Credibility: The Next Challenge

In the nineteenth century, studying literature meant studying the history of older literatures through the lens of philology-a historical discipline, less than an interpretive one. The degree-granting study of literature (especially contemporary) was an artifact of the early twentieth century. In the US after the second World War, however, the study of literature became ideologized in a very particular way, we recognize now: as part of the post-war postsecondary curriculum that tried to define the "educated human" whose image resonated through Harvard, Yale, and Princeton up through the 1970s. The backlash (especially in the college curriculum) came in the so-called "canon wars," when the ideology of literary and social style and privilege came under critique as a tool of hegemony, leading to new critical interest in cultural processes and group-identity politics rather than literary form, style, or purportedly eternal human values. What has not been pursued to any great degree is how this shift of disciplinary practice has impacted the day-to-day business of scholarship, nor how it might change our position in the curriculum. Most particularly, no one has asked the question I wish to pose here: are we in a credibility crisis as scholars, teachers, and professionals? I think the answer is yes, which requires us to ask an additional question: what constitutes professional credibility today? Bygone forms of literary scholarship insisted on mastery of clear bodies of knowledge and skills to define successful professionals: how to scan poems and talk about genres, how to use historical dictionaries and reference books, what kinds of intertextual and textual hermeneutics were appropriate to study the canons of the literate elite. The canon wars brought many new forms of literary and cultural studies sharing little but attention to power relations-and usually without agreement about how to assemble evidence about those relationships, through research and/or new forms of close reading. During the canon wars, interest in theory did proliferate, but little of it was ever tested against empirical evidence, nor did the theorists ever generate new canons, textbooks, interpretive models, or tools for reading, historical reconstruction, analysis, or reorganizations of knowledge (the "post-library," one might call it). Theory, particularly French theory, guided various interests in power and identity on the parts of scholars, and, unfortunately, much of that theory was taken out of its original context, blunting the results' technical accuracy. This new scholarship embraces insights from history, cultural geography and anthropology, and the social sciences, as well as from communication and media studies, psychoanalysis, and any number of specialized studies. Yet what is produced is all too often a kind of new journalism: compelling acts of writing and self-expression-performance-on the part of the scholar, guided principally by that scholar's tastes and validated through rhetorical verve. All too often, these new journalists borrow work from other disciplines on which to base "new" scholarship, in blissful ignorance or willful overlooking of the challenges and critiques of that work from within its own field. Such borrowings have always characterized literary scholarship, but it seems now that we no longer care what the etiquette of these borrowings might be, intellectually and methodologically. Worse, perhaps, is how this new scholarship deals with source materials. In an era when more material is available at hand with little difficulty of access, the number of literary scholars is growing who make "culturalhistorical" arguments without checking Historical Abstracts for what historians actually think, who make arguments about language and identity in texts without checking the Linguistics and Language Behavior Abstracts to see how a dialect or language norm is represented or have been studied, or who use online text corpuses like Gutenberg. …