Friday, 12 August 2005

The Interpronomicon, or Samizdat for the Literary Scholar

Before I get started: If you're a regular reader but didn't comment on yesterday's post, I'm still 28 readers short of winning the bet, so I'd love it if you checked in.  On to business!

Theory business!  (ignores collective groans )

When I lunched with my advisor this past Monday, he told me about a very dangerous book with a very froufy front cover called Literary Interest.Knalit_1  He warned me that while I should read this book I should under no circumstances attempt to emulate the style of Steven Knapp's argument.  Nor should I attempt to learn anything from it.  I should read it, acknowledge that it exists then squirrel it away until such a time as I might have tenure.  He said it would ruin my chances of an academic career, a social life or ever getting remarried after the wife realizes how much better she can do than me.  (We have that sort of advisor/advisee relationship.)  According to my advisor, Steven Knapp wrote this book shortly before disappearing across the Mexican border to fight alongside Poncho Villa.   Or becoming the 11th provost of Johns Hopkins.  One of the two.  The point being you're damned curious to know what's contained in this little volume--it runs all of 142 pages before reaching its horrifying conclusion--but since I've only read the first chapter, you'll have to wait.  I know that's inconsiderate of me to build up your hopes only to shatter them mercilessly on the cold ceramic tile I recently installed on Acephalous.  (Do you like?)

I fully intended on presenting you with a taste of the Interpronomicon tonight.  Then it dawned on me that the first chapter works the argument of his and Walter Benn Michaels' "Against Theory" and "Against Theory II" through its implications for Milton's Paradise Lost. 

And that can't be that dangerous because I already know it.  I've read both those essays and my career, life and marriage are still intact.  There there be dragons ain't the scout's shout yet.  They must not appear until chapter two, which I'll read tomorrow.  All the theoretical equivalents of dragons and flatbreads concocted from the blood of Christian children (I am Jewish and have to eats my matzahs) will be communicated on the morrow, once I have fully imbibed the evil that is! that is! that is! negative capability?  Negative Capability!?!

Aug 12, 2005 10:11:02 PM | Academia, Books, Literature, Theory's Empire

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Stick It To The Historians! or Social Darwinism? No Such Beast. Responding to last Saturday's outburst of robust hatred, Luther Blissett jokingly recommended I avoid criticizing scholars in my field by criticizing historians instead. A week of dissertation frustration later, I'm seriously considering seriously considering his advice. Here's the dilemma: Social Darwinism is less coherent fin de siècle philosophy and more convenient myth unwittingly perpetuated by the well-meaning Richard Hofstadter.[1] Hofstadter emphasized the Herbert Spencer vogue in the person of William Graham Sumner, connected it to racist imperialism and thus was born a philosophical movement that only ever existed conceptually. Now, I could discuss (at great length) how Hofstadter should've undertaken a more comprehensive revision of his seminal Social Darwinism in American Thought (1944) when the "Revised Edition" appeared in 1959. After all, by 1959 he had already written The Age of Reform, and should've known that the majority of references to evolutionary theory (though rarely "Darwinian" in anything but name) between 1890 and 1910 weren't mouthed by laissez faire capitalists like Spencer's friend Andrew Carnegie but by reformers like pioneering sociologists Lester Frank Ward and James Mark Baldwin. Of all the robber barons, only Carnegie--whose ideas on social evolution were more Malthussian than Darwinian--fit Hofstadter's mold. Not that it's even that important: in terms of the frequency with which people applied evolutionary theory to social, cultural and political matters, "social Darwinism" pales in comparison to appeals to a Lamarckian model of evolution made by advocates of social reform. The real impact of evolutionary theory can be seen in someone like John Dewey, whose firm belief that anyone could acquire an education is founded on an idea that characteristics like "intelligence" and "culture" could be acquired over the course of an individual lifetime. That's classic how-giraffes-got-long-necks Lamarckism. If you're still reading you may be one of the lucky few I eventually ask to read this dissertation of mine when it nears completion. Rest assured I've almost reached my point. Because you've not done the primary research on your own and I haven't cited it here, I beg you to grant me all that and then tell me what I should when every article I read begins something like this: As popularized at the time, Social Darwinism was reduced to a crude argument claiming the survival of the fittest among individuals within soicety and among societies as well. The doctrine appealed to the privileged Anglo-Saxon elite because it reinforced ethnocentric and evolutionist attitudes towards so-called primitive peoples... ...or it would have if such a doctrine predicated on such a reduction had existed. Clarice Stasz's overall argument is whip-smart, but because of its assumptions (quoted above) it can't help but flounder. The section above's followed by an argument whose assumptions render it entirely useless for my purposes; and because of Hofstadter's eminence, Stasz's assumptions may well represent those of all literary scholars who have worked on literature of the period.[2] So should I take Luther's advice and nail my theses to Hofstadter's door and write a dissertation in which I appear to ignore...

Scott Eric Kaufman

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