On October 15, Gabriele Hayden led our discussion of Édouard Glissant's Poetics of Relation and Monika Kaup's "'The Future is Entirely Fabulous': The Baroque Genealogy of Latin America's Modernity," MLQ 68, no. 2 (2007) (abstract). Many thanks to Emily Setina for taking minutes. Please e-mail Andrew Goldstone if he has mistranscribed your comments; and please use the comments function below at will.
Follow the link to the full post for the minutes of our world-spanning discussion!
Present: Anne DeWitt, Colin Gillis, Andrew Goldstone, Gabriele Hayden, Susannah Hollister, Ben LaBreche, John Muse, Justin Neuman, Emily Setina, Jordan Zweck.
GH, introduction. Poetics of Relation was throwing you in at the deep end. Glissant's earlier work is more specific about the kind of critiques he's making. You can see the elements out of which this book develops. In particular:
Andrew Goldstone: How will this play into the work you're doing now?
GH: My first two dissertation chapters show how Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams are indebted to the Spanish baroque, the aesthetic of which they coopt for modernism. It's close to home for Williams, in his mother's mixed background; and the techniques of the baroque let him get around an Anglo model. My strategic question: should these ideas of the baroque belong just in these chapters or could I use it as a framework for the whole dissertation? For example, my original idea was to use it for thinking about Hughes as someone interested in connecting peripheries to each other.
Colin Gillis: I like the neo-baroque as an alternative to talking about "modernism," but it seems kind of like a relabelling of a standard modern vs. premodern dichotomy.
GH: Well, the historical baroque is already more complicated--is it just in Spain, or is it formed in the Americas as well?
Justin Neuman: Let's go back to a more basic question: what is the baroque denominating here? How does it relate to the Renaissance baroque? It's a troubled issue; it has a clear meaning in art-history--the monumental, the ornate--as a counterpart to the early modern era. Can we get at this question of relabelling by getting at what the baroque is engaged in?
AG: It's important to recall that there was a time when "Classicism" was important for talking about modernism, but that time has receded. So the opposition of baroque and classical doesn't seem so important for us--but in a French context, Classicism is the dominant art-historical period. The turn against it is far more revolutionary than it seems to us, in a literary history where TS Eliot lays simultaneous claim to Donne and classicism.
GH: As for defining the Baroque, it has a very concrete meaning in Spanish contexts: in literature, it's associated with the conceit (conceptismo), with wit, with outrageous erudition or cultismo. The archetypical Baroque writer is Góngora, whose language is crazy, altered in every possible way. These literary techniques are thus associated with the historical Baroque.
CG: When I say the Neobaroque looks like a relabelling, it's because it still seems to talk in terms of the same paradigm of modernism in terms of formal criteria drawn from European ideas of art and literature.
AG: Well, what else is it going to be? I don't want to defend a Eurocentric model, but you can't get around the kinds of formal changes Glissant names--the poetics of depth, language-in-itself, structure. They have to figure in any history. But when you relabel, that can get you somewhere by letting you tell other histories.
CG: Why does Europe have to be the center? Surely there must be other structures in world literature than Europe at the center and everywhere else at the periphery.
GH: You can see this dynamic at work in the historical baroque in Marvell and the Reformation. Is he authoritarian? Revolutionary? Is his baroque a liberatory cultural mixture? Or just another version of domination? If you don't go for mixture, you fall back on ideas of indigeneity--but that implies problematic ideas of purity. So is the baroque colonizing or decolonizing?
Ben Labreche: Does the fact that the historical label seem so strained mean you should keep the general idea but lose the label? Because in the historical baroque, it's definitely an aesthetic that's embraced by people in power.
GH: Well, in Latin American baroque you can see people building the baroque cathedrals but slipping in their local gods in the details. The baroque allows room for proliferation.
AG: And in any case it's hard to translate the authoritarian baroque into Anglo-American history.
BL: Consider the Counter-reformation: yes, it's using emotionalism to bring in the common people, but on the other hand it's definitely authoritarian.
GH: Well, in Latin America the Neobaroque is a strong tradition: it largely overlaps, for example, with the "marvelous real." It might be problematic for Anglo-American scholarship.
BL: How much credence do we give to the idea that Donne belongs to this baroque? The representative of the English baroque might be Dryden--but who, again, celebrates authority.
JN: Why is it important to Latin American writers to be labelling their work baroque, given its characteristics in Europe? What is at stake in this appropriation of form? Is this a relabelling of high modernism from below?
GH: It's part of the Latin American desire to declare independence from the US too, by valorizing the Spanish literary tradition. At the same time, it reminds us that, as Wallerstein says, the European baroque was set off by the influx of wealth from the colonies. So the baroque invokes colonization from the beginning.
GH: What I wonder is: at specific moments modern writers translate the Spanish baroque. But does the Baroque usefully indicate something larger?
CG: You might not need the theory at all. You have found these wonderful connections in the archive; Glissant's argument is for the Baroque as a world system. Does it really apply?
AG: It does matter to GH's account of the genealogy of Pound and Williams's poetics. Is it that their modernism was already in the air, and they fastened on the Spanish baroque texts because it resembled that modernism---or do you make the stronger claim that their modernism came out of their engagement with the Baroque?
GH: Pound read the Spanish writers eight years before he ever took an interest in Chinese. So the question becomes: did he ditch the Spanish influence for something new? Or did he hold on to something even though he stopped referring to the Spanish baroque overtly?
John Muse: The two alternatives could exist together as parallel genealogies.
GH: Somehow it's more powerful to say that there's a separate tradition in Latin America that rhymes with modernism, but differs from it.
CG: Are other scholars talking about the Baroque?
GH: It's in the pipeline, with the work of Kaup et al. coming out. There's a push toward alternate genealogies. For example, the baroque (Calderón especially) was important to German Romanticism. And that's Walter Benjamin's genealogy, why he comes to the baroque. So it's a trans-European phenomenon.
AG: And a good way to link modernist studies to Caribbean studies.
JN: Why preserve the moniker "modern" at all? I wonder this about all the alternate-modernity theorists--why keep the pre-modern/modern divide? Why do we care about expanding "modernity"? What do we mean when we talk about the modern in this way?
CG: We expand the term to explode it from within. The term "modernism" doesn't really work; there are significant and important differences between the literary movements it's applied to. Gradually, European "modernism" will become a smaller part of early twentieth century studies.
JM: How do Latin American scholars deal with the different assumptions between Anglo-American "modernism" and "modernismo"?
GH: "Modernismo" means something more like our fin de siècle: it's influenced by Mallarmé. Rubén Darío and a Symbolist poetics. So a lot of people in the Latin American context have taken on post-modernism while leaving their relationship to modernism unclear.
AG: As for JN's question: people care about begin modern because at a basic level they care about the basics of modernity--industrialization, social mobility, etc. Our own question as shcolars of culture is whether this basic idea of historical modernity really matches up with particular "modernist" cultural movements.
JN: Exactly. I was also shocked by Glissant's use of the term "errantry"--with its appalling connotations.
BL: And couldn't you also associate the Baroque with the feminine?
GH: There's the idea of the Black Legend--which feminizes people in Catholic countries by conceiving of them as subordinated to an authoritarian regime. What I took from Glissant's "errantry" was the recognition that pieces of culture can travel anyway. The history of the Caribbean is a history of violence, as Glissant knows, but he also knows that that violent history led to the foundation of the something he's celebrating. He is trying to theorize center and periphery in ways that will ultimately abolish them. That's his utopian gesture at the end: turning to the periphery will abolish the dichotomy.
Friday, October 31, 2008
Hayden/Glissant, 10/15: Meeting Minutes
Friday, October 10, 2008
Hayden/Glissant, 10/15: Packets available
Reading packets are now available for our next Using Theory session in the department lounge. Gabriele Hayden G6 will lead our discussion of Édouard Glissant's Poetics of Relation. Gabriele has also included an excerpt from an important recent MLQ essay by Monika Kaup on the Baroque and Latin American Modernity. We will meet on Wednesday, Oct. 15, at 1 p.m. in WLH 115. In the meantime, preliminary discussion can begin in the comments to this post!
Click here for the full blog entry.Wednesday, October 8, 2008
Goldstone/Bourdieu, 9/29: Meeting Minutes
On Monday 9/29 Andrew Goldstone led a discussion of excerpts from Pierre Bourdieu's The Rules of Art. Many thanks to Dave Gorin for taking minutes, which AG has lightly edited. Corrections to AG's and DG's memorial reconstructions are very welcome, as are comments on the post! For the full minutes, follow the link to the full post.
Present: Emily Coit, Anne DeWitt, Andy Eggers, Colin Gillis, Dave Gorin, Langdon Hammer, KC Harrison, Gabriele Hayden, Susannah Hollister, Eugenia Kelbert, Nathan Suhr-Sytsma, Jordan Zweck.
AG: I realize I threw you in the deep end with the section on method. It's the hardest part of the book to read. He's not a very good writer, and the translation is very bad. The two sizes of type are Bourdieu's own device.
Let me take a second to give you an idea of what this is all about. Look at the graph on p. 6. This diagrams the social world of Flaubert's novel, and the entire book is about how this diagram came to be written. Why does Flaubert have this knowledge of his social world? That's what Bourdieu is trying to solve, and requires him to create a whole theory.
Background on Bourdieu: he's atypical among French theorists. He's not a Parisian but comes from the sticks, the son of a postal worker. Agreg in philosophy, but then he went to do fieldwork in his home village and in Algeria. He becomes a social scientist instead of a philosopher. And unlike thinkers of '68 like Lacan, Derrida, or Althusser, he is taken seriously in the American social sciences, though he's provoked plenty of dispute and frustration. He matters.
Some writers on Bourdieu: John Guillory (see "Bourdieu's Refusal" [Yale network only]); Michèle Lamont; Pascale Casanova.
Here's how I came to Bourdieu. The salient piece of my background here is Harvard poetry courses: I took them, and they made a big impact. When I came here, I believed in the primacy of form, I despised the heresy of paraphrase, and so on. I had planned a dissertation which more or less defended these Harvard poetry principles. Then Lanny Hammer suggested that I read this book. It's a theory of modernism and aestheticism put back in its historical context. Furthermore, I immediately applied it to my own academic development; watching Bourdieu describe the rules of art made me reflect on the rules of the academic world and to see myself as a participant in a field. A quick example: the hierarchy of publishers--some academic prestiges are much higher prestige or "symbolic capital" than others. And we all make use of our own implicit knowledge of the hierarchy of publishers--but suddenly I was aware of this. I started trying to "objectivate" the institutional space, thinking of it as an object of study and not just something to obey.
But Bourdieu is also an aesthete. He loves modernism and thinks of it as one of the essential historical events in modernity. There's a widespread misunderstanding that he stands for reductive approaches to literature. In fact he wants to understand what kind of world artists make for themselves in setting out the position of art for art's sake. That love of form, in the manner of Harvard poetry courses, is still there in Bourdieu, but in a less transcendental framework.
Last year we spent a lot of time talking about what it means when you use theory. I see 3 possibilities. The first: for a suggestive quality. The second: introducing a whole new subject matter. This is a typical use of queer theory, postcolonial theory, deconstruction. And I do use Bourdieu this way, for a thematics of autonomy.
But there is a stronger use: methodological. Theory can shape our procedures and disciplinary aims. The best example is New Historicism, which shifts the object of study from literary texts to literary texts in certain kind of contexts, with a strong emphasis not on the literary itself but on history and politics. Now Bourdieu's approach is related to New Historicism, but his procedures are very different from the principally anecdotal method New Historicism uses. Instead of putting a few texts (literary, cultural, political) in relation to one another, Bourdieu says to put texts in relation to entire fields.
I think this does imply the necessity of: statistics, hypothesis testing, falsifiable models, a determinist idea of artistic production. This is necessary for addressing problems with New Historicism--for more rigorous procedures of knowledge production.
Dave Gorin: I am skeptical of the rhetoric of liberation in the Preface.
Colin Gillis: Yes, look at the last sentence of preface. We get liberated into what? I didn't have the same attachement to aestheticism. I'm not breathing the air of art for art's sake. Why do we need to salvage that original appreciation as an impulse for criticism?
Anne DeWitt: I was also somewhat surprised by the move in the preface. I was not expecting Bourdieu to make that appreciative move. Was he doing this to reassure people who feel upset by his sociological approach?
AG: It's important to think of Bourdieu's book as intervening in a French literary culture that clings more to aestheticism than ours does. He does want you to take his credentials as an aesthete seriously.
CG: Whereas if you're writing for an American audience, you would say the opposite. Not: no internal reading without external analysis, but no external analysis without internal reading.
Gabriele Hayden: I was wondering of we could get to some of the questions DG was raising through questions about your critical practice, AG. I've looked at dissertations that go systematically through periodicals to show the existence of racial stereotypes at a particular historical moment. A lot of work. There's a question of scope; I already feel like I'm juggling the universe...
AG: There's a big gap between what I see as real standards of proof and what we can do, especially as dissertating students. But ultimately, yes, I think we're going to have to resign ourselves to verifying more rigorously the things that we already know.
GH: How do you articulate that move from the contextual to the internal? I'm interested in thinking about style itself as signifying things in a political framework. But how do you make those moves?
AG (with handout from a thesis chapter): It's hard. What you need is a relation between a whole field of literary practice and those political questions. Bourdieu's 19th-century French example is the poetic choice between free verse and alexandrines. That formal choice is political; the choice of free verse has a politically rebellious aspect. But that comes out of a whole matrix of relations between the political world and the aesthetic world, where the position of aesthetic rebellion is aligned with an anti-establishment bohemia, and that of aesthetic conservatism with the political establishment. In my thesis chapter, I argue that Barnes is developing a particular kind of writing, but she's also living in a certain way-- the American in Paris, flamboyant, bohemian, hard-drinking, a whole set of related characteristics of her life-- and I want to make a relation between the style of writing and her style of life. In the conventional account, modernist expats become experimental stylists because, having left home, they've defamiliarized their surroundings. This is a bit fishy--where are the causal mechanisms? So I use Bourdieu to make a different point: the defamiliarizing style and the lifestyle are all part of one enterprise, the enterprise of carving out an autonomous position as a professional modernist writer. My one piece of sociological evidence is the preface Eliot writes to Nightwood calling it purely an achievement of style: Barnes gets received as a practitioner of pure art.
CG: GH, you're talking about anthologies, and AG, you're talking about lifestyle. It's harder to use Bourdieu to talk about reception than it is to use him to talk about production. As critics, we talk about the life of texts in social worlds. You can use Bourdieu to talk about that, but it's complicated.
Emily Coit: Hard because you need to gather data?
CG: It's hard to gather data about the use of texts.
AG: Yes. For the present day, Bourdieu does fieldwork on people: surveys, interviews. For earlier periods, you have to do broad archival reading.
CG: For example, in the modernist period, people are putting together literature anthologies to legitimize minority experience.
GH: Right, aesthetic autonomy is being deployed for explicitly political means. African-Americans claim recognition and status because they can produce autonomous art.
AG: Notice then that the claim for inclusion is still on the basis of the "rules of art"--the claim to autonomy. But CG, you're right that Bourdieu's theory squeezes things down into categories of autonomous and not.
NSS: Why do you want us to head in the directions you suggested Bourdieu leads?
EC: The critical practice Bourdieu advocates is endlessly self-reflexive. We're talking here about Bourdieu's work on the perceived autonomy of art, but he also studies the perceived sanctity of academic endeavor. I'm asking a very personal question: in using his theory in your own work, do you ever find the self-reflexivity demanded by him paralyzing? Does it make you uncomfortable?
AG: It does get kind of tiresome, and not that interesting for readers, to always come back to the norms of the profession. I don't know how to get beyond that yet. As to the question of what it's all for...I think you need to separate questions of what scholarly work must be for from how to do that work.
NSS: It raised my eyebrows when Bourdieu speaks of forsaking the sensory for the intelligible. He's going to see what we can't reach at the level of anecdote. But when I read criticism, what I like is grounded in stories of what people actually did and their relations.
AG: It is threatening in that it forces you to see the sensuous way of relating as something you can only do as a participant in the world of art, and not as a sociologist.
GH: The penultimate sentence of the preface [notes unclear here--ed.] By stepping back, you're going to tally the specific instances and get the whole model. And the anecdotal approach can't do that.
NSS: That's helpful. Why do I feel that a story or anecdote is more useful than an abstract story about how they met?
AG: True explanations don't necessarily come from sensuous, specific details, despite the appeal of the latter.
GH: A lot of the poets we read in the Working Group on Contemporary Poetry seem to be addressing some of these problems of materiality and the autonomy of art, impurity, all these things that make us uncomfortable--and they're making awesome art about it. Art goes on.
AG: Art goes on, having migrated into the university--as Lanny Hammer's work discusses. It's not coincidental that university poets write about issues that are dear to us.
LH: In that statement at the end of Bourdieu's Preface, it seems like the important world is "human." The sentence is a kind of credo. You can think about Bourdieu in relation to Marx and Marx's wanting to turn idealism on its head. Bourdieu wants to provide a human theory of the work of art, turning Flaubert on his head. The emphasis, as in Marx, falls on the maker in a powerful way that gestures, with the idea of the buried universal (in the writer), to the human. The question I was going to ask was: does Bourdieu talk about "truth"? He talks about objectivity, but Truth?
AG: I am definitely conflating what Bourdieu calls objectivity with truth. I do think that for Bourdieu, he does have a classically Enlightenment-style, purist idea of why objectivity matters. He is a political activist, but at the end of his sociology is the goal of the disinterested pursuit of truth. What would objectivity be if not related to truth?
LH: What do you think objectivity means? One of the virtues of art is the way it objectifies social relations...
AG: I don't have anything deep to say about this, but we could at least say that objectivity makes things visible potentially to all human observers, instead of confining forms of knowledge to particular social strata.
LH: Which is how it hooks up with the idea of the universal.
AG: The universal is only grasped from your position, but is (optimistically) potentially available to all. Let's look at the passage on 108 [on Flaubert's "work on form" and the "anamnesis" of his knowledge of the field of power]. Do you buy this?
CG: It makes the critic absolutely central.
AG: Is it a plausible theory? How does this look to the economist?
Andy Eggers: Why do you want to know what Flaubert is carrying around in his head?
AG: Bourdieu is doing a kind of anthropology. He wants to know what it means to be a writer in his time, and this is his way of getting at it. Flaubert knows, in the practical way of a social agent, that there's a world of the powerful, then a world of bohemia.
AD: This is the idea of habitus: Flaubert knows, but doesn't know he knows.
SH: Is it important that Flaubert doesn't know?
AG: This gets back to Colin's point on the importance of the critic's ability to unearth the buried knowledge. Bourdieu actually goes so far as to say that the only way to be liberated is to get the objective knowledge of the situation that you're in.
CG: This is what the historian says to the literary critic: why are you interested in literature and not all historical documents? And we say that artists are particularly good at capturing the social reality. The Rules of Art argues that Sentimental Education is the best evidence for this. But if you change what evidence you're looking at, maybe you'll come up with an answer that proves that Flaubert was wrong about the social field. In the end, Bourdieu attributes a real genius to Flaubert.
EC: The emphasis on appreciation that you mentioned is another response to the historian's critique.
CG: How do we find which texts and artists have captured truth / the social field? He's talking about Flaubert, not Audre Lord.
AG: In a way The Rules of Art is Bourdieu's long justification for liking Flaubert. This is my impasse: this is so specific to Anglo-French modernism. You'd have to do all this work over again if you want to take this theory somewhere else.
GH: Now I'm trying to think about the baroque and a whole other genealogy of moderism. In Spain, you're not supposed to talk about modernism, but the baroque tradition and the neobaroque. And I think there's a lot you can take from Bourdieu about the relation between historical structures and style and politics. Is baroque style something that imposes hegemony or an opportunity for disruption? You could take some of Bourdieu's questions, and maybe get different answers.
Wednesday, October 1, 2008
Fry/Departmental History, 9/15: Minutes
The first Using Theory meeting of the year was a special session on the history of the Yale English department, led by Professor Paul Fry. Many thanks to Julia Fawcett for taking notes for the minutes (below; follow the link to the full post). If AG has managed to garble your comments in transmission, please write him, and he will correct these minutes. We invite continuing discussion through comments on this post!
Paul Fry, introduction: Approaching ourselves is a tricky business; there is a debate about whom to include. Question to answer today: is there somehow an essential character of this department? The department is related to the nature of the university: we like to think of ourselves as diverse, but Yale has a history as an elite (or elitist) institution--the university began as theocentric; later, its aim was to educate gentlemen.
Does this distinguish Yale from other universities? Harvard and Princeton have the same history (with some subtle differences). This history does distinguish us from UVA, William and Mary, Penn--places that began as secular institutions.
Only belatedly was Yale a research institution (compare to Stanford and Hopkins). Yale followed Cardinal Newman's espousal in The Idea of a University of universities as spreading knowledge rather than advancing knowledge. Harvard was shaped by President Eliot's core curriculum in the 1880s-1890s; Yale had no such thing. (The core curriculum at Harvard prompted Matthew Arnold's lectures in favor of the study of the classics.) Yale resisted cosmopolitan diversity until after WWII; but Geoffrey Hartman points out that Yale too had continental scholars like Erich Auerbach (see epilogue to The Scholar's Tale).
How does this relate to the English Department? People would say we are famous for close-reading and a hermeneutic orientation. The criticism is that this implies turning inward as a way to avoid the socio-historical issues of the time. Against this John Guillory argues in Cultural Capital that this is no objection to teaching the careful reading of canonical works: he says that rigorous and careful reading must perforce be critical reading, and can never unconditionally confirm the norms of dominance or authority. Still, some say that it makes sense that we aren't known for vanguard socio-historical theories because of this charge of elitism; others would argue that we deal with these larger issues in our own way.
Discussion
Andrew Kau: What is our relationship to the Literature/Comparative Literature department?
PF: The inter-departmental dynamic has been very fruitful. Wellek worked closely with Brooks and Wimsatt, both of whom were New Critics and Anglocentric; Wellek's own view is influenced by the English department view (represented by Brooks and Wimsatt); his mammoth history of criticism, in trying to cover everything, dilutes his own formalist perspective. Similarly, Auerbach was a mentor to many who had joint appointments in English and Comp Lit. Later, one can imagine feelings of resentment in the English department toward Comp Lit because the Yale School emerged from Comp Lit, but the English Department gets the credit/blame for it. Today, the Yale School is no longer active in Comp Lit, but it's alive and well in the German Department.
Andrew Goldstone: Your history is valuable because it doesn't start where most histories of criticism start, with New Criticism. Instead, it sees New Criticism as in the context of earlier traditions (philology, appreciation, etc). Are there survivals of schools of criticism like appreciation and philology still around in what we do today?
PF: Jay Parini's Defense of Poetry is an interesting example of appreciation. Contemporary journalistic literary criticism does more than appreciate; in fact it often does the opposite but that's all part of the same enterprise. Small liberal arts colleges are places where appreciation is most alive and well. The trouble with appreciation is that it's linked historically to gentlemanly amateurism; this is what the philologists hated about it. They thought of themselves as professional, specialized, scientifically-oriented. Gerald Graff's Professing Literature is good on this. But the New Critics thought the philologists were not as scientific as they wanted to believe. Like the Russian formalists, the New Critics asked their predecessors: have you really thought about the object you're studying? Recent textual critics represent a belated version of philology: Fredson Bowers, Jerome McGann. Textual criticism takes methodological rigor and precision; there are hard problems and ongoing debates. At Indiana University, e.g., philology is alive and well; this is often the case in land grant schools.
Paul Grimstad: Yale and Harvard were both begun as divinity schools; is this connected to their present-day identity as the last bastions of a type of hermeneutic intricacy? Is there a link between scriptural exegesis and this commitment to close-reading?
PF: I think there is certainly a connection to scriptural reading, through the history of hermeneutics: from Protestants getting together to read the Bible to the democratic interpretation of a constitution; of course this is related to the interpretation of literature. Early scholars of vernacular literature like Theobald were mocked because they were thought to be making difficulties out of texts that any gentleman understood. Biblical criticism spreads to literature: compare the mystery of the Biblical parables, to their imitations in Romantic parables: stories that are deceptively simple but require interpretation to be understood. Thus religious enthusiasm for the Bible translates into enthusiasm for the secular word. This is part of the indictment of the English Department as an institution--that it is fetishizing literature as a secular experience.
Caleb Smith: The history of Yale seems always to turn on contrasting close-reading criticism with this vast Other. For most of that long history (and within PF's essay) this conflict is taking place within the English Department itself, characterized by arguments advanced by famous professors. But humanities departments are rethinking their roles within the university more seriously now then ever since the inception of the idea of an English Department. Has the close-reading paradigm worn out its legitimacy? Are there other questions we should be asking about the role of the English Department in the university? What about our role in teaching students how to write? Is that another way to think of our contribution?
PF: A couple of points: (1) The teaching of writing and oratory are part of this long history and have always been part of the English department. The problem is that the teaching of writing was initially thought of in an elitist context, as teaching gentlemen how to write, rather than as a necessary skill some students might lack. A while ago there was an effort to revive "eloquence studies": Joel Schiavone, a former Yale student from an underprvileged background, heavily sponsored this revival here a few years ago, arguing it wasn't just something for gentlemen. Even now, though English 114 and 115 are very carefully devised, English 120 [a less introductory, non-fiction writing class--ed.] is our signature writing class. Daily Themes is a somewhat uneasy index of what we take to be important: it's taken for granted that the teaching of writing need not be remedial, though this is less and less the case as the demography of the university shifts. Yale has always been committed to teaching writing, though perhaps there is a need to reexamine this commitment now.
(2) Our relationship to other humanities departments: We need to be clear about our object of study and how this object is different from other departments' objects. The borders of the disciplines, however, must be increasingly permeable. But it's important that criticism be dictated by how we define our object of study. In the Yale English department should we eschew a concept of literature or the literary and say that our object is discursivity?
But then interdisciplinarity raises flags; the openness of borders needs "border patrols"--there's a question to this day about how this interface works. At what level of generality do studies become or cease to be meaningful? The disciplines should be a basis for interdisciplinarity.
Tom Koenigs: What about the MFA/creative writing option? What is Yale's position on that?
PF: Yale's new 4-course, not 2-course, creative writing track for undergraduates is a step towards this, though we don't have a writing program the way that the University of Iowa has a writing program. This question takes us back to the issue of an elite institution. Harvard is worse; when I was there, they didn't offer drawing or painting or writing because these were believed to be vocational pursuits. [The Visual and Environmental Studies major has changed this situation somewhat recently, but it, like the extra-departmental Expository Writing program, still clearly resides on the institutional margins.--ed.]
Andrew Goldstone: It is said that the Harvard music department's philosophy is that music should be seen and not heard.
PF: Yale has flirted with this, and there's no creative writing program due in part to this anti-vocational bias. But this is starting to break down.
John Muse: But Ph.D programs, more and more, are becoming vocational schools.
PF: I was talking about undergrad; I can't think of grad programs anywhere that aren't pre-professional.
Langdon Hammer: In the English department it's actually too much professionalization that has led to the dearth of writing classes. The department thought that writing was a less rigorous class to teach than literature, though this is now changing due mostly to changes in undergraduate admissions. The Yale Capital Campaign lists among its priorities nothing in the humanities except the arts and creative writing.
PF: Again, the question is, Who gets to define what a discipline is? If the clarity of the object of study is unquestioned, we're at the center of the discipline; if it's unclear, we're at the margins and defining the margins. This is why it's so important to define the thing we're talking about--other disciplines are readier to define themselves and the implications of what they study. We must define ourselves in order to survive.
AG: What about people who went through Yale and went other places? (The history we're discussing is very faculty-centric; what happened to the students? What are they doing and how did their education influence them?)
PF: What has mattered to Yale grads in terms of fundraising is their attachment to charismatic lecturers--Phelps, Tinker, Sewall, Brodhead--but I don't know if Yale educates more future English profs than other universities.
Langdon Hammer: The Office of Institutional Research could tell us.
PF: But the charismatic lecturers are most important.
Caleb Smith: I agree with the need for specificity of disciplines, but it's the contact between the disciplines that produces this specificity.
AG: Isn't it actually market value?
CS: So how do we articulate the value of the humanities at this moment?
PF: I think that too depends on how we define the object of study.
CS: But there are several applications for our work here, and the object of study depends on those. What is the relationship between literature and writing? Because writing is a place where we are getting more market value right now.
PF: It used to be that the English major was thought to be good preparation for anything because it was a good basis for professionalization. This seems to have changed recently. There are fewer English majors because it's harder to explain to your parents why it's useful. Very few people are choosing it.