From the issue dated September 20, 2002
|
|
Why Are English Departments Still Fighting the Culture Wars?By MARK KRUPNICKEveryone has heard about the culture wars that have torn apart university departments of English. But it was still shocking to read a New York Times article a few months ago about how animosity between traditional and theory-oriented professors at Columbia University has decimated its once-great department. Similar antagonisms have created bedlam in a surprisingly large number of American departments of English. My own feelings about English-department life may be surmised from the fact that, in 1990, I jumped ship to take a full-time position in religion and literature in the Divinity School at the University of Chicago. I was at ease teaching literature in a religious-studies setting because there was no pressure to reduce literature to the circumstances of material culture, or to race, class, and gender. The same could hardly be said about many cutting-edge English departments. During my years at Chicago, I was also an associate (nonvoting) member of the English department, but my real commitment was always to the Divinity School. The usual explanation for the divisiveness in English is twofold. First, starting with the invasion of French poststructuralism in the 1960s, advanced literary interpretation changed from being formalist in method and traditionalist in ideology to a brand of French theory whose major distinguishing characteristic seemed to be that it required you to spend more time reading the theorists than reading the canonical texts of Western literature. The second major explanation for the culture wars is that they basically have been about politics, set off when '60s radicals took their battles from the streets into university departments. But the culture wars have petered out in many departments. Why so much less so in English? I suggest that the bitterness of the canon wars, and so much else in academic literary studies, has had a great deal to do with the kind of people who become English professors. Here I need to appeal to my own experience. My introduction to life in an English department was at Boston University, in the late '60s and early '70s. Those were some of the most intense years of the anti-Vietnam War movement and the youth counterculture, and the department was divided. The rather modest radicalism of the assistant professors antagonized many of the elders. Several tenured professors sympathized with our cause, but the dominant wing preferred to get on with business as usual, without the rumpus of sit-ins and all the rest. Their idea was that we young ones had veered from the proper -- that is, aesthetic -- focus of literary education. My purpose is not to rehash that intradepartmental clash. In any case, it more often took the form of personal conflicts than of reasoned debate. For example, when I offered my congratulations to one of the most aggressive of the antiradicals, who had just received an invitation to join a highly prestigious English department, that professor spit out: "I'm not going anywhere. I'm going to stay here long enough to see you all buried." "Professor X's" virulent hatred might be understood in terms of a unique personal psychopathology. But it's more illuminating to see Professor X's attitude in terms of a shared disposition among literary academics, who tend to stake their professional and personal identities on their readings -- their evaluations and interpretations -- of texts. But do English professors identify themselves with their theories and methods more than do their colleagues in, say, history or economics? I think so. Professor X detested the department's "radicals" because Professor X regarded literature and a proper approach to it as the key to truth and reality. Of course, there are as many permutations of an English professor's personal identification with texts as there are English professors. The point is that the archetypal English-department academic, in contrast to academics in other fields, is involved in a quest to know himself or herself and arrive at a more intimate relationship with the good, the true, and the real. So English professors tend to experience alternative approaches to the truth as they see it as a personal affront, and cause for counterattack. The personal truly is political. After leaving Boston University, I had a chance to observe another aspect of the culture of personality that is endemic to English-department life. The University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, where I taught from 1974 to 1987, had set up the Center for Twentieth Century Studies. It wasn't a department -- it didn't grant degrees or offer courses -- but was more like a European intellectual salon, providing an enviable social milieu as well as cultural enrichment. For the most part, the center's director managed to keep the tension between the theorists and the traditionalists in check. But what always struck me most about the center was the snobbishness it encouraged and satisfied. The hunger for social status has always seemed to me more pronounced in English professors than in other academics. In the first few decades of the 20th century, for example, one way that American English professors sought to distinguish themselves from their commonplace countrymen was through a genteel Anglophilia, which paralyzed academic literary study. Jews could rarely be found in prestigious English departments until the 1950s, because it was thought that they lacked the cultural background to properly understand John Milton or Henry David Thoreau. No such questions arose in physics departments or in the social sciences, where a more tolerant culture prevailed. Nowadays, that urge for cultural distinction has been displaced by zeal to demonstrate radical political piety. Yet, the two forms of status seeking aren't so different. Whether literature professors have sought acknowledgment for their cultural superiority or for their political correctness, they seem to have always insisted on their spiritual distinction. That is because the role of moral tutor in the United States has fallen to professors of English nearly as much as to the clergy. For the first 60 years or so of the last century, college English teachers were in a better position than pastors and priests -- in our mass democracy of recent immigrants -- to refine the manners and morals of the immigrants' progeny. Far from reinforcing old values, professors helped their students to separate from their parents and transcend the past. Professors of English began to derive a sense of their specialness by enabling students to rise above the materialistic values of their uneducated parents, who were striving to establish themselves in the New World. The objects of their attention have changed, but English professors continue to seem to feel as if they are uniquely responsible for the spiritual condition of the nation. I spent a few years, 1987-90, at the University of Illinois at Chicago. The wannabes at UIC hadn't been as fortunate as my former colleagues in Milwaukee. Those who had been at UIC a long time suffered from a sense that the brave new world of literary theory had been rendered inaccessible to them by an indifferent university administration. They weren't wrong about the administration. Still, it was uncomfortable working among persons whose sense of self-esteem was so damaged and who, as a consequence, directed toward the world, including newcomers like me, a free-floating resentment. It is necessary to keep in mind the social as well as the personal side of such wounded narcissism. Western intellectuals like Diderot and Voltaire once were literary generalists who, nevertheless, were also trenchant social and political critics. Contemporary critics, some of whom aspire to be "public intellectuals" like Sartre and Camus, have been compelled by economic changes to seek refuge in the universities. As their critical idiom has become more and more technical and specialized, they have exercised less and less influence on the general culture. But they still want to be noticed. It is almost as if they live in the shadow of the great literary-political intellectuals of the past, and are constantly trying to measure up. Their solution has been to achieve celebrity in the self-enclosed world of academic literary studies. The baby boomers have prevailed. Now there are fewer clashes within cutting-edge English departments, because nearly everyone is a theorist or cultural-studies specialist. The victors don't always present a pretty picture. Baby-boom and younger academics in English often project a sanctimony about their secular political-cultural convictions that I never see when my Divinity School colleagues touch on their religious beliefs. Their moralism strikes me as being at odds with their obsession with intradepartmental power plays and their rapt attention to new fashions in criticism and whatever will advance their careers. Mark Krupnick is a professor of literature in the Divinity School at the University of Chicago and the author of Lionel Trilling and the Fate of Cultural Criticism (Northwestern University Press, 1986). http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 49, Issue 4, Page B16
|
Copyright © 2002 by The Chronicle of Higher Education