April 22, 2008
Against Argument
Five days ago, Stephen Burt, an associate professor of English at Harvard, published a brief post at the Columbia University Press blog titled "Against Argument." Here's the opening:
The academy thrives on argument, at least in the traditional humanities: arguments get us noticed. Travel guides and scientific discoveries may both sell books, but to get attention within the realms of the arts and the humanities now, one almost has to make an extended argument: to take issue with some dominant view, to explain why what we already knew was wrong, or (especially in literary studies) to demonstrate some big connection between features within some literature, and features of history or (more rarely) philosophy or natural science outside it.
There’s nothing wrong with making extended arguments, of course, and I spend much of my time (at least during the school year) teaching our students how to do just that. Yet our sustained interest in arguments might be making us keep at arm’s length, or under a cloud, the reasons why we care for the arts at all, the smaller-scale features that distinguish works of art from one another, the features which help us explain (if it can be explained—can it?) why we care for this one, not that one.
The post has been noticed widely around the literary blogosphere, and has generated a lengthy and interesting discussion at The Valve. I find that Burt's claim, being rooted in how academics get noticed, is related to the opinions advanced by Harvard University Press editor Lindsay Waters regarding the "publish or perish dictum" in academia. Quantity and differentiation now seem prerequisites for moving up the tenure-track ladder, yet both can be antithetical to genuine insight into the effects works of art have upon those who experience them.