Comments on: Smells Like Teen Spirit?

By: aaron

aaron — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 17:46:36 +0000

That’s a better narrative than anything I’ve been able to come up with; the entire essay is like a sculpture made of ashes: touch it and it falls apart. Or deconstructs itself, or something. Though it seems to me that there’s always room for hating on the discipline, once you’ve got tenure. How can it hurt him? An odd response, yes, but one that allows him to have and eat his cake at the same time.

By: Timothy Burke

Timothy Burke — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 13:14:35 +0000

I noticed his book subtitle too, Aaron. I was thinking of mentioning it, so thanks for doing it. It’s interesting that he taught a class with that title. This is an interesting kind of careerist sub-strategem: posture at being postmodern, postcolonial, what have you while you’re a junior scholar, then chase a different reward system afterwards by playing at being a traditionalist curmudgeon. A certain amount of the disaffection at that point almost has to be read as confessional, as in “I was trendy, I was shallow, I was inauthentic”–but much as in the confessional subculture of addiction, the addict has to argue that everyone’s an addict, everyone’s like him–thus deferring indefinitely the possibility that maybe the only inauthentic, calculating person in the room is the person confessing, nor have they come clean at all by putting on another pose, another posture, another rhetoric. They’ve just looked at the marketplace of ideas and decided to invest in another position. If all that this amounted to was, “I had to hide my real self, and now I can do close reading of modernist novels and drop all the other stuff”, then all that would follow is the close reading of modernist novels; if it was “I wanted to love literature, but the historicists and theorists wouldn’t let me”, then what would follow is the love of literature. Instead what follows is “English/academia is bad and corrupt”, which is a pretty odd response to achieving the freedom to study what one always wanted to study.

By: The Constructivist

The Constructivist — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 05:14:29 +0000

Thanks for all the visits, everyone. Be warned: this is a sequel.

By: The Constructivist

The Constructivist — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 19:23:26 +0000

How's this for the appropriate level of disdain?

By: aaron

aaron — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 15:17:05 +0000

I think you guys have been too easy on this piece. The idea that an emphasis in some strange, eccentric, funny-sounding specialization makes it any less a dissertation on Dickens is just stupid. Putting ketchup on a hamburger doesn’t make it into a tomato; neither does the fact that Deresiewicz himself once taught a class on “Contemporary South Asian Fiction” make him any less of a Conrad scholar. It’s also pretty rich for a guy with the words “Jennifer Aniston” in the title of his book to make snide remarks about “kids nowadays and their film studies.”

But, as you noted, he’s just weirdly sloppy here. After all, if so many departments are trying to hire people in “minority” literatures, why couldn’t the fact that the demand has outstripped supply be as easily explained by the fact that there are still very few teachers teaching them and, as a result, few students take such things up (less supply rather than increased demand?). If he had to look at actual rules on course requirements or how examination fields are structured, after all, he’d have to notice how little those “canons” have actually changed. Plus, the whole “there are a lot of jobs you’re not going to get” section of the essay just makes me cry him a river. The job market has been mindbogglingly bad for some time now and undergrads are recognizing that an English degree and a dollar fifty will get you a cup of coffee, but that’s somehow the fault of the ten percent of people who study a minority literature? Whew…

I also love how we end the essay with the idea that nothing has changed since 1990, even though everything has gone to hell since then, too.

By: cmd2245

cmd2245 — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 12:53:11 +0000

I agree with everything above that others have said. But at the very end of his essay, he does make a fair point about the lack, or even absence of any encouragement extended to talented students to pursue graduate study. I count myself amongst that group; I actively try to discourage any of my students who express interest in graduate study. In fact, much to my department’s chagrin, some years ago I put together a 50-page packet of essays and articles, including Tim’s famous essay, about the job market in the humanities and the culture of academe and graduate school. I’m proud to say that in eight eyars, I’ve only lost one to a graduate program in English — and she is poised to drop out and has told me many times that she wishes she’d taken my advice.

By: meburste

meburste — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 00:33:21 +0000

The complaint about children’s lit is a real head-banger, because those of us at comprehensive colleges/universities usually have massive populations of students preparing for teacher certification. And most certification programs require children’s lit (and increasingly, for secondary certification, YA lit). Of course we need a specialist in children’s literature–we usually offer two sections per semester, and they’re frequently overloaded!

By: Timothy Burke

Timothy Burke — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 00:09:09 +0000

Yeah, I didn’t even bring that up, but I agree that it’s yet another problem. The old version of the English Department that he’s pining for was one that took composition and rhetoric seriously as part of its intellectual responsibility, not just as a kind of service learning.

By: k8

k8 — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 23:36:42 +0000

One of the most frustrating parts of the article (for me) was the assumption that my part of the discipline, composition and rhetoric, is merely concerned with service courses for undergrads. The author not only ignores over 2000 years of the study of rhetoric, but also misunderstands the relevance of undergraduate and graduate instruction in rhetoric and writing. I’m not really sure how the study of Aristotle, Plato, and Cicero, among others, became non-canonical authors.

As for his issue with children’s literature – I’m not sure I would be a comfortable with hiring an English education major not well-versed in both canonical and new titles, authors, issues, etc. Granted, this is a secondary area of study for me.

But it’s his misunderstanding of the non-literary studies portion of English that ultimately detracts from his argument. Studying the production of texts is as important as studying texts produced by others. This isn’t merely an issue of teaching students skills for the workplace. Instruction in writing and rhetoric also teaches us how to read others’ texts, whether they be part of the canon, a business report, or a political speech.

I realize I don’t need to convince anyone here that these things are important, but this is at the heart of my complaints about that article.

By: Neb Namwen

Neb Namwen — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 23:22:57 +0000

On another note, I found the second Deresiewicz essay linked (the one on erotics) deeply moving — it speaks very much to my sense of vocation, which is to teaching more than to research. The essay which is the subject of this post is indeed dull and petty in comparison.