For those who don’t already follow Crooked Timber, a group blog comprising (mostly) academics from an assortment of disciplines, I highly recommend it. It’s one of the best forum in which to read academics commenting on current events and, more usefully, to get some sense of the pulse across the academy, particularly in the humanities and social sciences. It’s hard not to be struck at the vibrancy of discussion on it, especially given the lack of much substantive journalism on the academy. If the last claim seems too tendentious, just try to find what’s going on social sciences from the Times’ Science page, or track debates in the field of philosophy by reading the Globe’s Ideas section. And those are the current jewels of the academic beat, given the death of Lingua Franca.
This preface all to say that today John Holbo has an interesting post (though a rambling one) asking why there isn’t a good group blog for lit studies. Holbo is an outside spectator of sorts, a philosopher who has looked at PMLA, Critical Inquiry, and other major lit crit journals and found them lacking as a place to garner the best work being done in the field - an oddity given that their counterparts in other disciplines are the best place for scholars to read up on subspecialties outside their view. What makes lit crit different? It’s the lack of rigor, Holbo claims, a diffusion of belletristic voices each pursuing its own methodology and construction of the object of study (”Periods. Genres. National literatures. Not that there aren’t still curricular divisions and specializations, mind you. But many more people are ‘interrogating’ them — torturing them into confessing, whether they are guilty or not - than dutifully observing them. “). I’ll let you wade though the original post (it’s long!) for his exact argument. But the real recommendation comes in the conclusion:
And the objection that academic blogs are not peer reviewed misses the point that I am advocating that blogs BECOME a giant, distributed network of peer review in literary studies. It is precisely efficient, comprehensive, fair, sane peer reviewing of this mass of stuff that is presently so desperately unreviewed that is needed. I simply don’t see any realistic way to achieve any leverage over this stubborn mass of overproduction, barring the discipline of literary studies disciplining itself, putting up street signs, building roads, even instituting traffic regulations that people try to obey (like: if you contradict yourself, that’s probably bad, not a sign that you are ready to move on to the next level.) Barring unforeseen development — e.g. discipline - literary studies will just be everyone breathing heavier and heavier and increasingly ingoring each other until it finally occurs to someone to cut funding. Which would be a damn shame.
I’m someone both inside and outside literary studies: I was trained in it but have always specialized in film studies, with its own definitions of rigor and more centralized publishing nexus. But I share many of Holbo’s conflicted feelings and in any case think that “desperately unpeer-reviewed” is an accurate desciption of the state of the academic publishing and in some ways that of cinema studies as well. The Alan Sokal hoax should have been a wake-up call to those in the lit-crit/cultural studies world.
But beyond the critiques of the discipline, I find Holbo’s notion of blogging as peer review a fascinating one. And I suspect academic blogging would help literary, cultural, film and media studies would help in a related malady: the seeming inability of these disparate but related fields to communicate rigorous cultural scholarship to an educated but nonspecialist audience. The disciplines, I’m convinced, would be stronger for it, and would regain some of the cultural legitimation lost in the past few decades. I’m firmly entrenched in the post-structuralist, anti-humanist hegemony to think it’s a good thing that literary studies doesn’t see its main function to teach youth which books to read, but it’s not always done an adequate job of convincing people there’s another reason for its existence.
So maybe one of these days I’ll set about working on establishing some academic blog on film and media studies. Though most of my colleagues are pretty technology-phobic and certainly non-blog-users - not to mention busy people - so perhaps a group blog will require more academics in the field who read and write blogs to begin with. Then again, who knows, perhaps there are already blogs in the field out there that I haven’t yet encountered.
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