Jonathan Kramnick, a philosophically-minded English professor at Yale, has an interesting response to the “Boghossian Report” which is worth reading. Professor Kramnick agrees with the Report that, “When scholarship becomes subordinated to extra-scholarly ends — when a field decides in advance what its findings must be and bends its methods accordingly — it ceases to be scholarship.” But he also raises some serious questions about the representation of his field of study. He writes:

[T]he literary humanities are not, in the main, a domain of self-proclaimed relativists, and the report’s own argumentative resources, philosophically powerful as they may or may not be, are aimed at a target most literary scholars do not occupy. The picture the report paints — of fields that have explicitly repudiated objectivity and openly subordinated scholarship to political projects — does not capture the actual texture of literary study as I know it. The report mistakes a vocabulary lifted from decades-old theoretical texts for a live method.

In practice, most scholars working in English or comparative literature do not spend their time arguing that there are no facts about texts, only readings that power has sanctioned. They spend their time arguing about which facts are most significant, which contexts bear on a poem’s meaning, which formal features reward attention — disagreements that are themselves constrained by the object under discussion, and that presuppose, rather than abandon, the idea that some readings are better supported than others. That is methodological pluralism, not relativism, and pluralism is not a crisis. It is intellectual vitality. The history of literary study includes a heterogeneous mix of approaches — formalist, historicist, philological, theoretical — each of which has generated genuine knowledge and corrected the others’ blind spots, and none of which has had, or should have, the final word.

What the report calls distortion is, in many cases, methodological diversity doing its normal work. The question of whether a poet’s views on slavery are relevant to the assessment of her poetry — the report’s single, sketchily adduced example of the supposed problems with literary studies — is not a case of political criteria displacing scholarly ones. It is a genuine, longstanding critical debate with serious arguments on multiple sides. That some people answer it differently than the committee would have them answer it is not evidence of corruption, but of an ongoing intellectual conversation.