Academia Nuts #3
Greetings from the wonderfully gothic University of Chicago. Having just completed my first week as a graduate student, I'd like to offer a thought or two thereon.
We've heard some remarks this week about "entering the conversation," "the conversation" here meaning the scholarly conversation, or all of the scholarly conversations, or really, whatever scholarly conversation happens to be relevant to you in your field at the time. It's clear that as apprentice scholars, writing about any old thing is no longer satisfactory. Our job, like nearly every other profession, is to create value, and value is found in research that is current and relevant. One can't dig up some paper from the 1920s (or even 1970s), write a rebuttal and expect anyone to care -- and by "care," I mean "grant the degree" or "publish."
That much is clear to me, and in that respect I'm all set to jump into "the conversation" -- as soon as I find my bearings of course. But this need to stay current and up-to-date smells dangerously like chronological snobbery. If you're unaware, chronological snobbery is the term C.S. Lewis used (which he got from Owen Barfield, I believe) for the practice of dismissing any idea without knowing a) when it was refuted b) how it was refuted and c) who refuted it. That is, it's the practice of dismissing anything simply because it's out of fashion.
So here's my problem: how can one make the practice of "staying current" a priority, while remaining open to, even seeking out, ideas or methods that perhaps no one has implemented in decades, or centuries? And how can one convince one's colleagues that a dusty old idea or method is not worthless or irrelevant simply by virtue of being dusty and old?
I believe that nearly across the board, academics turn this practice of keeping up-to-date, which is really just a pragmatic career decision, into a monomania that causes them to dismiss out of hand most perspectives of the past. I say "most," because obviously most scholars (not all!) would give a pass to the canon. But let's not forget that none other than Plato went virtually unread and unknown for hundreds of years.
Structuralism petered out, for better or worse, in the 1970s. Now thirty years later, if a serious scholar introduced structuralism into a serious scholarly work today, my guess is they'd get laughed out of the tower -- or, more likely, totally ignored. It is worth considering how much time 30 years represents in the context of over two and a half thousand years of literary studies.
It seems to me that at deconstructionism, the current fashion (though I won't be able to post this until tomorrow, so don't quote me)-- anyway, at deconstructionism, we hit a dead end. Deconstructionism will run its course eventually, and dry up, but this time there will be no new -ism to replace it. (Time may prove me wrong, we'll see.) But once the academy does tire of Derrida et al, there may indeed be nowhere to go from here but back, back over the countless galloping eras of literary criticism. When we reach this stage we'll be able to pick up methods, theories and ideas from any era and combine them with any others; to modify them in the light of another time and place; and to find unfamiliar perspectives on familiar works, or to look at unfamiliar works from familiar perspectives. I believe that this is what truly pluralistic postmodern humanistic studies would look like, and that in their thirst for only what is new, what's happening right now, they are being curiously old-fashioned.
We've heard some remarks this week about "entering the conversation," "the conversation" here meaning the scholarly conversation, or all of the scholarly conversations, or really, whatever scholarly conversation happens to be relevant to you in your field at the time. It's clear that as apprentice scholars, writing about any old thing is no longer satisfactory. Our job, like nearly every other profession, is to create value, and value is found in research that is current and relevant. One can't dig up some paper from the 1920s (or even 1970s), write a rebuttal and expect anyone to care -- and by "care," I mean "grant the degree" or "publish."
That much is clear to me, and in that respect I'm all set to jump into "the conversation" -- as soon as I find my bearings of course. But this need to stay current and up-to-date smells dangerously like chronological snobbery. If you're unaware, chronological snobbery is the term C.S. Lewis used (which he got from Owen Barfield, I believe) for the practice of dismissing any idea without knowing a) when it was refuted b) how it was refuted and c) who refuted it. That is, it's the practice of dismissing anything simply because it's out of fashion.
So here's my problem: how can one make the practice of "staying current" a priority, while remaining open to, even seeking out, ideas or methods that perhaps no one has implemented in decades, or centuries? And how can one convince one's colleagues that a dusty old idea or method is not worthless or irrelevant simply by virtue of being dusty and old?
I believe that nearly across the board, academics turn this practice of keeping up-to-date, which is really just a pragmatic career decision, into a monomania that causes them to dismiss out of hand most perspectives of the past. I say "most," because obviously most scholars (not all!) would give a pass to the canon. But let's not forget that none other than Plato went virtually unread and unknown for hundreds of years.
Structuralism petered out, for better or worse, in the 1970s. Now thirty years later, if a serious scholar introduced structuralism into a serious scholarly work today, my guess is they'd get laughed out of the tower -- or, more likely, totally ignored. It is worth considering how much time 30 years represents in the context of over two and a half thousand years of literary studies.
It seems to me that at deconstructionism, the current fashion (though I won't be able to post this until tomorrow, so don't quote me)-- anyway, at deconstructionism, we hit a dead end. Deconstructionism will run its course eventually, and dry up, but this time there will be no new -ism to replace it. (Time may prove me wrong, we'll see.) But once the academy does tire of Derrida et al, there may indeed be nowhere to go from here but back, back over the countless galloping eras of literary criticism. When we reach this stage we'll be able to pick up methods, theories and ideas from any era and combine them with any others; to modify them in the light of another time and place; and to find unfamiliar perspectives on familiar works, or to look at unfamiliar works from familiar perspectives. I believe that this is what truly pluralistic postmodern humanistic studies would look like, and that in their thirst for only what is new, what's happening right now, they are being curiously old-fashioned.
posted by Matthew at 7:09 AM
1 Comments:
Whether it was condoned or not, I found that when I was in grad school, I took the approach to critical theory that you are suggesting - picking and choosing between theories, basing my choices on what seemed to "fit the text" best. In one paper, I would take several different critical approaches to make my point about the meaning of the text and how the author constructed that meaning. I really see it as using whatever evidence you have at your disposal to prove your thesis.
The problem, as in a field like psychology where there are multiple schools of thought, is that you may be in danger of not being taken seriously, either immediately by your professor who has a specific critical background, or ultimately by the critical community when you attempt to publish.
It seems in a culture of fragmentation, those who often have the hardest time are the ones who try to tow the middle line and integrate the fragments rather than consign themselves to overspecialization. The same seems to be happening in our culture in general - you are either this or that - if you take a middle position, you are either disregarded or alienated.
This is an altogether human condition - the desire to see the world in simplicity and duality. We want reality to be either this or that, for or against, one thing or another. The irony is that in academia, we are taught to see the complexity of everything, but forced to specialize to such an extent that we take only one "fragment" as our area of expertise.
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