You just were. Feel better about it?

Now that I’ve got the snarkiness out of my system…

T. Burke, will you be posting some version of your comments here to your blog? I know CT is a high-traffic place an all, but your thoroughness on the issues at hand deserves a more prominent place than down among 130+ comments.

I’m also glad to see that no one appears to think The Valve oughtn’t be doing what they are doing. There was some tenor of that early in the thread, but it seems to have been a misunderstanding.

Off to read J. Holbo’s piece…

And for some reason, I had missed this from Henry in comment 10: “Why is it that you aren’t creating a competitor blog to us?”

Um, have you see this? We predate Crooked Timber, so technically that makes you guys a competitor to us!

;-)

I addressed the well-worn stereotype of literary studies as inaccessible in comment 79.

“I’m aware of your personal beef” didn’t sound right. Perhaps I was unnecessarily touchy. Given my position, I have to watch vigilantly for signs of condescension.

I learend quite a bit from exchanges you’ve had in the past about the state of philosophy, and I’ve sympathized with your position, though I may not agree with your sweeping condemnations. Naturally, it hurts a bit when a person you have read charitably dismisses you and accuses you of contempt. Nothing further from the truth. But oh well: the nature of online conversations, I suppose. Even when you try really hard to avoid personal conflict, it is bound to occur. And with the most unexpected people.

The fact that your denial that literary studies is exclusionary seized on a verbal slip as small as that one in order to avoid responding to what I was saying does not bode well for the proposition that literary studies are not exclusionary.

Pedro, I like rudeness better than whatever it was you gave me. To me the phrase “personal beef” is not a friendly one, but perhaps you were just being informal.

At this point I might as well dump the whole nine yards. When disciplines define themselves methodologically, there are always people who are methodologically excluded, such as myself. They normally leave the university and go on to other things, but some, such as myself, keep on reading. We are, as a rule, not happy with the state of affairs.

As far as the university is concerned, that is of no importance, because the university is a closed corporation and can ignore us. On the internet, on the other hand, the gatekeepers are not present. So here I am.

No, “passing the buck” implies someone’s to blame for something that’s gone wrong. I was explaining that, as with much writing that is produced by professionals, readers have to pay to read it, unless they go to a library, where it is free. And, of course, interlibrary loan is another route to getting materials.

I don’t think the economics of academic journals make much sense, and it would be great if all readers everywhere could access the scholarship they’re interested in for free (and there are those who are working to try to make this happen), but that’s not and has never been the world we live in. Wouldn’t it be great if you could walk out of your local bookstore with a backpack full of novels without paying? You can’t; who’s to blame? (And no passing the buck this time!)

“whatever it is that we’re talking about”

We’re talking about literary studies (or as some are referring to it, academic literary criticism). These are code words?

You know, you could—if you wanted—read more charitably what others say. What I meant to say is that I sympathize with your position, that I have paid sympathetic attention to your complaints before. But frankly, now I feel like I should have been rude. (Heck, I should have been rude to “put up or shut up” Doug Merrill, too.)

Opportunity cost. Sucking up the oxygen.

And it’s not a personal beef. And the fact that you’ve heard this all before from me is not a valid criticism, if you were implying that it is.

Correction: “There’s more exclusivity to whatever it is that we’re talking about than just electronic gatekeepers.” You were passing the buck to the electronic gatekeepers. In this case, I used the wrong codeword. I’m an outsider, see, and there are always several things going on at once.

I recognize the wisdom of what you’re saying (and in fact think the Valve is a great site, regardless of where some of the cash comes from), but I don’t see why English professors have to prioritize professional duties in the way you propose: why can’t I be a guide at the same time that I’m recovering things from the archive and presenting them to my fellow specialists? Why does the writing I do for the latter group have to be transparent for non-academics?

Teaching seems to be missing from this discussion. We English professors do a lot of communicating with layfolk—in the classroom. And that discussion includes appreciation and formalism right alongside historicism, theory, politics, and a great many other things. It’s just not visible because of the emphasis the tenure system puts on original research (and here I think the hard sciences have been doing the bulk of the driving since mid-last-century—the humanities mistakenly jumped on the science bandwagon in an ill-advised attempt to justify themselves primarily as scientists). It’s also not visible because, well, I’m not about to put my lecture notes online so that non-academics can read them when I know that doing so will essentially empty my classroom.

I think that if teaching were a factor in debates like these, there’d be a greater sense of the intellectual diversity of many English professors. People would see that traditional methodologies are still practiced, that in fact the profession as described by the ALSC and the NAS bears little resemblance to the on-the-ground reality. (I’m with gzombie on this point: there’s massive continuity with pre-Theory criticism and methodology, even at the most Theory-driven departments and programs.) But we all focus on research.