New House Rule
March 18, 2008
Feeling tempted, compelled, inclined or in any way disposed to write a journalistic assessment of the decline of literary studies is prima facie evidence that you shouldn’t do it. It is a genre that can only fail. At best it can make people laugh, a bit.
Oh, world, why do we love to fail? Why are these stupid targets so appealing? I would say it’s like making a pass at a hot individual in a bar, but it ain’t: there’s a lot more deliberation involved. A lot more deliberation. Days or even weeks of deliberation—
Then again, I don’t quite get the full-on desire to be a sincere public intellectual in general; the odds of being intelligent in public, as opposed to stupid in public, are VERY, VERY POOR.
…
But, alas— he totally riled me up on the one bit that is a matter of opinion, as opposed to wrong. (Most of the article is wrong, so: best to leave it alone.) This is the canon of important white male and female American writers:
This is an old story, but let’s stop for a moment to consider what the many ads like the last one, for a tenure-track position in twentieth-/twenty-first-century American fiction, actually mean. They mean that you can be a brilliant young scholar, from a top program, but if you’re an expert in Hemingway, Faulkner and Fitzgerald, or Malamud, Bellow and Roth, or Gaddis, Pynchon and DeLillo, or all of them plus Dreiser, Dos Passos, Sinclair Lewis, Steinbeck, Thomas Wolfe, Mailer, Salinger, Capote, Kerouac, Burroughs, Updike, Chandler, Cheever, Heller, Gore Vidal, Cormac McCarthy and God’s own novelist himself, Vladimir Nabokov, plus Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes, Cynthia Ozick, Flannery O’Connor and Joyce Carol Oates, but not in African-American or ethnic American fiction, then there are a lot of jobs you just aren’t going to get.
Well, he’s wrong about the jobs thing too, but… is that really all that white Americans can boast in 20th century fiction? Faulkner, Pynchon, Nabokov, Stein, those I’ll grant him; I have certain sentimental attachments to Barnes and Bellow too. But honestly, yeah: there are a whole lot of better ethnic writers than that crew, and I maintain that many of America’s greatest literary achievements in the second half of the 20th century have been in poetry and genre fiction. The idea that every university needs someone to teach a class on Hemingway, Cather, Mailer, Salinger, Updike, Oates and DeLillo… only if they also outlaw creative writing among students and instructors, that’s what I say.
But what do I really think?
The real story of academic literary criticism today is that the profession is, however slowly, dying.
Just like life as we know it on this planet. Really, let’s get some fucking perspective.
Update: God bless Ads Without Products for having more heart than I do. Original notice from ED.
March 20, 2008 at 9:29 am
Oh no! You mean there are jobs I’m not going to get!? Oh the injustice!
Seconds on the “that’s all you got, white America?” feeling. I mean, seriously, *Americanists* don’t even respect half the people on that list.
March 20, 2008 at 9:48 am
My heart really goes out to the “brilliant young scholars” from “top programs” who are “experts” on THIRTY-THREE white American novelists and zero writers of color. What kind of bizarre fantasy *is* that? I hear unicorns and griffins are out of luck on the job market these days, too: too dead, too white, too European, possibly even too male.
This sort of hyperbole reminds me a bit of small children yelling at their mothers after being told to clean their rooms: “I bet you don’t care if I DIE!” Just clean your room, kiddo.
March 20, 2008 at 10:03 am
I didn’t even notice at first how his argument seamlessly morphs from “we must defend the canon” to “we must defend the right of white writers to monopolize literary studies” without a hitch. Seriously, how is that not exactly what he does here?
The weird thing is that this guy has taught a class on South Asian literature at Yale. Perhaps it’s all a madcap prank? If so, well-played sir.
March 20, 2008 at 10:43 am
“Contemporary fiction by writers of South Asian birth or descent. Issues of identity, modernity, empire, and history as well as of narrative and linguistic experimentation. Authors include V. S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, Rohinton Mistry, Arundhati Roy, Amitav Ghosh, Jhumpa Lahiri, and either Hanif Kureishi or Mohsin Hamid.”
No disrespect meant at all here, but I did immediately think, “This is not going to be Mahasweta Devi”, and indeed it is not. Points for not assigning Vikram Seth; negative points for the absence of non-Anglophone authors. I know it’s an English class, but — well, who’s on your “contemporary African literature” syllabus, sir?
March 20, 2008 at 12:02 pm
Well, its clearly a class on “anglophone writers who happen to have sub-continental ancestors,” so non-Anglophone writers would be beside the point. I mean, Naipaul and Rushdie don’t have much in common other than the marketing/literary studies niche they fill. Unless he’s going to appeal to phrenology, and at this point, I’m not convinced he’s not going to.
Also, please tell me you’re joking about him teaching a contemporary African literature survey. Please. Letting this guy teach “minority literatures” is like electing avowedly anti-government Republicans to government office. Oh wait.
March 20, 2008 at 12:17 pm
Sorry: the “sir” was addressed to you, as in, “But if you had the freedom to put together a contemporary African lit survey, surely you would include at least one novel in translation?” I suppose it’s my déformation professionelle that makes me expect this every time, everywhere.
I also completely forgot Rabindranath Tagore’s name for about an hour. But now it’s back! Hurrah!
March 20, 2008 at 12:51 pm
Sure; francophone would be a big chunk of it, plus luso, and arabic, etc. But then an “contemporary African lit” class is very different than the kind of beast he’s doing here. I wouldn’t include Toni Morrison as an example of contemporary African fiction, but he includes Naipaul and Kureishi, a not totally inappropriate analogy. His class is more like a “Anglophone diaspora of people whose relatives were colonized by the british” or something.
April 4, 2008 at 8:42 am
[...] his interest. I though the piece was pretty bad, for multiple reasons (and you can read over here or here should you be interested in how, or links to other takedowns of the piece). But [...]