The current issue of PMLA landed in my mailbox with a thud. It reminded me again why I worry about the future of language and literature scholarship. The study of languages and literatures is immensely important. But I fear that we scholars are unintentionally undermining the importance of our own work.
The Modern Language Association, publisher of PMLA, is rightly concerned about the status of the scholarly profession. The numbers of US undergraduate majors in English or foreign languages plummeted disastrously in the 1970s. By the beginning of this century, the raw numbers had recovered most of their lost ground and have held steady since. Expressed as a percentage of all undergraduate majors, however, the picture continues to grow worse. Even since 2000, the percentage of US undergraduates majoring in English or foreign languages has dropped from 5.4 to 4.2. Undergraduates majoring in communications, in contrast, have held steady at 4.7%.
The academic profession, partly as a result, has increasingly divided itself into two castes. Elite holders of tenure and tenure track positions cater to undergraduate majors and graduate students. Core requirements courses are relegated to a non-tenure-track proletariat. The MLA has responded by seeking greater support for non-tenure-track faculty. I agree with those efforts, and contribute financially, but I believe they are insufficient. They aim to answer the question: How do we more fairly divide a shrinking pie.
The real question here, the one we scholars must ask ourselves, is this: Why is the pie shrinking in the first place? If we can figure out the answer to that question, more positions will open up for all scholars. Distinctions in the two-caste system will diminish without any specific effort. And we can come up with a reasonably good answer. Undergraduates in our utilitarian economy are interested in courses of study that will help them in their future lives and careers. In my career as a lawyer, all my cases have concerned business-related litigation, so I have practical experience with both law and business. I’ve trained several generations of young lawyers, and had the opportunity to see how various undergraduate majors affect the lawyers’ further development.
I genuinely believe that studies of languages and literature are among the most important a young person can undertake if he aims to enhance both his life and his career. Yes, if she intends to become a doctor or engineer, she’ll also have to study math and science. But in all professions—even science-oriented ones—the study of language and literature will develop skills essential for success.
If you want to thrive in any career, and have a happy life as well, you must gain the assistance and cooperation of others. However, each person has his or her own unique perspective, a perspective shaped by each individual’s own knowledge and experience. If we want to gain the cooperation of others, we must first understand that they have perspectives different from ours. Next, we must be sensitive to what those perspectives might be. Languages teach us that ideas and expressions are not universal but partly the products of culture. Literature teach us about the enormous variation in human perspectives. No one who studies Canterbury Tales or Shakespeare’s plays can fail to appreciate those variations.
The ability it gives us to transcend our own individual experiences, by the way, is why all educated people should continue throughout their lives to study languages and literature. Enhancing the quality of our lives should be a lifelong project.
Once we recognize that the people whose help we need have perspectives different from ours, we need to figure out how to persuade them to adopt the conclusions that we would have them draw as theirs. To do that we must learn the forms of rhetoric, the use of language, and the skills to convey our meaning clearly. That learning will usefully be applied to everything we write aimed at achieving a purpose—briefs, memoranda, even emails. And that is learning that the study of languages and literature best teaches. Let’s take just five lines from three well-known poems, all from one language, all from one century:
The world is too much with us, late and soon;
Getting and spending we lay waste our powers.
Twilight and evening bell,
And after that the dark.
That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall,
In these five lines alone, especially considered in context, we can learn rhetorical technique, the power of words and images to persuade, and the value of plain writing when we seek to convey even complex ideas. Future lawyers and business people could not spend their time more productively than by studying these lines.
If I am right, then, that languages and literatures are so useful, why are undergraduate major enrollments so dismal? I have a theory. We scholars have lost sight of the reason why our scholarship matters. We have increasingly focused on our own diminishing circle of fellow scholars, and have forgotten that if what we do has real meaning, it must also engage the outside world, a world which consists in part of undergraduates seeking useful majors.
Let’s turn to the current issue of PMLA. It’s the one at hand, but they are all similar in these respects. Do we really want to pick it up? Our predecessors fifty years ago looked forward to the next issue. It contained essays among the most important being written, essays which might inform the scholarship of all MLA members, not just specialists in particular fields. Today I fear that even we scholars pick up the PMLA only with a sense of weary resignation. We’ll find in this issue essays on the pianola in 20th-century novels, the 1922 Congress of Paris, and the sporadic late work of Djuna Barnes. Some scholars will be interested in these topics, of course, but do the topics address readers outside three small, discrete circles? Now, there is also an essay concerning Wallace Stevens’s conflicting perspectives, which will interest a broader readership, but on the whole, the issue will not dispel anyone’s prior sense of resignation.
Essays on topics that seem obscure today, it’s perfectly true, might someday prove important for reasons that we cannot anticipate. Perhaps future scholars will fit them into now unknown patterns. But we shouldn’t assume that all essays are important just because we can write them. At a minimum, we should say at the outset why non-specialist readers might be interested in the essay’s conclusions. How might the essay fit into a larger, better known pattern? If I wrote an essay about a play by Henry Glapthorne, for example, oughtn’t I to say why it might tell us something, if not about Shakespeare, at least about Middleton, Davenant, or 17th-century drama in general?
We sometimes hear in scholarly conferences that we “privilege” Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton. That assertion perplexes me. Is it meant to suggest that we have elevated these authors to a status higher than they deserve? To me, such a suggestion can’t be sustained. Or is it meant to suggest that the study of English literature should be reduced to intellectual egalitarianism and all literature be treated the same? To me, that is nonsense. All men may be created equal, but all literature they create is not. We shall never enroll English majors if we plan to have them study Glapthorne and Shakespeare in equal proportion.
Let’s think of our problem in terms of American football strategy. We need plays designed to gain three and four yards, to be sure. They mark off real, albeit incremental, progress. We can’t go long on every play, or we will get nowhere. But we do need to mix in some long plays. When successfully executed those are the plays that actually win games. For us, long plays will comprise major advances in our knowledge or understanding of literature that matter to everyone. They will convey the excitement of discovering something new and important. They will engage both curious undergraduates, including perhaps those seeking majors, and members of the educated general public.
The classic long play in English literature scholarship remains John Livingston Lowes’s Road to Xanadu, concerning the origins of “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and “Kubla Khan.” Lowes’s scholarship vastly expanded our understanding of Coleridge’s mind and poetry. More than that, his book was sensationally popular with the educated public, and has remained popular since its publication in 1927. In my field of Elizabethan drama, I would also nominate the accumulated works of Walter W. Greg. He began around 1910 with a great chaos of materials, and by the time he finished 50 years later he had given us a reasonably clear picture of what transpired in the world of Elizabethan theater. He never gained Lowes’s popularity with the educated public (he didn’t need to; he was very rich), but even today, his learning continues to shape the way both scholars and the public perceive this field.
Both Lowes and Greg, unsurprisingly, have supplied the materials for small industries of scholars who since have pointed out the deficiencies in their work. Greg, we can all agree, was overenthusiastic in his penchant for classification. So was Darwin. No one, probably, could synthesize so much disparate information without making some mistakes. We need to appreciate the long gains and not ululate over the mistakes, lest we discourage others from attempting their own long plays. We don’t want to behave like crabs in a barrel, each circling around in our own little way, pulling down any crab among us who manages to gain a spot near the top of the barrel.
Whether any particular essay or book represents a long or short gain, all literature scholarship should be well and persuasively written. A principal reason why undergraduates should major in languages and literature, as I mentioned above, is that those studies will enhance the students’ writing skills. That point should be illustrated in our own scholarly writing. All too often, however, it is not. Many of our essays, to be blunt, are not well written.
The PMLA makes particularly frustrating reading. Authors rarely begin their essays with proper exordia. We are forced to plow into each essay with little idea about what the subject is, what the author means to tell us, and what the author’s plan is for getting us there. Without such an exordium reading any essay is a cumbersome, inefficient process. If we plow ahead nevertheless we often encounter little effort to signal to the reader the essay’s organizational strategy and many sentences that are difficult to comprehend. Let me just pick a couple, more or less at random, from the current issue: “More often, scholars of literary phonography participate in a Derridean critique of phonocentrism, reading in the gramophone an extreme case of the voice’s detachability from the speaker, body, and presence.” “Each poem is an experiment—an attempt to establish a collective response to the fact-value dichotomy that avoids nihilism and what Wittgenstein calls the ‘supernatural.’”
How shall we persuade undergraduates to take our courses to enhance their writing skills when we ourselves write such things? And if our work should be read by curious undergraduates and the educated public shouldn’t we seek to reach them with arguments that they can follow and prose they can understand? A secondary benefit also attends clear writing, as any litigator will tell you. Obscurity in expression can conceal flawed reasoning. Clear writing requires the writer to lay his or her cards on the table. We do scholarship because our work matters. Our regard for that work should be reflected in what we write and how we write it.