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    Some background: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2026/may/12/thousands-of-university-of-nottingham-staff-told-they-are-at-risk-of-redundancy Not only does Nottingham University have a good academic reputation, the city of Nottingham has a great…

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In defense of English Departments!

Brian Leiter

Michael Clune (Case Western) replies at 3AM to Alex Rosenberg's criticisms.

Professor Clune's piece raises an interesting point:  namely, what's going on in English Departments today may not be what people like Alex and myself remember from the "bad old days," like the 1980s, when English Departments were (as Princeton's A. Walton Litz put it–I am paraphrasing from memory) "the repository for all the world's bad philosophy, bad social science, and bad history."  (Litz left the English Department at Princeton and moved to Creative Writing because, as he put it, he wanted to be around people "who liked reading literature.") 

So readers, especially those of you in English Departments, what's the story?  Is Prof. Clune right or Prof. Rosenberg?  Or is the reality somewhere inbetween?

Signed comments–full name and valid e-mail address–will be strongly preferred.  (One reason for valid e-mail addresses is that sometimes I need to ask the commenter a question about what appears to be an error or typo.  I do not disclose the e-mail addresses to anyone else.)

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36 responses to “In defense of English Departments!”

  1. Anonymous Undergrad

    I enrolled recently in an undergraduate English class on discussing literary theory through Joyce’s Dubliners. The teacher came in, sat crossed legged on the table, and proceeded to give a talk about how he didn’t consider himself a professor of English, but a philosopher, and that this class wasn’t an English class but a class about philosophy through Dubliners. I gave him the benefit of the doubt, hoping maybe something useful would come out of it, but the class ended up being awful and was filled with bad philosophy and bad interpretations of literature, and is so far the only ‘W’ I’ve ever had on my transcript. I have no idea if this experience is indicative of English departments today, and I sure hope it isn’t, but it has given me plenty of hilarious stories to tell to other philosophers about the state of “philosophy” in English departments.

    Reply
  2. Jonathan

    It seems as if you're asking if an English professor knows more about what goes on in English Depts. than a philosophy professor.

    Rosenberg's Atheist's Guide to Reality reveals a somewhat idiosyncratic and polemical attitude towards all of the humanities, not just English. I wonder how many philosophers agree with his skepticism of narrative explanation in history, for example.

    BL COMMENT: I am wondering how representative Prof. Clune's account is.

    Reply
  3. MHernandez

    I took two undergraduate English classes, both beginner level, early in my college career. Both times the professors talked constantly about how there is no such thing as an objective reality and how science is just one interpretation/opinion, as well as stating that ethics and morality were useless to talk about since it was all culturally relative. Anytime a student would try to challenge them on these topics they'd brush it off and say something to the effect of, "You would think that" and give a pity-laugh.

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  4. Jonathan

    I think Clune's account is representative, yes.

    Reply
  5. Mark Stephen Eberle

    I'm not convinced. The problems Rosenberg addressed in his article were essentially the reasons I had as an undergraduate for dropping my English major. Clune's defense of English departments was pretty vague, and one example he uses, Shakespeare studies, isn't monolithic. For every good Shakespeare scholar there are dozens of hacks, and there are so many increasingly creative ways the hacks ruin the literature. I saw Rosenberg's concern at least partly along the lines that the hacks are the ones who the average person comes into contact with and give the humanities a bad rap. This runs parallel to the concern in philosophy to give ourselves a better brand so people know what the hell it is we do. Does English have more hacks than philosophy? It's hard to say.

    Also, I tried to stay away from anecdote people seem to be offering stories about bad literature class experiences, here's one for you.

    I took an upper-level course two years ago, supposedly on Shakespeare's early comedies, in which we were to read three plays over the semester. However, instead of actually teaching the plays and giving us the pertinent academic details and historical context, our professor had also assigned a book of abstract art, which we would take out in class and write about how the art and the play illuminated each other and illuminated issues like morality, feminism, and reality. The art had nothing to do with the plays, and other than bare plot details, we didn't analyze or really learn anything the entire semester.

    I'm pretty sure this sort of thing isn't what Clune is defending, it seems to be exactly what Rosenberg is attacking, and I'd imagine it's probably more prevalent than we'd want to admit. That being said, I've heard plenty of horror stories from non-philosophers about intro Philosophy courses, so I don't know how easy this little spat is to adjudicate.

    Reply
  6. Landon W Schurtz

    I did my undergrad degree in English, and my department was mercifully free of "theory," generally speaking. But when I was in grad school, my fiance – an undergrad at the same institution – discovered the the departmental syllabus for the Comp classes were mostly laden with "social theory" and bad interpretations of Marx. My own experience in this regard (at several different schools, now) has been uneven – I see no clear trend as to whether English departments really are returning to a focus on literary works, their authors, and their historical context, or whether they remain committed to doing some parody of social science (sans methodology or expertise). I can say I wish they would stop trying to play with our toys, though – they tend to break them.

    Reply
  7. Will

    I am a M.A. student in English at a state school in the south. Although there are several courses on non-canonical writers at my university, the canonical writers still figure prominently. I have taken single-author courses on Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Jonson, and Milton. Even if students were to avoid taking courses on major authors (difficult for PhD students because of distribution requirements), they would still have to know something about them in order to pass comprehensive and preliminary exams. Contra Clune's claim, though, I've seen little interdisciplinary work. What I have seen typically incorporates either history or existentialist philosophers. Few people seem interested in philosophy outside of Sarte or Heidegger, and the sciences (and sometimes history) are frequently dismissed as irrelevant or unreliable.

    Reply
  8. Ken Hirschkop

    When I first read Alex Rosenberg's piece I was surprised. It's always suspicious when someone claims their own discipline has somehow avoided the rot that has beset everyone else's; shouldn't Rosenberg be self-reflective enough to wonder whether his pride in analytical philosophy was just a case of special pleading? I was trained as a graduate student in the 1980s, and I've taught in three English Departments since, one a mainstay of 'theory' when I worked there. Rosenberg's account sounds like a fantasy: in every place I worked teachers taught Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth and so on with just as much enthusiasm as Toni Morrison and Ngugi wa'Thiongo, and the 'theorists' were as insistent on close reading as anyone else. I'm sure there are terrible, platitude-spouting English professors today, but I also know they existed in the glorious past and I suspect there are some terrible philosophy professors out there as well.

    There are also two substantive issues which Rosenberg raises that merit comment. One concerns the claim that literature professors should be bearers of a 'continuous cultural tradition'. Whether there is a continuous cultural tradition (or in what respects we can make a claim for one) is one of the most important questions facing any cultural discipline, but it's a genuine question: much of the most interesting work in literary studies has pointed to discontinuities in the cultural traditions we have inherited. You can argue the case different ways, but you at least have to make an argument. Secondly, it's disappointing to hear a philosopher articulate what sounds like the crudest kind of positivism (the humanities shouldn't be engaged in making knowledge claims). I know there are movements within philosophy that imagine cognitive science will displace existing philosophical method and that many in the analytic tradition still think it will all come down to physics sooner or later, but I assumed there were still philosophers would be interested in articulating and defending the claims of the human sciences. All I could gather from Rosenberg was that, as so often is the case (and I'm sorry it's a platitude), arrogance goes hand-in-hand with foolishness.

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  9. Ed Barreras

    I was an English major in a very well regarded department during the early to mid-2000s. Incidentally, I was also a philosophy major during that time (this was a Leiter top 20 department). I have to say that polemics against Lit. departments like the latest one from Rosenberg have always puzzled me. The core of the curriculum I undertook consisted of three survey courses covering the major periods and authors, from Beowulf to Virginia Woolf, as it were. Shakespeare was required, and the Milton courses were large and filled up in a hurry. Contrary to what the polemicists would have us believe, Derrida, Lacan, and Lyotard did not form the central texts. In fact, they were hardly mentioned. And when they were mentioned, it was usually in the context of a non-mandatory survey course on literary theory. (Paul Fry's theory course at Yale is available in full on YouTube; as it seems fairly representative, I invite interested readers form their opinions based on it). Now perhaps I was lucky to have entered college after the 1990s purging of the charlatans and hucksters; I can't speak to that issue, as I have no wide-ranging knowledge of the scholarship that was produced during that period. My impression, though, is that the core education I received was not too different, in terms of content, from what an English undergrad in, say, 1970 would have received — with perhaps one major difference: It seems to me that of all the developments in literary theory, the ones that have had the most lasting impact are those that concern issues of race and gender (perhaps looked at through a 'New Historicist' lens). This strikes me as a mostly positive state of affairs, for surely understanding the ways in which literary works reflect the reigning ideologies of their time — as those relate to race and gender — is just as important as understanding their purely aesthetic, 'timeless' properties. Hence I am skeptical of those who would pooh-pooh the 'theory' era as having made no worthwhile contributions to the discipline.

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  10. Grad student in Classics

    I agree with Clune that Rosenberg's criticisms seem sweeping and dated. In my field, at least, we definitely still spend most of our time teaching students to appreciate canonical texts in the original languages. I also agree with Clune that Rosenberg's recommendation that the humanities be about "the business of moving us emotionally" seems not very well thought-out.

    Finally, I found Rosenberg's self-congratulatory praise of his own discipline a little distasteful. In my experience of philosophy professors, they are not always as skillful at negotiating the combination of canonical and contemporary texts as Rosenberg suggests. And surely an emphasis on research at the expense of undergraduate teaching and a failure to focus on foundational skills like clear writing are accusations that could be leveled at many professors/departments in various fields, at least at certain institutions?

    BL COMMENT: I would be surprised if Alex thought his criticisms applied to Classics.

    Reply
  11. Anonymous Grad Student

    As an undergrad, I generally found that courses did focus more on actual literature, although the big names of theory certainly were tossed around, usually just to give the students a sense of what they should know. During my senior year I took a grad course in "theory" where, in addition to Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud, there were also seminars and discussions dedicated to Saussure, Derrida, Lacan, Foucault, Postcolonialism, Feminism, and Queer Theory. It seemed bizarre to me that we would be talking about Saussure, even though he had no longer been deemed (from my understanding) a significant linguist for several decades. Why no word on Chomsky? Or Wittgenstein? This line of thinking raised my initial suspicions to the whole thing, and made me uncertain about applying to grad school. Indeed, I spoke with a student at Brown (a top program) who told me that their department is essentially just theory.

    These are tendencies that I try to strongly combat, believing that there is little to most of the "theory" aside from cheap gimmicks and flippant conjecturing. Students fall into it quite easily when they are fed this stuff uncritically by professors, eventually believing that Derrida was the most important philosopher in recent memory, and anybody who thinks otherwise just feels threatened by what he has to say. I have met such caricatures, and it's very disheartening. Students similarly fall into the jargon, taking atrocious prose as examples of how they should write.

    I spoke recently with a professor who shares my views and showed her Nussbaum's critique of Butler. She told me that, while she entirely agrees with the essay, no one will be convinced who is not already on her side. I objected, saying that a student who is not already inculcated into the stuff will certainly approach it differently if he/she hears prominent voices like those of Chomsky or Nussbaum denounce it.

    A few days ago I thought about something readers may find amusing, namely, the similarities between the people in these cults and viewers of Fox News. I find that the term "radical" is used in ways similar to how "Christian" or "American" is used by the demagogues on TV. They know the crowd they are playing to. When Judith Butler is charged with bad writing, she calls it "radical." Zizek never tires of telling everyone how "radical" he is. In reality, it is careerism with a lot of postures, a way of appealing to emotions and a crowd mentality.

    I am young, so I do not know how bad it was back in the day. That same professor of mine told me that things are better now than before, but, speaking from my own experiences, I think there is still much to be done. I would urge philosophers to try to create more contact with literature departments. Incidentally, I am at the École Normale Supérieure for the year, and the courses in philosophy here are similar to those I would expect to see in the US. Having gone through my course packet, the names that appear, from a wide selection of courses, are Dewey, Kant, Leibniz, Spinoza, Quine, Frege, Locke, Descartes, Lewis, Merleau-Ponty, Strawson, Adorno, Marx, Boolos, among many others. There is also significant overlap between philosophy and cognitive science. Nothing on postmodernism, although Badiou seems to be teaching a course called "The Immanence of Truths." The literature classes are also not really marked by "theory." Apologies if my post jumps around a bit.

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  12. Philosophy Grad Student

    I'm generally sympathetic with what Ken Hirschkop says here. I did my undergrad in philosophy in the mid to late 2000s at a Leiter top-15 that had an English department even more highly regarded, and I ended up taking a few courses. Anecdotal evidence: Two of the courses were taught by holdovers from the pre-theory era. (This was just by accident — I had no sense of what I was getting myself into, I just picked the courses that sounded interesting.) One of these two professors had basically given up any pretense that English had real "academic rigor" of any kind, and the class just involved discussing why certain sentences from Beckett and Nabokov were good. But he was really great at explaining why sentences were good, and I learned a ton from that class. The other was a similarly skilled close reader, but he also had an annoying axe to grind against anything that sounded theory-ish. (He marked down one of my papers for using the term "a priori.") Ironically, he was given to very pat moralizing about many of the texts we read and said a lot of things that were as dumb and philosophically immature as anything I've heard in the "but it's all a social construct man" vein. The third course I took was with a youngish professor who taught a good bit of theory alongside fat Victorian novels. But, he was not only fairly philosophically sophisticated– a lecture he gave on Foucault was as good as any I've seen in a philosophy department — but he taught the theory in such a way that it genuinely illuminated the novels. I'm still skeptical of Zizek's more strictly philosophical ideas, but I know that reading him in that class helped me appreciate Vanity Fair.

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  13. Anonymous Graduate Student

    At Carleton College, in the early 2000s, my required courses as an English major were as follows: English Literature 1, Beowulf to Milton; English Literature 2, Milton to T.S. Eliot; American Literature, Puritans to F. Scott Fitzgerald. Four seminars distributed across time periods, which I did as: Chaucer; Spenser/Milton; English Romantic Poets; Vladimir Nabokov. There was one required "Literary Methods" course, which was theory heavy and useful. Otherwise, while you could use theory in a paper if you wanted to, it rarely came up. There were a few feminist/outsider texts assigned, but I appreciated them. The canon was very much intact.

    At Harvard University, where I have been a graduate student in a related field for a few years, the department is if anything still more conservative. The ascendant methodology in English these days in any case is sociology, not 'theory' per se. A representative book is Mark McGurl's generally brilliant "The Program Era," which is as much a work of intellectual history as literary criticism. Surely some philosophers would take issue with it, but it's not bullshit.

    What those outside of literary studies don't seem to recognize is the continuing dominance of the field by historical interpretation. Far more historically contextualized studies of texts, authors, movements are published every year than theoretically inflected books. And with this kind of work, there really is a clear accumulation of knowledge. We know far more every year about literary history. For instance, we only learned in 1996 that James Fenimore Cooper's father had died of natural causes, not been assassinated, as had been believed for a century.

    The best analogy might be this: criticizing the English department these days as being dominated by theory is roughly like criticizing analytic philosophy as being dominated by logical positivism.

    Reply
  14. Jonathan Kramnick

    It's difficult to answer your question because the premise is so hostile. Are English Departments intellectually bankrupt? If not, when did they stop being so? Anyway, Alex Rosenberg's attack on English was shoddy and irresponsible. He provides no evidence for his claim that English has stopped teaching older, classic authors, a claim that is simply false as five minutes perusing course offerings online would show. He also provides no evidence for his claim that enrollments in philosophy remain robust as they have allegedly fallen elsewhere (this too would apparently not withstand any investigation, as Clune demonstrates). His only example is from Jonah Lehrer, who is not a professor of anything, let alone English. Imagine if I were to pen an attack on Philosophy using Deepak Chokra as my central exhibit! Anyhow, the vast majority of work in English consists of close readings of literary texts placed in some relation to historical and intellectual context. Rosenberg has not the remotest sense of what this work is like. Why on earth does he feel the need to attack a discipline with which he is not at all familiar? And this from a position that prides itself on rigor.

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  15. English PhD Candidate

    I'm a PhD candidate in English, doing the research I do and hoping to stay in academia precisely because I find so much of the research (and hence the approaches to teaching) in my field silly and misguided and changeworthy. It's amusing that the poster above mentions the over-use of the halo term "radical": when I was looking at programs to apply to, one very high-ranked department had put their most recent grad-student-prize-winning essay up online. It used the word 'radical' more than 50 times in 15 pages, and for no clear reason that I could see: it was standard-issue 80s Derrida. Much as a certain kind of graduate student in economics or, indeed, philosophy would crumble to dust if someone pointed out that not everything they do is "rational", a lot of my colleagues would curl up and die if they had to show that their claims to being personally, professionally, or research-ly "radical" were anything more than phatic.

    That said, I do think that some of the caricatures of the field as a whole are exaggerated. The era of high deconstruction is pretty much over, fewer professors will openly say (like Andrew Ross, the spur for A Walton Litz' comments) that they hate literature, and the end of the methodological lockstep of the deconstructionist era means that the field is, possibly to a balkanizing fault, currently going through an unusually open boom in methodological plurality. If that plurality still orbits a particular "destroy the bourgeois autonomous western subject" ideology and still operates in unanimous opposition to a non-existent enemy (a very silly caricature of mid-century analytic philosophy) then, well, you can't have everything…

    Anyhow, no personal perspective is as useful as actually providing examples of the state of things (what was that we were saying about dismissing things without experiencing them?), so here are a couple of links, firstly to things that sum up current methodological debates in English, and then to what I think are some viable projects that have emerged from English or literature departments that are literature-focused but interact usefully and (as far as I can tell) validly with Anglophone philosophy.

    The single most important essay in recent literary study, as far as I can tell from conversation and conference attendance, is Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's 'Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading' – http://nonoedipal.files.wordpress.com/2009/09/paranoid-reading-and-reparative-reading.pdf It's a manifesto against the default assumptions of literary study from the 70s through to the late 90s, that the whole job of literary scholars is to uncover and expose the hidden ideology underlying any text. It's clear and acknowledges the obviousness of its own point. Hearing this from one of their own has had a huge effect on high-profile literary theory people: there's a sort of scramble to be more than just paranoid that seems analogous to the way that deconstructionism suddenly scrambled to prove it had always been about ethics after Paul de Man's war writings were uncovered. So, if you want to know what's up in English departments, imagine the people who best fit the Rosenberg caricature all trying to work out how to frame what they've been doing as compatible with Sedgwick's critique.

    The most coherent methodological advance on this critique, I think, is Sharon Marcus and Steven Best's concept of 'surface reading' which grows out of Marcus' own earlier (and I think preferable) concept of 'just reading' – http://academiccommons.columbia.edu/download/fedora_content/download/ac:157280/CONTENT/rep.2009.108.1.1.pdf . It's an approach that suggests that we can get just as much out of literary study if we focus Only on surface details as if we treat all surface matter as ideological mystification.

    A related approach that has little to do with Sedgwick is Franco Moretti's development of a method for 'distant reading' – http://www.versobooks.com/books/1421-distant-reading – which basically involves attention to large-data phenomena rather than to the words of individual texts.

    And a much less influential book that I still think reflects some of literary study's growing self-consciousness about its silliest recent history is Christian Thorne's The Dialectic of Counter-Enlightenment, which is a genealogy of literary people's rejection of "philosophy" that shows how un-radical a lot of such rejecting has historically been – http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674035225 .

    As for recent things that take Anglophone philosophy seriously to say interesting things about literature in ways that I don't think Anglophone philosophers would scoff at, the following spring to mind (from an Americanist perspective):

    Lots of good stuff on original pragmatism (not the Rorty/Fish mode that literary study helped to popularize) and the relevance of its concepts of experience and dailiness to literary experience – http://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/literature/american-literature/natural-history-pragmatism-fact-feeling-jonathan-edwards-gertrude-stein , http://global.oup.com/academic/product/pragmatic-modernism-9780195389845?cc=us&lang=en& , http://english.yale.edu/experience-and-experimental-writing-literary-pragmatism-emerson-jameses , http://cup.columbia.edu/book/978-0-231-14930-3/the-poetics-of-the-everyday

    On Sellarsian concepts of agency and their role in mid-century fiction that doesn't just reject personal agency as a category like mainstream literary theory does – http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/?GCOI=80140100411180&fa=author&person_id=1738

    On the centrality of logical positivist fact/value distinctions to mid-century fiction – http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/product/9780199890408.do

    On the philosophical context of civil-war-era literature's treatment of slavery – books.google.com/books?isbn=0521846536

    This kind of work is entirely non-mainstream in English, but it is getting done. Rosenberg's critique isn't totally wrong about mainstream English-department thinking, but English currently has a less lockstep mainstream than at any time in the recent past. Caricaturing the whole discipline along the lines of that dissolving consensus won't help it shed its sillier bits any quicker.

    Reply
  16. Anonymous Grad Student

    I wrote earlier from the perspective of a student in Comparative Literature, where the atmosphere is, I think, different than in English. The courses I took in English had no mention of theory. In Comp Lit, the theory stuff is not really laid on until grad school. Some students ignore it, but I think that many still get swept up in it.

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  17. Brian Edwards

    As often, Kingsley Amis at least raises the right question: "Ask yourself whether our literature has improved or declined since it began to be studied as a university subject. Start with English poetry."

    I think our literature has indeed declined, but our philosophy has improved.

    Reply
  18. Blinn Combs

    Two points. I suspect part of what is driving Rosenberg's criticism is perspectival distortion. Surely professional philosophers are going to be sensitive to bungled intrusions into their professional turf, and such bungled attempts have become increasingly incorporated into the popular caricature of "literary studies" and "comparative literature" departments. (The latter are particularly easy targets, as one gets the sense merely from the titles of courses and books that too many different strands of thought and areas of ostensible expertise are comingled to produce a coherent narrative, much less an exercise in critical thought. The resultant impression is that the advanced training involves learning how to write things that people who have written relevantly similar things will like–problematically a caricature which applies uncomfortably well to most humanities research.) And surely some of the mishmash that flies under the banner of "theory" has had a damaging effect on otherwise promising minds, at least at the graduate level (allowing for the bias of self-selection). But of course the bread and butter of Literature departments in their undergraduate courses remains much the same. It's also expanded into other territories, but what hasn't? (Philosophy of Comic Books, anyone?)

    The other part is just the narcissism of narrow differences. And so, philosophers still teach Plato and Hume, and English profs still teach Shakespeare and Chaucer, but both camps tend to stray fairly wide of the classics. So philosophers can (and should) talk about the value of (good) fiction to enliven our understanding of (e.g.) complex emotional reactions and different conceivable possibilities, and will often make rather uncritical use of such "intuitions" or "thought experiments" in their own work. And teachers of literature (of which philosophers are, of course, a prominent type!) should do their best to clearly analyze texts (a process which, more than any specialized tricks of any trade, requires time, the study of a variety of good examples, and a lot of trial and error–bearing in mind that the perception of error is highly sensitive to trained preferences). Part of Rosenberg's criticism is just a proxy for his judgment that people in the humanities have let a lot of bad examples slip through. (And who would disagree? :)) Along the same lines, it would be somewhat charitable to describe a lot of what flies under the banner of analytic metaphysics and modal logic as forays into an exceedingly dry realm of fantasy fiction. But who could persuasively deny that such stuff is common stock among graduate-level philosophical training? If you don't understand the basics, you won't understand a lot of what gets published in professional journals. Needless to say, that's no argument for either canonical status or inclusion in any core curriculum. But it is a fact about the discipline in its current incarnation.

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  19. Current Philosophy Postgrad

    My experience of the sort of thing noted above has mostly not been through English students, who in the two institutions I've studied in (both in the British Isles) have mostly been into early English literature, from Chaucer through to roughly Shakespeare, I guess. I do keep finding it in philosophy students though. Not so much in my current department, but in my old department and in people from other departments, I find claims like "Analytic philosophy has no history before Russell, while continental philosophy dates back to Plato" (made as a claim about 'continental' philosophy's value), or that the analytic tradition or school has nothing to say on ethics.

    I do find some things like this in other humanities/arts fields though, such as Art History, Music Theory, and that slightly odd field, Human Geography.

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  20. Anonymous new PhD

    Clune’s response to Rosenberg contains some apt points: undergraduate courses still tend to be highly canonical, and many, perhaps most, of these courses do not assign “theory.” I also found particularly bizarre the claim that literature classes should be limited to helping students to respond emotionally to literature, as it supposes that there is no such thing as validity in interpretation. Does Rosenberg think that historians of philosophy who puzzle over the meaning of difficult passages in Plato or Spinoza are wasting their time? Equally perplexing to me is Rosenberg’s exhortation that the humanities “surrender the pretension of competing with science on its own explanatory turf.” I cannot imagine that it would occur to anyone, in any literature department anywhere, that they are competing with science “on its own explanatory turf.” Most of us are trying to understand literature, and it is no insult to the physicist to point out that the tools of physics are little help in the analysis of, say, the influence of Lucretius on sixteenth-century French literature, or the structures of Middle English alliterative verse. I have the most profound respect for scientists, and I leave their work to them. I have many friends in my field, and as far as I know none of them feels otherwise. But we also think our own work is important, insofar as the history of human culture is important, and the arts are an important part of human experience.

    I don’t have any quarrel with fellow literary scholars who want to produce interdisciplinary work that draws on the sciences in intellectually responsible ways. But one does not have to choose between, on one hand, interpretive methodologies validated by the sciences and, on the other, postmodern “theory.” Much of the best literary scholarship now relies on neither of these. Instead of referencing cheap popular books of the “Mark Twain was a Brain Scientist” type and lamenting the influence of “theory,” why doesn’t Rosenberg pick up a book by Helen Vendler, or Daniel Heller-Roazen, or David Quint, or Giuseppe Mazzotta?

    Some literary scholarship is misguided, pretentious, or brainless, but there are impostors in every field. I would like to remind Rosenberg that intelligent design advocates can point to the credentials of Michael Behe and other scientists. Also, I have read many anecdotes, like some recounted in the comments above, of literary professors deriding the sciences, or heaping French "theory" on freshman, and I don't doubt that these people exist. But somehow I spent four years as an undergraduate literature major, and six years as a graduate student, without ever once encountering such characters.

    BL COMMENT: Michael Behe, a professor at Lehigh, is the only actual scientist to have written in defense of intelligent design; his own department repudiated his work (while defending his right, as a matter of academic freedom, to produce this work). I think the worry is that there are more "imposters" in literary studies than other fields, a point which some other comments do seem to support.

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  21. Anonymous new PhD

    Michael Behe might be the only scientist to have written in favor of it, but the Discovery [sic] Institute's website does mention several other scientists who do research that is inspired by, or implicitly grants some merit to, intelligent design: Scott Minnich, a microbiologist at the University of Idaho; Ralph Seelke, a microbiologist at University of Wisconsin, Superior; Wolf Ekkehard Lönnig, a scientist at the Max Planck Institute; Guillermo González, an astrophysicist, formerly of Iowa State University. I won't dispute, though, the claim that on the whole there is much more nonsense in literary studies. I only propose that accounts of this are enormously exaggerated and have given rise to pop-cultural myths that a) have little to do with what goes on in most classrooms and b) have a remarkable uptake among people, like Rosenberg, who lack knowledge of the field.

    BL COMMENT: The Discovery [sic] Institute is not a great source, as we clearly agree. The analogy would be more apt if the folks named by DI were at UC Irvine, Duke, and Yale…but they aren't. In any case, I think this is a side issue, and your criticisms can stand independent of them.

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  22. Peter Buchanan

    Brian, in your comments you say that you (and I assume Rosenberg) are concerned about whether or not there are more "imposters" in literary studies than in other fields. I can't help but think, then, that it is rather damning that the only book Rosenberg cites as evidence of the rot in English departments is one written by Jonah Lehrer who did not do an undergraduate or doctoral degree in English and does not teach any classes in English departments. If these charlatans are so easy to find, then why on earth can't Rosenberg talk about any of them? Would you like it if I said that philosophical approaches to neuroscientific research are all stupid and cited Lehrer's book as evidence? You would rightly conclude that I didn't know anything about philosophy as it is conducted at universities and ignore me as a crank.

    I think on the whole, Clune's picture of English departments is much more accurate than Rosenberg's caricature. I do think that if Rosenberg were to actually approach the topic in a serious way he would find lots of great scholarship going on (as well as some mediocre scholarship and some execrable scholarship but not, I think in a higher proportion than what happens in philosophy departments). I don't think people are as hard on Derrida and Lacan as you would like for them to be, but they're also generally seen as quite dated for most work that is going on today.

    My own experience has been that students can get as much or as little theory as they want in literature departments. As an undergraduate at the University of Kansas I didn't have any required readings that would be considered theoretical. The closest I think I came would have been my own independent readings in Bakhtin that influenced my undergraduate thesis. In graduate courses at the University of Toronto I did some theory reading in courses, although because I was at the Centre for Medieval Studies it would have been pretty easy to avoid it all together. But I always found it useful and there was never a class that felt like it was pushing theory on me while excluding literature. To the contrary, the class with the most theoretical content was also one that required extensive work in palaeography, manuscript studies, and had multiple articles giving historical, literary, and theoretical context for every work of literature we read which was still the primary focus of the class. My experience has generally been that the most theoretically savvy professors are also the most demanding with regard to quality of thought, awareness of historical context, and attention to the primary text.

    I will also say that as an undergraduate, my (small) exposure to philosophy was that it was taught with lazy pedagogy by small-minded bureaucrats who were slavishly devoted to maintaining the status quo of university administration. I concluded, however, that I had simply had a couple bad experiences with particular professors rather than chalking it up to systemic rot.

    Now, I do think that there is a genuine difference in philosophy and English with regard to the canon. When I attend philosophy conferences there is much more of a sense that everyone has read the same texts and is capable of debating finer points in them, whereas in English there is a lot of emphasis on discovering things in texts that have not been read as much. However, that is not to say that people are not also doing tons of research on canonical authors. I think there are good and bad things in both systems. One unfortunate consequence of this in English is that the oldest part of the literary tradition is quietly being removed from English departments. Anybody who has been paying attention to hiring trends in English will be aware that most departments (even world class ones like UCLA and Penn) don't have Anglo-Saxonists and if they teach Old English at all it is usually by later medievalists or people in other periods who have a personal interest in the subject. And if the current trend of hiring people with specialty in late-medieval/early modern is any indication, something similar may soon be happening to Chaucer.

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  23. Dean C. Rowan

    I'm encouraged by the several cautionary remarks appearing here, the comments about differences among literature departments, the worry that exaggeration of Derrida's stature as a philosopher will send students the wrong message. (I don't care about Derrida's philosophy, and I can't stomach some of his writing, but some of it is delightful.) I can't speak to how English is taught today. I can only recall my undergraduate study, which culminated in 1981, and was meat-and-potatoes (Milton, Romantic poets, Eliot, a workshop with John Ciardi, etc.) with a garnish of theory. With respect to the latter, we read a good deal *about* the topic (Hazard Adams' anthology of excerpts ancient and modern, none later than 1965, but also Stanley Fish's marvelous Self-Consuming Artifacts [1972], Hirsch's Validity in Interpretation [1967], and the like). We did not attempt to *do* theory. But after graduation I stuck with the trends and continued to read de Man, Culler, Miller, Bloom, and the gang for several years. A good popular account of the advent of theory and of Derrida's insinuation into literature departments is a Feb. 9, 1986, New York Times Magazine article, "The Tyranny of the Yale Critics." There Geoffrey Hartman, one of the eponymous tyrants, concedes that "deconstructors" can be "too cute and deliberate, too self-conscious … [a]nd that can be a bad habit." We find mild correctives to comments above. For example, EnglishPhDcandidate's formidable remarks claim "deconstructionism suddenly scrambled to prove it had always been about ethics after Paul de Man's war writings were uncovered." Not quite. De Man's wartime writings were discovered in 1987. By then J. Hillis Miller, another tyrant, had already written a good deal about the ethics of reading. A charitable reading of the Times piece reveals, I think, that some of the celebrity scholars accused then of inflicting a wound on the humanities in fact held much less extreme views than we tend to ascribe to them, and that, ironically, even they were worried about the threat of impostors.

    The latest issue of Daedalus is devoted to "What Humanists Do." A skim suggests none of the contributors is working on scientific approaches to reading or literary experience as advised by Clune. Nor are any of them working with vast digital corpora. Rather, it appears they are all reading important texts they'd been asked to identify and comment upon. There is a good deal of disciplinary fraternizing. One piece riffs on Cavell, Benjamin, and Nietszche. Another invokes Mozart and Purcell. And so forth. Largely, the issue is tradition- and canon-enforcing, which I suppose is not surprising coming from the Academy. Ever the ethical prod, Hillis Miller contributes "What Ought Humanists To Do?" I cheated and read the last paragraph, which commences, "Helping students share in my joy of the text is what I do as a humanist and feel I ought to do." Perhaps this is what Rosenberg intends by "the business of moving us emotionally," but somehow I doubt Hillis Miller perceives his enterprise as a business.

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  24. Roger Albin

    "The cognitive science of perception helps Gabrielle Starr to understand why writers often create literary ‘images’ appealing to multiple senses — as in Elizabeth Bishop’s description of knowledge as “dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free.” Starr employs new models of cognitive architecture to trace patterns of “excitatory” and “inhibitory” connections between sense-images, patterns which she argues underlie poetry’s aesthetic pleasure."

    Prof. Clune apparently takes what sounds like drivel seriously. Sokal could hardly have done better. It looks like faux Neuroscience is replacing faux philosophy in English departments. I'm sure that Clune is correct about the largely canonical nature of undergrad instruction in English, but Rosenberg's remarks were addressed also at scholarly research in English departments.

    Its an interesting question why English departments became such a large component of the humanities and undergrad education. This is partly a consequence of 19th century romantic nationalism with its push for national literatures coupled with romantic exaltation of artistic creativity. As these things gradually fade, the role of English departments will diminish.

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  25. Nicholaos Jones

    I am married to a Literature professor (ethnic American lit.), and we've had quite a few discussions about what she thinks she's doing while teaching and using "theory." I think her views align more closely with Clune's than with Rosenberg's, but I think she has a broader view than Clune. So I thought I'd share what I think I understand about how theory and lit, or at least a certain conception of "what literature knows."

    Start with the assumption that all reading is reading-as. (Think N.R. Hanson on "seeing"/"seeing-as".) Then what's going on in a literature class is skill developing in reading texts — different ways to read texts, and standards of assessment (about whether the particular reading is a good one) appropriate for those ways. For example, one might read a piece of fiction as an instance of some genre (say, an epic or a tragedy); then standards of assessment for that reading might include close attention to plot and other textual details. Or one might read a text as a political artifact — as a contribution to some real-world issue regarding identity, inclusion, etc, or as (say) a postcolonial response to instances of colonialism (e.g., -Heart of Darkness- vs. -Nervous Conditions-); in such cases, standards of assessment might depend less heavily upon close or extensive attention to textual details and more heavily upon the relation between particular excerpts and extra-textual information about the relevant issue. Or one might read a text as a response to another text (e.g., reading -Pym- as a response to Poe's -The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket,- Or one might read a text as a vehicle for inducing certain emotional states; or as an extended thought experiment; or as a test of some theory (think Bennett's famous essay on Huck Finn and conscience); or …. But there's no such thing as "just reading" a text (despite frequent complaints from students that they want to just read the books).

    Different ways of reading a text produce different kinds of knowledge — perhaps deeper appreciation of the text as an instance of a particular genre, or insights into the text that might have been obscured or ignored by more "natural" ways of reading (think about how gestalts work), or knowledge about one as a reader (e.g., assumptions one is bringing to the text, reasons driving preference for one way of reading rather than another, etc). (On this last point: my wife reports that many students like to read contemporary Native American lit. as historical and anthropological, even when the novel is set in the past (pre-encounter with Europeans) and there are no reliable sources to confirm or deny, say, depictions of certain ceremonies; but many students don't have this inclination for Asian-American lit. Go figure.)

    As for the role of "theory" in all of this, both Rosenberg and Clune strike me as having very narrow conceptions of theory (Rosenberg perhaps more than Clune). As I understand it from discussions with those who claim to "do theory," "theory" can include any extra-textual general idea — economic theory, sociological theory, theory about history, psychoanalytic theory, linguistic theory, ethical theory, scientific theory, and so on. The theory needn't be contained in the text being studied (although it may, and Clune mentions this). Indeed, bringing theory to bear upon a text is one way of reading a text. And there are may ways to do this: interpreting characters in light of a theory (Clune mentions this too), using theory to discuss author motivations for writing a character one way rather than another (especially when the author changes the narrative between editions–cf. The Antelope Wife), using theory to assess how well a text instantiates a certain genre (e.g., answering "what is an epic?" requires a theory), using theory to understand how the text (as a political artifact) contributes to a past or ongoing conversation on some issue (e.g., what it shows about how those who have been colonized choose to write their fiction), and so on. (For those interested in this, I have had recommended to me -The Theory Toolbox- by Nealon and Giroux.) Of course, sometimes the theory originates within lit. as a discipline. For instance, one might gather together a range of texts that share certain features in order to construct criteria for a new genre (e.g., a friend of ours is doing this for the currently-nonexistent genre 'American adrenaline narrative'); then, having constructed the criteria, one might read various texts as instances of that genre.

    If one thinks of teaching lit. in this way, and of theory in this way, Clune gives a better representation of English departments than Rosenberg: there's no getting around theory, because there's no way to avoid reading the text in some particular way and every way of reading a text involves (or presupposes) some kind of theory (in a broad sense of 'theory'). As for specifics, the English department at my university includes only two people who consider themselves to be teachers of "theory," but everyone else is also doing "theory" in some way or other too — by teaching how to do close readings, or how to read poems as beautiful, or how to queer Shakespeare, …. Of course, styles for writing in research differ — my impression is that there's more emphasis on walking readers through the experience of coming to read a text in a particular way and less emphasis on presenting a particular reading concisely and precisely (but I might be mistaken).

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  26. Michael Clune

    Perhaps Albin would like to read Starr's work before passing judgement. I refer interested readers to Starr's faculty profile at NYU, where readers will find the relevant citations. I note also that she is the recipient of an NSF grant, and coauthor of papers published in neuroscience journals. It may well be that some people in the field will contest her findings, but to dismiss them out of hand as drivel seems a little…much. (I will also note that Starr is the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at NYU.)

    http://english.fas.nyu.edu/object/GabrielleStarr.html

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  27. English PhD Candidate

    Just to calibrate my earlier post (no. 15), I think I got a bit carried away failing to differentiate "mainstream" in the sense of daily classroom practice from "mainstream" in the sense of research-thinking towards the high-prestige theory journals. Nicholas Jones' account of what "theory" might mean in the undergraduate classroom is vividly right. On those grounds, Rosenberg is way off. But at the same time, I do think the "theory is whatever you choose to do to the text, just know that there's no pre-theoretical doing" logic gives way as you rise up the totem pole of professionalisation. Once you get to the big journals and the star-hiring departments, there's a very policed conception of what's theoretical and what's sub-theoretical, based largely on what's acceptable/"radical" and what's drearily not (no. 13 above is right that much of what's done in English [and not seen by people in other disciplines] is historical sociology around literary work, but it's rarely sociology as sociologists understand it, and within English it's low-prestige work unless it's in the service of the central "theoretical" givens, or unless it markets its sociology as itself a theoretical stance [book history is a field that's done this pretty well, for example].). It's certainly not live and let live, and the constraints of prestige theory's done-thingness do, eventually, constrain the kind of things that get done in classrooms.

    To that extent, the connections Rosenberg draws between literary research's guiding ideologies and English professors' distaste for teaching composition seem worth pursuing (Clune doesn't address this, which is a shame). Under the heading of "radical" suspicion of intro-to-writing capabilities like standards of evidence and reason, cultivation of judgment, or attention to interlocutor intention, we've made them a zero-prestige proposition within the discipline and hived their teaching off to a near-zero-remuneration underclass of adjuncts.

    On Dean Rowan's point about Hillis Miller, see Geoffrey Galt Harpham's account of the de Man affair:
    "The timing of the discovery had an unfortunate effect on J Hillis Miller's 1986 book The Ethics of Reading… de Man had, according to Miller, erased from the reading subject every concern but respect for the text. A properly respectful or ethical reading, Miller had argued, lingered in the apprehension of textual undecidability… measured against the virtually infinite prolongation Miller had envisioned, any definite judgment could seem premature, or 'unethical.' Although mounted with considerable energy and commitment, the argument that de Man's ethics could only be judged in de Man's terms was not universally persuasive" (Shadows of Ethics p21).
    Which is to say, Hillis Miller's celebratory textualist ethics had to give way, in the wake of a de Man affair that made them look cheaply exculpatory and inhuman, to an autobiography of deconstructionism in which it had always, honest we promise, been effectually concerned with respect for otherness of the living, embodied kind. The "scramble" I mentioned was to ground such an account (settling quickly and dubiously on "Levinas as prototype deconstructive ethicist", retrofitting "Violence and Metaphysics" into the center of the deconstructionist canon, etc.).

    I'm not at all invested in the vocabulary of "fraud," but the deconstruction era does seem from my present-day reading if its texts like a high-water mark of disciplinary bad faith, and despite that era being over I think it left literary study a lot of bad psychological/linguistic axioms and some excruciating rhetorical tics. People from other disciplines seem to get hung up on the latter, but I'd like to think that glasnost between Anglophone literature and philosophy departments would have more to offer regarding the former. Then maybe the good stuff being done in English departments might get a chance to help philosophers nuance their understandings of context, rhetoric, signification, and the transmission, modulation, and extension of concepts by unordinary language.

    One fine day…

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  28. David Beard, Associate Professor of Rhetoric

    I find it odd that people without training beyond the undergraduate level or a grad elective would feel capable and confident of critiquing the necessary work of another field.

    I teach at a midsized regional state school, MA-terminal in English & Rhetoric, BA-terminal in philosophy. If an English PhD examined the catalog of courses in the Philosophy department at my university, they might claim that Philosophy has, outside a sequence of 4 courses [ancient, medieval, enlightenment, and modern histories of philosophy], abandoned its obligation to teach the grand cultural and historical traditions that make philosophy great in favor of a scientistic approach to knowledge-making in the analytic tradition. I would expect that most folks on this blog would think it unfair as a representation of the field.

    I might also believe that it would in appropriate for someone not trained in philosophy to assert what the curricular goal of philosophy "should" be.

    I would also guess that, having taken an elective undergraduate ethics course would not qualify me to claim that Philosophy, as a field, is too much fixated on ethics.

    What level of knowledge is necessary to critique a field? We can debate that, I hope, but I think it is more knowledge than is visible in some of the comments here. I might be tempted to say: at minimum, an MA degree in the field? I[m not convinced that all BA students really get an insight into what professional work in a field entails.

    I am not an English professor, my degree was from a now-shuttered ag school, in a program type of which there were, at most, 10 in the nation. So maybe I am oversensitive to the gaps that exist between disciplines.

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  29. Will

    I left a then top-ten program in Philosophy after getting the MA in order to get a PhD in English from one of the five or six best programs in the country, and I now teach in an interdisciplinary program in the humanities. I haven't seen it all, but I have seen a lot of it.

    More than philosophy, English is a faddish discipline. (Philosophy is, in my opinion, the least faddish of the humanities by a fair stretch. Partly this is due to the intellectual intensity and almost combative nature of its academic culture, and partly – – I am coming more and more to think – – it has to do with Philosophy being an article and not a book discipline.)

    When I was in grad school in English , the discipline was dominated by historical approaches to literary analysis that, while often illuminating, usually made much bigger claims than were warranted by the evidence. (Rosenberg describes a different time in the discipline, the 1980s and 1990s,when both High Theory (Derrida, Barthes, de Man) and the Canon Wars were in full effect.) For more or less thirty years now, you would have been more likely to encounter claims such as the following:the Renaissance "invented" self – fashioning, the Victorian novel "invented" gays, and so on. Lots of this stuff was reliant (obviously) on taking as gospel truth (a much simplified version of) Foucault's work of the 1970s. More recently, however, the very top departments have witnessed something of a return to close textual analysis and legitimate interdisciplinarity, especially drawing on law and history. At the same time, you have people meddling around with cognitive science, evolutionary accounts of literature (yes,you read that right) and even quantitative analysis. Most of this latter work strikes me as faddish. (Though I am quite prepared to believe that there are exceptions. I have not read Starr's work (referenced above) and so can't comment.)

    Two things you should understand about English : first, second and third tier departments often exhibit an academic culture that is an exact snapshot of what the top departments were like ten or more years ago. (Hardly anybody worth taking to ever bandies about the word "theory" any more, even as there are entire departments stuck in 1999.); second, because English organizes itself historically rather than topically (for the most part), its scholarship and teaching tend to get more rigorous the further it reaches back in time. (This only holds locally, of course.) This is because you need to learn a whole lot of history, theology, political theory, law, and Latin if you want to say anything interesting about sixteenth century drama, and because scholars studying this period, as well as those studying medieval literature, have always basically retained a focus on close reading and historical context – – both of which guard against some of the, shall we say, conceptual creativity that goes on elsewhere.

    By the way Philosophers, I hope I do not too inflate your pride if I say–speaking from a fair amount of anecdotal experience-that we only do one thing better, and you do two. For the most part, we are better readers. But you are much the better arguers, and, what is more, far and away the better prose stylists–even if lots of what you write is boring. That's not too bad, since lots of what we write is unintelligible – – or maybe just really profound.

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  30. Dean C. Rowan

    I am in complete agreement with English PhD Candidate's account of the embarrassment and defensiveness exhibited by many of de Man's friends and colleagues in response to the discovery of the wartime journalism. The volume of "responses" prepared by admirers and detractors alike following the revelation of the writings can serve as Exhibit 1. However, not having Miller's 1985 lecture at hand, I'm not entirely comfortable accepting Harpham's spin. An early review of Miller's book recognized his commitment to careful reading (of literary texts or of philosophical texts approached with an eye to their literary value), his at least implicit concession that "the general unreadability of texts still allows for an elimination of misreadings." It turns out Miller's a teddy bear. And so I'm also in accord with Will's diagnosis. English, perhaps literary studies generally, is faddish, inviting excessive enthusiasm among the skirmishers. Take, for example, the projects Clune describes involving examination of literary accounts of addiction and of the Gibson's contributions to a popular ethos of the internet. On their own terms, these are worthy academic pursuits aimed at gleaning "literary knowledge." But how do they contribute to literary appreciation? I'm willing to bet that graduate students of literature even today are first drawn to their studies by the experience of reading and not by their ancillary effects elsewhere in the academy.

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  31. Jake Spinella

    I'm a senior philosophy major at UNC Chapel Hill who takes mostly lit, comp lit, and media studies as his non-major classes (not its own department at UNC, but it was at my prior institution, University of South Carolina) and from my admittedly small sample size I think Rosenberg's critique is pretty dated. The English classes at both of the institutions I attended were concerned first and foremost with close reading of texts and their historical contexts–"theory" was touched upon but not treated as definitive or necessary to the understanding of the text under scrutiny. One English class on modernist literature in my freshman year assigned us, to my great pleasure, Beardsley and Wimsatt's "The Intentional Fallacy" to read in the context of Eliot's lit crit and the rise of New Criticism. I have no stories of the quack English professor that some of the previous commenters have relayed; even classes heavily invested in ethnic literature and issues of post-colonial society (subjects that would, it seem, be ripe for the kind of "theory"–a bit of it good, most of it bad–that the analytic tradition is hostile to) were, again, concerned with close reading of literary texts and their historical contexts through primary documents. In short, all of my English classes have been rewarding educational experiences that were respectful of the literary canon while also interested in bringing previously marginalized minority groups into the canonical fold.

    Comp lit and media studies seems to me where most of the theory happens. I took a mixed grad-undergrad film theory class at South Carolina that was a mixed bag, filled with all the standard theory types: Lacan, Althusser, Horkheimer and Adorno (H & A are cool with me though), etc. However there was also really interesting empirical work on cultural interaction in the media and how other cultures interact with American media exports. The professor, despite being inundated in this theory, wasn't given to lame platitudes but was interested in explaining how these thinkers could be brought to bear on film and film criticism. A comp lit class at UNC was the same way (we were forced to read Latour, much to my chagrin) and the professor treated Zizek as a serious philosopher (there was, mericfully, no Zizek assigned)–he was still, however, clear and concise, with interesting ideas on the subject at hand. Neither of these professors were charlatans (at least in their capacity as professors–I have no idea what their work is like), and I think that while "bad English" may be alive, it is certainly not well–it being vitiated by the blowback from the Sokal hoax onward. What follows is mere conjecture, but I think most professors who engage with this stuff and weren't around for the 80's are much like the ones listed above: smart people who mistake certain work as intellectually serious and then waste time engaging with it without it completely dominating their paradigm–it is modestly pernicious at best. I could be very wrong of course, as I don't know the realities of every English/Comp Lit/Media Studies department.

    Rosenberg's assertion that English departments need to teach students how to emotionally involve themselves with literature is lame and ham-fisted. It is an open question whether or not art can provide interesting propositional knowledge (Stolnitz in "On The Cognitive Triviality of Art", thinks it can't, for example) but Rosenberg's assertion that English departments are in some kind of turf war with science to determine who has a monopoly on knowledge is absurd and patently false. English departments are informed by and in dialogue with science in most everything they do (I'm writing a paper on cognitive science and Don Quixote, for a proof-of-concept) and much of contemporary literature is engaged in that dialogue (one of my professors is interested in Richard Powers, an author who is deeply concerned with neuroscience and identity). To throw that all away and argue that in teaching English and doing criticism we should only aim to move our audience gives short shrift to an important philosophical issue that is really important scaffolding for his argument (is art cognitively trivial?) and is a little bit chauvinist.

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  32. Michael

    I am an MA student in English, finishing my last semester while working on a thesis on John Milton. My undergraduate was a double major in both English and Philosophy, and I am currently awaiting responses from Ph.D programs across the country for a doctoral program in Philosophy. I have wide experience in both programs.

    Rosenberg is certainly right that teaching the canon of one's discipline is central. Indeed, one of the strengths of philosophy is that it is often taught from a historical standpoint, showing the evolution of ideas through different contexts. Yet my own program at a California State University in English literature has been nearly identical, both as an undergraduate and a graduate student. Survey courses are mandatory, with two semesters of British literature followed by one semester of American literature, mostly covering dead white dudes, with the occasional female author. Once the surveys are completed, majors take seminars on the canon that are organized by time period or theme, e.g., "17th Century British Drama," "The Long 18th Century," "Milton and His Age," "Anglo-Saxon Literature," etc. There is one theory class for our undergraduates, and one theory class for our graduates.

    Of course, part of Rosenberg's objection hinges on the quality of the theory used, much of which he implies is probably BS. And if he doesn't, the comments section of this blog certainly do. But I think most of this stems from not understanding that literature studies are all about interpretation, and interpretation does not follow the same rules as the sciences. The sciences are remarkably conservative in their core. They insist on teaching predominantly widely held theories and observations, while "fringe" ideas such as Max Tegmarks Level IV Multiverse or Lee Smolin's new time theory are only broached in popular works and graduate level studies. This is probably as it should be, because the sciences are seeking a kind of singular truth about their subject – the nature of biology, the nature of physical matter, etc. In contrast, literary studies are not looking for the singular truth of a work; indeed, works that only admit singular readings are often vigorously excluded from academic interest. Rather, literary scholars are interested in works that are so rich with potential meaning, that they can be read from many different angles fruitfully. These angles are interpretations. For example, in my field of Milton studies, Milton's most well-known piece, "Paradise Lost," can be read from the perspective of Adam & Eve as the tragic heros of the poem, or with Satan as the tragic hero. Additionally, the poem can be read historically, as a theodicy, as a theory of interpretation itself, as realist hypothesis of biblical myth, and more. Theories such as Marxism or psychoanalysis may not be useful for the sciences, but they are helpful for seeing new ways in which a text can be engaged with. Where the sciences perhaps prize singularity, literature (and I would argue, the humanities generally, including philosophy) prize multiplicity. In the last analysis, literary studies are way more theoretically experimental; they dare to take more risks at improbable possibilities that deviate from the conservative center of "accepted readings."

    Indeed, to defend my last sentence, I would add that philosophy's hallmark is not its conservativism, but its own experimentality. Philosophers constantly propose and defend radically counter-intuitive and counter-establishment theses, such as David Lewis' modal realism, Ted Sider's recent mereological nihilism or Rosenberg's own anti-intentionalism. What makes philosophy great is that it is a space for pushing thought beyond empiricism and lab equipment, to see how far thought can go and how many creative theoretical approaches we can bring to bear on research problems for comparison. Moreover, much of philosophy has been labors in re-reading the canon in new ways, re-engaging with Plato or Kant or Spinoza to discover new insights in their work. This interpretive labor is identical to the interpretive project in literature. Indeed, this is where Clune is at his best – literature is interdisciplinary wherever it draws on other disciplines to provide fresh insights and interpretations on a work. Rosenberg may think that finding neuroscince precursors in Proust is pointless, but isn't that exactly what Antonio Damasio (a neuroscientist) has done with Spinoza? If modern neruoscience helps us better understand Spinoza's project, why can't neuroscience help make more explicit what Proust was unconsciously doing?

    In conclusion, I want to add that I find just as much fault with the recent naturalistic trend in analytic philosophy to hand all its interesting problems wholesale over to the sciences (see for example Rosenberg's own Atheist Guide, where it seems only the sciences produce any knowledge). In fashioning itself as a handmaiden to the sciences' advance, rather than as a valkyrie defending Truth or as the discipline which analyzes the content of thought itself (Dummett's phrase), analytic philosophy has rendered itself largely the object of derision by scientists such as Stephen Hawking. Hawking's now infamous comments in "The Grand Design" may be ill-informed, but it's hard to see how it Rosenberg disagrees with him in the Atheist Guide, where physics fixes all the facts. Instead, I find literary scholars courageous, insisting that interpreting texts is not something that depends on the sciences for justification. The sciences may yield tools for interpretation, as Lisa Zunshine as demonstrated using cognitive science to read literature, but the actual interpretive work still must be done, and is still undetermined by and autonomous from the sciences. What Clune should have said is that creation in the fine arts and interpretation in the humanities are autonomous disciplines producing a multiplicity of meanings, a liberal march of thought that is worthwhile precisely because it resists the necessary singularity of the sciences in their insistence on one pre-eminent interpretation of their objects of study. Of course, literary interpretations do not compete with scientific theory either, and certainly don't invalidate it. But neither do they need to justify themselves by appeals to the sciences. Nor does philosophy.

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  33. Jake Spinella

    Michael I think what you are forwarding is actually a very controversial thesis about the nature of literary interpretation and its relation to other forms of inquiry–there are philosophers who would dispute the point that literary works are pluralist in what they are about or that literary criticism, when done correctly, has a categorically different method from the way we do many kinds of scientific inquiry. Few would deny that pluralism in method and viewpoint is a useful thing; pluralism in what a story is about is a whole other claim that requires more backing.

    If you want an interesting alternate take to your views, read Alexander Nehamas' 'The Postulated Author: Critical Monism as a Regulative Ideal", it argues the contrary to your assertion that there are multiple correct interpretations of a work. I don't entirely agree with it but am largely sympathetic to this view of criticism and interpretation.

    Here's the link:
    http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/1343210?uid=3739776&uid=2478121337&uid=2&uid=3&uid=3739256&uid=60&sid=21103364357767

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  34. Dorin Smith

    I feel the need to frame this anonymous graduate student’s statement, as I am a graduate student in the English department at Brown. While the typificiation of the department as a "theory" department is accurate, there is quite a lot of firm historicism and responsible critical thinking as well–though this is not, I will admit, the majority. I can verify that talking out of one’s ass is an issue in English seminars. This leads to a lot of bad philosophy with trendy verbiage. My undergraduate background is in English and Philosophy (from a Leiter top-20 philosophy department), so I feel safe in making this pronouncement.

    But to offset this slightly, the problem of theory-speak and bad philosophizing is usually the product of a professor introducing and endorsing these acts. But when the rubber hits the road in respect to literature and those works in the literary canon, the language loses a great deal of the pretense and stupidity. Moreover, I should that having come from the UC and later CSU systems in California, the emphasis on "theory" at Brown appears more of the exception than the case. Most undergraduates seems insulated from this–I certainly was. Most of the real teaching is directed at very predictable swathe of canonical works and a few non-canonical works (usually literary, sometimes political, occasionally religious or philosophical). Methodologically, the writing common to English undergraduate courses revolves around historicist approaches to reading texts: setting context, political scene, language ambiguity therein, the literary repertoire at play behind the work, etc.

    In short, the presence of "theory" in English departments generally is regrettable and obnoxious, but it is far from common among all programs and often absent at the undergraduate level. I would be lying were I to write that Brown is not a "theory" program. However, for the majority of the graduate students in the department, theory-speak is begrudgingly adopted. Most people hate it and recognize the vacuity therein. But the old guard, educated in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, comprise a large section of the faculty, so one has to adapt. But all of this does seem on the way out or, at least, on the way to Media Studies departments.

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  35. Michael Fitzpatrick

    Jake, I appreciate your thoughts and reply. And thank you for the Alexander Nehemas article. Of course I agree that my claims "require more backing" — I provided a response to a blog, not a formal journal article. But this admission aside, I'm not sure I see what is so controversial about claiming pluralism of interpretation in the humanities, particularly literature. Nehemas' article is primarily a response to the post-structuralist attack on being able to fix any meaning at all, and most of Nehemas' criticisms hinge on incompatible interpretations. However, none of my suggestions in my post depend on deconstruction or incompatible interpretations. If someone reads John Milton's "Samson Agonistes" biographically, where Samson represents the heroic though tragic blind Milton writing of his own situation post-Restoration, they will get a very different reading than reading "Samson Agonistes" in light of Samson's apparent self-authorizing theology, where Samson is an anti-hero that represents the evil that happens when God's servants do things on their own without divine sanction. Are these readings contradictory or incompatible? I can't see how – contradiction or incompatibility the way Nehemas discusses the theme requires common assumptions. There is a big difference between contradictions with a single system (e.g., within predicate logic) and between systems (e.g., between classical logic and a paraconsistent logic). These readings, if they are incompatible at all, only are so because they assume different interpretive approaches to the text. The approaches are supported by how fruitful of readings they produce, and how many interpretive problems they solve. But they are just different ways of reading the text, not competitors but alternatives that show how polysemous Milton's poem is, how much creativity he packed into his lines and plots.

    Notice after mentioning Nehemas' article, you suggest it argues contrary to my assertion that "there are multiple CORRECT interpretations of a work" (emphasis mine). I didn't say "correct" in my post, or if I did, I didn't mean to. What counts as a "correct" interpretation? I simply claimed that what is valued in literary studies is pushing the possibilities of interpretation as far as possible. For me, there are just many different interpretations, and some are more fruitful in solving interpretive problems than other. Some are equally fruitful. Does that make the most fruitful one's "correct"? I don't what this adds to "most fruitful". Certainly there are authorial intentions that lead to written works. Does authorial intention limit the possibilities of meaning? As a writer myself, I do not see how. I once did an experiment as a part of class where I wrote a poem, and then two weeks later provided a critical interpretation of the poem. I was shocked to discover many rich meanings embedded in the poem that I had not intended at all, but which I found made the poem far richer and more complex. If I can find meanings in my own poems that I didn't intend, I can't imagine what it would mean to ask me which meanings are the "correct" ones. There are just interpretations, some of which are more useful than others. Texts and cultural conventions provide limits to how radical a theory can be before its fruitfulness diminishes, but fruitfulness still seems to be a better category that "correctness" when thinking about textual interpretation.

    Finally, I was not making assertions about methodology. I quite agree that literature and the humanities share many common methods with the sciences. I simply said they have different goals. The sciences have a goal of singular interpretation, while the humanities have a goal of plural interpretation. But I see no reason why they can't both achieve their goals through the uses of empiricism, reason, evidence and imagination.

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  36. Michael Fitzpatrick

    Jake, as a further follow-up, I readily endorse much of what Philip Kitcher has to say here about pluralism in literature.

    http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/fighting-incompleteness/

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