Lovely Viral Erudition

"How much time 'til that post's done?"

"Another 15 minutes at least."

As CR noted, my intellectual biography revolved around the professors I worked with more than the ideas they helped me think through.*  I could chalk that up to the empahsis of that particular post, but there's something to the notion that we adapt to our intellectual environs, and that the most imposing predators therein are the professors we work with.  Let me weave a few conversations together here:

• CR: "I have found that the closer that I keep to the issues that are actually important to me, what keeps me up at night thinking and reading and writing, the happier I am and, so far, the better I do. The trick, as is always the trick in intellectual production, is adapting what is most authentically mine to what the market demands."
• Laura: "But my point is that you’re wrong to claim that love must end before 'pointed interest' (which I take to be the most you think a professional critic ought to own up to) can begin.  You’ve every right to say there’s no place for love in your personal experience of writing about literature, and perhaps even within the culture of your institution, but there are no grounds for asserting that it’s also how things must work for everybody else.  Reasoned, communicable academic scholarship and criticism is perfectly compatible with love, warmth, pleasure, curiosity, respect and enjoyment.  I would even go so far as to say the very best criticism must harbour some sympathy for the object of its attention.  It’s a negative capability thing.
• Marco Roth: "It seems to me that an interesting debate could be had about the idea of love implied in the essay. Can’t we go from love of a single author to love of styles that remind us of our first love? Can the circle of our affections widen without betraying us to pseudo-science? But surely the purpose of a profession ought to have some relationship to the reasons people have for entering it. And—thinking psychologically rather than professionally—what does actually happen in English departments?"

Now thrust this all into the intellectual environment of an English department during graduate study and witness love's ideal evolution:

1. You come to graduate school with love.
2. You're forced to adapt that love to professional ends, preferably without soiling or despoiling it, in order to survive graduate school.
3. You take your professionalized love to the MLA and hope that it enhances your performance and increases the odds that you'll land a job you can stomach.
4. You land such a job and allow that love to guide your intellectual development for the rest of your days.

Somewhere beneath that professional veneer your first love continues to inform the work.  The formal properties of the academic article deaden interest in their content.  Love enlivens the tired form.  It inflates the flattened prose and communicates to the reader its contagion.  Case in point. 

Now I'm gonna read Shakespeare.  Why?  Greenblatt sneezed as I walked by and now I've caught it.  I've got love.  The more I think about this the more convinced I am that CR, Laura and Marco nail these matters of the literary heart.  Because without passion it would be difficult to muster the investment necessary to acquire viral erudition. 

But note the implications of this line of thought.  The love must be of literature.  I'm not sure I have that the way many of my colleagues and interlocutors do.  Not that I'm not partial to a well-turned phrase.  (I am.)  Only my investment isn't literary so much as polemical: I love a well-turned argument more furiously.  What my intellectual history reveals to me is an infatuation with ideas and mode of their articulation, of which "the literary" is but one. 

The ideas I came to graduate school chasing were primarily theoretical, even when they were guised in literary forms.  Another way to say this may be that I'm not seeking happiness in my professional life so much as amenable modes of thought.  I could call them "soporific" in that they ward off the insomnia which accompanies the fear that I'm making it all up.**  (Which reminds me that I haven't fully appreciated N. Pepperell's contribution to my intellectual biography.  Such is the incoherence that accompanies having too much on one's plate.) 

So I've stumbled this argument into a corner.  Now I throw my teddy in it.  (And Bob's my uncle!)  I can't argue against what logic and evidence compel me to believe.

But I'm wrong.  Prove me so.  (What else are you good for?***)

* Or, as Adam would have it: "the professors with whom I worked more than the ideas through which they helped me think."  Silly Englishman trying to wind me up with elitist codswallop.  I'll show him with.  He'll learn the meaning of.

** ". . . up I'm making it all."

*** "For what else are you good?"

Comments

[Adam Roberts]

"Silly Englishman trying to wind me up ..." I'm like Brer Rabbit in the briar patch (is that the story? it's one of your quaint colonialist yarns at any rate) when it comes to accusations of 'silliness'. For most middle-class Englishmen, silly is a badge worn with pride. (Not working class Englishmen, mind; they'll punch you if you call them that).

[Brendan]

Philosophy, just abandon literature and do pure philosophy! It's amazing how many people use the literature they think they want to study mostly as an entree into or pretext for the philosophy they wish they did.

Do philosophy and Robert really would be your mother's brother.