<< Donald Lazere on Funding Foundations | Front Page | David Thomson Likes 24 >>
Thursday, July 21, 2005
Teaching Theory’s Empire?
Many English Departments have an “Introduction to Graduate Study” course. The content of these classes varies depending on the school and who’s teaching it. I believe it was once more common than it is now for the course to be devoted to research methodology. Perhaps over the last twenty years, it has been used more as an introduction to the theoretical debates that shape the field. Theory’s Empire would have no place that I can imagine in the first type of course. Its essays are not exercises in literary theory or criticism; rather, they attempt to indicate the deficiencies of various contemporary approaches to these activities.
Supplemented by primary readings in the other texts being debated, TE would be useful in an introduction to the academic sociology of the English Department. I myself didn’t pay much attention to this sort of thing as an undergraduate, preferring instead to cultivate my aesthetic (or hide under some blankets and hope that somehow everything would work out), and I had to learn a lot very quickly about the profession when I entered graduate school. My first two seminars comprised a survey of a major author and an exercise in the practical use of theory. The bullshitting among my colleagues was far more intense in the second, through no fault of the professor, a singularly creative theorist. His attitude towards the books we were reading was that they should be used to generate ideas you could apply in your own work--an exhaustive study of Lacan and Hegel to evaluate the claims of one of these books, as seemed necessary to me at the time, was not in fact necessary for the purpose of the course, which was not to evaluate but to use.
Ellis wouldn’t approve: “Literary theorists find many useful ideas in adjacent fields, but to use them well they must master their meaning in the context of their origin. Because this mastery is rarely achieved, literary critics have always been prone to amateurish misuse of borrowed concepts” (95). One answer to this, and the one I received, is that the prospect of “mastery” is an illusion, one also fraught with considerable terminological baggage. There’s little point in denying that standards of mastery are relative. I get the feeling that few critics/literary historians/theorists/philologists alive now would fare well in tests of comparative mastery with the average 19th C German philologist, for example. You could attribute this to the actual Flynn Effect, or, more plausibly, to the exponential growth of knowledge. The logical alternative then to the chimera of mastery is a generative pragmatism: take what you can use, and run with it.
Anyone who uses any ideas from anywhere is subject to the charge of “amateurish misuse of borrowed concepts.” So much depends on the reader’s perspective. The study of literature encompasses many things. Its theories and practices are only incidentally pyramidical, inverted or otherwise. A problem with discussing general theoretical trends is that so much depends on their use. The essays in TE don’t deal with specific cases very often because they have been excised from longer works or larger debates. Some are content to evoke the snows of yesteryear.
Should then a class on academic sociology or professionalization be part of the required curriculum for any PhD program? An elective for undergraduate English majors who may be contemplating graduate school? If the choice is between that and a class heavy in bibliography and research methods, which is more important and why? I’m suggesting that the types of classes in which TE would be most logically taught would be just the very type that upset some of its traditionalist contributors.
Comments
Your final suggestion is polemically sound if you’re attacking an anti-Theory strawman, but I don’t think it applies to the majority of the contributors to TE. If “responsible” criticism entails a working knowledge of the field, then even someone who abhors, say, psychoanalysis as much as F. Crews would argue the necessity of a basic understanding of Freudian logic; without it, there’d be no way to understand huge chunks of the critical history any responsible scholar must confront to deserve the label.
I think the idea of responsibility also governs the fuzziness around “mastery.” I know that I’ll never be more than an amateur historian, but I don’t consider that license to play fast-and-loose with historical fact or historiography. The complaints of dilettantism usually arise on the heels of an irresponsible scholar pilfering from other fields the theories necessary to prove the point they intended to prove from the get-go. That’s frowned upon (and rightly so).
As for choosing between a class heavy in bibliography and research methods and an introduction to Theory, I can say that until a couple of years ago Irvine’s Criticism 220A was both. We spent the quarter reading the cornerstones of contemporary critical debate (the next two courses 220B and 220C would flesh out the historical context) and then produced a casebook, in which we selected one work of fiction--I chose The Castle--and then found ten articles, one from each of the ten major critical movements we’d studied that quarter, and wrote a “critical history” of the poem/novel/play we had selected. Unfortunately, the department cancelled the “case-book” exercise--which had been both a trial-by-fire and a bonding experience for incoming graduate students--a couple years later.
I don’t think it’s misrepresenting the positions of many--not all, but many--TE contributors to say that they would not condone a seminar on the politics of the English Department, particularly as it would draw ten times the enrollment as one on the literature of an unpopular century. Crews, etc. is not relevant to this point.
Though ten’s a strange number, I think that would be a fine exercise--probably one that should be given during the undergraduate years.
I don’t know how things are now, but when I was getting my degree at SUNY Buffalo (in the mid 70s), one of the options was to present evidence of competence in some supporting discipline rather than the traditional foreign language requirement. I forget exactly how this level of competence was defined, but my sense is that it roughly corresponded to a master’s-degree level of competence. In some areas—such as psychoanalysis or philosophy—there were programs within the department that had specific requirements. Those typically consisted of coursework in some other department (e.g. philosophy) plus specific theory courses offered in the English department. I hung out in the linguistics department, took a course or two, and had my mentor there write a letter on my behalf.
These days I’m particularly interested in the use of cognitive science, neuroscience, and evolutionary psychology in both practical criticism and literary theory. I’m finding that wildly varying degrees of mastery of the psychology. It’s disheartening.
I know that, at U of Florida (at Gainsville I believe) Norm Holland has been teaching a course on “The Brain and the Book” (you can find the syllabus on-line, though I don’t have the URL handy at the moment). There he has the students read papers and book chapters in the cognitive and brain sciences, along with chapters of a book he’s been writing on the subject. They take tests but he decided not to have them write papers. As the course presumes no prior knowledge of those subjects, the students simply don’t have time to work up the level of competence where writing a paper made sense. It’s all they can do to plow through the pile of often technical reading they have to do.
* * * * *
This issue speaks directly to the institutional questions that have been raised. Developing such mastery takes time. It’s one thing to work it up in graduate school. But if you have to work it up once you’re out, then the time required to develop competence is time taken away from teaching and publishing in literature.
Why does the fact that “mastery” is a subjective term render it an illusion? Isn’t this just the old “there is no such thing as a tall man” argument? Can’t it be answered the same way? Just as no fine line between short and tall can be found, but one can still intelligently discuss concepts like short and tall by using accepted understandings of the terms, can’t one discuss mastery in the same way? There may be no fine line between “mastery” and “no mastery,” but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a set of people who are capable of making useful comments on a subject, another set of people who are incapable of making useful comments on a subject, and some people in the middle we can argue about?
And on a larger note, isn’t this sort of reasoning the sort of logical leap so often criticized by those who aren’t so much fans of Theory? A logical leap from “x is subjective” to “therefore x can be discarded,” when a better leap ought to be, “therefore we should be cautious in making strong judgments about x?”
The logical leap you mention should be criticized, though it’s not taken by the position I describe above. Theorists are unlikely to discard something because it’s subjective, I find. Fill in the phrase: ____/slave dialectic.
What you’re describing is more accurately and generally referred to as “competence,” a different--though still relative--matter.
I’m going to drop the larger question of whether many Theorists regularly perform particular logical fallacies, often with a political end being served by the fallacious leap of logic. I feel there is much to discuss in this area, and that it would contribute a great deal to the more sociological question about why certain people hate Theory and/or Theorists. But this thread at least is not the place for it, and Theory’s Empire as an anthology, and the resulting discussion here, seems to have benefitted from avoiding a heavy delving into this topic, and instead keeping everything collegial.
I figure that if we want to get into that, we can always go to Butterflies and Wheels.
But, in the meantime, if one replaces Ellis’ use of “mastery” with “competence,” don’t you end up in the same place?
I’m with you, Patrick. Nicely said.
There is a difference in connotation between “mastery” and “competence.” The latter has some technical inheritance, but it also suggests understanding and utilizability rather than dominance.
Quick question (for anyone reading this, but especially Jonathan): What exactly is the difference, as you see it, between “research methodology” and theory in literary studies? I realize there are ways to teach a research methods course in literary studies with a strictly applied, systematically procedural approach (practices of archival research, bibliographic description/anatomy of the book, textual criticism in the manuscripts and variorum editions sense, etc.), but aren’t the theories also the methods insofar as they’re interpretive tools?
I took an “Introduction to Literary Research” course in the first semester of my master’s program, and books we used included <em>Introduction to Scholarship in Modern Languages and Literatures</em>, edited by Joseph Gibaldi, Redrawing the Boundaries: The Transformation of English and American Literary Studies, edited by Stephen Greenblatt and Giles Gunn, and William Proctor Williams and Craig S. Abbott’s An Introduction to Bibliographical and Textual Studies, 2nd ed. We also did a complete bibliographic description of a book published before 1800. I chose a copy of <em>Aristotle’s Masterpiece</em>, heh.