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January 11, 2008, 08:37 PM ET
Stop the Presses
According to the 2005 MLA International Bibliography, Edmund Spenser was the subject of 64 books, chapters, essays, or notes that year. Wallace Stevens earned 46 entries, Faulkner 78, Henry James 131, and Jane Austen a mighty 146.
Ten years earlier, Faulkner won that five-horse race with 143 pieces, James with 141, Austen with 83, Spenser at 45, and Stevens at 42.
It’s been this way ever since the boom years of the 1960s and 70s, which means that every year has added dozens of readings, edits, introductions, critiques, theories, interpretations, reinterpretations, and meta-interpretations to the scholarly record. Pile them up and you have a stack of commentary that adds up to . . . what? Well, a lot of readings, edits . . . At this point the only folks to whom they matter are young aspirants microspecializing themselves into a secure position in the profession. For most everybody else, the sheer bulk is a turnoff.
How does it look today to those on the way up, say, graduate students who entered Ph.D. programs because they couldn’t get enough of the Brontes and Dickens? They find they must spend enormous amounts of their training “positioning themselves” in the field. So much has been written, so much material covered again and again, that they struggle to say anything new, and struggle again to relate themselves in some meaningful way to this crowded critical history (barely four decades old).
It’s a heckuva way to keep young scholars from becoming broadly learned, and a sure way to narrow their horizons to a small sphere of interest. This can’t go on, can it? Can we really accommodate in the next ten years 1,000 more items each on Austen, James . . . ?
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