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[juanb]

Don't think that the editors of the American Journal of Chess and Yahtzee ("cheesee" for short) are not going to hear of this!  The world has been playing chess for thousands of years, not to mention derivative games like Shogi and Risk.  How can we possibly understand the world we live in, without the guiding insights of board games? 

[popsucket]

Recent studies indicate that only a few people play chess and of those people only a handful really understand the game.  Thus, since practically the whole world lives without a good working knowledge of chess, most universities don't need their own board game schools with separate graduate programs. 

Our board game needs can be covered by one or two lecturers over in Video Games.  It's practically the same thing anyway and many more people want to major in Video Games and use Video Games daily in their lives.  The old field of board games is obsolete and practitioners should either learn something relevant or retire.

[juanb]

While, I haven't published recently in the VG field, I can, if necessary, teach a course on the Theory of Pong.  Let me know if you are looking for adjuncts.

[popsucket]

Theory of Pong?!  We're a practical institution here.  We don't hold with theory classes. 

Now if you can teach a class on The Practice of Pong or better yet, Dance Dance Revolution (we need to cover an extra three sections of that next quarter), then I can offer you an adjunct slot at $1500 for the two credit lab.

[nordicexpat]

The readers you describe mostly don't exist on U. S. campuses. The study of literature is dying because students are bored by and won't read "good literature," never mind theoretical approaches. Literary scholars are offering a product that very few people want to buy.

The Fiona

But this is exactly the point that I began with, and I don't see how you can both say this and say that "lit crit should be an engagement with the text itself" (and by the way, although I now live abroad, I have had plenty of experience teaching middle-to-low students, however that is defined, including a special program for what it eupemistically called at-risk students).  Look , I never advocated that undergraduates read Butler or Derrida: that is a pointless exercise, for the same reason that undergraduate chemisty majors don't read articles designed for professional practioneer of that field.  My larger point was that introduction of literary and cultural theory had the potential to change the nature of literary studies, moving it away from "readings" of set of particular text to something else (it's clear that those at the time wanted it to be "representation studies." I would prefer something else, but I appreciate the sentiment at least).  In order for this transformation to have been effective, we would have radically needed to change the structure of English departments, moving it away from a focus of particular texts (and the myriad of different ways of reading them) to a study of concepts fundamental to the study of language and language-use (of which literature is one particular aspect). The justification would not be that you need to know these concepts in order to understand Shakespeare, Austen, Joyce, Woolf, or whoever.  The justification would be that language and language-use are fundamental aspects of our existence as human beings, and it is not going to go away even if high literature does.  I would no more say that a middle-to-low student shouldn't have an understanding of how language works than I would say a middle-to-low student shouldn't have an understanding of mathematics or chemisty.  Although many don't seem to appreciate it, understanding how language works is a technically demanding exercise, on par with any other academic subject.  Yes, we need to teach it at the appropriate level and with good teaching practices.  And, yes, education very often consists of learning that an assumption one previously had turns out to be mistaken (I'm still learning that what I previously thought is inadequate, so I really don't see that is so suspect about that).  Good teachers know how to make students feel good about this process, bad teachers don't.  Surely, there are theorists out there that have had a positive impact upon their students.  And, just as surely, there are plenty of so-called humanists who have made their students feel like #%&! because they haven't read the "right" texts.  Demonizing one'e intellectual enemies may make feel morally superior, but it isn't going to solve the very real crisis the humanities is now facing.

[juanb]

Theory of Pong?!  We're a practical institution here.  We don't hold with theory classes. 

But I wrote my dissertation on the History and Feminist Interpretations of Pong (from a Marxist perspective) and did Pong Studies at one of the Top-10 Pong schools in the nation!  And now you're telling me I can't find a job?!  My adviser was one of the leading lights (a superstar, really) in the Black and White Video Gaming field and he told me it was the hottest field and my employment was guaranteed.

[juanb]

The justification would not be that you need to know these concepts in order to understand Shakespeare, Austen, Joyce, Woolf, or whoever.  The justification would be that language and language-use are fundamental aspects of our existence as human beings, and it is not going to go away even if high literature does.  

ExACTLY. 

[popsucket]

Theory of Pong?!  We're a practical institution here.  We don't hold with theory classes. 

But I wrote my dissertation on the History and Feminist Interpretations of Pong (from a Marxist perspective) and did Pong Studies at one of the Top-10 Pong schools in the nation!  And now you're telling me I can't find a job?!  My adviser was one of the leading lights (a superstar, really) in the Black and White Video Gaming field and he told me it was the hottest field and my employment was guaranteed.

Your advisor was Jumbo Smartassky, wasn't he?  You didn't check his academic family tree, did you?  He was the star pupil of Bill O'Ney--the man who pioneered the poker face under pressure.

You really should have done your research on your graduate program more carefully.  Perhaps it's not too late to get a certificate in WoW and work as an adjunct at the local CC while you retool yourself into something useful.

Imagine thinking you could get a job with a degree from a Pong department.  Pffft.

[popsucket]

The justification would not be that you need to know these concepts in order to understand Shakespeare, Austen, Joyce, Woolf, or whoever.  The justification would be that language and language-use are fundamental aspects of our existence as human beings, and it is not going to go away even if high literature does.  

ExACTLY. 

Now I'm confused.  Isn't that the opposite of the point that Nordicexpat made in the previous post?  Has the light dawned and I missed it?

[rowan1]

The justification would not be that you need to know these concepts in order to understand Shakespeare, Austen, Joyce, Woolf, or whoever.  The justification would be that language and language-use are fundamental aspects of our existence as human beings, and it is not going to go away even if high literature does.  

ExACTLY. 

Oddly there are departments out there that have English Literature programs and writing and linguistics programs. 

[juanb]

Oddly there are departments out there that have English Literature programs and writing and linguistics programs. 

True enough.  But often these departments house multiple majors, e.g. Lit/English major, Linguistics major, Creative Writing major, such that students rarely study all three.  So what you get is lit majors who complaint about having to take linguistics and linguistics majors who hate taking literature.  My daughter is a linguistics major and often comments on how clueless the "English majors" are in the grammar/syntax courses.  I suspect she'd be equally clueless in the lit courses. 

[malcha]

I would be delighted to take Malcha's course. I hope she'd bring pictures of her feline.

The Fiona

I used to tell anecdotes about my feline to my students, and they gave me this look like "it does not surprise us that you live alone with a cat," so then I started making them translate Latin stories about Nutrex, Evil God of the Nutria, instead, and then they learned to respect me.

[fiona]

Nordicexpat's posts do seem contradictory to me, and I have a strong impulse to grab on to Malcha's feline instead. (And go away, the gamer/hijackers.)

Sure, it would be great if literature depts. studied the structure of language. The field of Cultural Studies, popular a few years ago, was somewhat doing that.

The larger fact, though, is that there isn't any way to institute new ways of reading or teaching literature, or even bring back old ones. There is no literature mafia, and no accreditation procedure as there is with, for instance, the American Chemical Society. So arguments that "we should" or "there should be" have no force.

In the humanities, there is no way to make a "should" into a reality.

The Fiona

[juanb]

In the humanities, there is no way to make a "should" into a reality.

The Fiona

What a ridiculous statement.  Things will change just as soon as humanityliterature professors want them to change. 

[mountainguy]

I find this discussion fascinating. As a rhetorical historian, my own perspective on this issue is may be out of the mainstream. That having been said, I'll wade into the debate now.

It seems to me that much of what passes for "theory" these days really just means heuristic approaches for reading texts. I find that highly problematic and would maintain the need to distinguish between method and object. When we allow theory to become a cookie-cutter recipe for how to study a text--as in "apply these these five steps to do a Foucaultian analysis"--we have made ourselves slaves to method. In an age of growing class sizes, creeping tenure expectations, and grade inflation, it's tempting to teach this way just to simply the teaching process.

While I would characterize my own work as non-theoretical in object (the primary goal of my research is to show how language constructed specific historical situations), I freely admit that I have theoretical commitments. They are there in the background, informing how I choose to bracket significant meanings in a text and context. As someone more in the modernist than postmodernist camp, I've been particularly influenced by Kenneth Burke. But my goal is not to advance Burkeian theory, nor do I think it's particularly useful to throw Burke at students with directions to "go do a dramatistic analysis of X text."

I must furthermore express some skepticism about the object of literary studies as professed by some instructors. I don't believe that reading literature is itself transformative. While I certainly want my students to think of rhetoric or literature as what Burke called "an equipment for living," most of them don't think of it that way (at least judging by the text-messaging and glazed-over looks I get in class along with caustic evaluation comments). On a more practical level, though, studying literature can teach students how to write more fluently, how to marshal evidence to advance a particular argument, and how to more clearly think and speak. Perhaps I'm giving too much credence to pragmatist/progressive thought here, but that's my gut reaction.

I am of course open to your reactions and willing to revise my position if persuaded to do so.