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Wednesday, August 02, 2006
Easy Erudition, Anyone?
[X-posted to the Acephalous]
So I’m reading Jonathan Arac’s Critical Genealogies: Historical Situations for Postmodern Literary Studies this afternoon and am flat dumbstruck by the erudition displayed therein. After dashing through the complete works of Harold Bloom—which is akin to dashing through the Western canon once-removed, no mean feat in itself—he surveys the response to what he calls the "theory boom" in American literary studies. He possesses an intimate familiarity with everything, passing judgments on Bloom’s wavering allegiances here, the adoption of M.H. Abram’s notion of "heterocosm" there, Geoffrey Hartman’s Nietzschian rhetoric yonder ... and so on ad infinitum.
I don’t dip my quill in Latin ink just to be pretentious, either. The man seems to have had the requisite infinity needed to read what he’s read. I don’t have that kind of time. I suppose I have to accept the fact that I’ll never title a chapter "The History of Romanticism in Contemporary Criticism." I could cry. Or write a PSA:
Parents, start your children reading contemporary criticism young. If they haven’t read the complete Keats and W.J. Bate’s John Keats by five, their first tenure review may well be their last.
The best I can do is read Arac’s chapter about the history of Romanticism in contemporary criticism and hope I remember enough to pass for someone reasonably well-read. Only throwing it in the memory well isn’t enough.
It has to float.
Or I have to find some way to fake it. The intellectual equivalent of what us Southerners call "floaties." Because honestly, how does one fake dizzying erudition? Slap a quote from here, there and one from there, here? Rewrite the books no one remembers reading or even having written anymore? Wait a minute, that baby’s buoyant. You know, if Arac’s book weren’t written so damn well, I’d probably be rewriting right now. Sentence-by-sentence. Learning what he means by revising how he says it. By the time I finished, I’d know what he knew but has long forgotten and have myself a manuscript with what credit card companies call a "pre-approved stamp of approval."
Plagiarism is the only option, people. There’s no way we can read that much. Come to think of it, there’s no way he could’ve read that much. I’m tempted to say that everything ever written isn’t a footnote to Plato but a plagiarism of him. The continuity of the Western tradition must be the result of a massive fraud. No other explanation fits.
Maybe now I can sleep without the nagging feeling I ought to be dousing the midnight oil with pages from Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism ...
Comments
Scott, you’ve nailed the very reason why I’m dropping out of the whole academic thing. That and I’m a big quitter.
But one thing you should remember, even though it’s probably stating the obvious. Arac published that work 13 years after completing his dissertation. That’s 13 years of designing related courses, compiling annotated bibliographies from talented grad students, 13 years of research assistants, 13 years of reading and reading groups filled with very smart people, semesters and years of leave time, and so on. Think of where you were intellectually 13 years ago and then imagine where you could be 13 years from now.
Is this nauseatingly touchy-feely?
How’s this then: a few years ago, Arac delivered a paper on Huck Finn to my department. In it, he concluded that high school teachers simply aren’t smart enough to handle the racial issues raised by Twain’s novel. So they shouldn’t teach it in high schools. QED. After all those years of research and writing and being brilliant, you can still make a total ass of yourself and prove your total ignorance. (But, even after making a total ass of himself, Arac was offered a senior position in my department.)
All that and more to look forward to!
If all else fails, you might pick up some tips from Marjorie Perloff’s “Cultural Liminality / Aesthetic Closure?: The ‘Interstitial Perspective’ of Homi Bhabha,” which is also very entertaining.
http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/perloff/bhabha.html
You’re leaving academia, Luther? That’s too bad. For what it’s worth, my impression is that you don’t have anything to worry about in terms of your ability to be a good academic, if you want to do it.
I don’t think that a claim that high school teachers shouldn’t teach Huck Finn is that bad. From my memory of my high school teachers, they shouldn’t have taught anything.
So what is the main emotional key of this post? Admiration? Awe? Panic? Abjection?
Objectively there are people with dizzying command of an improbable amount of literature and scholarship. They are rare. They tend to get jobs at columbia, harvard, princeton sometimes and yale more often. Other leading departments tend to have a handful of them, but aren’t exclusively populated by such people. Plenty of extremely good scholars simply aren’t in Jonathan Arac’s league.
But I’m more interested in the progression of your post from admiration that blends into the sense of almost helpless dependence that morphs into the sense of despair. Just because I wonder a lot about the necessary connections between scholarly admiration and a sense of one’s own unworthiness. Do we gravitate toward scholarship that leave us feeling helpless more than we gravitate toward scholarship that energizes us, leaves us feeling eager to quibble, refine, extend, revise?
I was going to say something similar to Luther’s comment. My point was going to sidestep all the infrastructural issues and say that it doesn’t take that long to read a bunch of books. Do 50-100 pages a day, and before long you’ve read a lot of damn books.
LB, for what it’s worth, in the first draft of this, I’d included a couple of links to comments you made on my posts as more examples which cause me despair. The thought that you are leaving the academy for feelings of inadequacy tells me you need to take a long, hard look in the mirror ... then at what other people write. I think you’ll find your stuff more than comparable, in breadth and erudition, than 99% of the crap published today.
Also, I think I heard a more refined version of that Arac talk on Huck Finn ... or maybe I just remember reading Huck Finn as Idol and Target for Brook Thomas’s seminar, which included a series of appalling stupid attacks and defenses of Huck Finn. His position seemed reasonable, in comparison. (But then again, when he’s the one writing the book, there’s no reason for it not to.)
Muchos gracias for the tip, Scott. Just skimmed it now, realized I can’t understand anything Bhabhian from a skim, and will read it through more carefully later.
prefer not to say, I think the correct answer is “All of the Above.” Admiration, certainly, for the book’s damn brilliant (Fred Jameson even says so on the back cover); awe, too, for its stunning breadth of reference and argument; panic, inevitably, when I compare to what I produce; and abjection, invariably, when I compare it to what I think of I’m capable of producing in the future. As for this question:
Do we gravitate toward scholarship that leave us feeling helpless more than we gravitate toward scholarship that energizes us, leaves us feeling eager to quibble, refine, extend, revise?
I have two modes, I suppose you can say: there’s “research mode,” in which I aim for archival materials—which has its own attendent fears of inadequacy—and “scholarly improvement mode,” in which I read things I think I ought’ve read. When I’m reading for the latter, I opt for difficult brilliant works which’ll inform my own. When I’m reading the former, I have to let what the research guide, take me where it will, you know. I’m rarely intimidated by the difficulty of the archival work, even if I’m frequently intimidated by the amount. But I’m always intimidated by the “scholarly improvement reading,” largely because that’s the point: expand what I know, think differently, &c.
That’s why I can’t whole-heartedly support Adam’s plan. Sure, I’ll have read a lot, but it won’t be of the requisite intelligence quotient to make me a better scholar. I’m no Miriam B., but some days I’ll read 500-600 pages ... of a terrible historical romances from the 1890s. Not all that edifying. Other days, I’ll read 50-100 pages of something like the Arac, which’ll make me feel more well read, but don’t relate directly to my dissertation. (Because yes, there’s always that demand to write to factor in there too.) I’ll feel productive on both days, but only on the latter do I feel I’m improving my chance to, say, do well in an interview. Because I don’t think they’re going to ask questions about some crap Winston Churchill novel, but they will expect me to know how to frame questions about larger scholarly debates, &c.
Ah, but neither of your modes seem to have much to do with—well, what you enjoy. What you crave. Which I don’t bring up to make an argument that oh, you know, the modern academy takes all the joy out of it. Because I DO think there’s a lot we enjoy about modern scholarship. I’m just curious if the feeling of being abjectly helpless in the face of [someone like] Jonathan Arac is one of them. But then, maybe it’s not the helplessness per se that’s part of the appeal. Do we love doing scholarship because it holds out the promise that we might have something to say—or because it teases us with the possibility that we might never be able to say anything worthwhile at all?
I don’t know if I even want to own the question because it hinges on the idea of loving scholarship, an idea that too often has been claimed as the sole terrain of people who hate Marxists, or something like that.
Don’t know what to say about the erudition thing. OTOneH, it’s terribly important. OTOtherH, it’s a high class parlor trick.
How do you tell the difference? Perhaps more to the point, are WE in a position to make that call in this particular case?
I’m certainly not, because I’ve never read Arac. What’s at stake is whether or not worthy stuff is constructed over what he has done.
Thanks for the kind words, Rich and Scott.
But Scott, your blog and what I’ve seen of your thinking towards the diss makes *me* feel unread and generally lazy. The amount of thoughtful prose you’ve produced on your blog is astounding.
But my feelings of inadequacy have less to do with coverage of research and more to do with my total inability to do the increasingly historicist mode of criticism. Jameson’s style of historicism is about as close as I can get. I’m also in a field where some scoops my arguments every year—the contemporary American historical novel is one of the few on-going conversations in contemporary literary criticism. And I’m not sure my diss really adds much to that conversation.
Maybe I need to post a diss chapter on the Valve and hold an Orphic rite in which everyone can tear it to pieces.
Don’t you only really need one tenure review, so long as it goes well?