The Marketplace of Ideas by Menand Louis

Author:Menand, Louis [Louis, Menand,]
Language: zho
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2010-01-17T16:00:00+00:00

3.

As an illustration of this process, we can use the example of my own discipline, which is English, keeping in mind that although bureaucratically all disciplines are treated alike—they have parallel requirements for the doctoral degree, for peer review, for tenure, and so on—it is just common sense to acknowledge that some kinds of research fit comfortably within an academic structure and some kinds don’t. Academic shorthand for this is a distinction between “soft” disciplines and “hard” disciplines, but the terminology is invidious. Another way of slicing the universe of knowledge production would be to say that some disciplines are interested in the way things are, some are interested in how people behave, and some are interested in what things mean. The first kind of inquiry is basically empirical, the third is basically hermeneutical, and the second usually involves some combination of measurement and interpretation. There are empirical aspects to the business of English departments, but the work is mainly hermeneutical—figuring out what things mean. And the results of this labor are obviously more difficult to assess objectively than the results of a chemistry experiment or an analysis of voting behavior are. Beyond attaining the assent (usually provisional, and understood to be so) of other people who are trying to figure out the same things, there is no watertight verification procedure. So a hermeneutical field of study is likely to show more vividly the consequences of professionalization. It is obliged to undergo more contortions.

In the first years of the modern university, the field of English was dominated by philologists—so much so that for many years at Johns Hopkins, the school that served as the model of a research institution in American higher education (it opened in 1876), English was part of the German department.12 This way of incorporating literature into the structure of the research university was effective because the disciplines were organized around a scientistic conception of scholarship, and philology—the study of language—could clearly lay claim to being scientific. Eventually, philology was superseded by literary history as the dominant scholarly appraisal, but there was still no problem. Literary history, too, could lay the same claim to a scientific, or sciencelike, status. The problem arose when English professors proposed to produce literary criticism.

From a purely intellectual point of view, the obstacles to including literary criticism among the professional activities of English professors are slightly absurd. Literary criticism would seem a natural part of the job description. But there were obstacles, and they were thrown up not by problems most people would otherwise have had with the practice of criticism, but by the design of the institution. In order for literary criticism to be recognized as a valid professional pursuit—that is, an activity amenable to the process of self-regulation that governs the production of academic knowledge—several points needed to be established. The first was that literature is indeed an object that can be isolated for academic inquiry. This meant demonstrating that literature is a field whose study requires a transmissible but

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