Writes Merve Emre, in "Has Academia Ruined Literary Criticism? Literature departments seem to provide a haven for studying books, but they may have painted themselves into a corner," (The New Yorker).
If there is a thesis that unites the essays in [John Guillory’s new book] “Professing Criticism,” it is that professional formation entails a corresponding “déformation professionnelle.”
Ooof. What a stumbling block! But there's a Wikipedia article, "Déformation Professionnelle" — in English:
... a tendency to look at things from the point of view of one's own profession or special expertise, rather than from a broader or humane perspective. It is often translated as "professional deformation", though French déformation can also be translated as "distortion". The implication is that professional training, and its related socialization, often result in a distortion of the way one views the world....
The colloquial term nerdview describes a similar tendency.
Ha ha. "Nerdview" is a much better term. More lighthearted too. Déformation professionnelle — sounds grimly medical. In fact, those words were used in the 19th-century medicine to refer to physical deformities caused by one's work.
Maybe something like a chimney sweeper:
Back to the New Yorker article....
Any kind of occupational training imparts to its recipients both a sense of mastery and a certain obliviousness to what this mastery costs—namely, the loss of other ways of perceiving the world. Related terms are “occupational psychosis” (John Dewey), “trained incapacity” (Thorstein Veblen), and, most recently, “nerdview” (Geoffrey K. Pullum), all more openly pejorative than “deformation.”...
Ah! The New Yorker found "nerdview" too and determines that it is "more openly pejorative than 'deformation.'" Ha ha. And I thought "nerdview" was lighthearted.
From the list of things I'm not going to do: Read Geoffrey K. Pullum to find out what's his conception of "nerdview."
All professionals are deformed; every professional is deformed in his own way. The funniest and angriest commentator on the deformation of scholars was surely Friedrich Nietzsche, whom Guillory cites.
In “The Gay Science,” Nietzsche writes:
In a scholar’s book there is nearly always something oppressive, oppressed: the “specialist” emerges somehow—his eagerness, his seriousness, his ire, his overestimation of the nook in which he sits and spins, his hunchback—every specialist has his hump. Every scholarly book also reflects a soul that has become crooked; every craft makes crooked. Look at the friends of your youth again, after they have taken possession of their specialty—Alas, in every case the reverse has also taken place! . . . One is the master of one’s trade at the price of also being its victim....
Skipping ahead in this long article, we encounter Marx:
Under the communist organization of society, Marx speculates, eliminating the division of labor will also eliminate the distinction that accrues to artists—writers, painters, sculptors, composers, actors, critics, and other producers of “unique labors.” ...
In this world, there would be no professional critics, only people who engage in criticism as one activity among many.... All that would matter would be the logic of the critic’s thought, the pleasure of her style....
Oh! I agree! And so I will end my pleasurable stylings here.
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Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach. Those who can’t teach, become critics or administrators. Those Scholar-Radicals can’t write anything worth reading themselves. They’re too full of themselves to be effective teachers. And they’re too politicized to be effective critics, not that literary criticism is worth much. It seems their career arcs lead to administration, where they’ll inflict their political obsessions on everyone in their domain. The university is dying, and it’s a suicide.
So is a Renaissance Man someone who holds no nerdview?
All that would matter would be the logic of the critic’s thought, the pleasure of her style....
That hasn’t been my observation of how Marxists approach es thing. With them, all that matters is that you’re a Marxist, which, if you’re not, the logic of your argument doesn’t matter. You will be discounted, shamed, and ignored (and if they can get away with it, imprisoned and even killed.)
In a world without professionals, everyone would be a generalist, mediocre at all tasks. Unhappily so, I think. Do I want to do my own plumbing, weaving, herding, smithing, bone-setting, carpentry and computer coding? Do I want to be my own security guard, firefighter and dentist?
This “déformation professionelle” is a useful notion but if it tempts us to imagine we can run things without specialization, it’s pernicious.
Which is not to defend the “professionals” in academia, culture and government and the cack-handed mess they are making of things. They’ve become a cult of “experts.”
One is the master of one’s trade at the price of also being its victim…
Once again, Nietzsche is the most honest and accurate of the lot
"Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach."
A facile axiom, a cliche by now, and, as with so many such facile "truisms," it is surely true of some, but by no means of all. Many teachers have had long careers (or remain active professionals) in their educational fields of endeavor, whether it be medicine, history, economics, the sciences, the humanities, (literature, art, music, etc.), and so on.
A person unembarrassed to use this cliche now communicates only unconsidered and uninformed contempt of the person(s) and/or field(s) of study under discussion.
Jeez. They talk about expertise as if it's a disease instead of celebrating that individuals have at least one area of competence. Certainly it makes more sense that we speak from the worldview we know, rather than from some grand worldview we think is representative of all peoples. And of course, better that we speak from that area of competence than all the other areas of which we may know a bit, a trivial anecdote, or a bit of hearsay and use that to run on.
Like I do here, daily.
Anyway...it's always good to get into the mind of the academic. To see their struggle with language and communication. To observe, from the outside, the navel gazing. I wonder why I don't remember it being this bad when I was in college?
I'm not sure how you escaped all that.
I find it sickening that anyone would pay money to see Taylor Swift.
When I was in college, the vaporings of certain profs were for spare time, theirs and ours. Classes were pretty straightforward.
Should say I graduated in 66 and had only the required--for freshmen--lit classes. "American Thought and Language", and a bit more in soph required "Humanities".
After that, I had a boot camp level composition course and then....the lit folks could get by without me and I without them and we both profited.
I did psychology--needed a degree for OCS--and anthropology which were not as politicized as they are today.
Seems like a kind of penance to have to read lit crit. I haven't sinned that badly.
"To a little boy with a hammer, the whole world is a nail."
Guillory, if the author's description is accurate, gives a historical timeline for this topic of literary criticism that dovetails exactly with Jacques Barzun's analysis and thesis of a half-millennium pattern, described in his last book's title "From Dawn to Decadence, Five Hundred Years of Western Culture."
For Barzun -- and apparently for Guillory, in at least this specific case -- the deterioration of many cultural trends in the 20th century was unmistakable Decadence at work. At work on a large degree of scale. And it was an inevitable part of a historical cycle.
So as trends reach their periods of exhaustion, quality diminishes and eventually disappears; organization crumbles; and, consequently, the economic viability of the activity disintegrates.
But humans are inherently curious and ambitious. When one cycle ends, there must be a period of distress and dysfunction; then our innate drives will find among those ruins some bits of value and something worthwhile will begin to be rebuilt.
It was refreshing reading something from The New Yorker that had something to say and was written by someone who knew what she was talking about.
I had need of scholars and critics not shape my opinion of them but to figure out what the hell was going on with T.S. Eliot and Nietzsche....She doesn't mention Edmund Wilson who used to be The New Yorker's resident literary critic. He was a big deal. I read his book To the Finland Station. He reviewed the thought processes of any number 19th century economic theorists whose efforts found fruition in the works of Karl Marx and Lenin. Wilson, iirc, thought highly of these men. Well, on the plus side, Wilson was right about Fitzgerald.....A solid background in literature might lead to one having the taste and fund of knowledge to read T.S. Eliot without a gloss but it doesn't have much impact on your ability to appreciate to properly judge Marx and Lenin. I suppose you can expound your errors with more eloquence and persuasiveness so there's that.
True experts are a joy to behold, even when you don't know what the heck they're talking about. It's the enthusiasm. If you have a mind to, watch a documentary called California Typewriter. At one point, Tom Hanks (an avid collector) is asked which one he could keep if he could only have one, and it's so enjoyable to watch him get all excited about this one or that one, rattling off each one's plusses and minuses.
Same way with academia. I've had quite fun times babbling with a colleague about this or that esoteric theoretical concept, but it's archaeology so it's very much aside from "the real world". Well, it used to be. Now we have to be all anti-colonial, and anti-racist, blah blah blah, so nothing much is getting done anymore. Academia needs either reforming, or a parallel system outside of the current one to replace it.
Those who can't do and can't teach can also get a professorship and academic centers named after themselves if they have political connections and can help with the fundraising.
Emre is right about lit departments, but they so thoroughly explained and explicated everything in earlier decades, that they've run out of things to say apart from race, gender, sexual orientation, post-colonialism, and environmentalism or else pop culture analysis. They could fall back on preaching the old moralistic truths found in literature, but that doesn't satisfy the "research" imperatives of modern universities.
In the sciences, new instruments could be developed at this point to take the investigation further, but that's not possible in the humanities. Someday, we will be able to make connections between writers' works and their DNA, but I'm not sure that matters much, and by that point most literary forms will be dead anyway.
Amateur criticism, vague appreciations of favorite authors and ordinary book reviewing were what the heroic mid-twentieth century literary critics were trying to get away from. They wanted something more rigorous. They may have gone as far as one could in that endeavor.
It would fit the current animus against things masculine and hard-edged if essayistic, appreciative criticism made a comeback, but there's a danger there in critics not really saying anything definite and in readers not have anything in a critic's work to grasp hold of, judge, and evaluate.
Ideology and the need to make an ideological point - Freudian, Jungian, Marxist, down to the more recent ideologies - have long been the salt or spice or sweetener that makes literary criticism interesting to those who are interested in it.
Nerdview is just one instance of the broader phenomenon of the inevitable incomprehension of others caused by the fact that everyone has a different set of experiences, and processes that set differently from everyone else.
In some sense, we can't avoid deformation. Nobody gets to be omniscient.
Faith, religion, ideology, empathetic causes, and mortal gods and goddesses to order them.
Sociology went down this road 50 years ago, or more. And Sociology is dead now as an academic pursuit, unless you are a prog radical activist looking to use your PhD in Sociology.
Serious Literary Criticism has been dead for a long time. Good that the New Yorker finally noticed. First, you can't have serious literature criticism when people aren't reading serious literature. Second, the vast majority of literary criticism was nonsense written by 2nd raters about 2nd rate literature.
After WW II, the number of English Professor exploded, and they had nothing of interest to say. But they had to write books or magazine articles for professional reasons. And a large number of them hated Western Civilization and its Literature and just wanted to boink co-eds or have a soft job with good benefits. So you got lots of "Marxist critiques" and books about the racism/antisemitism of Shakespeare or Whoever.
As a result men at the very top: like F.R. Leavis, T.S. Elliot, Cyril Vernon Connolly, Edmund Wilson, Ezra Pound, or even Trilling, have been replaced by.... nobody.
My local library has been reducing the amount of shelf space for literary criticism and biography almost every year for the last 20 years. Whereas before, you had 20 books on Shakespere, you have 3. The 10 books on Jane Austen are down to 2. The Books on Norman Mailer... don't exist.
The underlying problem is that it is really hard to make a contribution that is both original and correct to a mature field in the humanities. There's no way to guarantee that you'll have an insight in time for tenure or promotion. In the past (up through 1985 or so) that wasn't so bad, because the job market was strong: a good dissertation was enough to get you a job, and six years before tenure was enough time for most people to have enough useful insights.
But the collapse of the job market and the simultaneous watering down of the PhD/dissertation required much more "productivity," so there was enormous demand for intellectual "machines" that could produce publishable articles. THAT's what the "theory"-driven approaches did for scholars. You start with "this essay is the first to apply the theory of X to the text of Y," and then you turn the crank and out comes a publication. The problem is/was that the "theories" are almost always shallow, wrong, or both, so papers produced by this machine aren't really of interest to anyone except someone investigating the same combo (Theory X, Text Y), which fails the originality test. So from 1990-2005 or so, you had the creation of a huge collection of scholarship that nobody read or really evaluated while the job market got worse and worse.
At some point around 2007-10, the job market had been so bad for so long that people's only hope was to get ATTENTION for their work on social media in a desperate bid to be recognized as the most moral person in the application pool. With too many scholars/articles chasing too few positions, you got rhetorical hyperinflation. Most scholars who have jobs are miserable about the results, but no one has any idea how to fix the problem. No one wants to move first, because the online mob, hoping to create a job opening, will descend on heretics and attempt to get them fired. Perhaps ironically, instead of opening up jobs, this behavior just convinces everyone outside the field that everyone IN the field is a lunatic AND a racist (or whatever the slur du jour is), so any job opened this way gets turned into some other, more obviously virtuous field rather than being filled with someone in the heretic's original discipline.
Temujin said...
Jeez. They talk about expertise as if it's a disease instead of celebrating that individuals have at least one area of competence.
That's very cute of you, assuming that "the experts" are actually competent.
How many days was it to "flatten the curve"?
The reality of the modern world is that most "experts" are worthless hacks, and their tribal world view is one of the reasons WHY they're worthless hacks
Been there, done that.
As early as '72 it was obvious that literary criticism was a matter of putting earlier writings through the RaceClassGenderizer and finding them pernicious.
By 2010 even us library profs were expected to report on Engaged Scholarship. I had no problems on that score because of my position and activities in the community, but had no desire to continue in a system where stuff like that was REQUIRED.
Just as in any declining or decadent organization some solid work still gets done, in my preferred fields of interest there's still some righteous product.
One of the best things about the internet is that its opened book reviews and film reviews up to everyone.
Before the "net", if you read a serious novel or saw a movie, maybe you could watch Ebert and Siskel, or read Pauline Kael, or if the novel was old enough, go read to the liberary and read what Trilling or Professor so-and-so wrote about it.
Now, I can see the reviews of hundreds of "average" people think on the internet. And notice the sometimes enormous gap between what the "Expert critics" wrote/said and what a lot of intelligent "average" people say/wrote.
Sometimes, things, a few of them anyway, actully get better. But yeah, top level criticism has REALLY gone downhill. It misquote someone who saw "The wiz" in the 1970s:
From Edmund Wilson and the Wizard of Oz;
To Adam Gopnkik and the Wiz
It doesn't seem possible;
But Tis.
I think the original application of "Those who can, do; those who can't, teach." was athletics. It's an accurate description of the life cycle of a coach. When you are young and strong, you do the athletic feats in question. When you age out, you teach others how to do them best. It's not an insult to teachers.
The concept of deformation professionelle has served me well as a reminder to look for my own biases and conceptual blind spots.
Helen Vendler is our last real interpreter of poetry. Her essays are a pleasure in themselves to read. Camille Paglia isn't bad either. John Updike's essays about literature are literature. Some historians bring a lot to the table by placing literature in its time.
The rest is a circus act performed by word clowns.
Updike's art criticism is literature too.
Indeed, Narr. There was nothing Updike couldn't commit to the page. He and John D. MacDonald were the most prolific and pleasant writers of their age. In the case of MacDonald, he got so much done because he didn't partake in the Longboat Key writer's tradition of kicking off for the day when someone raised a flag that indicated it was time to stop writing and start drinking -- sometimes quite early in the day. I suspect the same was true of Updike.
The most famous post-modern literary theorist I encountered was a nut who showed up at my undergraduate school with giant Cupie dolls with safety pins through their heads and her earlobes like earrings. I had to take her to dinner, and she acted out so badly at the Olive Garden early bird that I was dying inside. She then got into a potty screaming match with another professor about some translation of 'Zeus rolling his living whiteness in the sand.'
From what I could figure, her famous book was about her reading older men being like incest. Good incest. I think. I'm far too quotidian to grasp such rich inventiveness.
These people literally broke the study of Literature. They tried to penetrate a few law schools, but it didn't take. Lawyers generally have to know how to behave at the Olive Garden.
I don't know MacDonald's work at all. His is just a name I see and hear once in a while.
Genre writer with a pun on a color in the title of every book. Pulp fiction, but very good pulp fiction. Travis McGee is his main character.
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