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Friday, October 28, 2005
Humanities Labs? Coteries?
Gina Hiatt’s piece at Inside Higher Ed about different styles of research in the humanities and the sciences caught my eye. Hiatt is a dissertation coach, and she’s noticed that the vast majority of her clients are people in the humanities and social sciences, most of whom are extremely isolated from peers and advisors. Dissertating graduate students might see their advisors once a month, sometimes less often than that. In science research labs, by contrast, graduate students, post-docs, and professors put in 9 to 5 days five days (or more) a week, and talk quite a bit about their work.
Hiatt argues that disciplines in the humanities ought to consider the model of a humanities lab, partly because it might make it less intimidating for scholars who are trying to find their feet in the field, and partly because such environments are more likely to lead to the “hothouse effect” out of which major advances are likely to come.
Perhaps the idea of a humanities lab is a little simplistic. There are good reasons why a degree of solitude is beneficial to getting extensive amounts of independent reading done. And some of the commentors at Inside Higher Ed have challenged Hiatt’s focus on formal professional settings, suggesting that there are many informal ways in which humanities students and professors meet to work through ideas and discuss things—including restaurants and bars.
But I do think she has a point.
The current norm for intellectual interaction amongst humanities scholars (especially after graduate school) seems a little too sparse to me. Many of us only make it a point to meet when we have ‘something to say.’ Isolation is sometimes a good way to let something simmer and gestate, but it can also allow you to spend a lot of time pursuing what friends could tell you is a dead end. And it is coincidentally true that there haven’t been many dramatically original ideas coming out of American English departments lately, not with the frequency of the 1960s and 70s. (Note: I am not saying that we aren’t doing important work, but rather that there haven’t been many real paradigm shifts since the rise of Theory.)
Also, Hiatt doesn’t mention this, but some of the big leaps forward in literature as well as the broader intellectual climate have come out of coteries—such as the Bloomsbury Group or Tel Quel in France in the 1960s. It’s certainly possible to say that Bloomsbury was never all that close together, and perhaps one could say that Tel Quel published some rubbish along with the theoretical brilliance of Derrida, Barthes, Bataille, Foucault, Genette, Kristeva, and Todorov. Whatever their weaknesses, both movements defied the Solitary Genius model of intellectual and artistic production.
If not humanities labs, perhaps we might want to pursue humanities coteries. And I don’t think I’m talking only about a neo-modernist avant-garde, though I may have to concede that the idea of a coterie is inevitably an elitist construction. Aren’t there other examples from literary history of intensely productive coteries? Isn’t it possible to say that the Lake Poets formed a kind of coterie? Grub Street? Renaissance drama?
Comments
"Aren’t there other examples from literary history of intensely productive coteries?”
Jonah Raskin’s current article “‘Howl’ at Fifty” http://www.alternet.org/story/27455/ discusses exactly that in regard to the rise and influence of ‘Beat’ literature. I assume his recent book goes into much more detail along those lines too. Without discussion and interaction the generation of ideas and art, etc, can easily come to a standstill. Some people can be more or less isolated and be productive - most people can’t, I think.
It seems to me that MFA creative writing programs by way of their writing workshops foster far more of the collaboration Hiatt points to than do MA and PhD programs of scholarship. Not least given the explosive growth and interest in MFA programs, I’ve wondered why MA and PhD programs haven’t nearly as much or at all incorporated such workshops (that focus on student work) into their own structure.
Yes, the beatniks count, even though I’ve personally outgrown the Ginsberg hysterical naked unpunctuated writing thing a bit. (Though not the davening; that I still dig)
The rapper Talib Kweli says, “quit the stargazing, move something.” Love them or hate them, the Beats moved something.
The idea of a humanities lab is certainly a good one and I think a better model than the coterie, a metaphorical construction in this case which inevitably suggests snobbish exclusivity. It is also freighted with the idea of a particular theoretical “school” often tied to elite graduate programs--a somewhat diluted model that nevetheless still has some currency.
The deep penetration of communication technologies into our professional lives, however, provides unique opportunities for humanists to imagine and construct new kinds of collaborative projects that can reach across departments, institutions, and disciplines. We in the humanities have been particularly slow to adapt these technologies to our own purposes, continuing to insist upon the primacy of the monograph and the single-author article as vehicles for communicating our research.
In a comment like this, it seems unwise to go into the long history of the monograph in the humanities and what John Guillory has called its “golden age” following the massive expansion of the research universities after WWII. As academic presses struggle with the over-supply of monographs and the faltering demand of readers for such texts, it has become a very propitious time indeed to consider expanding our ideas about how our research is best disseminated. This, in turn, will also require us to interrogate some of our most basic (and therefore unexamined) assumptions about what constitutes proper scholarly research in the humanities.
This is by no means an easy task, particularly for younger scholars who must build CVs in graduate school and (for the lucky few) on the tenure track. Hiring and review committees expect to see books, articles, and other single-authors objects--demands that are not made of scientists and even many social scientists. This suggests that at the higher institutional levels there is a certain willingness to entertain a change in these expectations, provided we can articulate clearly how such work might be judged by internal and external referees. This is something we should learn how to do, and we should be willing to do so without attaching any undue romantic weight to the single-author monograph. This mode of production has--and will continue to have--its purposes, but we need not mystify it as the only vehicle of humanistic communication.
At the risk of solipsism I’ll wrap up with one example of a humanities lab already in action and in which I am deeply involved: the Modernist Journals Project (http://www.modjourn.brown.edu). Based at Brown and the University of Tulsa, it is creating a digital thematic research collection focused on early twentieth-century periodicals. Over the eight or so years that it has been around, the staff has expanded and contracted based on the availablity of funding--exactly as scientific labs do. It has been able to fund post-doctoral researchers, graduate students, and undergraduates from various disciplines, all of whom work together to generate both the core archival materials and a wide array of supporting work. In the past few years, the MJP--again like a science lab--has been generating research in the form of papers, roundtable discussions, and lectures. It has assembled a touring and on-line exhibition of drawings from the pages of one of the digitized magazines and is looking now to broaden its collaboration by focusing on periodical studies more generally. The directors guide the selection of journals and oversee the work, but the project is essentially collaborative: creating an archive, writing and editing supporting materials, generating scholarship, and publishing research. I suspect other such “humanities labs” already exist and that we need to begin think in more serious ways about the models of scholarly collaboration and production they are developing.
Sean,
Thanks for your comment. I must confess when I was writing this post I had a paragraph about how an alternate model of humanities research (whether as ‘labs’ or ‘coteries’) might also be created electronically. But I took it out: too many academic blog posts end with a conclusion about how great academic blogging is!
But of course you’re right about the possible value of doing it electronically, as well as the particular urgency of going digital in the current academic publishing crisis.
I checked out the MJP and it seems really interesting. I’ve started flipping through The New Age and am already noticing stuff that might relate to my own interests in modernism and colonialism ... so thanks for that! (I also noticed that the PDFs have a few embedded hyperlinks, which is really excellent.)
Finally, you may be aware of this, but just in case you’re not I thought I would mention that the Valve was started with many of these things in mind. Even the title (Holbo’s idea) is a kind of reference to The Dial, and Holbo started the ball rolling here with a manifesto (or three) encouraging the resurrection of ‘the little magazine.’ The difference is, as a web-based platform it isn’t regionally bound and participation isn’t limited to 10 or 15 people.
It seems like The New Age might have been a ‘little magazine’ as well, albeit with a socialist bent… Would you agree?
A small question: what about the years after 1907? Is that on your agenda as well?
I majored in English while my brother majored in geology in the same school. The geologists (down to upper-division undergrads) spent a LOT of time together outside school (at bars and at fieldtrips), whereas I never was invited anywhere by an English prof even though I was a star student. The English profs seemed to think of themselves as important personages, and also seemed to be using their tenured positions to finance their elite lifestyles and/or nervous breakdowns.
The sciences tend to be less factionalized than the humanities, with more consensus about what good work is like.
There’s something to be said for the humanities lab model, though. My wife had one of the first graduate fellowships at Emory’s brand-new Center for Humanistic Inquiry. IIRC, the terms of her fellowship (which included all manner of goodies) required that she be present for X hours per day, 5 days a week. You could go to the library, but you had to check in. There were also regular lunchtime presentations, etc.
I think the other grad fellows were in History and French. She has always spoken highly of her time at the CHI, and it’s certainly the case that she took her dissertation from “only a little done” to “finished, plus a handful of related publications” within that academic year, and she seeded an awful lot of work that she’s been following up now that she’s gotten a job.
She has always said that the director’s insistence on fellows’ physical presence (including faculty fellows) was a crucial incentive for her progress.
One of the problems noted correctly here is that grad students face competing demands. On one hand, they’re supposed to come up with articles, reviews, and a book in press to qualify for a job. Those things take a lot of solitary work in the library. But on the other hand, when it comes time to win the job, they have to perform brilliantly in an interview in a hotel room with four strangers, then deliver a lecture and field questions on a campus visit (and sit down to lunch and dinner). Those things take a lot of practice talking with peers and debating ideas and values. And electronic exchanges won’t help much. I once heard a chaired professor say that she would never hire someone until she’d talked to him face to face, no matter how brilliant that person’s scholarship. Unfortunately, to develop those social/intellectual skills, the humanities encourages young people into artificial and scattered engagements, such as professional conferences, not the sustained ones such as you find in science labs.
I have good reason to believe that science labs, including right there at Emory, have their own sets of problems--rigid hierarchy, people being worked half-to-death, credit appropriated for underlings’ work, etc. Just something to think about.
I’m gratified at the level of discussion generated by my article. As I read the thoughtful comments here, I’m learning about “humanities labs” that are in existence—how wonderful. I had intended the idea to be something to aim towards; almost a tongue-in-cheek idea that would lead to more conversation among those in the humanities. The experience of Jason’s wife, though, suggests that it could be an actual good idea whose time has come.
I agree that online dialogue is helping people create some of that community, and I also agree that that is not enough. I’m excited to see the Brown community that Sean mentions. I believe that’s not the only online “humanities lab” at Brown. I’m going to be giving a workshop to the Brown graduate students on November 17, so drop in and say hi, Sean! The fact that you are running your site in cooperation with another university is also like a science lab.
I would agree with Jonathan’s comments about science labs having their own set of problems—I’m not sure if it’s created by the community setting as much as the fact that people everywhere are crazy and you’re more likely to see that craziness when there is more interaction.
I just realized you’re at Tulsa, Sean. Maybe I’ll be speaking there some day! Sorry for the mixup.