What began as theory persists as style

December 8, 2015 1:24 PM

When Nothing Is Cool is an insider critique of English academia's culture of critique.

The core of the piece is a 9-year survey of the journal English Literary History. The main argument is that current theoretical commonplaces subtly encourage new entrants to the profession to submerge their selves and interests.

[A]n intellectual regime so designed discourages initiates from identifying with their own capacity for centered, integrated selfhood. Some will identify instead with the aggressor, turning against the soft “interiority” that the profession belittles. As a more moderate option, scholars can adopt a neutral historicist voice that allows them to handle the inner life—someone else’s—as a historical curiosity, without attributing value to it. (As one of my interviewees ruefully remarked, “You can write about anything so long as it is dead.”) Either way, the distanced attitude toward inwardness takes a toll.

Nothing inherently makes the theories that dismiss the idea of integrated selfhood better than the alternatives; they are just preferred by this academic community.

I believe that when a scholar traffics in antihumanist theories for purposes of professional advancement, his or her private self stands in the doorway, listening in. When it hears things that make it feel unwanted—for example, that it is a “Kantian” or “bourgeois” fantasy—it can go mute. I have spoken with many young academics who say that their theoretical training has left them benumbed. After a few years in the profession, they can hardly locate the part of themselves that can be moved by a poem or novel. It is as if their souls have gone into hiding, to await tenure or some other deliverance.

BONUS: the reading room in the main photo is the Joe and Rika Mansueto Library at the University of Chicago, designed by Helmut Jahn.

posted by grobstein (29 comments total)

I think the author inexplicably fails to consider that English grad students and professors feel malaise because their theoretical complexity and sophistication greatly exceeds their ability to take empirically consequential action on any front, including cultural and political change, advancing in their own field, etc. Maybe the discipline tends toward self-abnegation in part because its practitioners have are basically skeptical about their own capacity for efficacious agency.

From the article:

I sometimes think that many academics of my own boomer generation, awakened as young people to the greed and violence of modern society, reacted as monks do who flee to the cloister to purge themselves of all that the world cherishes. If the capitalists valued aesthetic pleasure, we academics would take no pleasure in the beauty of the books we taught. If those in power used morality as a pretext for spreading social stigma, we would renounce the idea of the inner teacher. If the same people cherished home and family above the larger community, we would spurn home and family. The deprivation of inwardness that I have just noted in the pages of one of our journals is due partly to a poignant asceticism.

Or perhaps academics of that generation have been lying to themselves in assuming that their flight was really a choice at all, and not a resignation to their lack of ability to efficaciously challenge the tactically-professed pieties of the powerful; thus instead they challenge these in private fora in which the capitalists were mostly uninterested. Until relatively recently, of course, and now they're basically powerless to resist them there either.

What's more, the grad students and professors I know feel depressed and dehumanized because of the conditions of their work, and its inability to defend itself from a powerful onslaught against it, not because there's something wrong with theory (though I wouldn't rule that out, obviously).
posted by clockzero at 1:35 PM on December 8, 2015 [16 favorites]

This is a little late, given that even folks like Jameson and Terry Eagleton were writing about the "Death of Theory" about ten years ago. Humanities scholarship has in fact largely moved on from the 1980s and 1990s moment of "high theory," at least at the R1s.

This doesn't mean they've abandoned all the ideas, but that the tone has shifted to an exploration of *how* culture works and, in many cases, toward efforts at elucidating the forgotten cultural logics of historically underrepresented peoples and showing their contributions to what we all take for granted today.
posted by kewb at 1:35 PM on December 8, 2015 [8 favorites]

Also, I think it's worth mentioning that scholars of literature are never going to be happy if they want to answer sociological, empirical questions with a methodology of rhetoric.
posted by clockzero at 1:37 PM on December 8, 2015 [17 favorites]

This is a little late, given that even folks like Jameson and Terry Eagleton were writing about the "Death of Theory" about ten years ago. Humanities scholarship has in fact largely moved on from the 1980s and 1990s moment of "high theory," at least at the R1s.

Yeah I don't mean to babysit but the piece anticipates this response, arguing that, while the explicit reign of high-theory ideas has passed, "what began as theory persists as style" (see thread title).
posted by grobstein at 1:40 PM on December 8, 2015 [6 favorites]

This is a little late, given that even folks like Jameson and Terry Eagleton were writing about the "Death of Theory" about ten years ago. Humanities scholarship has in fact largely moved on from the 1980s and 1990s moment of "high theory," at least at the R1s.

Yeah I don't mean to babysit but the piece anticipates this response, arguing that, while the explicit reign of high-theory ideas has passed, "what began as theory persists as style" (see thread title).

It goes on to support its argument by reviewing the most recent 9 years of the journal ELH.
posted by grobstein at 1:42 PM on December 8, 2015 [1 favorite]

Oy vey at this article, and especially at the idea that what gets published in ELH, alone, should be taken as proxy for anything beyond its editors' views.
posted by RogerB at 1:43 PM on December 8, 2015 [1 favorite]

So, generally, people value things less if they're paid to do them. That would seem to make this causality argument substantially less convincing.

Yeah, I think the suggestion that lit scholars don't like reading because of this particular theoretical lens is not the strongest part of the piece, for this reason and because it seems like there are a million reasons to be unhappy if you are an early-career academic.
posted by grobstein at 1:45 PM on December 8, 2015 [3 favorites]

Every once in a while, I peek in at what is going on in much of the the rest of the humanities. Then I close the door quietly, swearing at myself under my breath, determined not to do that again.

That said, thanks for posting the article!
posted by persona au gratin at 1:50 PM on December 8, 2015 [2 favorites]

Eek, what is that? Our eyesight is the best in existence, but where your katamari is, We cannot tell. Is… this… perhaps… because it is so small? So miniscule? Aha, yes, We understand! The current trend, this minimalist craze. This is something that had to be tried by the Prince. Of course he did, being the trendy sort of Prince. BUT… We do not acknowledge trendy Princes! Please go away now. Go, go, go. GOOD BYE!

posted by grobstein at 1:51 PM on December 8, 2015 [7 favorites]

What's more, the grad students and professors I know feel depressed and dehumanized because of the conditions of their work, and its inability to defend itself from a powerful onslaught against it, not because there's something wrong with theory

This is the best possible response to this article, yeah. What this piece is really doing is using widespread dissatisfaction with an often genuinely punishing job, and with a rapidly proletarianizing profession, as a stalking horse to fight by proxy about an almost entirely unrelated intellectual agenda. Defending "humanism" against stale fad antihumanism (even granting that this is often an empty, conformist pose and that such conformism is always worth calling out) is not going to make academia an inch better workplace.
posted by RogerB at 1:52 PM on December 8, 2015 [3 favorites]

I'm an English professor at a small liberal arts college. I love the books I teach and ask my students to love them too. (I also teach them to call the books on their shit: today, for instance, I had a student in my office who is writing a clever term paper about the things that Crusoe thinks make Friday a "savage" in Robinson Crusoe are in most cases qualities of Crusoe himself.)

I have published in ELH. While it may not be obvious from my article that I deeply love and value the six-volume eighteenth-century text that I wrote about, I think you might be able to read it between the lines. I spent three months living in its world, after all.

English grad students and junior faculty are afflicted by self-doubt and malaise because after having been brilliant at something meaningful and lovely for their entire young lives they are now being rejected en masse by a political economy that seems determined to destroy one of the few global economic sectors, higher education, in which America has been an undisputed world leader for the last two generations. There is no market for what they do, and as any idled worker in the rust belt or the innter city or Appalachia can tell you, that is a profoundly disheartening thing to feel.
posted by sy at 1:59 PM on December 8, 2015 [41 favorites]

Yes, this seems little better than the standard cliché "make fun of crazy MLA theories"-style articles. I would second/third the idea that general feelings of alienation in English grad school are more likely to be based on the work conditions than on scary theories about subjectivity, nowadays.

I would say also that it’s weird how the author makes the assumption (based on almost no evidence) that academics in this area can’t really have been, you know, actually genuinely persuaded by antihumanist theories, so they must just be adopting them out of a desire to fit in with trends, advance their careers, etc. Almost as if there were structural reasons for it…

Also odd that she recommends “contemplative practices” at the end, when a lot of versions of those (ones that go back a lot further than high theory) also deny the idea of a self.
posted by demonic winged headgear at 2:06 PM on December 8, 2015 [3 favorites]

Greg Nog: looks like Innocence and rapture : the erotic child in Pater, Wilde, James, and Nabokov by Kevin Ohi. (Wow, that title, though!)
posted by Jeanne at 2:09 PM on December 8, 2015

what is the "hot potato" book she mentions

It appears she's talking about Kevin Ohi's Innocence and Rapture: The Erotic Child in Pater, Wilde, James, and Nabokov. While I haven't read his work that I recall, I'd bet long odds based on the writer's apparent intellectual politics that her characterization of it is somewhere between deliberately uncharitable and insane.
posted by RogerB at 2:10 PM on December 8, 2015

That is a truly fine plate of beans you have there. Would you mind if I... think about it a bit?
posted by Splunge at 2:13 PM on December 8, 2015 [4 favorites]

This thread has sent me a-googling Kevin Ohi. He does seem to have a brief for pedophilia in the name of queer liberation, judging from a 2000 article from GLQ:

The link between child molestation and homosexuality may well be, in other words, a homophobic illusion, but the effort to challenge the political ideology underlying this link—an ideology of sexual oppression in general—is better served by a thorough examination of structures uniting homophobia and abuse paranoias than by a simple debunking of this homophobic illusion as counterfactual. I would further resist the collapsing together of child abuse and pedophilia, as well as the distancing of homosexuality from both; while it should go without saying that pedophilia, whether “acted out” or merely fantasized, is not the same thing as child abuse, the fact that pedophilia and pedophilic relationships are legible only under the rubric of abuse attests to the power of the bleakly monochromatic discourse around child abuse, pedophilia, and childhood sexuality.

Briefly skimming around the book mentioned upthread and Ohi's other writings, he seems to be saying a) that children are more sexual than we pretend, b) that our pretended outrage at the sexualization of children allows us to indulge in it while condemning it, and c) that not all pedophilia (even "acted out" pedophilia? the sentence implies this but isn't explicit) is abusive. These do indeed seem to be extreme views, particularly the last, and prima visa it doesn't seem that the characterization in The Point was unfair, except perhaps in imputing careerism to Ohi and hence denying him the courage of his convictions.
posted by sy at 2:25 PM on December 8, 2015 [1 favorite]

I was idly pondering this piece in its relation to the University of Chicago English department, where Ruddick teaches and where I earned my Ph.D. in 1997. (Disclaimer: had no courses with Ruddick or, as far as I can recall, even any interaction with her.) Chicago was and is notorious for its actual lack of interest in high theory on the "English" side; the theorists all tend to be Americanists (Lauren Berlant and Bill Brown being the most obvious examples, both now and when I was there). Its graduates tend to be relatively pragmatic literary historians like, er, me--that is, people who are interested in theory insofar as it helps raise interesting questions, but not committed theorists--with a lot of folks working in history of the book &c. Janine Barchas, who graduated shortly before I did, is a good example. Which is to say that most of her descriptions of what it means to be "a graduate student" don't particularly ring true in the context of Chicago, which is rather adverse to hand-holding, and where your exposure to theory depends entirely on which professor you get (ironically, when I was there, Ruddick herself had a rep for being more theory-oriented). Quite a few Chicagoans are, if anything, in favor of exactly the sort of practices Ruddick herself advocates--Maureen McLane, another near contemporary of mine, for example. My glimpses of various Chicago grads' CVs in the intervening years suggests that nothing has changed much since I've been there. If you're looking for "high theorists," well, that's frequently what you see coming out of Yale (not Harvard), my undergrad alma mater UC Irvine, Duke, Berkeley, Cornell to some extent.

More generally, I've always found these articles a little puzzling, in the sense that you find what you look for. I do a lot of reviewing, thanks to a longstanding association with a library journal, and the cross-section of literary scholarship I see isn't particularly jargon-ridden, or even averse to, gasp, suggesting that some authors/works might be better than others. Shocking, I know! There are thousands upon thousands of books and articles out there; it's difficult to construct any meaningful generalizations about them, even across academic fields. (One of the side effects of doing my doctoral quals across three historical fields--Restoration through Victorian--was that I got to see how even chronologically adjourning disciplinary fields produced wildly different approaches to scholarship, and sometimes even wildly different approaches to collegiality.) ELH has its "thing," as does PMLA, as does my former employer Modern Philology, as does Texas Studies in Language & Literature, as does Criticism...I mean, if I can have a successful career writing about nineteenth-century religious novels that five other living people have read, then you can probably have a career writing appreciative things about Tennyson.

Personally, I love to read. (Although anything by the Victorian Catholic novelist E. H. Dering is likely to make me want to do nothing but play Nethack. For a month.)

But, yes, we're more likely to be stressed by the collapse of the job market, or the casualization of academic work, or the disappearance of public funds (for those of us in state university systems), or the ways in which academic employment requires serious disruptions in family life (e.g., married couples in different states, living across the country from one's parents). At Chicago, graduate students seeking employment are likely to be additionally stressed by knowledge of the university's terrible reputation when it comes to preparing people to teach, despite its periodic attempts to remedy the situation.
posted by thomas j wise at 2:43 PM on December 8, 2015 [16 favorites]

Maybe this malaise has something to do with the almost complete irrelevance of current research on Literature? I understand that we need good teachers who teach literature and good novelists who write good books about the human condition. But I'm at a loss of the utility of research on literature as it is currently done. I regularly draw on works in a wide variety of fields, but I have yet to come across an research article related to anything I have been working on that is recently published in a literature journal.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 3:25 PM on December 8, 2015 [2 favorites]

Christ, this is a blast from the past. I was at the University of Chicago 2009-2010 for a one-year Master's, and I applied to be her research assistant. Someone else got the job, but she sent out a draft for a chapter of a book she was writing on, well, this subject exactly. Even had the Bill reference in there.
posted by AdamCSnider at 4:46 PM on December 8, 2015

Speaking of that damn library, why are the students allowed to have WINDOWS now? When I was a wee undergraduate, one was either shepherded into the gargoyle-infested Gothic stone pile for training-wheels stacks and study, or one was condemned to the enormous dusky concrete bunker of the Regenstein--easily defensible what with its arrow-slit windows.

I do note that the majority of this newfangled library is underground, so I suppose standards of existential horror are being kept up.

At Chicago, graduate students seeking employment are likely to be additionally stressed by knowledge of the university's terrible reputation when it comes to preparing people to teach, despite its periodic attempts to remedy the situation.

I think many of my instructors remedied this by simultaneously moonlighting as adjuncts at small colleges all over Illinois.
posted by Hypatia at 4:50 PM on December 8, 2015 [2 favorites]

I think many of my instructors remedied this by simultaneously moonlighting as adjuncts at small colleges all over Illinois.

Remedied it and/or attempted to keep body and soul together during their lengthy graduate careers.
posted by kenko at 5:10 PM on December 8, 2015

literary research can be beautiful and profound. it can illuminate the beautiful and profound. that is worth something. the social sciences want to roll around in the worst muck of humanity and make poorly-supported guesses as though that were worth something, but it rarely is.

That's certainly and opinion but definitely not an argument. Regardless of whether literary research can be those things, it's present irrelevance suggests that it is not. Perhaps the goal of that type if research is not to advance human knowledge, but to be beautiful.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 5:47 PM on December 8, 2015

Did I say it has no utility? I did not. And uh, this is an online community site, maybe we can let anecdotal evidence be admissible in a discussion?

Anyway. I said the current state of the research is largely irrelevant to nearly all the other fields of study. There is not enough, but there is some cross pollination between economics, history, sociology, philosophy, statistics, computer science, psychology, etc. literary research is largely irrelevant nowadays. Why?
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 6:23 PM on December 8, 2015

Mod note: Let's not turn the whole thread into one back-and-forth, please. Thanks.
posted by restless_nomad (staff) at 6:24 PM on December 8, 2015 [1 favorite]

Can we get more reminiscing about life in UofC's English department? I was a music PhD student there, but I had enough contact with some of the English kids to make these reflections very interesting / amusing…
posted by LMGM at 7:21 PM on December 8, 2015 [1 favorite]

ironically, when I was there, Ruddick herself had a rep for being more theory-oriented

This backs up my idle theory that people are usually berating their younger selves when they write these kinds of pieces. I thought this one was better done than most, but man I wish whoever did the abridgement had also taken out the 'in this essay I'm going to say x, describe y and argue z' stuff that American academics seem to be trained to do.
posted by Mocata at 3:52 AM on December 9, 2015 [2 favorites]

Is anyone else having problems getting the footnotes to appear? I've tried both Safari, Firefox and Chrome, both on my iPad and laptop.
posted by Kattullus at 6:57 AM on December 9, 2015

They didn't appear for me either (Firefox, Chrome, Edge).
posted by thomas j wise at 8:18 AM on December 9, 2015

Yeah, as far as I could tell from the source, the footnotes just aren't there. I had no luck reading the comments on the page, but having looked over them in the source material, perhaps the web designer was forward-thinking in making the comments impossible to read.

As for the article, it's interesting. For a while I've felt like there's been a sea change in Western Culture. It's been taking place over the last decade. I haven't been able to put my finger on exactly what it is, but it might have something to do with a belief in a unified self. The sort of earnestness that follows from that is intellectually acceptable in ways it just wasn't a couple of decades ago.
posted by Kattullus at 4:17 PM on December 9, 2015 [1 favorite]