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On the Conflation of Humanities and English

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John,

I think this is a major theme for us. I made a category. Setting the question of the literary object aside for just a moment, it needs to be said that English scholars (like Menand, e.g.) habitually promote this conflation and have done so for decades. It may at this point be unconscious.  There are many consequences. One is simply that there is better, more easily available data about English (and about the humanities from an English point of view), than any other humanities discipline. There is an entire cottage industry of English professors who mostly write about the profession. This is not really the case in Film and Media Studies–which certainly worries about the future of the field, the future of film, and the future of the world, but is not particularly obsessed with the future of the University or the humanities. For good or ill, we aim to change that.

If our project is against anything it is against the habit of English speaking for the humanities. One way we have of opposing it is by pointing out that English only got to think of itself this way by closing down early-twenieth-century engagements among academics and non-academics in various fields who were concerned, broadly speaking, with the problem of managing populations through media. “Hollywood” was an emblem of this problem, but it was not really media specific. Somewhere on this blog we need a thread for developing that strand of the argument.

In any case, we argue that English empowered itself at mid-century not so much by abandoning the project of managing populations by managing media but by claiming knowledge of “literature” as the sure route to good management. We consider the two major flavors of this claim–Leavis and New Criticism.

Our story has tended to leap over the 70s and 80s in a rush to get to the present, but I think we have a rough idea of what happened in the moment Menand identifies as the pivot point. English extended its reach to “culture” (with a small “c”) and integrated new tools (“theory”) without abandoning the claim that what made English English was the specialized reading practice cultivated by the study of literary objects. There were any number of currents and countercurrents. It was a moment that enabled some clear thinking about the social function of the University of English within it, including approaches (e.g., Bledstein and Ohmann) inspiring our own. In this moment, it became possible for English to congratulate itself for being ecumenical, inclusive, and interdisciplinary when it talked about “texts” other than novels and poems.

An interesting example that just happens to linger on the internet is Bob Scholes’ 1989 “On Reading a Video Text.” Scholes demonstrates his visual literacy by mentioning in the first paragraph certain formal properties of visual materials (close-ups, slow motion, optical filters) and then proceeds to “read” a Budweisser commercial as a narrative and myth of Americanness (the influence of Barthes is clear). The piece belongs to the culture wars. Its explicit antagonists are William Bennett and E. D. Hirsh. Scholes is on the side of all right thinking people, who will recognize the power and importance of teaching students to be able to interpret commercials in this way. As model of “visual literacy,” however, the piece stinks. While Scholes calls attention to certain visual devices in its opening paragraph, he does not bother to explain how they might be relevant in conveying the narrative information he summarizes. He could have used the tool of Film Studies to do so. Scholes was at the time working alongside some of that discipline’s leading practitioners in Brown’s pioneering Modern Culture and Media Studies program (now department), which we can both claim as part of our scholarly DNA. In eschewing these tools, Scholes encouraged English professors and graduate students to imagine that they where not needed to engage Bennett-and-Hirch-defying materials. That was the genius of the approach. Non-literary material could be wedged into even the most conservative English curriculum. No revision of the requirements would be necessary.  This explains why I have been tenured in two English Departments without a PhD in English and why my colleagues in both of those departments have felt (sincerely, I think) that it is critically important for students to understand film–but not so important as to require coursework in Film and Media Studies as part of an English major. Non-literary examples proliferate in English courses, while arguments and interpretive methods developed by those who study film and media do not.

This is why our augment that English remains obsessed with defining its objects “is greeted with blank stares or opaque nods of the head,” as you put it. The obsession was reincarnated in the 70s as a promiscuous reading practice that could attach itself to anything text-like. This allowed English to claim extended reach without revising its basic architecture. Graduate students, for example, would still be trained to inhabit the same old nation and period specific categories of literary history while also doing something “extra” to question them. The inclusion of all this “extra” non-literary and/or theoretical stuff may turn out to be a virus that will have entirely rewritten the code of English from within. That could be cool. The problem is the blind spot it tends to create: English can think that it has engaged other disciplines whenever it succeeds in making the evidence of those disciplines look text-like.  This predisposes it to an incorporation model (English as the humanities) rather than a collaboration model (English as part of the humanities.)

What do you think of this story so far?

You asked about realist film. Where to start? As I think you know, the question of whether film is essentially realist is foundational to the discipline, although this “realism” is not the “realism” of the “realist novel.” The line of argument is continued in several recent publications including Opening Bazin, a collection of essays. The groovy Film Studies for Free blog would be happy to help you navigate Bazin scholarship. Although “neo-realsim” identifies a period, style, and ideological problem set; so far as I know “realist film” does not.

Mark

 

Not everything is institutionalized via time to degree

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Dear John,

Requiring a five year PhD would certainly prove consequential for the humanities disciplines. Would it make them more “relevant” as the Stanford authors claim?

I’m not exactly clear what that term means in context. Clearly, the authors think that relevance equals employment outside the university. There is also an assertion of what humanities PhD’s should be relevant to: “an increasingly global and cosmopolitan 21st century society.”  And, as you point out, departments are asked to redesign “curricula to prepare PhD’s for a diverse array of meaningful, socially productive and personally rewarding careers within and outside the academy.”  The rhetoric of “relevance” allows readers to imagine that nebulously defined social goods (“meaningful,” “productive,” “rewarding”)  can be appraised by means of metrics like time to degree, job placements, and starting salaries. The equation is obviously fallacious. As numerous PhDs, JDs, and MBAs of our acquaintance will testify, one can complete one’s degree on time, immediately find a well paying job, and still not be engaged in activities one regards as particularly “meaningful,” “productive,” and “rewarding.” It has been the job of the humanities to consider such questions of value. They will undo themselves by treating job placement stats as equivalent types of questions. This doesn’t mean that humanities disciplines shouldn’t contemplate a shorter time to degree, just that they have to stick up for the difference between such metrics and questions of social value, lest they lose their professional distinction.

Would the five year PhD encourage humanities disciplines to refocus on questions of social value by requiring them to pay more attention to the professional world outside their boarders?  Maybe. It could be a productive jolt, and the parts of the disciplines in which we seem to be most interested may be poised to take advantage of  it.

Would such an effort necessarily expand job opportunities for humanities PhDs and thus secure the positions of those who train them? I have doubts.

We might consider why the strategy of reducing PhD output did not work. I think we have both found Marc Bousquet persuasive on this question:

shrinking the supply wasn’t working, and could never work, because administrations retain total control of the “demand” for labor—in many disciplines, administrations are perfectly willing to use faculty without doctorates. For that matter, a lot of the work formerly done by faculty is done by persons without an MA or, increasingly, without a BA. In the absence of meaningful regulation, studying the academic labor system as a “market” in tenure-track jobs has little validity.

In different ways, both the Stanford authors and Menand sidestep Bousquest’s challenge to about the entire academic labor system (as opposed to the faculty “job market”). Stanford simply treats as a matter of fact that only a fraction of Humanities PhD’s will secure tenure track jobs without going into the whys and wherefores. Menand encourages his readers to imagine that English professors control admission to their profession in the same way that doctors and lawyers do, whereas there are significant differences in the ways these professions and institutional fields are organized and regulated. (There is no scholarly equivalent of the Bar Association, for example.) Both the Stanford authors and Menand invite us to imagine an ever-larger pool of  humanists credentialed to move across a porous border between academe and industry. Who will regulate this flow and thereby set the market value for humanities PhDs?  It seems likely that humanities PhDs themselves might not have that much to say about it.

I have a lot more to say about this, but I’m going to stop to call attention to another matter.

You left to me the task of pointing out the most important part of Menand’s article (from the point of view of our project). Apologies in advance for the lengthy quote:

The hinge whereby things swung into their present alignment, the ledge of the cliff, is located somewhere around 1970. That is when a shift in the nature of the Ph.D. occurred. The shift was the consequence of a bad synchronicity, one of those historical pincer effects where one trend intersects with its opposite, when an upward curve meets a downward curve. One arm of the pincer has to do with the increased professionalization of academic work, the conversion of the professoriate into a group of people who were more likely to identify with their disciplines than with their campuses. This had two, contradictory effects on the Ph.D.: it raised and lowered the value of the degree at the same time. The value was raised because when institutions began prizing research above teaching and service, the dissertation changed from a kind of final term paper into the first draft of a scholarly monograph. The dissertation became more difficult to write because more hung on its success, and the increased pressure to produce an ultimately publishable work increased, in turn, the time to achieving a degree. That was a change from the faculty point of view. It enhanced the selectivity of the profession.

The change from the institutional point of view, though, had the opposite effect. In order to raise the prominence of research in their institutional profile, schools began adding doctoral programs. Between 1945 and 1975, the number of American undergraduates increased 500 percent, but the number of graduate students increased by nearly 900 percent. On the one hand, a doctorate was harder to get; on the other, it became less valuable because the market began to be flooded with Ph.D.s.

This fact registered after 1970, when the rapid expansion of American higher education abruptly slowed to a crawl, depositing on generational shores a huge tenured faculty and too many doctoral programs churning out Ph.D.s. The year 1970 is also the point from which we can trace the decline in the proportion of students majoring in liberal-arts fields, and, within that decline, a proportionally larger decline in undergraduates majoring in the humanities. In 1970-71, English departments awarded 64,342 bachelor’s degrees; that represented 7.6 percent of all bachelor’s degrees, including those awarded in non-liberal-arts fields, such as business. The only liberal-arts category that awarded more degrees than English was history and social science, a category that combines several disciplines. Thirty years later, in 2000-01, the number of bachelor’s degrees awarded in all fields was 50 percent higher than in 1970-71, but the number of degrees in English was down both in absolute numbers—from 64,342 to 51,419—and as a percentage of all bachelor’s degrees, from 7.6 percent to around 4 percent.

Note the indicative collapse of the difference between “humanities” and “English.” Note also that disciplinary hyperspecialization increases the number of credentialed professionals while decreasing their market value and interest to undergraduates. We think that–despite the culture wars–this is because English was obsessed with defining its object rather than explaining what its object does. Right? What changes about this picture once other humanities disciplines are admitted to it?

Mark

 

 

Public Culture’s “Intellectual Practice” Pitch

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Dear John,

Thanks for identifying Klinenberg’s letter as an occasion to refine our position on disciplinary collaboration, specialization, and the problem of “addressing a public.” That phrase sticks out to me in the quote you pulled–no doubt because of its resonance with Klinenberg’s statement. It strikes me that we more often talk about managing populations than addressing a public. I take our position overall to be that intellectuals do not affect populations primarily by persuading them to think this way or that, but rather by institutionalizing ways of knowing. This involves establishing the terms according to which statements about the public good can be appraised and ratified as much as it does wagering statements in the space of evaluation so established.

I wonder if this can be Klinenberg’s model? It’s difficult to know. The letter does, as you note, invoke the figure of the public intellectual who through plain and persuasive writing might influence a broad audience on matters of shared concern. It also invokes a community of crafty scholars who can be expected to take interest in each others’ work process apart from its results. Are we to think of the public intellectual type as one posture or role the team of crafty scholars might assume? (Perhaps they could designate a star spokesperson or create a virtual avatar.) Or is the public intellectual an ideal type to which every crafty scholar should aspire? I think we could become comfortable affirming the first proposition, but never the second.

As you note, a lot depends on the craftiness at issue, and the picture of the lone scholar laboring in the workshop has got to go.

There are at least two other points in Klinenberg’s letter worth bringing up.

First, this is all really important business: if we are to survive the coming environmental cataclysm and neoliberalism’s savage depredations, we need to get with the program!  Is Public Culture’s idea that intellectuals can intervene on these matters by making more accessible arguments in its pages or by better understanding how they do what they do?  I hope not. To intervene on these questions requires not simply identifying and defending alternatives but actually institutionalizing them, which means learning to work with engineers and policy wonks.

Second, Klinenberg writes:

in the future, as in the past, we will publish analytic images — that is, pictures that help us glimpse the cultural patterns, social structures, and transformations of nature underlying contemporary life. They will include photographs by artists, journalists, and scholars but also images of artworks, film stills, and video footage on our website. These images will surprise not only by revealing times and places rarely seen but also by modeling ways of using our eyes to register deep changes in the social and natural landscape. They will, in short, be pictures to think with.

Good idea! And an occasion to underscore our statement that “while social scientists certainly worry about whether they are talking to themselves, they may be better positioned to make their work relatable because they never equated discipline with the effort to specify a media object.”  Public Culture has been fairly unusual in allowing images to share conceptual space with arguments (as opposed to being objects that prose necessarily interprets). This is not to say that pictures and words analyze in the same way or that it is not worth figuring out how they differ.


Mark

 

Dear John

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As we discussed, I have established this blog for our project. It all seems a bit much, but I suppose we’ll grow into it. Our big idea, as you well know, is that the humanities disciplines as currently configured owe an unacknowledged debt to arguments that Hollywood provoked, in the university and outside of it, in the early twentieth century, about the prospectus for improving populations by managing aesthetics. Your contention was that we have a lot to discuss and that we might as well do it in full public view, to amuse as well as enlighten those few idlers with time enough to read it.

Mark