Mel weighs in:

“In a world in which so many forces work to limit human expression, constrain human behavior, and destroy human lives, why bother feeling threatened by someone else finding beauty, pleasure, or intellectual satisfaction in a text that doesn’t give you that same experience?”

For those who care to pay attention to the scholarly work that is recognized as exceptional in the humanities, The Making of the Modern Self, by Dror Wahrman, has won the Louis Gottschalk Prize from the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, which is one of the two most important professional organizations I belong to. The other is the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing, which last year gave its top prize to Janine Barchas’ Graphic Design, Print Culture, and the Eighteenth-Century Novel.

Now you can behave as if we’re all obsessed with politically correct witch hunts, but I reserve the right to point out that your assertion is demonstrably false.

Remember this thread from last summer?

Maybe what we need is one of those standard responses for when people start throwing around the “Literary studies is too political! It’s too theory-laden. It’s out of touch with what the people want!” crap in the same way that Clancy did with the lame “Where are all the women bloggers?” meme.

The latest comment from Henry Farrell in the CT thread:

…the kind of division that some commenters here are trying to create, between academic literary criticism (which only other specialists, or those who read ìcontemporary literary fictionî are allowed to criticize), and vulgar debate over books is very strongly reminiscent of the division between ìhigh cultureî and ìordinary cultureî that Raymond Williams tells us about, or the processes of distinction that Bourdieu describes. To be blunt, it smacks of defensive manoeuvres that aim to preserve discursive power, and to shut out debate that might be awkward or uncomfortable.

Tell you what, Henry: I’ll start a blog about the current state of political science. I have a PhD in English, not political science, but what the heck. Then, when political scientists question the accuracy of my comments, and question the adequacy of my training for such an enterprise, I’ll accuse them of being elitist and solemnly lecture them about Raymond Williams and Pierre Bourdieu. Maybe then they’ll see the light.

What literary scholars do is an academic discipline that, whether people like it or not, requires years of advanced training. Do you honestly not see why saying otherwise is insulting to many of us?

I’m dropping Crooked Timber from my RSS subscriptions. (Yes, I’m sure they’ll be heartbroken to learn this.)

…or “Why doesn’t Crooked Timber pay attention to people who actually study language and literature for a living?”

A recent Farrell entry on Crooked Timber defends collaborative literary blog The Valve against a critique offered by Cultural Revolution, a critique that, in part, points out that funding for the Valve came from the conservative Association of Literary Scholars and Critics. In fact, on that organization’s website, the Valve is described as an ALSC “discussion forum.”

Look, I don’t have a dog in this fight. I haven’t really read much of the Valve, although it looks interesting. However, I do think that Farrell is being naive when he fails to realize that buzz words and phrases like ìimagination,î ìshared literary culture,î ìserious,î and ìclassicists and modernistsî are loaded weapons in the hands of culture warriors. Here’s an analogy: if you were to stumble across a political website advocating “states’ rights” in America, you’d have an easy time figuring out which political party they were likely to support. You would have a similar reaction to such phrases as “culture of life” and “ownership society.”

Let’s say I asserted that “culture of life” was a suspect phrase used by Republicans to try to link a wide variety of otherwise disparate programs, from infringing on civil rights in the name of fighting terrorism to opposing a woman’s right to determine the course of her own pregnancy. Now let’s say someone responded to my assertion by saying, Who could object to establishing a culture of life? What kind of sick person opposes life? We would assume that person was pretty ignorant about the current state of American politics, no?

See, language doesn’t exist in in a vacuum. Words that may appear harmless when taken out of context carry a significant amount of weight when understood within their original context. It’s an obvious point, I know. I don’t mean to patronize you, dear reader, and yet here we are.

I am not going to jump into the argument taking place in the comments thread. (I did ask Henry a couple of questions in that thread and he ignored me; frankly, it’s not a bad policy to ignore people who use the word “Zombie” in their name.) No, my concern is with the framing of the debate as established in Henry’s original post. He makes reference to

The hostility of many literary theorists to the notion that they ought connect with a wider culture, or that they are, in the end of the day, critics of cultural forms that have a value in themselves apart from the tropes that their methodologies can uncover

Here’s one question: Who are these hostile literary theorists? I mean, I have a PhD in English, and I have no idea who he’s talking about.

He also cites Scott McLemee on the annual meeting of the MLA as evidence of a “deeper malaise” infecting literary studies. (Sidenote: does Crooked Timber get $5 every time they mention Scott McLemee?)

After McLemee’s quote, Farrell writes that the criteria of literary scholarship mean that literary scholars lead a miserable existence:

You spend your life studying work which you arenít supposed to enjoy on its own terms; too high a degree of enthusiasm is anathema, unless itís couched in political or critical terms that disconnect the value of the text from the text itself.

This is news to me, and I’ve been in the field he’s talking about for over a decade. (Note that Farrell is a political science professor.) The thing that everyone who works in language/literature departments knows and that apparently everyone who doesn’t refuses to believe/acknowledge/notice is that the annual meeting of the MLA is about jobs.

I’ll say it one more time, so you don’t miss it this time: The annual meeting of the MLA is about jobs.

That’s why there’s a malaise there. Desperate people are hoping to get hired. Exhausted people are interviewing the desperate people who are hoping to get hired. The rest is the tail on the dog that is the job market.

If you want to see the excitement at the heart of what literary scholars do, go to the specialist meetings. People who are Medievalists, Renaissance scholars, eighteenth-century scholars, Romanticists, Victorianists (and on and on) have their own annual, professional conferences. Jobs are not being advertised and sought there. No malaise is there.

The image of the blinkered literary theorist talking jargon-riddled nonsense to other blinkered literary theorists in a Mr. Magoo circle jerk that ignores the concerns of “real people” living in the “real world” is a tired, old, (and whether Henry Farrell wants to believe it or not) conservative stereotype.

But why listen to me? I’m just an English professor, so what could I know about, you know, the study of language and literature? This brings me to my second question:

Given that Crooked Timber so often has posts on literary matters, why are there no CT contributors who actually work in departments of literature?

I have been consistently bothered by the CT posts on the state of contemporary literary studies (most of which are, I think, by Farrell and John Holbo), and I do wish they would listen when others object to the way they characterize what we do. With the possible exception of Holbo, they are not qualified to comment.