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.