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[fiona]

This article says it mostly isn't.

The cost-benefit breakdowns are very interesting and sad.

http://chronicle.com/article/The-Research-Bust/129930/

The Fiona

[lasquires]

I find it interesting that this article focuses primarily on scholarship produced on the most canonical, over-studied authors in Western literature, when some of the most interesting (and influential) work produced in the last few decades has been on authors not on the traditional list of "classics." Granted, there have been a few phenomenal works that deal with, say, Jane Austen. Edward Said's chapter on Mansfield Park in Culture and Imperialism comes to mind, but this article seems misunderstand where and on what topics the most interesting work in literary studies is being performed.

The point about tenure requirements and quality vs. quantity are worth noting, though hardly news. I'm probably not really qualified to comment on that issue as a new PhD, but the escalating requirements for tenure and hiring would seem to be a by-product of the saturation of the field.

[humpty_dumpty]

That pretty much depends on what research, doesn't it?

lasquires, I think this is exactly the point the article is trying to make - there are areas where the literary research can be interesting and useful, but the criteria by which faculty performance is currently measued ensures the field is being filled with unwanted, though quality, research.

After all, isn't it what has long been discussed in subdued whispers by rebel grads and post-grads - things like "how long can we do research in Shakespeare?", "what's there to be learned in Dickens after all these years?", etc., etc. 

[lasquires]

I finally looked at the author's name. It does not surprise me one bit that Mark Bauerlein wrote this piece, particularly given the objection I noted above. His debates (both in print and for radio) with Michael Berube are pretty interesting.

Bauerlein is a smart guy, and he's not as strident as some conservative critics of the liberal arts (like David Horowitz), but as a rule, I think his arguments with the current state of the academy as a whole rely too much on straw men and conservative caricatures.

Edit: Wow. Someone posted his RMP profile in the comments.

[lasquires]

I apologize for the double post (and 3 posts on the same page), but I wanted to respond to humpty really quick.

Given what I know about Bauerlein from his other articles (to be readily found on the web), I decidedly do not think that's the point he is trying to make. Bauerlein is a conservative, and he advocates a liberal arts curriculum that is based on inculcating tradition and common culture in a very Arnoldian sense: the humanities exist to impart to students the best of what has been thought and said in the Western world.

While he's diplomatic enough not to be openly hostile to the project of "opening the canon," he does tend to be dismissive of the projects of those who study and teach minority, non-Western, and contemporary literature. To quote from the Valve article I linked earlier:

True to Bérubé’s neopragmatist outlook, classroom liberalism bears upon attitude and conduct. It does not endorse a curriculum. The inculcation of tradition is barely hinted at. A student’s educational path may amble promiscuously through a smorgasbord of course offerings.

This is today’s fallback position for liberalism in higher education. It used to push curricular innovations such as “opening the canon,” but those enthusiasms faded years ago. Now, shying away from content, it emphasizes forensic ideals and content-less habits such as critical thinking. In doing so, it never really engages conservative educational thought, whose operative concepts (tradition, core curriculum, common culture, high art, etc.) are mostly about content.

I don't entirely disagree with his criticism. I do think that education as a whole has veered dangerously away from curriculum and content over the last few decades in favor of focusing on vague skills, but is dismissal of opening the canon suggests that such a project was primarily one of inclusion, one that was finished a long time ago once we started assigning Frederick Douglass in survey courses. But it fails to acknowledge the ways in which studies of, say, Native American, African American, non-Western, and LGBT literatures have contributed (in ways that have permeated the entire academy--not just literary studies) to our understanding of how racism, sexism, xenophobia, etc. work in culture. And that study is still very much ongoing, and there is a diverse and exciting amount of work being produced in venues like PMLA.

In other words, I do think that the critiques in this article proceed from a very narrow definition of what research in MLA fields entails or perhaps what he thinks that research should entail.

[betterslac]

Another commenter contributed an entry worthy of the "Sh!t people make up about my field" thread, arguing that humanities research should be stopped because:

"we have compiled enough information on authors and eras".

Yep, did all you humanities people know what you do is compile information in some big ol' encyclopedia?

[helpful]

Just because a book isn't cited doesn't mean it wasn't valuable. People read books all the time, but you can't measure that unless you get statistics from libraries about how many times a book was checked out. Now with kindle, etc. perhaps it is easier to find out how many times it was downloaded.

[lasquires]

I can't sleep, and this discussion got me curious, so I went and looked at the JSTOR page for PMLA, which shows the most cited and most accessed articles for a set period of time. If one measures influence by citations, then the stats truly are abysmal. The most cited article garnered 6 citations over the past three years. I think, however, that this data is limited to citations in journals that are also housed in JSTOR, so citations in books and many journals would not be included in that count. PMLA also stopped archiving their stuff with JSTOR after 2005, so data on the material in the most recent issues is unavailable.

If, however, you look at the most accessed articles, things are less bleak. Let's keep in mind that JSTOR, unlike Google Scholar, requires a subscription. As such, the people downloading these things are presumably doing so for serious purposes--scholarly research, class papers, etc.

The top article, a 1989 essay called "The Dollhouse Backlash: Criticism, Feminism, and Ibsen" has been accessed 4,280 times in the past three months. If you look at the stats for the past three years, the top article--on Frankenstein--was accessed 14,903 times.

This would seem to prove Bauerlein's thesis--that no one reads the best work produced by literary scholars--incorrect. It also suggests that his implicit sub-thesis (which informed my counter-thesis)--that we no longer have anything interesting to say about the "classics"--is similarly problematic. I do wonder, however, if the figures for essays on canonical authors is inflated by the fact that undergraduates as a group write a disproportionate number of their papers on them.


I performed a similar search with more specialized (but respected) journals, and even an article on Beowulf in Studies in Philology gets accessed more than 3k times over 3 years.

[humpty_dumpty]

On second thought, the article doesn't really make much sense. The problem: literary research sn't quoted often enough. Change topics? No can do, faculty research serves as proof of competence in the field, the faculty will have to research the same topics they teach.The solution? Decrease the No of pages the faculty have to print. Will it increase quotablity? Probably not, it might improve quolity, but the author himself suggests that it's not the quality of the research that is the problem, the quality is OK.  It will, however, decrease the number of artcles and books publish, and make the research per dollar ratio even more pathetic than it is today.   

[fiona]

It's not worth fighting the canon wars again. Many of us fought (on the side of opening the canon), won some things, are in the process of losing some things we won.

One sad fact is that during the canon wars of the 1990s, people did care passionately about reading. Now they mostly don't.

It was possible then to discover or revive minor writers who fit popular paradigms and literary theories, but there aren't any popular literary theories now. Hence if you write on Shakespeare, people are more apt to read you, because they don't have the time or interest to learn about New Writer X.

Essentially Bauerlein's saying that scholars in lit crit are trying to sell a product that not many people want to buy.

The Fiona

[busyslinky]

The top article, a 1989 essay called "The Dollhouse Backlash: Criticism, Feminism, and Ibsen" has been accessed 4,280 times in the past three months.

I put this title into Scholar Google and it has received 31 citations.  I then clicked on the citations and found that the first article that cited this work was itself cited 59 times. I clicked on its citations and the top work was cited 346 times.  I did this again and again a few more times. These are the citations of top articles that cited these works...712, 414, 499, 1110, 1918, 3267....

Not sure what the influences have been, but significant development may occur from very different sources.

The point here is that just looking at direct citations may not really be the best measure.  That is why Google Scholar's slogan is "Standing on the Shoulder of Giants".  Sometimes it is the unknown early work that influences greater thought.

[lasquires]

Actually, according to my (unscientific*) analysis of JSTOR stats, PMLA has a readership on par with or slightly better than Science and much, much better than The Harvard Law Review, at least on that particular database. In other words, major literary journals are read (or at least skimmed) by thousands of people each year. The oft-circulated claim that the very best research in humanities fields is read by only a few dozen people is patently false.

And my invocation of the canon wars was purely to put Bauerlein's arguments in context with his other arguments. Ten years ago, he was declaring that literary studies had forsaken the study of the best that had been thought and said in the Western tradition in favor of queer theory and deconstruction. He championed a return to "serious" research in archives as the savior of the field. But since then (in the mid-oughts, Bauerlein testified for Horowitz and had become a conservative gadfly in the debates over the politics of the academy), he seems to have decided that even that very serious research is worthless.


*Bauerlein, however, typed sh!t in to Google Scholar. Most of us would hold our undergraduates to higher standards than that.

On preview: also, what busylinky said.

[pournelle]

Fiona's gloomy perspective rests on faulty data.

Reading is not in decline. The english major is not in decline.

Book sales have actually been increasing; there is a crisis in publishing, but it has nothing to do with lower demand for books. Rather, it has to do with low profit margins, partially a result of the low price point of ebooks.

The number of english majors has remained relatively stable as a percentage of total degrees granted since the early 80's. There was indeed a precipitious decline in the late 70's, from about 7% to about 4%. The high percentage of majors in the 60's and early 70's was, historically, an abberation, largely explainable by the de facto exclusion of women from many majors.  

The crisis concerns the value of literary scholarship. It is both too easy and mistaken to say, "oh no one reads anymore." The current crisis in the value of literary scholarship is complex, and Bauerlin's analysis picks out some of the symptoms (although, as has been pointed out, it is methodologically problematic). But both his implied solutions and his analyses of the nature of the problem are weak. A broad conversation is needed.

[quasihumanist]

If you think no goods other than bread and circuses are worth having, then of course you don't think literary study is worthwhile.  It won't feed you, and many things are more entertaining than reading.

[fiona]

Fiona's gloomy perspective rests on faulty data.

Reading is not in decline. The english major is not in decline.

One sign that the English major is in decline is that people don't seem to know it should be capitalized.

There's a lack of respect for the English language and its conventions and traditions.

The Fiona