The shrill laments and urgent directives that literature professors lob at their peers have recently surfaced in The Chronicle Review, and we are drawn like rubberneckers to a car crash. In “The Interdisciplinary Delusion,” Yale’s Jonathan Kramnick condemns as facile the “interdisciplinarity” that disavows disciplinary norms. He celebrates approaches that acknowledge disciplinary differences while working across them. Michael Clune, of Case Western University, echoes this point in “The Bizarro World of Literary Studies,” extending it to indict English departments specifically. Thus both scholars defend a well-staked-out position in the century-spanning controversy over interdisciplinarity (a running argument ably chronicled by Julie Thompson Klein).
The dispute is important, and we are not unsympathetic to Kramnick and Clune, but the merits of the case may well be less significant than the turf war that such arguments inevitably invoke. Kramnick and Clune focus on epistemology, not subject matter. Nonetheless, literature scholars who work in areas like the digital humanities, ethnic studies, and women’s and gender studies may perceive a veiled attack.
These pieces draw their energy from the objectively strange proposition that the university’s future depends on how English professors do their jobs. As Kramnick and Clune frame the issue, effective resistance to “the corporate university” and defense of “the truth” equally require that ever-besieged literature scholars recommit to disciplinary first principles. With his book Paper Minds (University of Chicago Press, 2018) supporting it, Kramnick’s essay is prepared to make broad assertions about “the sciences” and “the humanities.” As is typical of the genre, however, “humanities” turns out to mean, mainly, literary studies. This creates an opening Clune finds irresistible. Pitying and scorning colleagues who have strayed, he sternly reminds them: “Our object of study is literature; our method is close reading.” Some will hear a call to arms, others a pithy epitaph.
Everyone wants to watch the car wreck that is English, but if we pry our gaze from the carnage we might notice where all the traffic is headed.
This particular kind of jeremiad has its roots in the 1980s. While literature scholars certainly disagreed with one another publicly before, disagreement about what was wrong with higher education, and indeed the nation, converged on the English department. A peculiar consensus emerged that changes in literature instruction would be necessary to fix our society. In national news, “English” appeared alongside the likes of the infamous “welfare queen” on a laundry list of conservative targets.
More peculiar still, throughout the ’80s and ’90s, “English” often appeared as a problem among its most vocal supporters. Scholars as different as Allan Bloom, Gerald Graff, and Richard Ohmann were united in their conviction that fixing English would be necessary to fix America. Its professors could do nothing right: Either they did not properly uphold tradition or they stubbornly refused to supplant it. Bad English came to figure in many, perhaps most, of the university’s post-1960s troubles. The fate of the liberal arts, the future of character building, the problem of research “excellence,” prospects for détente between the humanities and the sciences — English managed to pull these problems and more into its increasingly erratic orbit.
Depicted as a kind of black hole at the center of the academic universe, literary studies’ gravitational pull persisted despite the fact that, along with every other field, it was decreasingly important as a component of university curricula. This had less to do with the success or failure of any particular argument about the field than it did with a change in the competitive environment.
The period from 1967 to 1987 witnessed explosive growth in the number of major degrees on offer at the nation’s institutions of higher education. In 1967 the National Center for Education Statistics tracked undergraduate completions in 187 degree programs. By 1987 that number had grown to more than 600.
The hundreds of new degrees were not evenly distributed across colleges. English was one of a handful of majors — call them “basic cable channels” — that one could find at pretty much any postsecondary institution. This relative ubiquity helped secure the impression that every undergraduate could or should learn something about literature. Nonetheless, the share of undergraduates completing degrees in English, as in biology and psychology, inevitably declined as options increased.
In 1985 undergraduates could major in English at 91 percent of Ph.D.-granting institutions, but English claimed only 2 percent of those baccalaureates, according to our analysis of National Center for Education Statistics data. More were exposed to literary study, of course, as students might take English classes to fulfill general-education requirements. But fields capable of satisfying the humanities requirements in general education also proliferated.
The increase in the variety of disciplines and degrees on offer in different configurations at different colleges is the central story of this period. Discord over the once and future mission of English distracted attention from the fact that this change affected not only literature scholars but also pretty much everyone who worked at a university. Few fields exhibited greater dynamism than biology, for instance, which saw its general degree splinter and recombine into nearly 100 discrete programs by 2010, whether biochemistry or ecology or bioinfomatics.
Universities, meanwhile, accomplished a subdivision of labor that created new relationships among tenure-line faculty members, graduate students, term-contract instructors, and student-services professionals. Literary scholarship, like scholarship in many other fields, became increasingly specialized, and professors were required to produce more of it. New forums, such as the invited lecture and the humanities center, encouraged an emphasis on specialized research and cultivated new forms of academic celebrity.
Clune notes that “faux interdisciplinarity” thrived in this environment. The infrastructure of the lecture circuit and the new demands of tenure and promotion conspired to elevate a pantheon of stars and demi-stars. These figures built a “bizarro world,” claims Clune, “in which every aspect of human culture and thought could be confidently explained with the theoretical tools wielded by star professors. But when the students left the seminar room, the faculty office, the literary journal, that world ended, those stars winked out.” Clune may be painting with a broad brush here, but he has a point.
A national conversation was underway about literature, but the humanities centers were too insular to sustain it. As Julie Thompson Klein observes, “The word ‘center’ is ironic, since many are not central to the mission of an institution. They are peripheral enclaves.” In these sheltered spaces, she writes, “the emphasis has been on individual research and paper reading rather than collaborative work.” Exerting a compelling pull on the intellectual life of humanities scholars in the period, centers like those at Wesleyan University and the University of California supported grand agenda-setting projects, but they addressed niche audiences habituated to the academic star system.
This problem will not be solved by a reversion to core principles.
The claim that English departments could provide a big tent welcoming anyone who studied culture revealed a similar confusion over audience and scope. As Klein explains, “The success of Theory justified including ‘literary everything’ from film, romances, and hip-hop to museums and sexuality.” She might have added primatology, physiology, cartography, and any number of other sciences. Her point is not that this work was “fake,” but that the aggressive expansion “put English in direct competition with other disciplines.”
Rather than welcoming new friends, big-tent English produced an us-versus-them distinction that militated against alliance-building across the university. Klein narrates this primarily as an intellectual-history problem — an issue of how theory, discipline, and interdisciplinarity were understood and practiced. Arguably, however, the problem was less that English professors failed to get their message right than that they failed to reckon with the practical challenges of speaking to different audiences within and beyond the university. While it was clear that big-tent English wanted to talk about anything and everything, it was often much less clear who would listen, and who would have a stake in its ruminations.
Meanwhile, propelled by a conservative education-policy agenda led from the Reagan White House, English was also represented as the proper custodian of common culture — the font of general education in the Great Books or New Criticism fashion. In this light, increasing specialization was a fall from grace, a dramatic decline from an era in which English purportedly organized the undergraduate curriculum as a whole.
In truth, English had never justly claimed the power to curate national culture, which commercial media largely control. Literary scholars could, however, pitch particular works and approaches as salutary. They did so by identifying lists of Great Books or employing methods of New Criticism, which purported to inculcate reading habits that uniquely served the commonweal. I.A. Richards imported the New Critical emphasis to Harvard’s curricular master plan, General Education in a Free Society, and popularized it for public-television audiences in 1957. As ever, misrecognition underwrites nostalgia. Repeated denunciations of English made it seem that, once upon a time, it had actually vouchsafed a lettered citizenry. Such a gesture tells us more about the 1980s and 1990s than it does about any moment in the university’s distant past. Its repetition today — the fall from grace connoted by appeals to recenter “close reading” — is a measure of how much work needs to be done for literature scholars to absorb what happened to their discipline and its institutional home decades ago.
Everyone wants to watch the car wreck that is English, but if we pry our gaze from the carnage we might notice where all the traffic is headed. Disciplinary profusion is the rule. The organizational chart that matches department to discipline does not accommodate the field, and accounts of the humanities and English like Kramnick’s are in a position to recognize this if they so choose. For decades now, English departments have housed multiple majors — in literature as well as creative writing, expository writing, and more. It is simply not true, as Kramnick asserts, that “a discipline is an academic unit.” He means “department,” the organizational staple that American universities borrowed from business enterprise back in the late 19th century.
The now hackneyed talk of “silos” is one attempt to address the problem of proliferating disciplines that no longer equate with departments. This will not be solved by a reversion to core principles. Humanists have for decades engaged this issue as if it were an intellectual dilemma, as if finding just the right pitch would unify “the humanities” and clarify relations among the disciplines proper to them. It would be good, for a change, to confront the organizational problem head-on.
Scholars disagree about premises, methods, objects, and styles — it’s what we do. If we are to grapple with the university in which those perennial debates take place, however, we need a way to work together with faculty members and administrative colleagues within as well as outside our disciplines.
A generic formula allows literature professors to command attention by lambasting their departments. Perhaps they could also attract readers by making new friends. Given its checkered past, “interdisciplinarity” might be the wrong word for that project. A better one is “collaboration.”
Mark Garrett Cooper is a professor of film and media studies at the University of South Carolina. John Marx is a professor of English at the University of California at Davis. They are the authors of Media U: How the Need to Win Audiences Has Shaped Higher Education, out recently from Columbia University Press.
