Dude! Your Dress Is So Cute!' Patterns of Semantic Widening in 'Dude'"; and "A Pynch in Time: The Postmodernity of Prenational Philadelphia in Thomas Pynchon's Mason and Dixon and Mark Knopfler's 'Sailing to Philadelphia.'" Concluded the Times:
“What any of it has to do with teaching literature to America's college students remains as vexing a question to some today as it was a decade ago....The association has come to resemble a hyperactive child who, having interrupted the grownups' conversation by dancing on the coffee table, can't be made to stop.”
This is, to say the least, a peculiar way to frame coverage of a major academic conference in which leading scholars get together to discuss new research. As I've noted else where, beneath the mechanical reproduction of basically the same story every year is the buried presumption that literary scholarship properly should be about "teaching literature to America's college students." Does the Times worry about this same question when the annual chemistry conference comes to town?
As important, such a take misrepresents that vast bulk of MLA papers and panels which not only don't have laughable titles but are devoted to recognizable subject areas, historical periods, influential authors, and serious examination of new and old texts important to specialists. But panels called "American Neoclassicism," "John Donne and the Crises of His Times: Intellectual, Political, Religious," and "Troilus and Criseyde" (to name three from this year's offerings) just don't get the belly laughs. It's also worth pointing out that the assembled scholars do indeed spend time thinking about connections between their research and the classroom. Hence, panels such as "Iconicity and
Literature: Teaching Strategies;" "Teaching Indigenous and Foreign Languages"; and "How to Teach Prerevolutionary French Literature to Undergraduates and Why We Still Should."
None of this is to suggest that the MLA doesn't in many -- perhaps most -- ways live up to its reputation as one of the very most reliable bastions of political correctness. In 1999, for instance, the group passed a resolution opposing the "use of sweatshop, prison, and nonunion labor throughout the academic world," as if there are no meaningful distinctions to be drawn between, say, a convict working in a Chinese textile mill and a Fedex driver delivering packages at Harvard. At an annual convention in the recent past, French social critic Pierre Bourdieu, beamed in via satellite from Paris, exhorted the tweed-cloaked masses to join unions en masse. This year's conference features sessions on "Marxism and Globalization," "Marxist Theory: Between Aesthetics and Politics," and "Academic Work and the New McCarthyism," suggesting that Karl Marx remains more warmly remembered in U.S. literature departments than anywhere else in the world outside of Havana and Pyongyang. Similarly, this year's program leaves little doubt that the p.c. Holy Trinity of race, class, and gender will not go begging for attention.
But still, if you care about literature or culture, pat dismissals of the MLA are a shame. Despite its excesses, the annual convention comprises a State of the Union address when it comes to lit-crit studies. If it's true that we're in the midst of a culture boom -- a massive and ongoing expansion in art, music, print, video, and other forms of creative expression -- we'd be wise to keep up with analytical tools being created and perfected in the nation's universities. And, truth be told, the MLA is far less ideologically homogenous than one might think. Over the past several years, I even managed to organize special sessions on such market-friendly, libertarian topics as "The Economics of Culture: Non-Marxist Materialist Approaches to Literary and Cultural Studies" and "The Anti-Capitalist Mentality in Literary and Cultural Studies"; both sessions were well-attended and received. Hell, this year even boasts a luncheon arranged by the "Conference on Christianity and Literature." As with most things, there's surely more here than what you read about in The New York Times.
To that end, I'll be covering this year's MLA convention for TCS, filing dispatches on a daily basis through the week. I won't stint on reporting on ridiculous political excesses, but I'll also be on the lookout for new and interesting developments in lit-crit that might just all help us understand our text-soaked world a little better. And I'll be checking out those cash bars, too. Really, who could walk by something called "Romantics Cash Bar and Dinner," arranged by the Keats-Shelley Association of America, without stopping for a drink or two?
The Kids Are All Right, Dammit
WASHINGTON -- As the 2005 Modern Language Association annual convention officially got underway last night, attendees could choose from panels on "Travel Writing and Empire" (a growth field over the past decade or so, as "postcolonial studies" looking at the interplay between cultural artifacts and geopolitics has gained in popularity); "Contemporary Fiction and the Novel of Ideas" (featuring readings of books by Richard Powers, Tariq Ali, and Nicholas Mosley); and "Religion and Cultural Studies: Postmodern Approaches" (which included interesting-sounding papers on "Selling Religion and Literature in Cold War America" and "Georges Bataille's Yoga Practice" -- somehow I'm guessing the Surrealist author of several of the dirtiest books ever was into the Tantric variety); and much, much more.
I laid in with a panel called "English Studies and Political Literacy." As one of several "presidential forums," scattered throughout the week's proceedings, this crew not only tackled a big picture topic but pulled in scholars from outside traditional literature departments -- in this case a journalism professor and a political scientist.
In the end, the panel didn't really come up with any silver-bullet solutions to what all agreed was a stunning and troubling decline in student knowledge of and participation in not just partisan politics but civic engagement more broadly defined. But far more interesting than what they said was how they said it: Panelists alternated between recognizing that they had to change their teaching practices in order to connect with increasingly conservative students (see table 272) to invoking large-scale social, economic, and political forces and, in the words of one panelist, a "concerted effort" by "Goebbelsian" masters of rhetoric that have turned the country to the right over the past generation or so.
In other words, the panel accurately summed up the state of exasperation that many liberal and left-leaning academics feel not just about the kids these days but about American society more generally. More promising, perhaps, were the signs that such exasperation is leading to a moderation of ideological excess rather than a heightening of it. That is, faced with a choice between a sort of bitter righteousness and increasing irrelevance on the one hand and engaging students with more fair-minded argumentation and open-ended discussion, some academics are choosing the latter. That's certainly good news for kids stuck in freshman composition classes, those dreary required classes which are often little more than clumsy attempts at political indoctrination.
Political literacy, noted Emory University's Mark Bauerlein, matters because "of the heavy burden that democracy places on its citizens. Every government that is not watched closely slides into tyranny." If students don't know the basic facts of government and politics, they really have no role in the debates that will greatly affect their lives, he said. Among the signs of declining political literacy in college students, said the panelists, were lower rates of news consumption.
In 1972, said David Mindich, a journalism professor at St. Michael's College and author of Tuned Out: Why Americans Under 40 Don't Follow the News, half of all college students read a newspaper every day. Now the percentage is 21 percent. He and other panelists invoked a long-term decline in youth political participation, a trend which is at the very least complicated by the turnout in the 2004 election, in which, according to Pew Charitable Trusts, the youth vote surged more than any other group's. Indeed, with some notable exceptions, the notion of today's youth as disengaged is not particularly convincing.
Nonetheless, the panel's moderator, University of Tennessee's Donald Lazere, attributed political apathy largely to economic forces. Students from all socioeconomic backgrounds need to work outside jobs to pay for school and that financial squeeze leaves them less time for study. I'm not convinced that students are working more outside jobs in the past but if they are, that may be one of the prices paid to have more kids going directly to college after graduating high school. Since the mid-'90s, about two-thirds of graduating seniors go on to college, which is a sign of a strong higher education system (even if far fewer than 66 percent actually graduate). So is, for that matter, the amazing diversity of educational institutions -- indeed, one wishes that K-12 education offered up as many competing alternatives as you see in higher education.
And is working a job really antithetical to intellectual and political engagement? I never worked fewer than 30 hours a week during my undergraduate years and still I found plenty of time to kill in the library, engage in wee-hours bull sessions, and indulge in lost weekends.
Lazere, who identified himself openly as a "progressive," also noted that many students are simply "lacking the basic Hirschian cultural literacy" required for engagement in civic life. Adolph Reed, Jr., a political scientist at University of Pennsylvania, contributor to The Nation, and Labor Party stalwart, argued that "kids are sponges, they soak up what's around them." The past 25 years, he said, have been a period in which there's been "a concerted effort" to push the country to the right, to stifle left-wing political activity and dissent, and to create a consumer model of education in which the professor is really little more than glorified counter help. He singled out the rise of the for-profit University of Phoenix as a particularly reactionary trend (ironically, the University of Phoenix was created by billionaire John Sperling, a former political science professor, drug legalization advocate, and one of the biggest supporters of the Democratic Party). Such forces, concluded Reed, work to keep students from being politically conscious and engaged.
So what is to be done? Reed champions a plan for the federal government to fund tuition for any American that wants to go to college. Journalism professor Mindich argued half-heartedly for a non-binding national exam in current events and civics given to all 18-year-olds; he also called for a reinvigorated Federal Communications Commission to start forcing networks to show more news programming. Reed's plan is unlikely to ever be put in motion for any number of political and economic reasons. What's more, it is an unnecessary solution. There's no reason why middle- and upper-middle class students shouldn't pay for their education. Targeted aid programs, both privately and publicly funded, are already available to help lower-income students; what is probably more needed is not more money per se, but a spreading of social capital that will match students with no family experience of college with schools at which they will flourish. But that hardly necessitates a massive program that Reed likened to the G.I. Bill. (the remarkable self-interest of an academic arguing for essentially unlimited funding for higher education went uncommented upon). Mindich's exam seems ridiculous on the face of it -- and his view of the FCC as something other than a negative force on public discourse seems positively nostalgic.
Certainly, the last 20 years or so -- precisely the period in which cable and satellite services gave viewers a end-run around the FCC-regulated broadcast networks -- have seen a massive flourishing in all sorts of informational programming.
The University of Chicago's Kenneth Warren emphasized the role of pre-college education, even as he gently chided moderator Lazere for subtly equating "political literacy" with agreement on a particular political agenda. Lazere argued that instructors shouldn't shy away from politics in their classroom, because "literature can't be studied independent of political literacy." In fact, he said, they should bring in a wide array of sources, including The Nation and The Weekly Standard, where appropriate or relevant. That's all well and good. But Warren keyed into one of the unfortunate subtexts of any discussion of politics in academe (and, truth be told, everywhere else too). There's always a sense that a speaker thinks that once you understand things as clearly as he does, you'll of course agree completely with him. In this context, to be educated and smart strongly implies agreement on major issues. Which is one reason why the good faith of the classroom instructor is paramount: Students will turn off immediately if they realize they are being railroaded into agreement when discussing a topic.
Emory's Bauerlein -- who during a stint at the National Endowment for the Arts produced the widely discussed report "Reading at Risk" -- pushed the point of true ideological diversity. "We need more and wider perspectives," represented in the classroom, he said. "Bring in a little less Foucault and a little more Hayek. Some Whitaker Chambers to go along with Ralph Ellison." Bauerlein said to bring in a libertarian perspective, one that will upset longstanding Manichean right-left categories. One policy proposal with which I agreed wholeheartedly was his insistence that, along with The Nation and Weekly Standard, instructors should "bring in Reason magazine" (full disclosure: Bauerlein reviewed The Anti-Chomsky Reader for Reason earlier this year). In a more contentious moment, Bauerlein also pushed for instructors to provide students with an American identity that is positive. "Often the identity students get is too negative," he said. "We need not uncritical patriotism, but some line of argument about American history that students can espouse while criticizing other elements." That sort of positive feeling would, he argued, make it easier for students to want to become engaged politically and civically.
Arguably the most surprising presentation was offered up by Patricia Roberts-Miller, an associate professor of rhetoric and composition at the University of Texas at Austin. Roberts-Miller argued that in the classroom, "everyone's politics" -- including that of the professor's -- "should be open to change." She talked about the downsides of what she called "Calvinist political literacy," in which individuals, irrespective of ideology, look for reasons not to engage in political conversation. If Calvinism separates people into saints and sinners whose fates are predetermined and fixed forever, Calvinist political literacy means you don't have to argue with anyone with whom you disagree, because such interaction can only reveal differences rather than persuade.
Channeling radical education theorist Paolo Freire, she warned against thinking of students as "empty vessels" into which knowledge or enlightenment is poured. Rather, they need to be respected and taken seriously even and especially when they appear to be politically reactionary or obtuse.
Most of this is common sense, of course. But what is surprising is that it's coming from a composition theorist. When one digs into press accounts about the most tendentious classes in today's universities and colleges, they are often freshman comp classes. Over the past two decades or so, many of the designers of composition curricula have consciously seen those classes as the ideal place for political indoctrination to a sort of standard left-wing agenda. As one professor friend of mine told me, she's been in department meetings where comp doyennes have declared, "This is our best shot at getting into the minds of students."
So it's heartening to hear someone in Roberts-Miller's position talking the way she does. It suggests that one of the great virtues of higher education -- open-ended discussion -- is hardly a dead letter. Ironically, the beleaguered position of the left in contemporary America, if not the country's universities, may lead to its resurgence as it forced to engage and persuade indifferent -- or skeptical -- students.
When Darwin Meets Dickens
Editor’s note: This is the third installment of Nick Gillespie’s coverage of the Modern Language Association’s annual meeting.
One of the subtexts of this year's Modern Language Association conference -- and, truth be told, of most contemporary discussions of literary and cultural studies -- is the sense that lit-crit is in a prolonged lull. There's no question that a huge amount of interesting work is being done -- scholars of 17th-century British and Colonial American literature, for instance, are bringing to light all sorts of manuscripts and movements that are quietly revising our understanding of liberal political theory and gender roles -- and that certain fields -- postcolonial studies, say, and composition and rhetoric -- are hotter than others. But it's been years -- decades even -- since a major new way of thinking about literature has really taken the academic world by storm.
If lit-crit is always something of a roller-coaster ride, the car has been stuck at the top of the first big hill for a while now, waiting for some type of rollicking approach to kick in and get the blood pumping again. What's the next big thing going to be? The next first-order critical paradigm that -- like New Criticism in the 1940s and '50s; cultural studies in the '60s; French post-structural theory in the '70s, and New Historicism in the '80s -- really rocks faculty lounges? (Go here for summaries of these and other movements).
It was with this question in mind that I attended yesterday's panel on "Cognition, Emotion, and Sexuality," which was arranged by the discussion group on Cognitive Approaches to Literature and moderated by Nancy Easterlin of the University of New Orleans. Scholars working in this area use developments in cognitive psychology, neurophysiology, evolutionary psychology, and related fields to figure out not only how we process literature but, to borrow the title of a forthcoming book in the field, Why We Read Fiction.
Although there are important differences, cognitive approaches often overlap with evolutionary approaches, or what The New York Times earlier this year dubbed "The Literary Darwinists"; those latter critics, to quote the Times:
“...read books in search of innate patterns of human behavior: child bearing and rearing, efforts to acquire resources (money, property, influence) and competition and cooperation within families and communities. They say that it's impossible to fully appreciate and understand a literary text unless you keep in mind that humans behave in certain universal ways and do so because those behaviors are hard-wired into us. For them, the most effective and truest works of literature are those that reference or exemplify these basic facts.“
Both cognitive and evolutionary approaches to lit-crit have been gaining recognition and adherents over the past decade or so. Cognitive critics are less interested in recurring plots or specific themes in literature, but they share with the Darwinists an interest in using scientific advances to help explore the universally observed human tendency toward creative expression, or what the fascinating anthropologist Ellen Dissanayake called in Homo Aestheticus: Where Art Comes From and Why, “making special.”
This unironic -- though hardly uncritical -- interest in science represents a clear break with much of what might be called the postmodern orthodoxy, which views science less as a pure source of knowledge and more as a means of controlling and regulating discourse and power. The postmodern view has contributed to a keener appreciation of how appeals to science are often self-interested and obfuscating. In this, it was anticipated in many ways by libertarian analyses such as F.A. Hayek's The Counter-Revolution of Science: Studies on the Abuse of Reason (1952) and Thomas Szasz's The Myth of Mental Illness, which exposed a hidden agenda of social control behind the helper rhetoric of the medical establishment and, not uncoincidentally, appeared the same year as Michel Foucault's The Birth of the Clinic. (For more on connections between libertarian thought and postmodernism, go here and here.)
At the same time, the postmodern view of science as simply one discourse among many could be taken to pathetic and self-defeating extremes, as the Sokal Hoax, in which physicist Alan Sokal published a secret parody in a leading pomo journal, illustrated. Indeed, the status of science -- and perhaps especially evolution and theories of human cognition that proceed from it -- in literary studies is curious. On the one hand, a belief in evolution as opposed to creationism or Intelligent Design is considered by most scholars a sign of cosmopolitan sophistication and a clear point of difference with religious fundamentalists. On the other hand, there are elements of biological determinism implicit in evolution that cut against various left-wing agendas -- and against the postmodern assertions that all stories are equally (in)valid.
Yet if evolution is real in any sense of the word, it must have a profound effect on what we do as human beings when it comes to art and culture.
Which brings us back to the "Cognition, Emotions, and Sexuality" panel, which sought, pace most literary theory of the past few decades, to explore universal processes by which human beings produce and consume literature. That alone makes the cognitive approach a significant break with the status quo.
The first presenter was Alan Palmer, an independent scholar based in London and the author of the award-winning Fictional Minds. For Palmer, how we process fiction is effectively hardwired, though not without cultural emphases that depend on social and historical context; it also functions as a place where we can understand more clearly how we process the "real" world. After summarizing recent cognitive work that suggests "our ways of knowing the world are bound up in how we feel the world...that cognition and emotion are inseparable," he noted that the basic way we read stories is by attributing intentions, motives, and emotions to characters. "Narrative," he argued, "is in essence the description of fictional mental networks," in which characters impute and test meanings about the world.
He led the session through a close reading of a passage from Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49. The section in question was filled with discrepant emotions popping up even in the same short phrases. For instance, the female protagonist Oedipa Maas at one point hears in the voice of her husband "something between annoyance and agony." Palmer -- whose argument was incredibly complex and is hard to reproduce -- mapped out the ways in which both the character and the reader made sense of those distinct emotional states of mind. The result was a reading that, beyond digging deep into Pynchon, also helped make explicit the "folk psychology" Palmer says readers bring to texts -- and how we settle on meanings in the wake of unfamiliar emotional juxtapositions. As the panel's respondent, University of Connecticut's Elizabeth Hart, helpfully summarized, Palmers' reading greatly "complexified the passage" and was "richly descriptive" of the dynamics at play.
The second paper, by Auburn's Donald R. Wehrs, argued that infantile sexual experiences based around either the satisfaction of basic wants by mothers or proximity to maternal figures grounded the metaphors used by various philosophers of religious experience. Drawing on work that argues that consciousness emerges from the body's monitoring itself in relation to objects outside of it, Wehrs sketched a metaphoric continuum of images of religious fulfillment with St. Augustine at one end and Emmanuel Levinas on the other; he also briefly located the preacher Jonathan Edwards and Ralph Waldo Emerson on the continuum too. As Hart the respondent noted, Wehrs showed that there's "an emotional underwebbing to the history of ideas." That is, a set of diverse philosophers expressed a "common cognitive ground rooted in infantile erotic experience rather than practical reasoning."
Augustine, says Wehrs, conflates the divine and human and locates the origin of love and religious ecstasy with the stilling of appetite or desire. In essence, peace is understood as the absence of bad appetites, which accords with one basic infantile erotic or physical response to wants. Levinas, on the other hand, also draws on infantile experience but focuses not on ingestion but on proximity to the mother. Both of these reactions are basic cognitive realities that all humans experience as infants; together, they create a range of possible metaphors that recur in religious discussions. On the one hand, Augustine talks of being one with God (and the mother), of an inviolate bond that shows up in somewhat attenuated form in Jonathan Edward's imagery of being penetrated by God. On the other, Levinas stresses proximity to the Other, which mirrors infantile cognitive experience of closeness with the mother. This understanding, he said, is also reflected in Emerson's metaphors of resting and laying in Nature.
Will cognitive approaches become the next big thing in lit-crit? Or bio-criticism of the Darwinian brand? That probably won't happen, even as these approaches will, I think, continue to gain in reputation and standing. More to the point, as I argued in a 1998 article, these scholars who are linking Darwin and Dickens have helped challenge an intellectual orthodoxy that, however exciting it once was, seems pretty well played out. In his tour de force Mimesis and the Human Animal: On the Biogenetic Foundations of Literary Representation (1996), Temple's Robert Storey -- one of Nancy Easterlin's doctoral advisors -- warns:
“If [literary theory] continues on its present course, its reputation as a laughingstock among the scientific disciplines will come to be all but irreversible. Given the current state of scientific knowledge, it is still possible for literary theory to recover both seriousness and integrity and to be restored to legitimacy in the world at large.”
Ten years out, Storey's warning seems less pressing. The lure of the most arch forms of anti-scientific postmodernism has subsided, partly because of their own excesses and partly because of challenges such as Storey's. As important, the work being done by the cognitive scholars and others suggest that literature and science can both gain from ongoing collaboration.
http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=123005A
English Patients: Literature in the Digital Age
The final session I attended at the 2005 Modern Language Association convention -- "Taking It Digital: Teaching Literature in the 21st Century" -- wasn't just interesting in and of itself (though it was certainly that). It also opens up a broader discussion about the future of academic literary studies -- and suggests some ways that literature departments might turn around a long, slow decline in the number of students majoring in English and related fields.
Data from the Association of Departments of English are pretty grim. In 1950, English majors accounted for about four bachelor's degrees out of every 100 granted. That number rose steadily for about 20 years, peaking in 1971, when English degrees accounted for 7.66 degrees per 100 earned. Since then, it's been basically downhill (with the exception of a slight uptick in the late 1980s and early '90s). In 2003, English departments were back where they were in 1950, accounting for about four degrees per 100. The trends in foreign language degrees are similar, and you'll search in vain for a professor of foreign language who is not in an absolute panic over declines in student enrollment. These trends generally track with other disciplines in the humanities and social sciences and hold up when you control for gender, too (English has always been a more popular major for women than men but enrollments follow the same pattern for each).
Which is not to say that all is darkness, at least in terms of English departments. According to government data, in 2003 English was the 10th most popular major (the most popular by far was business; go here and check table 289 for a detailed breakdown). Still, the relative loss of undergraduate majors leads directly to a loss of institutional clout, which in turn leads to a loss of faculty resources ranging from tenure-track lines, research leaves, and more. A decline in majors hits humanities programs especially hard, since they have less opportunity than, say, most of the research sciences or professional schools to attract major grants from private industry or governments.
There's no simple accounting for the decline in English and foreign language enrollments. (Indeed, there's no simple accounting for their increase in the period from the end of World War II through the 1960s). Some of it is surely is due to the changing makeup of student populations. Despite the myths that surround the G.I. Bill, attending college only really became a mass phenomenon in the United States in the 1970s. (There has been a corresponding boom in the sheer number and variety of institutions of higher education, too. There are roughly 4,200 two- and four- year colleges and universities in the United States; in 1980, there were only 3,200.) It seems logical to expect that first-generation college students are more likely to focus on majors and courses of study that are more directly tied to job possibilities. I rush to say that I'm not fully convinced of this: I was among the first generation in my family to attend college and majored in English; my sister majored in French. Still, it might be that as college became more democratic, the perceived luxury of a lit degree seemed less appealing, especially as college costs have climbed. Part of it is surely economic in another sense. In terms of starting salaries, English majors actually do pretty well, but their immediate prospects are dwarfed by those taking degrees in fields such as electrical engineering, accounting, and economics.
Part of it is likely due to the changing nature of literary criticism. There's little doubt that over the past 30 years or so, academic literary criticism, as in every other field, has become more insular, segmented, and jargon-ridden. Some of this is inevitable--it represents an ever keener division of labor among scholars -- and much of it has resulted in work that is, ironically, fascinating to a broad reading public. For all the screeds -- which come from the left as well as the right -- decrying the rise of French theory and especially deconstruction -- it surely means something that the term deconstruction has entered the American vernacular. Sure, the common usage may have precious little to do with the precise way that Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man specified, but they more than most would recognize that concepts morph and change over time and circumstance. It's tempting to think that if all academic literary critics wrote like, say, the great Leslie Fiedler, that lit-crit would be packing in undergraduates like the carnival freak sideshows he wrote about so memorably.
Perhaps more important -- and this is something that Fiedler recognized in his excellent 1982 meditation on the changing nature of cultural consumption, production, and elite gate-keeping, What Was Literature? -- much of the work traditionally done by academics has seeped into the culture at large. In an age of cultural proliferation, where more of us can make and take whatever we want, whenever we want, Literature with a capital "l" -- doesn't command the same position it did even 30, much less 50, years ago (think of the difference in contemporaneous cultural standing, say, between Ernest Hemingway and Don DeLillo). The world we live in is not simply awash in an increasing amount of print, video, music, art, and other forms of creative expression; it's awash in an increasing number of critics of the same. Such a world is increasingly dispersed and decentralized and it is extremely hard for any single locus of power to exercise much control over what we consume or how we interpret what we consume. That used to be a role that academic literary studies could, if not quite dominate, lead. But no more. Ironically, a world filled with more culture may inevitably be one where the ostensible guardians of culture are less important than before.
So those are some -- and only some, for sure -- of the possible reasons literature departments have been losing students. And as Zachary Karabell argued in What's College For?: The Struggle to Define American Higher Education (1999), the loss of students eventually means the loss of institutional power at colleges and universities.
The presenters at the "Taking It Digital" panel suggest some interesting ways to rejuvenate the lit classroom. Olin Bjork, a graduate student at the University of Texas, described "The Tempest Multimedia Project," in which he and a fellow instructor had students build an extensive online compendium of all sorts of primary and secondary resources, including audio recordings of music used in various stagings of the Shakespeare play, period maps, and more. The students worked collaboratively and gained Web and organizational skills while they sharpened their critical faculties and gained deeper knowledge about a play whose theme and various interpretations remain vital to understanding conceptions of the New World. (Bjork said the project was still available online but I was unable to dig it up via Google.)
Mary Michele Bendel-Simso and Julianne Jasken, two professors at a small Maryland College, presented a summary of "The McDaniel College Short Story Project," in which students created extremely rich sites built around individual short stories by authors ranging from Sarah Orne Jewett to Kate Chopin to Mark Twain. The students worked with area high-school teachers to help create study guides and resources, as well, creating meaningful community ties between the college and nearby secondary schools.
The most interesting presentation was by Alain-Philippe Durand, who is an associate professor of French at the University of Rhode Island. He detailed his experiences with two "online seminars" he taught in 2001 and 2005. As a member of French department, Durand was especially cognizant of falling enrollments and he noted with pride that between 1999 and 2005, URI had upped its French majors from 35 students to 125, largely by trying to make its offerings more interesting and relevant--and focused on content and analysis rather than language instruction.
Following Foucault (mais oui), he noted that we live in an "epoch of juxtaposition...of the side by side" in which "networks rule." For his online seminars, he combined traditional classroom instruction with interactive Web forums in which students directly engaged some of the authors and filmmakers they were discussing as part of the course's requirements. He contacted the writers through their publishing houses and reported that most were not only willing to participate gratis but were energized by the direct connection with readers, especially those in a foreign country. The 2005 seminar forum is online here; one set of students also created an elaborate site built around the writer Marie Darrieussecq. Such exercises not only allowed students to hone their French skills but to explore more fully the way that tools of literary criticism and analysis function in a broad variety of settings. As Durand emphasized throughout his remarks, parents routinely insist on the "practicality" of their children's courses of study.
This isn't to suggest that the only way literary studies can or should survive is by teaching some mixture of Web skills and critical reading tools that might be applied outside of literary studies. Still, it's clear that in an information- and media-drenched world such as ours, critical reading and writing skills are at more of a premium than ever before. On this point, Durand cited Roland Barthes who once said, with characteristic overstatement, that if the university could teach only one subject it should be literature -- because literature includes all other disciplines. What is blogging if not literary criticism gone wild?
What each of these presentations had in common was an understanding of what University of Tulsa communication professor Joli Jensen has talked about as an "expressive view" of culture. That is, culture broadly defined "is a way that all of us, even those of us who are not in a special guardian class, understand and symbolically engage the world." This understanding puts art, music, literature, and other forms of creative expression, including political expression, at the very center of our individual and collective experience. Which means that lucid interpretation of the same is vital.
And it need not rely on cutting-edge multimedia technologies; in the end, the panel was less about "taking it digital" and more about engaging students in the creation of meaning. To the extent that literature professors can make it clear that what they do is central to what we all do -- engage and interpret the world within ever-changing and ever-evolving traditions and communities -- literary studies may well be poised for a great 21st century.
Nick Gillespie is Editor of Reason.
posted by bitandpieces at 11:14 AM
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