[Discussion] ... still fighting culture wars.........

[Paksoy, Hb]

 <<...OLE_Obj...>>  From the issue dated September 20, 2002 	

 <<...OLE_Obj...>> 	POINT OF VIEW Why Are English Departments Still
Fighting the Culture Wars? By MARK KRUPNICK  Everyone has heard about the
culture wars that have torn apart university departments of English. But it
was still shocking to read a New York Times article a few months ago about
how animosity between traditional and theory-oriented professors at Columbia
University has decimated its once-great department.  Similar antagonisms
have created bedlam in a surprisingly large number of American departments
of English. My own feelings about English-department life may be surmised
from the fact that, in 1990, I jumped ship to take a full-time position in
religion and literature in the Divinity School at the University of Chicago.
I was at ease teaching literature in a religious-studies setting because
there was no pressure to reduce literature to the circumstances of material
culture, or to race, class, and gender. The same could hardly be said about
many cutting-edge English departments. During my years at Chicago, I was
also an associate (nonvoting) member of the English department, but my real
commitment was always to the Divinity School.  The usual explanation for the
divisiveness in English is twofold. First, starting with the invasion of
French poststructuralism in the 1960s, advanced literary interpretation
changed from being formalist in method and traditionalist in ideology to a
brand of French theory whose major distinguishing characteristic seemed to
be that it required you to spend more time reading the theorists than
reading the canonical texts of Western literature. The second major
explanation for the culture wars is that they basically have been about
politics, set off when '60s radicals took their battles from the streets
into university departments.  But the culture wars have petered out in many
departments. Why so much less so in English? I suggest that the bitterness
of the canon wars, and so much else in academic literary studies, has had a
great deal to do with the kind of people who become English professors. Here
I need to appeal to my own experience.  My introduction to life in an
English department was at Boston University, in the late '60s and early
'70s. Those were some of the most intense years of the anti-Vietnam War
movement and the youth counterculture, and the department was divided. The
rather modest radicalism of the assistant professors antagonized many of the
elders. Several tenured professors sympathized with our cause, but the
dominant wing preferred to get on with business as usual, without the rumpus
of sit-ins and all the rest. Their idea was that we young ones had veered
from the proper -- that is, aesthetic -- focus of literary education.  My
purpose is not to rehash that intradepartmental clash. In any case, it more
often took the form of personal conflicts than of reasoned debate. For
example, when I offered my congratulations to one of the most aggressive of
the antiradicals, who had just received an invitation to join a highly
prestigious English department, that professor spit out: "I'm not going
anywhere. I'm going to stay here long enough to see you all buried."
"Professor X's" virulent hatred might be understood in terms of a unique
personal psychopathology. But it's more illuminating to see Professor X's
attitude in terms of a shared disposition among literary academics, who tend
to stake their professional and personal identities on their readings --
their evaluations and interpretations -- of texts.  But do English
professors identify themselves with their theories and methods more than do
their colleagues in, say, history or economics? I think so. Professor X
detested the department's "radicals" because Professor X regarded literature
and a proper approach to it as the key to truth and reality.  Of course,
there are as many permutations of an English professor's personal
identification with texts as there are English professors. The point is that
the archetypal English-department academic, in contrast to academics in
other fields, is involved in a quest to know himself or herself and arrive
at a more intimate relationship with the good, the true, and the real. So
English professors tend to experience alternative approaches to the truth as
they see it as a personal affront, and cause for counterattack. The personal
truly is political.  After leaving Boston University, I had a chance to
observe another aspect of the culture of personality that is endemic to
English-department life. The University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, where I
taught from 1974 to 1987, had set up the Center for Twentieth Century
Studies. It wasn't a department -- it didn't grant degrees or offer courses
-- but was more like a European intellectual salon, providing an enviable
social milieu as well as cultural enrichment. For the most part, the
center's director managed to keep the tension between the theorists and the
traditionalists in check. But what always struck me most about the center
was the snobbishness it encouraged and satisfied.  The hunger for social
status has always seemed to me more pronounced in English professors than in
other academics. In the first few decades of the 20th century, for example,
one way that American English professors sought to distinguish themselves
from their commonplace countrymen was through a genteel Anglophilia, which
paralyzed academic literary study. Jews could rarely be found in prestigious
English departments until the 1950s, because it was thought that they lacked
the cultural background to properly understand John Milton or Henry David
Thoreau. No such questions arose in physics departments or in the social
sciences, where a more tolerant culture prevailed.  Nowadays, that urge for
cultural distinction has been displaced by zeal to demonstrate radical
political piety. Yet, the two forms of status seeking aren't so different.
Whether literature professors have sought acknowledgment for their cultural
superiority or for their political correctness, they seem to have always
insisted on their spiritual distinction.  That is because the role of moral
tutor in the United States has fallen to professors of English nearly as
much as to the clergy. For the first 60 years or so of the last century,
college English teachers were in a better position than pastors and priests
-- in our mass democracy of recent immigrants -- to refine the manners and
morals of the immigrants' progeny. Far from reinforcing old values,
professors helped their students to separate from their parents and
transcend the past. Professors of English began to derive a sense of their
specialness by enabling students to rise above the materialistic values of
their uneducated parents, who were striving to establish themselves in the
New World. The objects of their attention have changed, but English
professors continue to seem to feel as if they are uniquely responsible for
the spiritual condition of the nation.  I spent a few years, 1987-90, at the
University of Illinois at Chicago. The wannabes at UIC hadn't been as
fortunate as my former colleagues in Milwaukee. Those who had been at UIC a
long time suffered from a sense that the brave new world of literary theory
had been rendered inaccessible to them by an indifferent university
administration. They weren't wrong about the administration. Still, it was
uncomfortable working among persons whose sense of self-esteem was so
damaged and who, as a consequence, directed toward the world, including
newcomers like me, a free-floating resentment.  It is necessary to keep in
mind the social as well as the personal side of such wounded narcissism.
Western intellectuals like Diderot and Voltaire once were literary
generalists who, nevertheless, were also trenchant social and political
critics. Contemporary critics, some of whom aspire to be "public
intellectuals" like Sartre and Camus, have been compelled by economic
changes to seek refuge in the universities. As their critical idiom has
become more and more technical and specialized, they have exercised less and
less influence on the general culture. But they still want to be noticed. It
is almost as if they live in the shadow of the great literary-political
intellectuals of the past, and are constantly trying to measure up. Their
solution has been to achieve celebrity in the self-enclosed world of
academic literary studies.  The baby boomers have prevailed. Now there are
fewer clashes within cutting-edge English departments, because nearly
everyone is a theorist or cultural-studies specialist. The victors don't
always present a pretty picture. Baby-boom and younger academics in English
often project a sanctimony about their secular political-cultural
convictions that I never see when my Divinity School colleagues touch on
their religious beliefs. Their moralism strikes me as being at odds with
their obsession with intradepartmental power plays and their rapt attention
to new fashions in criticism and whatever will advance their careers.  Mark
Krupnick is a professor of literature in the Divinity School at the
University of Chicago and the author of Lionel Trilling and the Fate of
Cultural Criticism (Northwestern University Press, 1986).