December 28, 2007
'Professing Literature,' 20 Years Later
Last night Gerald Graff was struck with an idea. It occurred to the University of Illinois at Chicago professor and president-elect of the MLA that literature professors might be evaluated for tenure and promotion not by the number of times they’ve published but by the merit of their arguments.
That such an approach might be radical was clear from one of a trio of lively talks given at the MLA convention to mark the 20th anniversary of Mr. Graff’s landmark book, Professing Literature.
Just reissued by the University of Chicago Press, Mr. Graff’s book argues that the institutional history of literary studies was shaped by the very conflicts over the canon that seemed to tear apart the discipline in the 1980s. He recommends that those conflicts be made central in the literature classroom, an idea he developed further in his 1992 book, Beyond the Culture Wars.
Literary scholars must continue to examine the structure of the profession to keep its time-honored practices “from being hijacked and used against us,” said Francis J. Donoghue, an associate professor at Ohio State University in Columbus, in his talk. Publishing has become “a dire professional obligation,” he said, outlining this by-now-familiar scenario: Promotion-and-tenure committees almost universally rank a candidate’s publications over his or her teaching, leading to pressures on newly minted Ph.D’s to find a publisher for their dissertation and even plan a second or third book while seeking a job. Meanwhile, the financial strains on university presses mean that fewer monographs are being published for an ever-shrinking number of readers.
“The perpetuation of research in this way must seem to those outside the profession — as well as those inside it — as ridiculous,” said Mr. Donoghue.
“Professors have been placed and have placed themselves in a position that no sane person would want to be in.”
In his response, Mr. Graff said that while listening to Mr. Donoghue’s paper it occurred to him that there was a “solution to this publishing mess: We should redefine the unit of publication as the argument rather than the book or the essay,” evaluating scholars in intellectual rather than material terms. Review committees, he said, should ask: “What’s her argument? Has she made a good case for it?” He indicated that he might pursue that idea during his tenure as MLA president.
The question may be, in a discipline held together largely by what Mr. Graff has termed “the field-coverage principle,” how will scholars evaluate each others’ arguments? How does your colleague, the queer-theory medievalist, evaluate your argument about Modernism and empire?
Elizabeth M. Renker, an associate professor also at Ohio State, said in her paper that a revolutionary change has occurred in higher education in the 20 years since Professing Literature was published. Citing research she did for her new book, The Origins of American Literature Studies: An Institutional History, (Cambridge University Press), she argued that the role of undergraduate students in the formation of the discipline has been overlooked.
“The scholar-driven professional model is becoming obsolete,” she said, giving way to “a bottom-up model in which the power resides with the students,” much the way sites like Wikipedia and citizen-journalism have democratized the publishing of scholarship and information. “Student desires will preside,” she said. “The question for us is whether we decide to treat them as invisible.”
Paul Lauter, a professor at Trinity College, in Connecticut, also emphasized the role of students in his remarks, which outlined problems he saw with Mr. Graff’s “‘teach-the-conflicts’ mantra.” Not all views should be given equal weight in the classroom, he said. Intelligent design, for example, “has no place in the science classroom — though maybe in abnormal psychology.”
The emphasis on teaching the conflicts may also “lead us fatefully away from primary texts,” he said. “I’m well aware that our reception of literature is mediated, but it’s simply not true to say that the content of our subject is not literature but criticism.” And it is literature, he said, that moves and inspires students.
Finally, he argued, “if written today Professing Literature would have to engage a very different student body and a very different professoriate.” Trying to aim a literature curriculum at all students “probably means meeting the needs of none,” he said.
Mr. Graff responded that he wasn’t sure that even Mr. Lauter believed his own arguments. “Surely when you teach your classes and you get a conservative student, I would bet that when they challenge what you say you treat your own views as open to debate, as any non-Hitlerian would do.”
As for making literature central, he said: “Even when students are having a class discussion about Macbeth or Native Son, what they say is criticism. It seems to me a contradiction, even a hypocrisy, to expect students to produce critical discourse and not to show them what it looks like.”
He cited one of the textbooks he’s written, They Say, I Say. “In good writing you set up the debate yourself,” he said. “You write the voices of people who disagree with you into your own texts.”
— Jennifer Ruark
Comments
Previous: Tech and the Humanities: A Report from the Front Lines
Next: MLA President: We're Always in Language
If we wish to slow down the trashing of our profession by the business-model types, we need to demonstrate a qualitative proficiency that can command common-sense respect. I propose that ancient model known as the love of wisdom: philosophia.
— Hnaef Jan 4, 10:20 AM #
Hnaef abhors“business-model types” making decisions about higher education. But why should the state, through our taxes, support philosophia? The state’s interest is not coincident with that of the MLA, thank goodness.
— walras1 Jan 6, 02:39 PM #