Jonathan Gottschall makes what is bound to be a controversial contribution to the ongoing discussion about how to bring focus to the field of literary studies – its purposes, methods and aims. This is a set of questions with which many writers struggle, often on purpose. In his article for the Boston Globe, Gottschall contributes to the scrum by brazenly proposing that in order to survive and prosper, literary studies must answer these questions by borrowing from …
(wait for it)
… the sciences.
In the next series of posts, I will analyze a few dimensions of Gottschall’s essay. I should remind readers that this blog is about understanding how arguments work, not about refuting or bolstering particular positions, so I am not preoccupied with judging Gottschall’s case. Rather, I am interested in how the essay stages a curiously difficult rhetorical problem: this author is telling literary critics that there is a basic flaw in the disciplinary conventions that define them professionally and that they use to assess merit. Due to this flaw, the canons of value to which critics have devoted their minds must be jettisoned and replaced with a more successful variety that had been innovated for other people and purposes.
It’s a bit like trying to convince an apple that its core is rotten and so it ought to become an orange, which is obviously much tastier and more popular. Whether or not this change is possible (and whether or not you believe it makes sense to compare apples and oranges) you have to admit that in this scenario the apple is going to take a lot of convincing.
Over the next few posts I’ll track Gottschall’s successes and failures at this task. In this first installment, I focus on a couple of important ways in which the early parts of the essay undermine the likelihood that argument will succeed at reducing the critical reader’s skepticism.
Gottschall begins his essay with a lament that the study of literature is in deep trouble. Class enrollments and funding are in decline, scholars have difficulty finding work, books go under-published and under-read. As a result, the field had become “moribund, aimless and increasingly irrelevant.” To prove this to us, Gottschall quotes an article from The Nation by William Deresiewicz, who ominously suggests that the field is “slowly dying.”
It is strange that Gottschall has chosen to use a quote from an authority to substantiate his declination narrative. If the overall claim is going to be that we ought to make literary studies more like the sciences, why not use something that resembles scientific data here? Gottschall is happy to tell us that the field’s “vital signs are bad,” but he has chosen not to give us the numerical values of those signs, even though details on the current rates of publishing, hiring, enrollment and funding are indubitably out there to be had.
Gottschall’s unscientific characterization of the symptoms is all the worse because of the way he diagnoses the underlying problem in the next paragraph:
We literary scholars have mostly failed to generate surer and firmer knowledge about the things we study. While most other fields gradually accumulate new and durable understanding about the world, the great minds of literary studies have, over the past few decades, chiefly produced theories and speculation with little relevance to anyone but the scholars themselves. So instead of steadily building a body of solid knowledge about literature, culture, and the human condition, the field wanders in continuous circles, bending with fashions and the pronouncements of its charismatic leaders.
This passage does two things. First of all, it uses sarcasm (“the great minds” “fashions” “speculation”) in a way that is as unproductive as it is flip. This choice makes Gottschall’s intervention seem heroic and even iconoclastic to some readers, but the choice also undermines the case being made to literary critics, because it fails to respect the fact that even if they are wrong, scholars actually have perfectly good reasons for why they believe the theories at the heart of their discipline. Instead of acknowledging this, Gottschall veers into polemic. In my mind, what distinguishes a scholar from a polemicist is that even in disagreements, a scholar is at least interested in why his or her adversaries hold their erroneous beliefs. On the other hand, a polemicist prefers to mock these odious beliefs rather than make an effort to look at the forces that gave rise to them. Because this article is more in the latter voice, Gottschall has made his job harder if he wants to sell his suite of scientific methodologies to literary scholars.
Secondly, look at how wonderfully Gottschall sets out two constellations of attributes for us to use later on in the paper. A poor literary criticism is theoretical, speculative, irrelevant, wandering, circuitous, bending to fashion and the pronouncements of false leaders. By contrast, a better litcrit will be sure, firm, gradually accumulated, new, durable, steadily built, solid. Although this contrast is very useful, it reminds us of the earlier problem: by his very own metrics Gottschall’s understanding of the state of his field resembles the first constellation of words and not the second. Indeed, to prove that litcrit is in decline, Gottschall relies only on Deresiewicz’ pronouncement, which is hardly a form of substantiation that is gradually accumulated or durable. In other words, Gottschall is about to propose that we wield upon fiction a kind of analytic machinery that he has already shown himself to be unwilling to wield upon fact.
This is not an auspicious beginning. We’re just a few paragraphs in and this paper has already identified itself as polemical rather than scholarly – even though it is addressed to scholars – and Gottschall has also touted a way of grounding claims that his own prose plainly does not exhibit.
Things look grim, but all is not lost. Gottschall is about to rescue his argument in a really interesting and subtle way.
How, you ask?
Tune in next time…
8 Comments
May 14, 2008 at 7:27 am
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May 15, 2008 at 9:13 pm
[...] in which the author argues that literary studies ought to become more like the sciences. In my first post, I argued that Gottschall’s initial paragraphs establish qualities for litcrit to aspire toward [...]
July 28, 2008 at 2:59 pm
[...] have considered Gottschall’s essay at length in the past (”Substance,” Part I, Part II and Part III). Here I’d like to highlight Peterson’s approach to reporting [...]
March 28, 2009 at 5:33 pm
[...] belong my series on Jonathan Gottschall’s efforts to make litcrit more like the sciences (Part I, Part II, Part III and there’s also this), probably just because Gottschall got a lot of [...]
April 1, 2009 at 5:07 pm
[...] the last post, I examined Jonathan Gottschall’s recent essay about integrating the aims, techniques and rigors [...]
April 1, 2009 at 5:08 pm
[...] in which the author argues that literary studies ought to become more like the sciences. In my first post, I argued that Gottschall’s initial paragraphs establish qualities for litcrit to aspire toward [...]
April 1, 2009 at 6:47 pm
[...] have considered Gottschall’s essay at length in the past (”Substance,” Part I, Part II and Part III). Here I’d like to highlight Peterson’s approach to reporting [...]
April 1, 2009 at 7:33 pm
[...] belong my series on Jonathan Gottschall’s efforts to make litcrit more like the sciences (Part I, Part II, Part III and there’s also this), probably just because Gottschall got a lot of [...]