That is the sort of thing we're supposed to be studying for fun?
Woo! Humanities! Party party party party!
[Spuds MacKenzie joke.]
This is sort of a "send up the AWB bat signal" post. The article just makes it sound like much of the field is stuck in some sort of time warp where it's always the early 90s. It's certainly possible, but this could also be about as accurate as those "let's find some funny sounding titles in the MLA meeting program and then mock the entire Humanities" articles. I'm just too far out of the loop by now to judge.
What Ruddick's trying to say, I think, is that the intense antihumanism of the 90s has given way to something worse: an inherited set of moves that no one really believes in or cares about, but people still repeat. So, you do your close reading of William Morris and then vaguely gesture toward the disaggregated liberal self. Or, more tellingly, you make your argument about how Henry James valorizes pedophilia and no one is outraged because no one really thinks you mean it.
Where Ruddick seems conservative to me is in her focus on the self: not that she thinks that there's a stable, coherent, meaningful self, which, fine, I probably think that, too, but that she takes it for granted that figuring out the self is our business as literary scholars.
I do hope AWB weighs in, though--I fear that my friends and I are getting too grumpy in our old age, and I'd welcome some pushback.
Our profession's devaluation of selfhood, passed from one generation to the next, softens members up for the demands the profession makes on their own selves. If it is "bourgeois" to care about your identity and your boundaries, perhaps you might throw your own identity and boundaries on the altar of your career.
It's absurd to write this sort of thing -- especially because the author's launchpad was the attitudes of contemporary grad students -- without at least making a nod to the wasting illness afflicting the academic humanities in this country. The people in the next generation likely don't have careers, bougie or no.
My experience with lit crit is rather shallow, but the main reason for that is that just about every time I dip my toes in or encounter it in passing I'm utterly repulsed. As an outsider I don't feel like I can make substantive criticisms, but whenever I run into it I'm immediately reminded of Frankfurt's On Bullshit. The whole thing just seems so untethered from anything. Academic discussions of when it's OK to rape kids is just the cherry on top of the shit sundae.
Huh. Snarkout's point is so very, very true that I took it as the necessary condition for the whole argument. I took Ruddick to be saying, this is what careerism looks like when graduate students no longer have any meaningful hope for a career. But if she's not saying that, then the argument is loathsome.
But if she's not saying that, then the argument is loathsome.
I took her to be saying that an academic environment where people can coolly endorse child rape (as the most extreme example) without fear of consequences is soul-destroying. That doesn't seem loathsome to me at all.
It's absurd to write this sort of thing -- especially because the author's launchpad was the attitudes of contemporary grad students -- without at least making a nod to the wasting illness afflicting the academic humanities in this country. The people in the next generation likely don't have careers, bougie or no.
The ones at Yale and Harvard do. Do they take things more seriously than everyone else who is doomed from the start?
That's not true in English, Ned. The placement rates at top programs aren't any better than the placement rates anywhere else. If anything, they're worse, since students from top programs are seen as qualified only for jobs at top research universities or at the most selective of liberal arts colleges. The rest of the jobs go to students from the rest of the programs.
Plenty of undergraduates who went on to become cheerfully nihilistic investment bankers with an "ironic" view of their work adopted these poses in my late 90s undergraduate milieu, so if career anxiety is behind this it's in some sense larger than just the lack of academic jobs. I would guess it's "late capitalism" (heh) inducing a general lack of conviction in the idea that there are meaningful personal rewards or social impact in being the conjunction of a professional (in the sense of performing technical, intellectual labor according to peer-provided standards) and an an old-style humanist (in the sense of crafting a intellectual style and values out of the best that's been thought and said). That a lot of Bloomite derp hides behind old-style humanism doesn't help the conversation.
I tried to read that first article, but I couldn't. I read the "antihumanism" thing and was disappointed. I guess I was expecting more "anti-human".
8: I'm kind of unsympathetic to arguments like the one in the linked piece (if I understood it correctly) that my soul is destroyed by you saying crazy stuff over there.
I'm good for a 10,000 word response to this kind of thing, but a question: do any of you know of any good discussion of the compulsion of literary scholars to speak for all of the humanities in the public sphere? Or the tendency to extend problems with literary studies to the humanities in general? It isn't clear that there's any way to make this stop, but it renders a ton of arguments bullshit on their face because of a confusion of terms.
Ruddick seems reasonably careful here, but her interlocutors are not going to be. I just realized I attended one of her classes in college, but it was so overbooked that I got gently but firmly booted before the discussion began.
14: Of all the academic classifications 'humanities' is probably the most worthless - knowing that something is one of the humanities tells you that the people doing research need the university to buy them a lot of books (as opposed to laboratory equipment, or IRBs) but as far as I can tell that's about all.* Once you've crammed philosophy, history, literature, and various cultural studies disciplines down into one category the possibility of saying anything useful about it is minimal given how different the methods/subject matters/etc. involved are.
My guess is that literary scholars got picked because they're the most exciting sounding and also easiest to make fun of, though. History is too obviously scholarly and when people go for philosophy they often end up learning that they were going after critical theory (usually from a few decades ago too), and also learning the kinds of opinions most philosophers have about critical theory which tends to undercut whatever point they were trying to make.
*I think "what does the University need to buy them" is about the right framework to understand the sciences/humanities/social sciences/fine arts/etc. distinctions, rather than trying to come up with some kind of content-based criteria. I suspect that that was largely how the division was made way back when modern universities were being organized and it has remained the same ever sense (with some exceptions for departments that have done some impressive politicking and gotten themselves moved into more prestigious categories like the sciences even though they are a far better fit for the humanities mathematicsIamlookingatyou.
Literary studies are the only place in college where for a second or two a certain expectation of the naive 18 year old that college is actually going to teach you about the "meaning of life" or some such thing actually seems like it's going to be met.
I have no idea why that is, and of course many or most literary studies professors would disclaim it, but it does seem to be the case. So (some) people both before in and after college are more emotionally invested in literary studies than other areas. Of course this can also make it the most bullshitty of college subjects. But it also helps to explain the self-importance and the wide circulation of middlebrow handwringing articles about the current state of literary studies.
You must change your assumptions that there is a life to change.
13: You think that marinading in a milieu where there having a moral center is a reason to be hated is not destructive? That's the argument I get from the OP piece, and it seems entirely reasonable, not to mention consistent with my own limited experience.
You think that marinading in a milieu where there having a moral center is a reason to be hated is not destructive?
Yeah, man! It's not a marinade, it's a tempering blaz... er, my claim, tangential to the article, is that not all problems of literary studies are shared across the humanities. My very recent PhD was in comp lit (so THE WORST OF THE WORST) and I don't know other disciplines nearly as well, but ISTM that philosophy has a completely different set of pathologies, as does history. Art history seems to me to be probably closest to literary studies in terms of the role theory has played, but it's still significantly different. My sense is that musicology is too nerdy to enthrone nihilism like this. In any event I think what Ruddick is describing is not an especially strong tendency outside of literary studies, based on my limited knowledge (would be curious to hear otherwise). But this is a very small part of the 10,000 word response I do not have time to write, and the entire point of it is: #notallhumanities; let's restrict the discussion to literature, where it belongs.
Philosophy sure does have pathologies.
16: I think "what does the University need to buy them" is about the right framework to understand the sciences/humanities/social sciences/fine arts/etc. distinctions
As someone whose research requires only a computer, pen, paper, and chalk, I'm a bit skeptical of this characterization. What I need the University to buy me is people: that is, to pay salaries for students and postdocs. And that is the leading expense also for some of my colleagues who run labs. I imagine the same is true in the humanities and social sciences. People are expensive.
We have a solution to that.
(All my comments here written under pressure from an increasingly mopey pissed-off child who doesn't understand why I make screen time restrictions for her and then just blow her off to use the computer. This is fair; I blame the corrosive effects of my literary training for destroying my morality in the sacred home.)
16.1: I think it gets complicated because capital T theory (or poststructuralism, or postmodernism, or whatever you want to call it) served for while as a sort of metalanguage that broad swaths of academia shared. Since literary studies are most strongly identified with Theory, that's probably why that field is so often used as a proxy for the humanities as a whole.
Also, I think that Theory (perhaps along with antihumanism; the two are related but not identical) is still the lingua franca in many of the newer interdisciplinary fields.
22: As opposed to other disciplines? If it's true everywhere then it's not much use when you're trying to organize your university...
26: I'd think you need to look at salaries of non-faculty member per faculty member. Salaries for staff and students may be the highest expense for all, but for somebody in the humanities they may be 1/4th of a full-time person for every couple of faculty members (just guessing but that seems high) while for my field a senior professor will have a dozen or more full-time positions.
Literary studies are the only place in college where for a second or two a certain expectation of the naive 18 year old that college is actually going to teach you about the "meaning of life" or some such thing actually seems like it's going to be met.
I think of high school English (maybe just junior/senior years) as carrying this potential, especially since there's little choice in high school course selection so your hopes have to go somewhere.
College English, if you're not going to major in the subject, is where you satisfy your reading and composition requirement if you haven't tested out of it.
The ruling ideas are the ideas of the ruling class. As academia becomes more commercialized, commodified, rationalized, competitive, ruthless one should expect the dominant discourse to adjust to support it.
The decline of Theory follows the triumph of neoliberalism and the abandonment of the quest for collectivities. The OP article is what I call neoliberal feminism, individualistic feminism, anti-Marxist identity politics, as in "What can your identity do for me?"
Like good academic writing, she drops the names, allies and enemies, as a way to bond. Likes Sedgwick, disses Jameson. Etc...
That's certainly how I felt about college English. I enjoyed high school English because the teacher kept pretending nobody in the class could understand the dirty jokes. She died last week, otherwise I don't think I'd have remembered high school English so readily.
I remember things like the Freshman intro to comp lit lecture where we were taught that Heart of Darkness was actually literally about the experience of anal rape, complete with the lecturer drawing a map of the Congo to make it look like an anal canal. It felt at the time like maybe it was deep and profound -- OMG maybe even those words are about anal rape!
My impression of Theory (with a capital "T") was that it really did have one major virtue which is that when you write in it almost anything has a sort of intellectual energy to it and a sense of saying something important and profound. The problem, at least as far as I could tell, was "almost anything" which usually meant really trivial or obviously stupid stuff if you were willing to dig down deep enough to rephrase what was being said in boring, plain English. So as far as an engine for a really exciting college class where you feel like you've encountered something profound it's really, really great, but then later you can't remember why and/or you feel a little silly about it.
(This is all shaped by my experience of writing a really exciting (to me, at the time) paper on film theory, which got excited comments from the professor and then, when I read it two weeks later, I realized my thesis had been "movies are cool because they are like pictures that move".)
Anybody can teach "Heart of Darkness" as being about some kind of horror. A real pro can teach "Jane Eyre" that way.
Rochester does turn out to have a crazy wife in the attic, IYKWIMAITYD.
34: You think you're joking, but the psychosexual Jane Eyre is pretty much the normative reading these days.
I'm only halfway through the linked article but I think lurid is exactly right that it's really just about literary studies, not about literary studies as some kind of window into "the humanities." I don't remember, in history, ever having a single conversation about or feeling obligated to have any thoughts about, the nature of the self.
I've never read Jane Eyre. I saw part of the movie and that was enough. I also saw part of the movie about the crazy-attic-wife in her pre-attic days. That was kind of hott (until the end), IIRC.
I never saw any of the movie, but I did watch I Walked With A Zombie which, I assume, is basically the same thing.
My favorite high school English teacher was the basis of Drew Barrymore's character in Donnie Darko, except the real-life teacher was much older than Barrymore. They probably should have had Angela Lansbury play her in the movie, but sexism and the patriarchy ruin everything. Plus it's notoriously difficult to turn litchritchure into movies.
(On preview: intervening comments have made this comment slightly more on-topic!)
Why is mathematics more clearly humanistic than chemistry?
I sometimes tend to ignore the arguments and just pick out the signifiers, the words that do emotional work (paranoid, hatred, barbarity, cruel), and the other signifiers that are close by. Sort of, I guess I am taking the piece more seriously, more hegemonic, than most here.
OP:
Some years ago Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick touched on this complex in her well-known essay on paranoid reading, where she identified a strain of "hatred" in criticism. Also salient is a more recent piece in which Bruno Latour has described how scholars slip from "critique" into "critical barbarity," giving "cruel treatment" to experiences and ideals that non-academics treat as objects of tender concern. Rita Felski's current work on the state of criticism has reenergized the conversation on the punitive attitudes encouraged by the hermeneutics of suspicion. And Susan Fraiman's powerful analysis of the "cool male" intellectual style favored in academia is concerned with many of the same patterns I consider here. I hope to show that the kind of thinking these scholars, among others, have criticized has survived the supposed death of theory. More, it encourages an intellectual sadism that the profession would do well to reflect on.
Bruno Latour rung a bell for me (with Sedgwick).
Benjamin Noys, Persistance of the Negative
The real target I suspect, with good reason as we will see, is Marxism, which Latour tends to assimilate to ideology-critique linked, 'in the last instance', to a reified conception of the economic as Prime Mover. In whatever form, critique is taken as functioning as a kind of theoretical imperialism, extending its domain out from its chosen central point and subsuming all around it. Latour therefore offers a triple challenge:undermining the usual resources of left politics, undermining the distinction between the human and the nonhuman, and disengaging from a critical thinking that, he claims, would firmly police these distinctionsitalics mineIt might seem that the advantage of Latour's position over that kind of traditional left thinking is its deflation of 'capitalism' from an unchangeable monstrous world-dominant regime to a micro-generated network amenable to change. This shift, however, is brought at the cost of any meaningful politics and a questionable metaphysics. Latour's commitment to ontological equality, figured as the positivity of all objects, lacks the ability to grasp capitalism's ontology of real abstraction, and this is coupled, or even perhaps determined, by his own political critique. In an unlikely fashion Latour coquettes with Marxism, but he is only mouthing the phrases as, all the while, he undermines the possibilities of intervention he claims to be opening.
Sounds like she's attacking one specific group of theorists, not theory.
Irrespective of the merits or demerits of Theory, what really struck me about the article was its claim the a particular style of muscular antihumanism that was trendy in the late 80s and eatly 90s still retains a commanding position in graduate level studies in English today, over 20 years on. If it's true, that strikes me as pretty strange.
That's why I was hoping that someone with a better current working knowledge of that world could weigh in on whether the picture painted by the article is reasonably accurate, or just ax grinding BS on the author's part.
Knowledge? That's more of a Crooked Timber thing.
"muscular antihumanism" by analogy with muscular christianity?
46: I suppose maybe that's not the best term. I can't say that I've heard of any antihumanist atheletics leagues. Although I suppose that with the recent attention to concussions and related cognitive problems, you could argue for football as a means to annihilate the self.
whether the picture painted by the article is reasonably accurate, or just ax grinding BS on the author's part.
I'm seriously considering drafting a response to this piece for discussion as its own post, but my experience reading it (quickly) was of initial recognition and sympathy slowly, then quickly, turning to alienation and bafflement, and in the end feeling that I'd been taken for a very weird ride. If she'd made her point as a single astute paragraph in support of a broader thesis: sure! The poorly-formed arguments that made up theoretical debate and development from 1965-95 drove people in all sorts of ill-advised directions, and careless (or scrupulously bad) application of psychoanalysis has always been especially toxic, anywhere and everywhere. But I'm not even sure I'd rate this as one of the top three most pervasive or urgent problems with academic literary studies, let alone the humanities in general.
The idea that high theory salted the earth is one I ran into a whole lot in grad school. Everyone had ideas about how to recover, but collectively no one ever got any traction.
I'd be curious to hear Blume's thoughts as well as AWB's, although I doubt she wants to venture back into this minefield. And maybe lourdes will weigh in. Our respective graduate programs were pretty significantly different.
And speaking of program-specific stuff:
I remember things like the Freshman intro to comp lit lecture where we were taught that Heart of Darkness was actually literally about the experience of anal rape, complete with the lecturer drawing a map of the Congo to make it look like an anal canal.
I'm not mistaken that you were at the school that hosts this, right? That may not be everyone's intro to comp lit experience.
The poorly-formed arguments that made up theoretical debate and development from 1965-95 should be heavily qualified. Yeah I do put in the qualifiers last, one by one, as if applying makeup.
Somebody who studied literary criticism should be able to tell me what urple was trying to type in the other thread in comment 104. Because I would like to know.
54 I don't know why you're resisting the obvious explanation. Unless you too . . .
I'm under the influence if nothing but box wine.
I thought the tone of the article was sad and concerned, not railing or grumbling about anything.
I've been watching youtube versions of Iko Iko. Naturally. Do people really pay money to watch Hugh Laurie sing? Is his version of Iko Iko evidence of the impending end of the world? Or rather is the lack of global cleansing fire after that performance conclusive evidence that there's no God?
To come back to the OP, is there any point in caring what anyone thinks of books in a world where Hugh Laurie sings Iko Iko for money?
I thought the tone of the article was sad and concerned
Oh, it's a really noteworthy shift from theme du jour "fuck you snowflakes crying at my office hours and tearfully thumbsuckingly threatening my job."
54: I think urple meant to write arriviste but autocorrect changed it. We may need to invent a totally novel critical act to understand his oeuvre as a whole, though.
"a small subset of work in ELH glamorizes cruelty in the name of radical politics, though this motif abates after 2006, perhaps because of a change in editorial leadership. "
It isn't a bad article but it sort of seems that the worst is over.
"U Chicago Lit Prof argues that the ideology of lit-crit and English departments is creating sociopaths. "
https://twitter.com/sapinker/status/676184842892103684
I think we can all agree that creating sociopaths is bad, but that seems unlikely. But what if the sociopaths are created the same way they've always been created (Freud said it's mom's fault, I think) and English departments offer just enough power and prestige for sociopaths to be content being destructive there instead of trying to go into bank robbing or genociding or what have you?
Is his version of Iko Iko evidence of the impending end of the world?
I could only make it through the first couple minutes of the thing, but, yes, it is so bad that it may well herald the end of the world.
Everybody is always calling for the end of the world, but nobody ever does anything about it. Except the English Departments, I guess.
64: this is where someone says "how ridiculous, what an idiot Pinker is, who could possibly believe that the purpose of a humanities education is to cause fundamental changes in the way you think about the world?"
ObHeterodyne: "It's funny. You don't meet many mad social scientists."
That's not actually true in my experience.
And indeed ObChesterton:
"The work of the philosophical policeman," replied the man in blue, "is at once bolder and more subtle than that of the ordinary detective. The ordinary detective goes to pot-houses to arrest thieves; we go to artistic tea-parties to detect pessimists. The ordinary detective discovers from a ledger or a diary that a crime has been committed. We discover from a book of sonnets that a crime will be committed. We have to trace the origin of those dreadful thoughts that drive men on at last to intellectual fanaticism and intellectual crime. We were only just in time to prevent the assassination at Hartlepool, and that was entirely due to the fact that our Mr. Wilks (a smart young fellow) thoroughly understood a triolet."
"Do you mean," asked Syme, "that there is really as much connection between crime and the modern intellect as all that?"
"You are not sufficiently democratic," answered the policeman, "but you were right when you said just now that our ordinary treatment of the poor criminal was a pretty brutal business. I tell you I am sometimes sick of my trade when I see how perpetually it means merely a war upon the ignorant and the desperate. But this new movement of ours is a very different affair. We deny the snobbish English assumption that the uneducated are the dangerous criminals. We remember the Roman Emperors. We remember the great poisoning princes of the Renaissance. We say that the dangerous criminal is the educated criminal. We say that the most dangerous criminal now is the entirely lawless modern philosopher. Compared to him, burglars and bigamists are essentially moral men; my heart goes out to them. They accept the essential ideal of man; they merely seek it wrongly. Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it. But philosophers dislike property as property; they wish to destroy the very idea of personal possession. Bigamists respect marriage, or they would not go through the highly ceremonial and even ritualistic formality of bigamy. But philosophers despise marriage as marriage. Murderers respect human life; they merely wish to attain a greater fulness of human life in themselves by the sacrifice of what seems to them to be lesser lives. But philosophers hate life itself, their own as much as other people's."
50-51: look, it is a school that most definitely and absolutely is a member of the Ivy League football conference. There is no disputing that it is a member of the Ivy League.
When I think of Cornell educated people, I think of Nell.
Don't forget my Nellie.
I'm getting a joint PhD in a humanities and a social science discipline. While both require IRBs, only the humanities requires expensive equipment and using Latex. It's also much less sympathetic to post-structuralism or post-modernism than my social science discipline.
Oh, I forgot, it's the only one that requires using R.
The humanities discipline requires LaTeX and R? Not the social science one? (Or maybe: also the social science one. But what humanities discipline is this?)
Oh, wow. Without the typography, I read 75 as referring to rubber in some form, rather than software. That makes much more sense.
79. Which of the humanities requires devices for safe sex?
Though now I'm trying to picture uses for R in history. Content analysis? Demographics?
Linguistics isn't social science?
People are starting to use R for economic and social history. And whatever they do in digital history that isn't social network analysis or mapping stuff. Or maybe even for that too.
YOU NEED R FOR HISTORY IT KEEPS THE O AND THE Y FROM BANGING INTO EACH OTHER
I've always understood linguistics to be a social science. I think you could make a strong argument that (sociocultural) anthropology has over the past few decades been drifting from the social sciences to the humanities but it's hard to see any similar trend in linguistics.
There's pretty strong overlap with some parts of linguistics and philosophy, but AFAIK that's the only other humanities department linguists really communicate with. Well, modern languages & applied linguistics also have overlap.
Socio-cultural anthro can tend definitely towards the woo, though there are/can be disciplinary tensions between anthro and the -studies departments.
The first three google results for "is linguistics a social science?" reveal some hedging. As a humanist, I regard this as proof of...something, maybe the non-existence of a stable sense of self.
I've always understood linguistics to be a social science, too, if not an actual science science.
Some people in social sciences think of them as science-science. Mostly economists, but also some people who seem thoughtful.
I guess linguists are more lovers than fighters.
(...laydeez)
You could argue that linguistics should be elsewhere, but as is, all the ones I know are housed in humanities divisions.
Division is usually housed in math.
It's in Arts and Sciences here. I don't know how that is divided, except at the level of departments.
Linguistics should probably be a social science because it's complicated and uses numbers (so not a humanities subject), but everyone still has fervent and ill-informed opinions about it (as they do with politics and economics, but not with biochemistry and geology).
It's also in Arts and Sciences at Ohio State. Nebraska doesn't appear to have one. Thus concludes by exhaustive search. Linguistics is either an art or a science, but then so are the humanities.
Yeah, I don't think most universities divide humanities and social sciences administratively. Is this some weird Chicago thing? I know they do have such a division.
Seems like it, yeah. They also put history in the social sciences, so.
At MIT it's in the Humanities, Arts, & Social Sciences division (so not helpful)
At UCSC it's in the humanities div
At my school it's also humanities, and interestingly history is a social science.
Stanford gives us this
At MIT it's lumped in with philosophy at the departmental level, isn't it?
101
From cursory googling the hum/soc sic division doesn't seem the most common but it appears to be more than just Chicago.* The UCs look like they do it as well.
*They are modeled on the German university system rather than the English one, so that could be related.
Huh, seems like it's more common than I would have thought to put it in humanities at schools that do that (although fwiw, of the schools I just checked at least Berkeley has it in social sciences).
UCSD too. Navigating these sites on a phone is annoying.
104
Appears so.
Linguistics is hard to categorize because it employs such diverse methodologies. Linguists do everything from extensive fieldwork to laboratory experiments to formal logic.
Political science does all that stuff also. But I suppose a few places but that as an humanity also.