My post yesterday pointed to already-well-circulated critiques of the way we teach literature in American universities. I failed to mention a discussion among academic bloggers who spent much of January answering the question asked by a well-attended panel at MLA ‘07: “Why Teach Literature Anyway?“
These bloggers suggest that literature offers students tools for social, psychological, and political awareness:
- Reassigned Time, 1/2: “To inspire creativity… To disrupt the consumer model of education… To insist on complexity and fine distinctions in understanding the world… To give students a vocabulary for discussing things that are complex, which is ultimately about socializing them to talk, think, and feel in ways that allow them to be upwardly mobile… To offer students a break from the other demands on their lives.”
- Short-Circuit Signs, 1/3: To “connect students with concrete human experiences.”
- Is there no sin in it?, 1/16: “To teach students to approach literature (and language and culture in general) as analysts.”
- Citizen of Somewhere Else, 1/22: To teach students “that reading literature, like playing golf, can be a worthwhile and rewarding lifelong activity.”
- The Kugelmass Episodes, 1/25: To teach students “how other people perceive the world and their place in it.”
- Mary Kate Hurley at In the Middle, 1/29: Because literature “gives students the tools they need… in our collective life on the singular multiplicity of habitations we call Earth.”
- The Rebel Letter, 1/31: Because literature “means that someone else has come before you and will come after you and that somehow a person will continue against terrible and painful odds to sit by herself wondering who she is and why she’s here and what she might be able to do, here, in the presence of language with the right words in the right order.”
- Ferule & Fescue, 2/9: Because “understanding how narratives are shaped and manipulated allows us to reflect more fully on ourselves and the scripts we live by (and who’s writing them).”
(I elide bloggers who write about history, philosophy, physics, librarianship, and so on. Many bloggers, also elided, answered a broader question: “Why Teach?” Free Exchange on Campus maintains the full list of answers.)
These bloggers offer more persuasive arguments than Stanley Fish, who seems to argue that literature has no use value except in the sense that it teaches students how to appreciate something with no use value.
But is this question the one we need to answer? Are there significant cultural forces arguing against teaching literature?
Maybe this is just because I am in the middle of my dissertation, looking at the field around me and trying to understand where I fit in, but for me the more difficult question is: Why research literature? Why write, present, and publish literary criticism?
Fish writes: “The challenge of utility is… to the scholarly machinery that seems to take those operating it further and further away from the primary texts into the reaches of incomprehensible and often corrosive theory.”
I know that this is a loaded claim, coming from Fish, but I’m not a student of his work and I’ll take what he writes at face value.
Right now my prospectus makes a claim to value in terms that only make sense within our field: my dissertation pins down one way literary cosmopolitanism manifests itself; it broadens our ways of accessing Weltliteratur; it brings philosophy of art together with intermediality.
If I had to defend my dissertation not to accomplished scholars but to some guy in a bar on State Street none of those answers would fly (unless the guy in the bar was another member of my department, which has a higher than average probability).
Does this matter? We all have to write statements of teaching philosophy, after all, but not statements of research philosophy.
Mike,
What does intermediality mean?
It’s no final, definitive answer to the question you’re raising — I think most literary scholars feel tremendous anxiety about the worth of literary studies in 2008 — but even as Weltliteratur has evolved into a spectrum of different world media, the phenomenon of aesthetically achieved and represented cosmopolitanism has kept its great relevance. Art helps us make sense of entities like the European Union; cosmopolitanism is married to “hip” through artworks like Tarantino’s quasi-kung fu films or M.I.A.’s hybrid hip-hop.
At particular historical moments, literature was the most vital medium for the sort of exchange that interests you; by explaining that historical reality, you’re also (ideally) writing a history of the present.
I should note that I wouldn’t justify my own dissertation in the same way; one of the best things about this sort of cultural work is that its relevance and value is specific, and isn’t exhausted by catch-all labels like political critique or critical thinking.
Joseph,
It’s such a pleasure to hear from you! I’ve been reading your work for the past week in the process of trying to learn what academic blogging sounds like.
I live in dread of becoming that guy who hides his literacy criticism behind silly new words, but hopefully this concept deserves its own term: I mean by intermediality a sustained relationship between different art forms — in the case of my dissertation, literature and painting and, occasionally, music.
There is some professional support: Rodopi’s Studies in Intermediality series “concerns itself with the wide range of relationships established among the various media and investigates how concepts, of a more general character, find diversified manifestations and reflections in the different media.” There is a call for papers at MLA ‘08 on “Intermediality or Literature and the Arts.”
Your defense of the relevance of my work is astonishing and generous, but I wonder whether a Wisconsin taxpayer who wants to know why I’m using his money would be persuaded when he heard that my dissertation helps make sense of the EU or M.I.A.
Still, the value of mapping cultural relationships certainly resonates with me, I can see a case being made for the carryover value of tools from lit-painting analysis to, say, hypertext-JPG analysis.
That makes sense; you’re using “intermediality” the way we commonly use “interdisciplinarity.”
My immediate reaction to your concern about the Wisconsin taxpayer was along the lines of “Who is Hecuba to me, or me to Hecuba?” It’s a big country — just as the hypothetical Wisconsin taxpayer may not feel much sympathy for a marketing consultant based out of New York City, he or she may not relate to my work, and that’s fine. The consultant doesn’t agonize over whether or not the nation applauds her work. She and you and I are taxpayers also. Taxpayers sometimes feel that since they are paying (supposedly) huge amounts to subsidize higher education, they represent a constituency, but this is a reactionary attitude. Some of my tax dollars go towards the military, and some goes towards subsidies for American business, and in neither case are those institutions expected to prove anything to me on a day-to-day basis, or be transparent to me, or employ a vocabulary with which I am readily familiar.
That said, there’s a very admirable democratic impulse to be accessible and inclusive, creating dialogues about art on a scale that Goethe certainly couldn’t have imagined when he was advocating for Weltliteratur. Ordinary people have access to media of all types, and there’s no reason to play down their enthusiasm for history and culture. There was less concern in previous centuries over this issue because literacy rates were so low, and social hierarchies so rigid (at least in the West), that the universalist hopes that underwrite our desire to be understood in the heartland would have been ludicrous impossibilities.
As an afterthought, I should mention that of course it makes sense to worry about Wisconsin taxpayers in Wisconsin, just as it makes sense for me (as a graduate student at the University of California) to consider the residents of the state who subsidize my work. My point is just that a certain amount of telescoping is required: taxpayers have to consider the whole institution of public universities in their state, how all of the scholars and teachers working within those institutions interact — the alternative so far (exemplified by the man who tried to sit in and videotape classes at UCLA) has been haphazard surveillance that amounts to really unjustifiable micro-management.
You win this round, Kugelmass! =)
I should have phrased my concerns in a way that weren’t subject to so persuasive a reductio. Perhaps our hypothetical Wisconsinite need not accept my reasoning; perhaps it suffices that I can argue reasonably enough for the public value of my work.
The UCLA videotaping incident is new to me, but not surprising. In Madison two years back there was a bit of a flap over Kevin Barrett, a lecturer and 9/11 conspiracy theorist whom the legislature tried to have removed.
I agree that the public sector’s direct interference in the particulars of what is taught at the university can at times constitute “unjustifiable micro-management,” but I’m not sure this absolves us from the duty of making claims to public relevance. It’s important that our telescoping move doesn’t miss any key steps, à la in arguing that by teaching conspiracy theories we reveal the truth about the American government.
(To his credit, Barrett argued that presenting alternate points of view taught students to question received information and to uncover techniques of evidential analysis. Of course, he assumed that the result would lead them to agree with him.)