Twilight of the English professors
One of the best personal decisions I’ve made was the one to give up on writing a dissertation in English Literature. It seemed silly to quit at the end, and only when the work got serious and needed to be professionalized, but there is such a thing as sunk costs, and at some point I had to write mine off. I didn’t have any interest in being a professor. No dissertation, no matter how broad or theoretical or New Historicist, was going to make up for my deciding to study English instead of economics or even sociology, the subjects I was actually interested in. At some point, I was going to have to try to say something meaningful about literature as literature, and I didn’t believe anymore that there was anything worth saying. This may have been my imaginative failing, but I was thinking that literature had only a faint impact on life as it was lived by most people, so to comment on it is to theorize about echoes when you could be wrangling with the real thing. It seems as though you are rejecting reality for the cave and the shadows. (I have a similar understanding of real news—aka business news—versus the personal-interest vicarious-fantasy material masquerading as news. Studying literature started to seem to me a way of affirming the latter over the former.)
Still, this Nation item depressed me completely. William Deresiewicz looks at the MLA job list and comes away with these impressions:
The most striking fact about this year’s list is that the lion’s share of positions is in rhetoric and composition. That is, not in a field of literature at all but in the teaching of expository writing, the “service” component of an English department’s role within the university. Add communications and professional and technical writing, and you’ve got more than a third of the list. Another large fraction of openings, perhaps 15 percent, is in creative writing. Apparently, kids may not want to read anymore, but they all want to write. And watch. Forward-thinking English departments long ago decided to grab film studies before it got away, and the list continues to reflect that bit of subterfuge.
That’s more than half the list, and we still haven’t gotten to any, well, literature. When we do, we find that the largest share of what’s left, nearly a third, is in American literature. Even more significant is the number of positions, again about a third, that call for particular expertise in literature of one or another identity group. “Subfields might include transnational, hemispheric, ethnic and queer literatures.” “Postcolonial emphasis” is “required.” “Additional expertise in African-American and/or ethnic American literature highly desirable.” ...
This year’s Job List confirms the picture of a profession suffering from an epochal loss of confidence. It’s not just the fear you can smell in the postings. It’s the fact that no major theoretical school has emerged in the 18 years since Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble revolutionized gender studies. As Harvard professor Louis Menand said three years ago, our graduate students are writing the same dissertations, with the same tools, as they were in 1990. Nor has any major new star—a Butler, an Edward Said, a Harold Bloom—emerged since then to provide intellectual leadership, or even a sense of intellectual adventure. The job market’s long-term depression has deepened the mood. Most professors I know discourage even their best students from going to graduate school; one actually refuses to talk to them about it. This is a profession that is losing its will to live.
Would that someone would have discouraged me. But the universities need writing teachers, and literature grad students can be impressed into teaching composition courses for meager wages as long as studying literature for a living can be dangled before them as enticement. In the English Department I was connected with, the rhetoric and composition folk formed a well-disciplined and highly professionalized cadre who were devoted to instrumentalizing the department’s course offerings. They had the energy for this because their teaching and their studies weren’t fatally split. They and their kind will inevitably inherit the shell of the English departments that are left when lit studies collapse completely. Perhaps they will be absorbed by Education departments, who share a similar fetish for pedagogy for pedagogy’s sake.
On a related note, John Mullen, writing in the TLS, looks at Rónán McDonald’s recent book The Death of the Critic and decides that English professors are ruining their own brand.
Rob,
This is an interesting critique of English studies. As someone who is currently finishing a PhD in rhetoric (and composition), I understand how one’s will to complete the degree can wane near the end. Part of the problem of working toward a PhD in the humanities is that there is such a long apprenticeship that by the time you finally figure out what it is like to be a professor, you’ve invested so much blood, sweat, and tears that it’s hard to decide to quit even if you want to. I admire your certainty that the field was not for you, and your confidence in cutting your losses.
I also can see how you would feel that there was nothing left worth saying on literature (as you faced your dissertation). Still, I disagree: I firmly believe there is much left worth saying. However, English professors have made it very difficult to maintain that faith.
You’re right to sense a crisis in English departments: I do too. But this crisis begs description so that we can understand its origins, which for me clearly lie in the political and cultural upheavals of the late 1960s. At this time, English departments more or less DECIDED to wilt on the vine when they agreed to focus on “social justice” and “radical” politics rather than on the values that had guided learning and research in the humanities for centuries.
The great project of the humanities from the 60s up to today was a radical critique of the concept of cultural value(s). There was a (valid) understanding that the academy had openly advocated a hierarchical social organization since its inception, and that such an organization encouraged systemic marginalization and oppression of minorities (racial, ethnic, religious, ideological, etc). In the service of destroying systems of oppression, the radical element of English departments undertook a destruction of the hierarchies that enabled them. This destruction took the form of scholarship that rigorously contested the validity of all varieties of value (economic, social, cultural, political). The destruction also manifested itself more overtly in the armed takeovers of university buildings.
All well and good. The problem here (and the reason that English departments are in crisis) is that English departments had always justified their very existence (and research) on the grounds of a hierarchical arrangement of art and culture. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, it was understood that literature was worth studying because reading CERTAIN books (i.e., the canon) attuned one to the most meaningful and VALUable (and universal!) elements of human experience. Of course, when the canon came under fire in the 60s (because of its exclusivity), it became understood that no text was more valuable than any other - they all presented equally valuable (and uniquely subjective!) visions of the world and its history. If anything, texts produced by marginalized writers (women, African-Americans, religious minorities) absorbed the value that had resided in writers like Plato and Dickens. This transfer of value was justified on the grounds that it derived from the fact that these new texts had been neglected. However, no one in the academy really likes to talk about this transfer of value: scholars mostly maintain that any appeal to the concept of value is residue of the colonial and imperialist tendencies in Western society writ large.
So, today...Is it any surprise that the positions that are open in literature are in Jewish Studies? Feminist Critique? African Diaspora? Post-Colonialism? I think not. And the predominance of rhet/comp positions? They can also be traced back to this shift. You’re right to suggest that this sub-specialization has thrived because of its service-oriented nature (the COMP end of things). But the vitality is also due to the RHET end. Rhetoric has always prioritized and interest in function over form (not “what is unique about this text?”, but “What does this text do?) This attunement to functionality is perfectly suited to the “value-neutral” orientation of the contemporary English department. From a rhetorical standpoint, questions of aesthetic merit or artistic execution (i.e. questions of Value) just distract us from the more important business understanding how texts persuade and how ideas circulate the social sphere.
And after all of this, English faculty sit around wringing their hands wondering how we arrived at such a dismal state of affairs. They’ve done a good job of pointing out the lack of funding for the humanities, or the corporatization of the university and society at large. But they remain resolutely unwilling to concede the fact that English departments themselves sowed the seeds of their demise. When anyone asks “What is the purpose of College English?”, the answer “To cultivate a superior moral and aesthetic sensibility” is no longer valid. The answer that IS valid is “To teach students how to write.” And thus, there is a lot of demand for composition people.
Anyway, good for you on getting out. You have a pretty sweet little website going here. I’d love to hear any follow up comments you have - feel free to email me. And if you’re interested, I’ll have a nice little article for Pop Matters this summer. Take it easy.
Comment by Tyson from Columbia, SC — March 20, 2008 @ 3:27 pm
I must say you have very well presented the article. congratulations for that.Learned alot
Thanks for sharing such a nice piece
Comment by investment management firms — April 4, 2008 @ 7:37 am