Lowell Prize Winner Retracts Journal Article

Rodrick Shapiro, who received the James Russell Lowell Prize for Pre/Post/Eros: Libidinal Economies in Utopian Literature, 1888 and Beyond, has retracted an article after other scholars failed to reproduce his original findings.

Columbia University, where Shapiro worked when the article was published in American Literature in 2006, has begun a review of article to determine if there is any evidence of misconduct.

In the article, Shapiro described how a neo-deconstructive reading of Thomas Dixon's The Clansman produced a work whose "deep 'negrophobia' signifies nothing less than the repressed homoerotic 'negrophilia' of Ben Cameron, Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan."  Shapiro had claimed that previous literary critics projected their own unconscious racism upon the characters in Dixon's romance.  "The phrase 'under the doctor's rigid gaze,'" Shapiro wrote, "implicates Cameron and Gus in a system of sexually gratifying panoptic leering; furthermore, when Gus 'lifts his huge paws lamely, as if to ward off a blow,' he recuperates the dread logic of literal slavery from its debased place in the psychosexual drama of American history." 

"It's disappointing," Dr. Shapiro, who is now a full professor at the University of Florida, told the journal PMLA in a news article about the retraction.  "I devoted my life to that study for nearly three weeks, but when I re-read it, I realized I was utterly full of shit."

In a statement, Columbia University said it is "disappointed" by the retraction, but understands why Shapiro had asked for it.  "There is a reason Dr. Shapiro's tenure review went as it did.  My colleagues and I think no less ill of him after the retraction than we did before.  We are confident he will produce work of a similar caliber in Florida and beyond."
 

Comments

[Ahistoricality]

Did you know that a Google search for "Libidinal Economies" returns two thousand hits?

I must find a way to work the phrase into my everyday conversations....

[Luther Blissett]

I don't get it.

[Sisyphus]

Oh noes! First Kafka's Metamorphosis comes under scrutiny, and now this!!!

It's starting to make me worried about my article series on Literary Cold Fusion...

[SEK]

I don't get it.

Have you ever seen an article in a humanities journal be retracted? I have -- once, on account of plagiarism. I mean, even Fred Crews lets his early psychoanalytic boosterism stay "on the record," despite having disowned it back in the 70s.

[zunguzungu]

About time some accountability entered this profession.

I don't think this will help me convince my alma mater to let me "retract" my MA thesis, though, on the basis that I've ceased to use "idiocy" as my critical methodology.

[JPool]

So, are you suggesting that humanities types should issue retractions rather than simply publishing new articles that declare their earlier arguments to have been wrong headed/dumb/not sufficiently attentive to subfactor x7? Are you satirically saying that we should be less or more structuralist in our post-structuralism? Or is this another in your series, "Whoo boy! The nineties, huh?"
Yeah, I think I'm with Luther.

[Ahistoricality]

I thought it was hilarious, and dead-on. SEK is right: humanities articles are never withdrawn, retracted, amended, or corrected, allowing bad information and absurd theories to live on in the literature forever (and its even worse now with digital archives dragging this stuff back up). There was a period in the 60s and 70s when historians attempted to apply the ideas of Freud and Jung to historical biographies and social phenomenon -- we called it psychohistory -- which produced some of the most embarassing stuff, thought it's still cited in some venues. There are more recent attempts to apply much better social psychology and cognitive theory, post-Freudian developmental psychology, etc, which is very promising in the development of family history, children's history, etc., but nobody calls it psychohistory any more, for obvious reasons.

Alfred North Whitehead said that "Learning preserves the errors of the past as well as its wisdom. For this reason dictionaries are public dangers, although they are necessities."

[zunguzungu]

It's fascinating how quick we are to turn SEK's piece of farce into something that can be paraphrased: he is "right" or he is "saying" something. Not that I don't do the same thing, let me quickly put in, but the humor seems to be getting lost in the translation, what E.B. White said about dissecting a frog (you can dissect frogs and jokes, but both tend to die on the process). The piece is funny because the humanities don't work the same way as the sciences, and the absurdity of treating them as if they do is just FUNNY. But that humor isn't reducible. It's funny for contradictory reasons: first that the humanities necessarily can't correct their own mistakes (and can therefore be mocked), but *also* that this is a good thing (the virtue of the methodology is that nothing is proven).

[Luther Blissett]

No, I really just didn't understand it. I thought it was a comment on all the retractions of memoirs and such these days.

I didn't realize scientists are forced to personally retract past research if someone comes around and disproves them.

[Bourgeois Nerd]

Wasn't there just a few days ago a case where a Nobel prize winning scientist retracted a paper because the findings couldn't be reproduced? So isn't this post just a humorous play on that, since such a thing would never happen in the humanities?

[SEK]

Wasn't there just a few days ago a case where a Nobel prize winning scientist retracted a paper because the findings couldn't be reproduced?

There certainly was. I used the article on it in the Times as a template for this post.

[Naadir Jeewa]

I say you call in the STS brigade and see what they can make of you lot.

[John Emerson]

Drug-test the motherfucker too.

Wait -- it was written years ago? I guess in the future urine and blood samples will have to be submitted on first publication.

[SEK]

They test my urine and blood all they'd like, I've never knowingly done nothing.