cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com

This is part 1 of a short piece forthcoming in the tenth anniversary issue of Pedagogy (Duke UP).

For me the most compelling question in English studies today is the tension between the figure of reading and the figure of writing, especially as it plays out in what David Downing calls managed disciplinarity, the disciplinary division of labor between writing and literature.

Nearly everyone thinking about this question acknowledges that it’s a distinction serving to justify the division of resources and rewards — time, salary, prestige, power — rather than a coherent intellectual division. This wasn’t always the case, but it was for much of the 20th century. So long as the literature curriculum remained central to sustaining nationalist and imperial projects, faculty working under the sign of “literature” were steadily more likely to be associated with research-intensive, or at least tenurable, appointments; to control institutional resources; shape the disciplinary agenda of the field; receive funding and media recognition, etc.

As James Berlin, Robert Connors, Sharon Crowley, Bruce McComiskey, Stephen North and many others have observed: The emergence of “literature” as a synecdoche for the many concerns of English sometimes came at a heavy price for faculty whose research or teaching encompassed such concerns as rhetoric, composition, philology, English education, creative writing, even critical theory and cultural studies. Many faculty with these concerns simply abandoned English departments, joining schools of education or departments of linguistics, communications, or philosophy; others seceded en masse, forming departments, programs, or even new disciplines of their own. Where faculty with these concerns remained under the administration of English, many were relegated to teaching-intensive, generally nontenurable appointments.

By the late 20th century, however, a “long-term decline in the cultural capital of literature” was spectacularly in evidence, as part of a larger decline in the role of the humanities in reproducing the professonal-managerial class for whom, as John Guillory bluntly observes, “technical and professional knowledge have replaced the literary curriculum.” (139)

At its most basic, this shift means that members of the educated classes are today far less likely to hail each other at cocktail parties, tennis matches, and job interviews by using such forms of call and response as dropping a book title — say, _Moby Dick_—in order to elicit such appropriate responses as “Ah, Melville,” “Call me Ishmael,” or “Oh, I never finished that!”

Today the circuit of recognition — sign, countersign; challenge, password — is completed for the majority of professionals and managers just as efficiently by class-specific tastes in music, television, film, or the massive discourse of management theory (“‘Management by objectives’? Ah, Drucker.”) One could easily argue that increasingly the management curriculum is “the” undergraduate curriculum, except for the vocational and STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) workforces, while the liberal arts generally have been redefined as, effectively, extracurricular. (Or at best peripherally preprofessional for such fields such as communications, law, and teaching.)

Even from the bleak perspective of the arts and humanities as a whole, the outlook for literary study per se is especially grim. Along with half a dozen other figures in English studies, I’ve previously written about broad changes in the academic workforce, especially the shifting of employment away from tenured faculty to a contingent workforce.

As of Fall 2007, contingent faculty outnumber the tenure stream by at least 3 to 1, roughly the inverse of the proportions 40 years earlier. Across the profession, this trend line will drive the percentage of tenure-stream faculty into single digits within 20 years. It is hard to imagine that the trend line for English could be worse — but it is — and the outlook for literature is worse yet. A 2008 MLA analysis of federal IPEDS data (Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System) shows that between 1993 and 2004, the hiring of nontenurable faculty continued to dramatically outpace tenure-track hiring in the profession as a whole.

However, in terms of absolute numbers most disciplines actually gained a modest number of tenure-track lines, or at least held steady. Political science gained 2.5 percent new lines; philosophy and religion packed on 43 percent. English, however, lost over 3,000 tenure-track lines, an average annual loss of 300 positions. This amounted to slightly more than one in every 10 tenurable positions in English — literally a decimation. If that trend proves to have continued — and all indications are that it has — by early 2010 English will have shed another 1,500 lines.

The decimation-or-more of the field hardly begins to tell the story of the losses to literary study in particular, however, since there’s been notable growth in tenure-track hiring in some of the subordinated fields, especially rhetoric and composition. (Though as I’ve observed before, to less than universal acclaim in the rhet-comp discourse, much of this growth has to do with the need for low-level administration of a vast army of the nontenurable: While only a minority of the research produced by rhet-comp specialists is about program administration, I’ve argued that the lower-managerial subjectivity shapes the discourse of the field.)

In addition to the continuing trend of rhet-comp specialists doing more and more administration — in institution-spanning positions across the curriculum, in digital media labs, writing programs, writing majors and minors, and offering new graduate degrees — there is quite substantial new tenure-track hiring in all writing-related fields — creative, technical, and professional writing, including scriptwriting, creative nonfiction, and composing for digital media. Some of the most interesting new hiring addresses the growing support for civic engagement in pedagogy by fostering socially engaged writing and rhetoric.

In the limited space of this forum, I’d like to zero in on the question begged by that last observation: With all of these new justifications for hiring, why isn’t the story of English more optimistic? From a macro perspective, or an outsider’s standpoint, what’s the fuss? So literature is less interesting, but old standbys like rhetoric and writing have unprecedented traction along fascinating new paths of inquiry and practice, and many research scholars under the sign of “literature” have rapidly and willingly shifted their research objects to nonliterary texts (often in close relationship with cultural studies, women’s studies, and ethnic studies).
Reasonable observers from other disciplines or professions can fairly shrug and ask, what’s the big deal? With stunning new justifications for its activities that far outnumber the reasons to shrink, English should be experiencing a renaissance (at least relative to other disciplines), not a collapse.

There’s no single answer to this question. A big part of the problem is structural, as I’ve suggested, so that new hiring in all fields is overwhelmingly nontenurable. But English has experienced this structural change with particular ferocity in connection with a crisis of dominance internal to the discipline — a crisis of dominance that’s at least twofold.

From the declining node of dominance we see an anxious response by the research faculty still operating under the sign of “literature,” to whom a recent disturbing MLA report speaks. Under the sign of literary studies, this faculty still maintains administrative control over most departments and the more prominent disciplinary channels: the result, in many departments, has been a growing flight to the reactionary postures exemplified by the MLA/Teagle report — a willingness to trade almost anything (tenure, wages, courseload, especially when they are someone else’s) in defense of a vision of English studies that peaked in the 1960s.

At the the same time, the rising rhet-comp mainstream has invested heavily in what Richard Miller memorably dubs “the arts of complicity,” or the world view of education administration. Rhet-comp’s “complicity” is in accepting a majority nontenurable workforce in exchange for gains that have steadily built a new discipline within English studies. Some of these gains have been impressive — new programs, degrees, and departments, and it is increasingly clear that rhet-comp has opened productive, often healthy relationships with communities, disciplines, and institutions over the past four decades.

On the other hand, a less palatable element of rhet-comp’s bargain with power, including some of its most dramatic institutional successes, is that it is granting doctorates structurally similar in some ways to doctorates in education, producing a tenured class of lower administration — as well as a graduate faculty producing both the Ph.D.-holding supervisory class and at least some of the subdoctorally degreed teachers. (Though many of the latter are trained in literary studies and creative writing; rhet-comp supervisors commonly function to provide on-the-job training to persons with literature degrees who have been trained to have contempt for rhetoric and composition).

As I’ve previously written, from the point of view of large trends in higher-education employment, rhet-comp’s successes are too often and too complacently the avant-garde of the administrative imaginary, with as little tenure for nonadministrators as possible: At its worst, it resembles the worst form of K-12 teaching, in which a stratum of administrator-researchers sets the curriculum and mission for a subordinated teaching force.

To outsiders, it’s generally obvious that English departments have much to gain by investing heavily in the figure of writing. The near-universal digitization of professional, academic, commercial, personal, and creative writing represents a world-historical shift in textuality, communications, and creativity. Over the past two decades, tens of millions of us have been engaged in the massive shared project of composing for hypermedia, the collective bringing into existence of a massively multi-authorial electronically mediated textual object — the not-quite worldwide artifact known as “the web” or “the Internet.”

Leaving aside the narrower, readerly questions of what to do with changing and disappearing digital texts (how and whether they should be read, valued, interpreted, archived, canonized, attributed, and monetized) English has a profound and inevitable investment in the process of their composition: countless acts of assemblage, interpretation, expression, analysis, debate, and persuasion.

As a broad spectrum of observers from outside of English agree, hypermedia composition represents a powerful intersection of research, teaching, and service: not only is the accelerating evolution of hypertextuality a gripping research object in its own right, it represents absolutely fascinating possibilities for the mediation of other research, and the relationship between archival texts, critical texts, and the discourse of learners, appreciators, imitators, and appropriators of those texts. There are enormous hopes for the democratization of cultural production — this is my special hope and interest — the re-democratization of producing culture, not just consuming it.

There’s also much to say about how those enormous hopes are exaggerated or, where viable, being rapidly foreclosed by law, convention, the increasingly naked class struggle from above. If there is only one thing to be said regarding the expensive and complex literacies represented by hypermedia composition: Democratization is too often taken for granted, as if everyone’s kids and everyone’s grandparents are doing it, when that’s not at all true. It seems to me that faculty in English have not just an opportunity but an obligation to be in the front lines of arguing for public support of this literacy so that it becomes in actuality a democratic literacy.

Despite this efflorescence of extracurricular composition — writing, writing, everywhere! — disciplinary trajectories in English have reduced the figure of writing to the figure of student writing, or first-year composition. This is unfortunate, though not because student writing is uninteresting. To the contrary, student writing has become more interesting than ever: the soaring quantity and diversity of contemporary writing by students and the institutional and social possibilities for that writing more closely than ever resembles the ever-less-obviously “literary” research objects of research scholars in English studies (those who have taken the cultural turn at least: In my own department, some of the most interesting work is being done on economic writers; Pacific revolutionary discourse; 19th-century elocution and reform; contemporary management theory; self-help, leadership, and spirituality; 18th-century sermons and other religious speech, and headmistress memoir — and evidently headmistresses with the souls of accountants, not poets).

To anyone outside of English, it would seem abundantly reasonable to say that all of these interesting researchers are interested in writers and writing, rather than litterateurs and literature.

Only the disciplinary division of labor makes sense of shoehorning these research agendas into work done by “literature faculty” with “literature doctorates.” Indeed, these are interests also being worked on by faculty in the other fields of English, including, especially, rhetoric and composition, where research into student writing is just one of many possible paths of inquiry. What this work by our “lit faculty” and persons with “lit Ph D ‘s” underscores is the false but useful-to-power distinction of “literature” versus “writing” where faculty under both signs do work steadily more inflected by cultural studies, women’s studies, ethnic studies and critical pedagogy, with a shared interest in questions of theory, interdisciplinarity, civic engagement, democracy, education, and literacy.

Embracing the figure of writing could represent a tremendous opportunity for expansion of mission, disciplinary healing, and employment justice in English. This would mean actively working to heal and transcend how the figure currently functions in the disciplinary division of labor and rewards — a task of considerable magnitude, but with comparably significant rewards, including pragmatic considerations for departments on the ground in day-to-day university politics.

My own view is that as an intellectual matter we have already long settled the major questions: We’ve historicized the emergence of literary and cultural value and the emergence of specific forms enjoying the designation “literature” and understand the contingency of those forms and related practices such as literary criticism. (Much of this work was accomplished in the late 1980s and early 1990s by faculty working in critical pedagogy and cultural studies; some were based in literature, like Pat Brantlinger, and others in composition, like James Berlin, who in 1996 considered that “research projects in literary studies attempted by those presently working in a rhetorically constructed English studies” showed “striking parallels” to the work at Birmingham, even where there had been “little or no communication between the two groups”{180}).

Much more slowly, but inevitably, we are moving toward pragmatic disciplinary and curricular accommodations of that decades-old recognition, so that eventually someone currently designated a literature scholar might feel comfortable saying, “I study writers and writing, some of which has enjoyed the designation ‘literature’ at one point or another, and much of which did not. Everybody in my department, whether they are on research-intensive or teaching-intensive appointment, is interested in writers and writing.” My sense is that we will get to that place eventually, and that getting there sooner and willingly would represent a happier, healthier, and more productive journey for us all.

Go to Part 2