The Real Cause of the Humanities’ Woes

Every few years another article appears throwing stones at the discipline of literary studies. In one more iteration of this tired genre, Michael Clune’s Chronicle Review article “The Bizarro World of Literary Studies” takes three very different cases — the by-now-infamous Sokal hoax, the so-called grievance-studies hoax of 2018, and the recent sexual-harassment charges against the NYU German-studies professor Avital Ronell — and attempts to weave together a coherent, overarching argument about the sorry state of the discipline. English departments, Clune claims, have gone off the rails, seduced by the twin sirens of hip-sounding poststructuralism and the inevitable cult of personality around “star” professors.

While Clune acknowledges the body blows that the humanities have taken from federal and state governments, the increased corporatization and instrumentalization of higher education, and the neoliberal logic of adjunctification, he quickly dispenses with those structural arguments to claim that literary studies’ real enemy is not legislators who have slashed support for colleges, but literary scholars ourselves. In our bogus embrace of interdisciplinarity, we have abandoned our true vocation: teaching close reading to eager undergraduates. “Interdisciplinarity” for Clune is our Rosebud, our white whale, and our yellow brick road all rolled into one — a false utopia that merges imagined mastery over knowledge and methodologies we have no expertise in and an arrogant ignorance of the (implicitly high) standards of the social and bench sciences that we neither respect nor adhere to.

Given his critique of interdisciplinarity’s reductiveness, it’s striking that Clune takes as his ur-texts two very different events two decades apart to explain away, or even justify, the abandonment of the humanities by higher education and of higher education by federal and state governments. How, exactly, did an ingenious (if sophomoric) hoax against a famous poststructuralist journal combine forces with a disheartening and enraging case of faculty narcissism, overreach, and emotional manipulation of graduate students over a more than 20-year gap to convince legislators that intellectual inquiry should be stopped in its tracks? There’s barely correlation, let alone causation. The Sokal affair was an embarrassment, for sure, but to see it as functionally similar to Ronell’s abusive demands for emotional intimacy from graduate students inflates the former and trivializes the latter. And using the Avital Ronell case to explain the years of change that preceded it is ludicrous: Would you also argue that Bill Cosby’s sexual assaults explain the changes in standup comedy since the 1990s? Or that Mario Batali’s harassment of female employees helps us understand shifts in gastronomy? In any event, Ronell has been a fairly marginal figure in literary criticism, especially in English departments.

Moreover, Clune makes no effort to explore actual interdisciplinary research currently coming out of English departments: the thrilling work of medical humanities and narrative medicine, which have largely been embraced by medical professionals and scientific researchers; the investigations of scientific racism and eugenics that were standard operating procedure in the sciences for centuries; the historicizing and analysis of the discipline of science itself. And there’s much more: engagement with anthropology and ethnography, psychology, evolutionary biology, epidemiology that both respects and challenges some of the données of those fields.

The interdisciplinarity that scholars embrace is rarely the type trumpeted by university technocrats. We’re concerned about cross-pollination and cross-fertilization of ideas, not breaking down “silos” and synergy. We recognize that true interdisciplinarity doesn’t save money; it requires real investment. To paraphrase the great Inigo Montoya, I don’t think interdisciplinarity means what Clune thinks it means.

Beyond its shaky foundation, Clune’s essay deflects blame from the real causes of the decrease in literary study: an ever-increasing emphasis on vocational and preprofessional education, a growing focus on quantitatively assessable outcomes, and a shift in employment choices by students away from education (which often overlapped with literary-studies majors) and toward the health sciences (the impressive statistical analysis of David Laurence at the Modern Language Association clearly shows all these changes). In some ways, I wish that Sokal and Ronell were the cause of the humanities’ woes: How easy they would be to remedy if that were so! But the causes are far more complex, more political, and more systemic than that, and we can only counter them by recognizing their power and their origins.