What can you do with an English major? Teach?

I have to write the question that way. That’s how I heard it when I was in college and decided to major in English, and that’s how I hear it when parents come to campus. It’s an important question, one professors should think about and have a good answer to, but it’s ultimately a utilitarian one and therefore not really a brain-buster. The harder, more philosophical question is, “Why should we study the humanities?” That’s the one Newman asks in The Idea of a University (c. 1854). It’s still the central one, maybe moreso given that the triumph of utilitarianism in the intervening 150 years has taken universities further than ever from being what Newman called a “school of universal knowledge…a school of knowledge of every kind, consisting of teachers and learners from every quarter.” That triumph of utilitarianism is what leads parents to begin and end with the vocational question, as though there is a one-for-one correlation between what you major in and what job you will get. As anyone who’s ever worked with students knows, they major in pretty much whatever and then they go on to do all kinds of things, depending on their temperament and ingenuity and opportunities.

Students sit in my classes with another very good question: “I’m not an English major, so why do I need to study English literature?” It’s not easy to answer, is it? Likewise, when it’s assessment time, people ask: “So what do your students get out of studying English literature?” These are hard questions to answer because the utilitarian urge leads people to want quantifiable results, and the humanities are notoriously resistant to these kinds of quantification. Trying not to beg the question, I think that most humanities professors would insist that their results be studied with the methods used to study the humanities–courses on language or culture simply cannot be translated into numbers without losing all of their meaning in the process, anymore than you can translate King Lear into binary code.

This leads us to a dilemma, however: because students have a hard time seeing the point of studying the humanities, many of them leave college with little appreciation for the kinds of nuances or causation that we’re comfortable with. And they’re socialized to appreciate dollars and cents and other kinds of numbers. So often the people who wind up assessing the humanities, whether professionally or as an outside observer who asks what you can do with an English degree, have difficulty putting them in any kind of meaningful context.

This leads me to an interesting post by Rohan, who writes in reference to determining the “impact” that the humanities have on society:

And here are Patricia Badir and Sandra Tomc responding, in English Studies in Canada, to calls to take the humanities “beyond academia.” Offering a polemical summary of “what the humanities in general, fueled by highly esoteric post-structural theory, have accomplished in the way of widespread social and cultural contributions over the last twenty years,” they begin with the premise that poststructuralism began as a “theory propounded by a tiny priesthood of high intellectuals”:

“But this priesthood had acolytes–graduate students at first, then, by the mid-1980s as ‘theory’ inevitably made its way into the classrooms of ivy league professors, undergraduates. The undergraduates . . . did not uniformly move into Ph.D. programs, thereby assuring theory’s continued enclosure in a specialized community. They moved into a variety of illustrious professions and industries, including, most significantly, America’s powerful and ubiquitous culture industries. . . . [T]he Hollywood of today is ruled by ivy league degrees, most of them earned in the 1980s or 1990s, and most of them . . . heavily larded with humanities courses–courses in English, film studies, American studies, gender studies, history. These people were taught by their professors to value certain kinds of aesthetic objects. As they assumed positions of authority in the late 1980s and early 1990s, they began to patronize films and filmmakers that meshed with what they had been taught was cutting-edge culture. The signature films of the early 1990s . . . featured the ‘politically correct’ identity issues and self-referential formal experimentation lauded in the postmodern classroom: Thelma and Louise; Philadelphia; The Crying Game; Priscilla, Queen of the Desert; The Piano; Pulp Fiction; The English Patient. In television, . . . the transformation to postmodern forms has been even more radical: Buffy, the Vampire Slayer; The X-Files; Alias. . .”

“One could make the same argument,” they go on, “for the field of journalism,” and they go on to do so, and to the “massive industry” in “‘literary’ objects” including not just books but adaptations. To calls that the humanities address the interests of “civil society,” they reply that “the humanities have, in a large measure, already shaped contemporary civil society”: “the fashions we are being asked to follow are our own.” (ESC 29:1-2, 13-15). I’m sure it’s easy to argue about which are the “signature films” of the 1990s, but the general case that specialist research in the humanities makes its way into the wider world by way of our classrooms seems presumptively strong–but that is just the kind of “impact” apparently discounted by the Research Excellence Framework.

I’m sure more (and perhaps more concrete) examples could be provided by most academics looking at intersections between their own fields of specialization and the world “outside” the academy. A concerted campaign to demonstrate the “impact” of humanities research might do as much good as insisting also that, whatever its “impact,” the work is valuable in itself. And it should probably be carried on not (just), as with my two examples, in the pages of academic journals, but as publicly as possible–in the TLS, but also through blogs, letters to the editor, talking to our neighbours–you name it. Many thousands of our students are out there somewhere, too, who could surely testify to the “impact” of our work, not just on their cinematic tastes, but on their thinking, reading, and voting lives. After all, the REF may be specific to the UK, but the narrow version of utilitarianism it represents is not.

Making these kinds of connections seems crucial to me as a way of explaining what it is that we’re doing. Of course, as soon as we do that, we’ve got to be ready for some conservative knucklehead like Horowitz (not to be confused with thoughtful conservatives like Andrew Sullivan) to come along and immediately flatten out all of the distinctions we’re trying to make. Probably by calling these studies some kind of grand cultural conspiracy to “derstroy our Amurkan values.” Still the moment seems propitious to start making these kinds of arguments–after all, all publicity is good publicity! Rather than seeing ourselves in perpetual crisis–a modernist gesture, which is odd considering that we live in a postmodern world–perhaps we should see ourselves as living at an opportune moment.

I say all this because, as someone on the tenure track, I’ve become very committed to explaining to my students what it is that we’re doing in my classes, how it differs from some of the other expectations that they’re asked to meet in other classes, and–very occasionally–why these things might be important. I’m also interested in explaining these things to parents at open house. Wait a minute–typing that up on my blog probably just got me another stint at open house! Oh well, can’t talk this talk and not expect to be asked to walk the walk. Parents of my students–be in touch and I’ll tell you why your kid needs to be an English major.

Some words need to be taken out back and bashed upside the head with the OED. All twenty volumes.

This is an interesting Oxford website: Save the Words. You can find an unfamiliar word, and sign up promising to use it in conversation and correspondence. Clever and quirky, sure–but kinda silly at the same time, no?

Swift, in his petty treatise on the English language, allows that new words must sometimes be introduced, but proposes that none should be suffered to become obsolete. But what makes a word obsolete, more than general agreement to forbear it? and how shall it be continued, when it conveys an offensive idea, or recalled again into the mouths of mankind, when it has once by disuse become unfamiliar, and by unfamiliarity unpleasing.
–Samuel Johnson, “Preface” to the Dictionary (1755)

One of my favorite Johnson words is “frigorifick.” I point it out to my students when I teach Johnson, mostly to mock him for using such a stupid word–and that’s the only time I ever bring it up in conversation. But if you guys want to go around saying things like

“Delicious prandicles, Joan!”

or,

“Samuel Johnson’s style is binoternary.”

you go right ahead. There’s no one to stop you from tilting at windmills of your own choosing.

Slubberdegullion.

From Johnson’s Dictionary:

SLU’BBERDEGULLION. n.s. [I suppose a cant word without
Derivation.] A paltry, dirty, sorry wretch.
Quoth she, although thou hast deserv’d,
Base slubberdegullion, to be serv’d
As thou did’st vow to deal with me,
If thou had’st got the victory. Hudibras.
[Corrupted I believe from Scullion…a slovenlyscullion]

Seriously, who doesn’t love Hudibras?

Louis Menand and Rohan Maitzen on graduate education.

Louis Menand recently published excerpts from his upcoming book The Marketplace of Ideas. Here’s one excerpt I found both challenging and troublesome:

The moral of the story that the numbers tell once seemed straightforward: if there are fewer jobs for people with Ph.D.s, then universities should stop giving so many Ph.D.s—by making it harder to get into a Ph.D. program (reducing the number of entrants) or harder to get through (reducing the number of graduates). But this has not worked. Possibly the story has a different moral, which is that there should be a lot more Ph.D.s, and they should be much easier to get. The non-academic world would be enriched if more people in it had exposure to academic modes of thought, and had thereby acquired a little understanding of the issues that scare terms like “deconstruction” and “postmodernism” are attempts to deal with. And the academic world would be livelier if it conceived of its purpose as something larger and more various than professional reproduction—and also if it had to deal with students who were not so neurotically invested in the academic intellectual status quo. If Ph.D. programs were determinate in length—if getting a Ph.D. were like getting a law degree—then graduate education might acquire additional focus and efficiency. It might also attract more of the many students who, after completing college, yearn for deeper immersion in academic inquiry, but who cannot envision spending six years or more struggling through a graduate program and then finding themselves virtually disqualified for anything but a teaching career that they cannot count on having.

I’m not sure what he means to accomplish by making these goals the equivalent of a Ph.D. It sounds to me as though he has something in mind not unlike a really rigorous and flexible M.A. program–i.e., not one that aims to produce a Ph.D. lite, so to speak, but one that aims to produce a more rigorously educated person. But he’s stuck there, because professors of English (like myself) are trained to teach people how to do serious study of literature (or film, or writing, etc.), not to “educate them rigorously.” And what would that mean, exactly? This isn’t any longer the Victorian era when reading classics at Oxford prepared you for the job of running (or ruining, as the case may be) the British Empire. And one notes that Harvard English probably won’t be undertaking this kind of self-transformation, so who does he suppose will be the first one to do it?

I thought the best thing he said in that passage is the disincentive of going to graduate school in the humanities. I was one of the blissfully stupid ones who skipped off to graduate school singing “tra-la-la” and not worrying a fig about the job market. Now I’m thankful almost daily that I ended up with a very good job, but not everyone who entered graduate school with me has been so lucky. Menand states in an earlier section that Ph.D. training isn’t transferable. I know several people who have made the transition, but usually it wasn’t without a sense of bitterness. It’s a bad problem.

In the meantime, people like Rohan Maitzen and I will still be wondering whether our M.A. programs can be improved. Her recent post (where I also found the link to the Menand article) is good on some of the questions that can be profitably asked about the nature of the M.A. especially:

All of this mental muddle is particularly distracting because one of the things I’m trying to get done is course planning for next term, and particularly the plans for my upcoming graduate seminar on George Eliot. When I first taught such a class (in 1997-98), I thought it was pretty obvious what I should do: graduate courses are training for professional work in the field of literary criticism, right? That shouldn’t have seemed so obvious to me then (I didn’t take into account, for instance, that Dalhousie’s program includes a ‘terminal’ M.A. and thus serves a student population that is not necessarily headed down an academic path), and it certainly does not seem so obvious to me now. But what difference does, or should, it make that there seem to me to be a number of uncertainties about the purpose of their degrees more generally, our seminar in particular, and even literary criticism itself? Is a (real or mock) conference paper a reasonable goal, or a paper suitable to be revised and submitted to a peer-reviewed journal? Should I diversify the requirements to suit a wider range of possible applications of scholarly expertise–say, a resource-rich website, an experimental hyper-text edition of a chapter, a paper aimed at a general audience, a portfolio of book reviews, a class wiki? Is it possible to accommodate such a range and still to ensure equal workloads and fair evaluation? I’ve been reading and rereading a swathe of critical articles in preparation for the usual “secondary readings” requirements but if I can’t even be sure myself what we need to accomplish in the class, how can I choose what they should read? Probably I’ll just do what I usually do, which is pick some articles that seem particularly useful or interesting, or that stand for some reason as key or classic pieces; require a couple of short response papers, a seminar presentation, and a term paper (of the usual academic variety). It’s tempting to reinvent the course–but it’s part of a whole system of requirements and expectations, and so there I am again, reluctant to deviate from local norms, to point out that most of them will never need to do academic criticism (or get a permanent job in which it is required of them for tenure) and so we should really find something else to do about what we read.

To figure out how to change the system, so that there is some kind of hierarchy where you begin by learning more, and more things that might be relevant in the real world, and end with specialized training in scholarship, would not be such a bad thing. But if the people at Harvard–who after all are the ones who landed the plum-est jobs in the land and have the time to re-conceptualize graduate study on something other than the nineteenth-century German model–can’t come up with more than a vague notion that things should change, we probably shouldn’t count on it happening any time soon.

Henrik Bering on Johnson at 300.

One of the people I met at the Oxford tercentennial for Johnson was Henrik Bering, a thoroughly excellent drinking partner and dinner companion in addition to being an expert in, among other things, urban warfare. Not your ordinary conference attendee! He recently wrote up the conference for the Weekly Standard, and it’s a thoroughly fun piece:

While Johnsonians may differ on matters of emphasis regarding their man, certain things bind them together: A deep distaste for the Romantics and everything they represent, which became plain during a visit to one of the other colleges Johnson had strong connections to, University College: When passing Edward Onslow Ford’s exceedingly decadent fin de siècle sculpture that shows the drowned
poet Shelley artfully arranged on a slab of Cremona marble, one delegate was heard scornfully muttering about Shelley’s “remarkably flaccid member.” Perhaps a bit uncharitable, given the fact that the man had just drowned, but indicative of the robust spirit governing the proceedings.

Not all the time was spent listening to papers. A series of events were planned along with the seminars: A Mozart string concerto was performed in Johnson’s honor in the Pembroke college chapel, somewhat ironic when considering Johnson’s profound lack of interest in music. Once when inattentive during a concert, a friend pointed out the technical difficulty involved. Johnson replied: “Difficult, do you call it, Sir? I wish it were impossible.”

A visit to the college wine cellars was also a must, considering the fact that Johnson was capable of downing great amounts of claret, when not confining himself to lemonade: “No sir, claret is the liquor for boys; port for men; but he who aspires to be a hero (smiling) must drink brandy.” When some delegates showed up the next morning somewhat worse for wear, others were quick to recall Johnson’s rebuke to Boswell: “Sir, you are without any skills in inebriation.”

One thing is certain, these people don’t frighten easily. When the fire alarm went off three times during the gala dinner in the great hall of Pembroke, nobody paid it the slightest attention.

I didn’t even hear the fire alarm, but then again, that gala dinner was pretty liberal in its use of the Pembroke cellars. No one can accuse Johnsonians of being without skills in inebriation.

When pig germs fly.

I’m just curious: has anyone else noticed that the hamthrax has been a terrific boon to the life expectancy of grandmothers this semester?

For some, the rolled trousers are not optional.

This article in the NYT makes me feel old, because I find myself doing these sorts of things more and more:

He said he had recently asked a group of students to be quiet. “They looked at me like I wasn’t cool,” he said. “I thought, ‘This is a library — we’re not supposed to be cool.’ ”

Mr. Hunt, referring to students with iPods, said: “They’re sitting next to me with their Walkmen on, and I tell them to turn it off. I’ve become like a granddad, and I’m only 33.”

But at least I know the difference between a Walkman and an iPod. Even when I didn’t have an iPod, I didn’t refer to them as Walkmen. Geez, dude, what millennium are you living in?

This is not to say that I’m cool, however. I am not cool.

But at least I haven’t already started rolling my trousers already, Mr. Walkman.

Never really wanted to go to Missouri before.

But that was before I heard about the Linda Hall Library:

STANDING among the 10,000 rare books in the stacks of the Linda Hall Library in Kansas City, Bruce Bradley, the director of the history of science special collections, pulls out a copy of “The Starry Messenger,” the revelatory book in which Galileo detailed his astronomical observations made with his own “spyglass” — the instrument that would later be known as the telescope.

“Treat it with care,” Mr. Bradley said as he gently handed me the library’s first edition, one of the more than 500 initially printed in Latin as “Sidereus Nuncius.” The library paid $38,000 for the book in 1988 — at the time the costliest book the library had ever bought. But it’s hardly the only jewel in a collection of 500,000 books, journals and pamphlets that make this private library among the largest science libraries in the world. Also in its stacks are Isaac Newton’s “Principia,” the 1687 book that presented his laws of gravity, and Copernicus’s 1543 “On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres,” among other noteworthy works.

But these books are not just for scholars. They are also on view for the average visitor, albeit one with a decided interest in the sciences who makes a pilgrimage to western Missouri, where the sprawling red-brick library sits majestically on a 14-acre urban arboretum just a five-minute walk from Kansas City’s Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art.

The Linda Hall is among dozens of libraries across the United States that house dazzling collections and often mount eccentric exhibitions but largely remain unfamiliar to the public.

“What is fun is to become aware of these marvelous libraries that, though open to the public, are not well known and are filled with wonderful treasures,” said Robert S. Pirie, a prominent book collector who lives in Manhattan and has his own library of several thousand volumes.

But if you’re local and, like me, can’t just gallivant off to Mizzura at whim, you should check out the Folger Shakespeare Library. Or the Library of Congress, which, rumor has it, also has a decent collection.

On blog traffic, or, poor Samuel Johnson, always bottom-feeding in the great internet search-term ocean.

I had no idea that posting about Henry VIII would bring so much transient foot traffic by my poor little blog. I guess it’s a good thing I didn’t post about Jon and Kate or the Carrie Prejean sex tape, eh?

(Uh, those are still current gossipy topics, right?)

Darnton on the ebook: not quite ready to replace the virtual kind.

A couple of pieces by Robert Darnton have come to my attention lately. I thought a post on the history and future of the book would provide a nice, lively interlude between all the Samuel Johnson coverage lately.

First, apropos of his new book, Darnton provides the sobering statistics that the book is not only not dead, but that the ebook represents the merest sliver of the market for all books:

The book is not dead. In fact, the world is producing more books than ever before. According to Bowker, 700,000 new titles were published worldwide in 1998; 859,000 in 2003; and 976,000 in 2007. Despite the Great Recession of 2009 that has hit the publishing industry so hard, one million new books will soon be produced each year.

Yet the general lack of concern for history among Americans has made us vulnerable to exaggerated notions of historic change—and so has our fascination with technology. The current obsession with cellular devices, electronic readers and digitization has produced a colossal case of false consciousness. As new electronic devices arrive on the market, we think we have been precipitated into a new era. We tout “the Information Age” as if information did not exist in the past. Meanwhile, e-books and devices like the Kindle represent less than 1% of the expenditure on books in the United States.

History shows us that one medium does not necessarily displace another—at least not in the short run. Manuscript publishing flourished long after Gutenberg’s invention; newspapers did not wipe out the printed book; the radio did not replace the newspaper; television did not destroy the radio; and the Internet did not make viewers abandon their television sets. Every age has been an age of information, each in its own way. In my new book, The Case for Books: Past, Present, and Future (PublicAffairs), I make that very point, because I believe we cannot envisage the future—or make sense of the present—unless we study the past. Not necessarily because history repeats itself or teaches us lessons, but because it can help to orient us when faced with the challenges of new technologies.

His point is finely stated, I think. Books aren’t dead. Americans, as is our wont, are prone to infatuation with anything that promises to thrust us across some kind of millennial marker and into the future. Darnton, a good historian, instead asks us to go…

…by remembering the past so that we can orient ourselves to face future challenges. His position is balanced and sane, I think.

he second article is a Fine Books Magazine review of Darnton’s new book. In it, there are quotes that describe Darnton’s decade of work on an ebook and his vision of what the form might eventually be able to do:

It’s not that Darnton eschews the great possibilities of electronic communication. He has been working on an e-book for a decade, which he describes in a chapter titled Cyberspace. “An ‘e-book’ unlike a printed codex, can contain many layers arranged in the shape of a pyramid, Readers can download the text and skim through the topmost layer…if they come upon something that especially interests them, they can click down a layer to a supplementary essay or appendix. They can continue deeper through the book, through bodies of documents, bibliography, historiography, iconography, background music…” he writes. Darnton said he plans to get much of the documentation he has collected for the e-book online in the next year and invites readers to check it out while he finishes the main text.

Darton’s ebook is one that won’t translate well to the Kindle, with its notoriously bad image quality and (as far as I know) inability to play back music. What is most interesting about his proposal is the qualitative leap past the Kindle entirely. His vision of the ebook offers interesting possibilities to scholars, including the chance to integrate scholarly and popular publishing. Think of it: introductions to chapters might be written in a more accessible or popular style, with links to scholarly notes, essays, or dissertations available at various points. That would be game-changing in terms of the current divide between the two kinds of writing. And it might be that there would be a larger audience for scholarship if it was easily accessible. I’ve noticed that when I hand out photocopies (OK, pdfs) of a heavily-annotated text, my students invariably dig into the footnotes. Their curiosity is kindled (no pun intended) by the fact that there’s a note on something, and they want to find out what it is. I warn them not to get bogged down–Samuel Johnson warned that notes “refrigerate” the mind, distract the reader from appreciating the whole, and eventually cause such tedium that the reader quits the book, blaming it rather than the notes–but many of my students don’t listen, the little Faustuses.

Darnton also has a nice response to the whole Cushing Library debacle:

Darnton is undoubtedly a bibliophile, but one who recognizes that the printed book and the digital book must co-exist. He advocates the creation of a national digital library. But when asked about ‘bookless’ libraries, such as the Cushing Academy in Massachusetts, which recently decided to discard its 20,000-volume collection, he said he was “appalled.”

“It’s naïve to think that all information is online. It’s also naïve to think that all information is in books, either,” he said. “I see this vast world of information in many different forms, and the notion that digital is going to encompass it all is just wrong-headed.”

And this is precisely what I meant when I said that apathy plus technolust spells the death of critical thinking. Few people think as critically about books as Robert Darnton, one of the world’s foremost historians of the book. And yet here we have a very respectable private school, filled no doubt with motivated and concerned teachers and administrators, and the barest whiff of a new technology drives them to destroy a collection built over generations. As you can see if you follow the link back to my earlier post, the words of the administrators. teachers, and students reveal that they haven’t given the matter much if any thought. There’s state-of-the-art thinking on this complicated subject, but there’s no reason to give that even a cursory look: no, the technology is already available; technology is the future; ergo, time to destroy the past. The world would be a saner and steadier place if there were more Darntons in it, but alas it is overrun with iconoclasts. That too is just wrong-headed.