That seems to be the idea circulating on the new literary studies group blog The Valve as well on Crooked Timber. For instance, the Valve’s Daniel Green writes:
More than anything else, academic blogging (in its literary version) is going to have to muster up some enthusiasm for its ostensible subject–literature. In my view, such enthusiasm is precisely what has been missing from academic criticism for at least the last two decades, and it is the reason why so many of those “mere graduate students” and “people possessing only a B.A.” have established themselves as bloggers worth reading.
Meanwhile, Henry Farrell seconds the desirability of enthusiasm for literature (and “imagination”, which seems to be a jargon shorthand for some line of scholarship I’m entirely unfamiliar with).
I should again give the caveat that while I’m familiar with literary studies, it’s not my field. Film studies is. This difference undoubtedly colors my reactions. And my first reaction is that literary scholars are in fact enthusiastic about literature. They may wear their disinterested deconstructive or historicist hats in their academic work, but you don’t have to scratch far beneath the surface (a few glasses of wine help) to discover that indeed the “radical” literary scholar believes that canonical literature is indeed a far more worthwhile pursuit than genre literature and that popular culture (including film) is a lesser art than literature. I don’t know if this proves the Valve’s point or refutes it, but at least I find their characterization of literary scholars a little off.
That brings up the question of whether literary scholars should love literature in order to study it. Henry makes the excellent point that this does not map over easily onto the political spectrum: one can love literature and be leftist. But to me the important thing is that scholars are enthusiastic about the intellectual questions of the field, not that their enthusiastic about the object of study per se. In fact, if a scholar is enthusiastic about the object, he or she usually must make some effort to think dispassionately along side the underlying passion. Think of an historian obsessed with 19th century South Carolina or a sociologist studying the neighborhood he or she grew up in. Now, literary studies doesn’t have the same disciplinary construction or rigor that social science or even history have. But it has something beyond its belle-lettristic origins. The value of belle-lettrism may in fact be the issue we’re debating here.
I happen to think the scholarly dispassion provided by some combination of the semiotic and historicist projects is desirable and fully applicable to a range of texts, whether by Milton, Zora Neale Hurston, or Robert Ludlum; Sally Potter, Howard Hawks or the Farrelly Brothers. At least my dissertation has been freed up by attention to a genre (the social problem film) that is nearly universally regarded as mediocre today, but equally universally was critically lauded at the time. I find the historical questions surrounding the genre so interesting (the industry economics, the sociology of reception, the politics of liberal consensus) that I’d hate to see similar discussions in literature closed off because scholars might not be enthusiastic about the works themselves.
This isn’t to say that enthusiasm for the art doesn’t enter into a semiotic/historical study: literary scholars need to understand how readers of literature apperceive art, and canonical literature is more likely to reveal the range of textual form better than lesser forms. Furthermore, in addition to the objective constraints of literary form and meaning, scholars should try to approach the subjective experience of literary art. So I’ll grant the desirability of enthusiasm, only perhaps not in the form that the Valve is prescribing.
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