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Monday, July 18, 2005
Warranted Bombast? Or, Apposite & Oppositional Rhetoric
I’m a fan of American Literary Scholarship. So much so I have a complete set (atop the shelves on the left). When the latest edition arrived, I scanned it 1) to check if someone else’s written my dissertation yet and 2) to ensure that my notion of where the field’s headed is more accurate than not. (For those interested: my dissertation’s still mine and only a minor course-correction’s needed.) I’ve read all the sections relevent to my work and I have but one complaint: the rhetoric.
I’ll focus on Michael J. Kiskis’ otherwise excellent round-up of “Late-19th-Century Literature,” but this inflated rhetoric peppers the entire volume. Kiskis’ review opens thus:
The scholarship produced during 2003 is a complex mix of perspectives and materials: in the host of essays and books we see evidence not only of the end of the academic apartheid that relegated women and minority writers to the margins but also a greater awareness of the intricate relationship between genre and challenges of aesthetic and political intention and result. (275, emphasis mine)
Now, I should say that the presence of that rhetorical bombast doesn’t diminish the intelligence or comprehensiveness of Kiskis’ review. That said, doesn’t the appellation “academic apartheid”
1) trivialize the consequences of historical apartheid and, in so doing, participate in the same logic of marginalization it wants to denounce?
2) needlessly needle those critics who choose to work on canonical or semi-canonical authors?
3) create the impression that the field, as currently constituted, is almost perfect?
Three sentences later, Kiskis condescends again: “We are growing out of separate spheres; we are finding our way to an adult appreciation of complex and compelling literary and cultural meaning” (275). Earlier critics apparently lacked the maturity necessary to cultivate an “adult appreciation” of “literary and cultural meaning.” The insult’s implied but easily deduced.
Now, I’m compelled to note that I’m satisfied with the direction of the field, as the course Kiskis charts is one in which ever more emphasis is placed on the historical context of literary works. However, even though I belong to Kiskis’ intended audience, I still find his self-congratulatory magniloquence as shrill as it is unnecessary.
Comments
Scott, you’re right on about such rhetoric, but of course, it’s not just a factor in academic writing/speech. Politicos also tend to conflate any forms of distinction with “apartheid,” just as any time someone makes a decision with which one disagrees, one calls the other “fascist” or makes a Hitler reference. Orwell or “thought police” are pulled out whenever anyone has a problem with someone else’s speech (i.e., any discussion of FIRE results in some FIRE supporter equating a university’s decision not to allow white students to follow around black students chanting “I hate niggers” with Orwellian thought control).
Likewise, when many academics describe their projects, they are forced into hyperbole. Christian Moraru’s otherwise interesting *Rewriting* claims to be the first book-length study of American fictions’ processes of rewriting, a patently untrue claim. But I don’t think that’s Moraru talking; it’s the pressures of the discipline.
LB, first, you’ve made an honest man of me. I’ve tried to respond to your latest comment on my post on Good but it’s required more research than I anticipated, so I haven’t yet. Consider that a sign of my respect for you and not of my intellectual laziness. As for your comment here, your point is well taken. Our careerism demands we take the positions most likely to force the hands of hiring committees, but I’m sure you’ll agree with me when I say that, well, I wish I were a Vanderbilt or a Carnegie...I wish I had the resources required to follow my instinct, my conscience, and my sense of intellectual honesty. Since I don’t, I’m bound to become part of the problem. Ugh. If only I had a more eloquent expression available, but I don’t, so “ugh” will have to suffice. (Such a statement is, of course, as loaded as they come, so I don’t expect a reply. What little economic determinism I abide by dictates that I wouldn’t have even tabled that proposition if I were a Vanderbilt or a Carnegie, but you catch my drift.)
I’m a regular reader of American Literary Scholarship, and the rhetoric you noticed, Scott, seems to me perfectly typical. There’s is an all but unrelenting chamber-of-commerce boosterism about “the field,” whatever the subject is. It is not merely professional--which is obnoxious enough--but just as often, as in the case you cite, moralistic as well. “Careerism” is a fair enough description, though I must say you seem to adduce it as an explanation, if not an excuse. If students of literature and language so easily accommodate themselves to such bullshit, what hope is there for any measure of plainspeaking truthfulenss elsewhere in the culture?