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Friday, September 21, 2007
Fantasies of the New Class
I know how John feels about PMLA, but as David Bergeron wrote in Shakespeare Quarterly some years back, it is “the most prestigious unread journal in our profession.” Being published in it is cause for celebration. So put your hands together for my friend Stephen Schryer, whose “Fantasies of the New Class: The New Criticism, Harvard Sociology, and the Idea of the University” [.pdf] appears in the latest issue. (In what is quickly becoming a refrain, I can’t recommend the acknowledgments highly enough.) If you fancy the abstract, read the article and, if so inclined, comment on it below. Stephen will be around to answer any questions you might have.
This essay examines the professionalization of United States literary studies and sociology between the 1930s and 1950s under the aegis of John Crowe Ransom’s New Criticism and Talcott Parsons’s structural functionalism. These paradigms pulled the disciplines to opposite poles of the professional class: Ransom argued for a less sociological literary criticism, while Parsons distanced sociology from the literary tendencies of the Chicago school. However, both implemented similar professional ideologies that synthesized their disciplines’ technical and moral claims, and both paradigms involved fantasies that specialized, disciplinary work within the academy can have a broader, moral significance. These ideas remained fantasies, which contradicted the actual effects of the New Criticism and structural functionalism; professionalism became reflexively oriented toward disciplinary self-perpetuation, isolating literature and sociology from the public they were supposed to reform. Ransom and Parsons thus exemplify the disintegration of publicly responsible professionalism—an event with broad implications for the “new class” of postwar knowledge workers.
Comments
I just blitzed through the article and am glad to see that it supports the argument I’m making to Steven Pinker (in absentia). He concludes a longish review of The Literary Animal with six pieces of advice on how to procede in the future. One of these is to devote more time to popular culture. Another is to learn about and employ conceptions from AI, cognitive science, neuroscience, and others. While I’m certainly in favor of both (and some others of his suggestions as well), I argued that the profession’s fundamentally ethical conception of its mission puts it in opposition to both.
I don’t want to sound too combative, as I really enjoyed reading your article, Mr. Schryer, but I have to ask: how exactly is this literary studies? Is this the kind of work that goes on in English departments, and if so, isn’t it more like Everything Studies? I ask because I’m thinking about grad school myself, and interesting as you article is, I’m not sure that’s what I want to do for the rest of my life.
Also, I’ve been reading this thread on Adam Kotsko’s academic blog, and John Holbo’s responses make me laugh, certainly, but they also bother me because they make me think that this is more about being clever than it is about being correct or paying attention to the nuances of the text. (I don’t mean that as an insult: “Insofar as misogyny is, as it were, a corollary of an axiom of universal hate” slays me, but I’m not sure I want to go into a career to be slain.)
I don’t know whether this will slay you as well, Ginger - my philosophy is: when it comes to being slain, the first time is always the hardest - but in between leaving comments over there (heaven forgive me) I’ve been reading Ransom’s “The New Criticism” very carefully. Specifically the final chapter. So now I’m going to read Schryer’s paper with great interest.
I think it’s a great topic and, as a stern critic of Everything Studies myself, it seems perfectly reasonable for English profs. to do some auto-sociology. I think you can’t really understand the intellectual formations you see around you today without understanding EXACTLY what Schryer has, evidently, written about. (And I don’t mean that weakly - i.e. in the ‘every bit of knowledge is useful’ way.)
Are you really a stern critic of Everything Studies, John? I mean, you, Tim and I like to wax disquisitory on funny books and assorted everythings, don’t we? I understand the importance of not declaiming about matters outside our expertise, but I don’t think that’s the ethos Everything Studies embraces. If you or I write about comics, well, we do so from a position of knowledge, don’t we? And if I write about terrible romances from the early twentieth century—written by villains of canonical feminist literature—I don’t think I’m drifting outside my mastery, am I?
In short, I think you may be underestimating the legitimacy of Cultural and/or Everything Studies here ... and, well, this means WAR.
This is an interesting point, Scott. I’m inclined to respond that I’m not an Everything Studies practitioner. I’m a specialist in SF and comics - and a few other things. (Except when Luther forces my hand.)
The thing that I think is hazardous is when there is a certain (always inadvertent, I think) slide to claiming special disciplinary competence in ... and then you say texts (for example), and that seems modest enough, but then it turns out everything is a text. And the proper conclusion, then, should that the original ‘I’m an expert in texts’ claim must have been seriously confused. But instead what you get is sort of accidental imperialism. I’m an expert in ... everything. (No one ever says it, because it would be stupid. But you can back into it, in practice.)
It’s one thing to be an inspired amateur with fingers in many pies, garrulous flaneur or feuilletonist, polypragmatic opinionator on many matters; it’s quite another to be a disciplinary specialist whose particular pidgeonhole is ... everything. (As a blogger, I would never dream of breathing a word against the virtues of the feuilleton, as literary form.)
I do concede - advocate - humanistic generalism. But it can arrive in good and bad ways.
There should always be a decently solid conception of the ‘discipline’ as something shy of ‘Everything Studies’. Then you can bend that conception out and eventually break it and build a new discipline. But you can’t just start with Everything. If you start with that, then you don’t have a discpline, for better or worse. (Maybe you have a stable of brilliant feuilletonists. But that’s still not a discipline.)
Ginger—English is in a perpetual state of self-examination, whether or not it’s very effective is another matter, but it is perpetual. But you don’t actually have to do it; if you go to grad school there’s a decent chance you’ll actually be able to read literature and think and write about it.
As for Holbo, he’s a philosopher. As such, he’s exempt—barbers who shave themselves and all that.
But he’s also participating in a grand tradition that goes back to Plato - don’t they all? Plato criticized the pretentions of poets as masters of everything, observing, instead, that they were mostly liars. So Holbo feels obligated to continue the calumny, though carefully redirecting it at critics.
Scott, the link isn’t working for me. It gives me a file that won’t open. “Couldn’t open file.”
John, check your email and see whether that one works. As for the distinction: yes, obviously, we don’t want to claim universal expertise via the “everything is a text” routine—but isn’t that what you mean here:
There should always be a decently solid conception of the ‘discipline’ as something shy of ‘Everything Studies’. Then you can bend that conception out and eventually break it and build a new discipline. But you can’t just start with Everything. If you start with that, then you don’t have a discpline, for better or worse.
Literary theory started as a solid discipline, then evolved into Everything Studies, taking with it the particular tools of its trade, right? I’m not seeing the difference. It seems to me what you’re saying is that the current version of Everything Studies—cultural studies—is a model of how to develop Everything Studies, just not an exemplary one.
I’m thinking that where literary theory went wrong is that it failed to differentiate the theory of literature from the theory of criticism (of literature). Once that happened, the theory of criticism became the theory of criticism of everything, and then “of criticism of” was dropped, giving us the theory of everything.
QED
It’s my understanding that the idea of literary studies as an autonomous field of inquiry was largely developed by the New Critics. That’s not to say that we have to throw the category out, but we do have to throw out the myth that In The Beginning, There Was Literary Studies. And Then Theory Came Along and Screwed It Up!
Stephen, I very much enjoyed the article. I’m wondering, mostly out of curiosity, how you see William James fitting into this story, if at all?
I believe that somewhere in the Valve archives we have an article by Daniel Green in which he argues that, once the profession had settled on interpretation as a major focus (in part through the New Critics), the self-consciousness that led to Theory was inevitable.
There seems, to me, to be a very unproductive assumption underpinning the reception of an idea of an Everything Studies, and that’s that the word “Studies” equates to “knowledge of an object”. Since it’s “Everything Studies”, one who identifies as (or is identified as) an “expert” in “Everything Studies” would therefore be claiming to be an expert on everything.
Hence JH’s understandable concern that “there is a certain (always inadvertent, I think) slide to claiming special disciplinary competence in ... and then you say texts (for example), and that seems modest enough, but then it turns out everything is a text.”
But is a discipline really reducible to “knowledge of X”? Isn’t a discipline rather expertise in a set of knowledge-production techniques and relative (albeit far from comprehensive) familiarity with the knowledge produced from having used such knowledge-production techniques in relation to X?
So, in the case of “texts” and “Everything Studies”, one wouldn’t be an expert on everything because one is “an expert on texts” and “everything is a text”. Rather, one would (at best, which is still quite a bit self-flattering) be potentially an expert on “everything” qua text, which is very different from being an expert on everything qua commodity (say), or qua physical object, or qua thing that my neighbour does or doesn’t like, etc.
BTW, that’s why I prefer to see my “discipline” as being something more like “textuality studies”, where the term “textuality” links with a conception of a “text-without-limits”, with a point about a thing’s condition of being textual, and with a sense of “text-as-process”, which means before anything else that one’s “knowledge” of a thing qua text forms part of the process by which that thing “becomes” a “text”.
I’d like to thank Scott and the Valve for linking to my essay. I’m just going to cherry-pick a few comments to respond to here.
1) In terms of the ongoing debate about “Everything Studies,” my own sense is that the purpose of literary studies is to study the literary field as an evolving historical entity. Whatever techniques / other disciplinary paradigms / etc. can be rigorously and profitably yoked to that project are fair game.
2) Natalia, glad you liked the essay. The New Critics didn’t really invent literary studies as an autonomous field. As an academic discipline in the United States, it has existed since the late nineteenth century. Gerald Graff’s book, Professing Literature, offers a pretty thorough account of that early history. What the New Critics did was to institutionalize a way of studying the literariness of literary language at a moment in time when the U.S. university system was rapidly expanding. I’m not really sure how William James fits into that picture.
Sorry; I was unclear: how does William James fit into the picture described by the article?
Let me explain further. You have a throwaway line wherein you speculate that the Chicago sociologists, in their approach to theory, were influenced by “Chicago pragmatists such as John Dewey and George Herbert Mead.” James is early for your period, of course, but your article got me wondering what Chicago sociologists (and, by extension, naturalists) might have owed to James.
I ask, in part, because Richard Wright avowed Gertrude Stein as a major influence, and James was of course influential in Stein’s writing, especially the early writing. It made me wonder if Wright hadn’t been drinking in the Jamesian goodness from two different fonts. Er, so to speak.
Hi Natalia,
Sorry I didn’t at first understand what you were asking. Anyhow, I know that Robert Park, a key figure in the Chicago School, received graduate training in philosophy and actually studied with William James. But beyond that I’m not sure to what extent Chicago naturalists like Wright and Farrell were influenced by him.
Sorry for a dumb question, but what is PMLA?
Publications of the Modern Language Association, where the Modern Language Association (MLA) is a professional organization for college and university level teachers and researchers in English and foreign languages and literature.