Once again, Erin O'Connor at Critical Mass has posted a very interesting reader comment. The correspondent is someone who can remember the introduction of postmodernism and unorthodox curriculum into the English classroom. He puts it like this: " After 1970, we began to get courses that often strayed a long way from traditional curriculum. The same professor who was catatonia-inducing at noon on The 20th Century Novel shone teaching a non-credit course on film noir seven hours later. Can there be such a thing as a spirit of a profession? If there can be, it was tired of the rigors of scholarship in 1970, and found no joy in its rewards. New and exciting ideas had come into the room, colorfully dressed and flirting madly.
(A side note. On purely practical grounds, I have to give props to pure-theory academics who start from the premise that nothing has meaning in and of itself, and that nothing is objectively "true." If such is the case, then all the theory in the world is mere solipsism, and the practice of academic theory is a pursuit as pointless, and as sad, as building sand-castles during high tide. By their own lights, day is night, black is white, cat is dog, theory is practice, the map is as good as the territory, and their work is devoid of worth or significance. Yet they get paid for it, sometimes handsomely. A giant scam? Perhaps! Impressive chutzpah? Definitely!!)
Later in the same post, O'Connor takes to task the baseless "grandiosity" of the critical discipline, arguing that
the increasing shrillness, snobbery, and grandiosity of so much humanist scholarship can be traced directly to the attempt to argue for the social, political, and cultural relevance of the arts. And of course they are relevant--they give meaning, depth, and texture to our lives in precious, priceless ways. But they are not relevant in the ways many scholars insist that they are.
You cannot discern the ideology of imperialism from Jane Eyre--but there are scores of critics who say you can. You cannot detect a uniquely homosexual literary style in the work of a Walt Whitman or a Henry James--but there are critics who say you can. You cannot argue that a poem or story singlehandedly subverts patriarchal hegemony or that a novel or play may be read as a microcosm of the culture in which it was written. But critics do it all the time, and they do it because they want to make works of art into something they are not.
Making exaggerated, often irrelevant claims about the relevance of particular works and making those claims stick: that is the work of the professional humanist today. By and large, it's what gets rewarded, it's what gets published, and it's what gets taught.
This is true, partially, but also see commentary sent by the reader cited earlier: "It takes a good deal of effort to become a 'learned person.' You have to value the effort and the goal. If you're going to teach A Tale of Two Cities, you not only have to know the text back to front, but also have a good idea about how Dickens understood the French Revolution, how the book fit with Dickens' other work at the time of composition. . . ." The reader goes on to say how tiring this work is when compared to the sexiness of single-theory teaching.
Fair enough, but what gets lost in this discussion is that you need both. In small amounts postmodernism can be incredibly handy, but it must support a rigorously, even tiresomely, researched argument. Of course it's not true that you can comprehend the entire edifice of British imperialism from analyzing Jane Eyre, but you can make a start of it. By carefully placing cultural artifacts or moments in their context, and by creatively teasing out hints and rumors of hidden meaning and unspoken motive, you can get very close to the heart and spirit of a time and place. Kipling's writing is an excellent example. If you take him at face value, you get a coherent, yet distorted view of British imperial-era thought. You get Kipling's view. But if you examine the context around Kipling, his writing, his life, and his history, you can use his work as a base on which to build a more accurate picture.
[begin wankery] To take an example from my own amateurish work: it is possible to discuss the history of African-Americans after Reconstruction by the songs they sang. However of you don't move beyond the texts of the songs, you remain in the solipsistic morass that O'Connor mentions. That happens ALL THE G-D DAMN TIME and it makes me effing crazy.
For example. Historians who study music tend to treat songs as just sets of words, like poems, ignoring the performativity, probable commercial interest, and audience presence inherent in all music prior to the recording age, and ignoring the possibility that the music-- the notes themselves-- might contain signifiers distinct from, and more important than, any "text." Which of course is monumentally stupid. Yet many historians do just this and elevate the lyrics to the level of concrete, ahistorical artifact, deconstructing them through a theoretical lens while ignoring even the most stupendously obvious contextual clues. This is exactly what O'Conner's on about, and I agree to this point. But, by doing the same po-mo exegesis using a theoretical framework of your choice, while firmly placing cultural artifacts in the context they come from-- economic, social, political, geographic, you can hopefully achieve a deep understanding of American history along dimensions that might othewise remain hidden. Theory then becomes what it should be-- one means to an end. [here endeth thee wankery]
I agree with Erin O'Connor and all her various correspondents. I just hope that, when academia finally moves back from the high wierdness of postmodernism, they keep the cool stuff and don't throw out the baby with the bathwater.
[moreover] n.b. I have made a couple edits to this post for clarity and forcefulness. Hey, meaning is fluid anyway, right?
June 2003
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