Cultural and Interdisciplinary Studies Curriculum Revision Literature Teacher Education Teaching and Learning Technical Writing Technology and Teaching The Major Theory and Criticism Two-Year Colleges Professional Issues. Conditions of Work and Employment Minorities in the Profession This content downloaded from Cultural Capital bels, in short, reflect how scholars read as they organize literary history ac- cording to.
I avoid that sort of obvious eroticism. Media scholars said players have been intentionally encouraged to both objectify and… Erin Schreiner, for instance, has considered how scholars writing on the history of ideas might "learn from, and contribute to, this nascent movement towards a 'post-critical' sensibility," and proposes ways in which "the topics historians… Mark Z.
When read more charitably, however, Arnold offers a statement about how impressionistic qualities effect moral commitment. Satire and RomanticismSteven E. The growing number of these works calls scholarly publication itself into question.
Editors of university presses point to the poor sales of many scholarly books as evidence that these books are not being read or are being read by too few scholars to justify minimal print runs. This testimony, unfortunately, does not settle the empirical question of how many books fall into the limbo of the unread, much less the economic question of what number of readers justifies publication.
All that we do know for certain is that the number of scholarly works increases continually. At all times historically, the accumulation of text has been experienced as unprecedented, which is to say that with each incremental increase in accumulation, new challenges confront the practice of scholarly reading. At present, we can say with assurance that the accumulation of scholarship in any given.
Scholarship might be said to propagate scholarship, by provoking response and further inquiry. But this generative principle does not entirely explain the accumulation of books that may be unread or read by very few.
In addition to the absolute growth of the professoriat, accumulation has also been driven by the system of academic advancement, which is founded on an imperative to publish.
There is no question that both the demand to publish and the demand to keep up with published works in ones field have been escalating in the postwar decades, for reasons documented by Richard Lewontin in an essay entitled The Cold War and the Transformation of the Academy. Lewontin demonstrates that the rapid expansion of the research professoriat was the result of a change in the social valuation of research occasioned by cold war politics.
I am immediately concerned not with the particulars of this argument but rather with its implications for the humanities professoriat or scholarship as such. The expansion of the postwar university was driven by investment in science, which entailed the reduction of teaching commitments for scientists to permit more time for research.
In the interest of equity, university administrations extended this reduction to humanities professors. University administrations understood this reduction contractually, as the right to demand more publication from humanities professors in exchange for reduced teaching loads. Thus was born our current tenure and promotion system, which in most universities and many colleges demands more publication than in the previous history of American education.
In one sense we might regard this historical accident as a great boon to scholarship, a boon that made possible the proliferation and growth of university presses. Yet the geometric increase in the quantity of scholarship also put a new kind of pressure on the reading of scholarship and ultimately on the social value of scholarly writing or the capacity of this writing to recommend itself in contexts other than bureaucratic advancement.
In the remainder of this essay, I point out some of the consequences of this transformative development for the reading and dissemination of scholarship.
With incremental increases in the quantity of scholarship, scholars have been compelled to adopt the techniques of extensive reading employed for archival material as the default mode for reading scholarship.
Extensive reading can be complemented by other longstanding nonlinear techniques. Scholarly books are often read from the peripheral matter inward, from the table of contents, the index, the notes, the introduction and conclusion, then to the chapters themselves, some of which might be read closely, others scanned, others skipped altogether. Scholarly books are pulled apart like the Sunday paper. I would not say that this is a bad thing, that all books ought to be read whole from beginning to end, even scholarly books.
The reality of how scholars read, however, raises the question of whether the writing of scholarship might be retroengineered from the endpoint of the reading situation. Such a transformation is already occurring with online venues, although without as yet any effect on the bureaucratic demand for the production of paper monographs.
Let me hasten to say that I am not arguing here for the abolition of the scholarly book in favor of an electronic alternative. On the contrary, I would rather see a diverse system of scholarly publication that preserves as one of its possibilities the book that solicits an intensive reading, no matter how difficult its prose and no matter how long it happens to be.
But that possibility is just what the tendency of academic publication is militating against. Despite the dominance of monograph publication, a new norm for the scholarly book is emerging, a book that is short about pages , with few footnotes, and these dismissed to the end matter. The dissemination of the new form has been hastened by the adoption of the social science citation method in many publication venues for humanities. This method of citation has the usual effect of reducing the number of footnotes altogether, presumably on behalf of making scholarly writing easier to readthat is, easier to read more quickly.
This kind of monograph in my view concedes too much to the prevalence of extensive reading; these books beg to be skimmed. Such congenitally ephemeral scholarship no longer really needs the shell of the paper monograph and might just as well take some other form.
Ideally, the system of academic publication should give us fewer but more diverse monograph publications. In the system we have, our reading of most scholarship has become increasingly more. The intensive reading of whole books of scholarship has been relegated largely to those writing on very similar subjects or reviewers for journals or those who read for evaluative purposes such as tenure or promotion.
In the spirit of Nietzsches confession, I must admit that I too read few whole books of literary scholarship, and those mostly because I am reviewing them for promotion. I also find few books that reward intensive reading. I have to wonder, then, whether the system of academic publication, as the servant of administrative demands for ever greater volumes of publication, has resulted in poorer scholarship, books that, to recycle Nietzsches metaphor, cannot dance.
There is nothing to lose at this point in questioning the demand for more publication that dominates the bureaucratic organization of scholarship, reducing scholarly writing often to a measure of productivity.
Perhaps the greater harm in the proliferation of unread or casually read scholarship, however, is the devaluation of teaching, both as the means for transmission of long-standing knowledge and as the first venue for disseminating new knowledge. Would it perhaps be healthier in some ways if we scholars taught more and wrote less? When I have tendered this immodest proposal to colleagues, I have been greeted with the stunned silence reserved for the most intolerable social impropriety.
Such discomfort betrays what we have repressed so successfully, the origin of the current system of academic publication and advancement in a cold war contract that redistributed labor time from teaching to research.
If, for very good reasons of equity among the disciplines, it is hardly feasible today to reverse this distribution of labor, it costs little to inquire into the historical effects of the arrangement. This little is worth risking if historical recollection helps us understand the deflation in the social value of scholarly writing as inversely related to its inflation as bureaucratic measure of productivity.
At the moment, the fact of deflation is registered symptomatically in the complaint of authors that no one reads my books or of editors that scholarly books sell so few copies, both statements that are useless as analysis if also revealing as testimony to widespread unease with the state of scholarship.
Another effect of the geometric increase in scholarly publication during the postwar period is the pressure it exerts on graduate education, which has evolved to facilitate early publication and which. Those of us who teach graduate students know that the conceptualization of a dissertation project is constrained not by the imagination of the student but by the requisites of a job market that ruthlessly rejects scholarship that does not conform to current models of organization and address current topics.
This constraint, which forces us to regard every dissertation as the draft of a first book, also narrows the scope of graduate education, in deference to a specious norm of professionalization. Graduate programs now turn out some PhDs who have been trained very narrowly in the novel and in literature after and who see little reason to waste time acquiring a broader knowledge base. This highly specialized training, which may well expedite publication, also virtually ensures a limited readership for young scholars first books, paradoxically undermining the very purpose of publication.
Over the long term, the imperative of rapid professionalization has effectively remade the discipline of literary study by contracting its core generic and historical domain to narrative of the post era.
Resisting this contraction of the field in no way implies a retrograde elevation of poetry over the novel or nostalgia for some more ideal era of the discipline. On the contrary, it can be argued that a broader historical knowledge base can only deepen the interest for all of us in scholarship focused on modern narrative forms and perhaps also expand the readership for scholarship in earlier periods and in nonnarrative genres.
If the difficulties consequent on the differentiation of scholarly writing from the textual world of lay literacy long predate the postwar period, those difficulties have been greatly exacerbated in recent decades.
Historical tendencies are seldom successfully reversed by an act of will, but they can be critiqued and they can be ameliorated by good policy. The most desirable model for scholarly production today is surely one in which scholarship takes diverse forms; therefore it behooves us to resist the homogenization of the monograph in response to the bogey of the market.
Obviously our false expediency has not worked out well for the market in scholarly monographs, where we see demand fall despite the extraordinary responsiveness of scholars to what they suppose the market wants. To put this argument in a different, more spiritual idiom, the tendency toward the one-size monograph with all the other formal and topical limitations of that model constrains the.
Still, we need not assert that all scholarly books must be written in order to be read intensively. The point is rather to preserve a place in the market for some scholarly books that might be read intensively by more scholars than typically do so today. The greater the proportion of such books, the stronger the discipline. It may also happen that because these books are more rewarding to read, they will even sell better. Most scholarship, as Nietzsche saw, will solicit a less than intensive reading.
Since his time, we have seen a further, geometric accumulation of scholarship, the effect of which has been to transform scholarship itself into another archive. This is the last consequence of the postwar contract to which I draw attention. Much scholarship today is almost instantly archived, less read than held in reserve for possible future consultation.
Geoffrey Bowker has commented interestingly on this fate of scholarship in his recent work Memory Practices in the Sciences, in which he confesses, I share the academic passion for photocopying and filing away articles, which I have no real intention of ever reading. This is honorable testimony, like Nietzsches, and it occasions an important reflection. Bowker, like most of us, finds himself constructing an archive of scholarly writing in lieu of reading.
Much of this work will perhaps never be read, but that is the condition of the archive. Some items in the archive of scholarship might someday be consulted, but we cannot know at present who will find what items to be of what use.
Only a few works of scholarship at present are likely to rise above archival status. In the meantime, we might consider the possibility that some of this scholarship might take some form other than the paper monograph, which does not always justify its length, its expense, or the demand it makes on the readers time. If we have overvalued the scholarly monograph for reasons having too little to do with scholarship itself, it follows that many scholarly books today might just as well take some other form, as journal articles or as writing in yet undefined electronic genres.
One especially unfortunate consequence of the bureaucratic inflation of the scholarly book is that the long-standing form of the stand-alone essay has lapsed into an undervalued vessel for scholarly writing that solicits intensive reading. I suspect that valuable arguments lost in books might be found again in essays, which can be read intensively in far less.
In this case, as with every form of scholarship, the success with which we confront the challenge of accumulation depends on our ability to manage the clock time of scholarly reading. The worst case scenario for academic publication today is one in which all scholarly books are read quickly, with little pleasure in writing that does not dance and little gratitude for the manifest effort it takes to make a scholarly argument.
Notes 1. In an important address to the Association of American University Presses, Publication and the Future of Knowledge, Andrew Abbott suggests that this demand may not in fact have been met by the professoriat in the aggregate. He cites several studies, concluding that from the s to the s the number of journals and books as a ratio of professors has remained nearly constant. Or, to put this point another way, the amount of publication in the average scholarly career is about the same for the period under study.
The research cited, however, leaves many questions unanswered, beginning with the rate of publication for the period after In order to square this research with Lewontons observations, we would have to hypothesize that the demand for increased publication did not have a powerful effect on humanities scholars until the later s.
That decade also marks the decline of the job market, which suggests that the buyers market enforced a demand that was much harder to enforce previously.
In her broadside against Althusserian-derived symptomatic reading, The Limits of her in college so I downloaded the new one straight away'. Jackson, S. These views are disputed by traditional and conservative biblical scholars who consider Samson to be a literal historical figure and thus reject any connections to mythological heroes.
How Scholars Read.
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