re: Academic blogging and literary studies

John Holbo, one of the Crooked Timber bloggers, recently posted a long piece of commentary on academic blogging, especially blogging concerned with literature. Here, a summary and some responses:

• Academic blogging, John argues, is often of "higher quality than … high level seminar and conference talk," because writing, even speedy blogging, requires more thought than (impromptu) speech.

• "Every class ought to have a blog." I agree. Blogs can turn individual assignments into class conversations, and the technology is simple and free. But, better than a blog for each class would be a blog for each student in a class, with the professor's blog housing a blogroll + RSS feed, along with post prompts and comments. In my experience, a group blog, with postings assigned as homework, encourages passive agreement more than thoughtful and independent contributions, but having a blog all to oneself often feels empowering and can be private enough to allow for more personal reflections on the material.

• John writes, "What really interests and excites me personally is not academic philosophy blogging, however - although I am an academic philosopher blogger - but encouraging blogging about academic literary studies and cultural criticism." He goes on to say that literary studies, more than other academic fields, should take advantage of this new technology to draw into itself new "interest and excitement." I'll return to this in a moment.

• "I would like to hear from literary studies bloggers - everyone else, too - about what they think the role of blogging could be in making things better. And what they think about the state of literary studies generally." (Earlier this month, lit bloggers began a long meta-conversation on lit blogging: its possibilities, and its role in a larger cultural dialogue. I linked to most of the major moments in this meta-conversation at the bottom of this post.)

• John goes on to acknowledge the strong web presence of lit blogs, and suggests academics "[meditate] long and hard on the question: why are our journals not as exciting as these non-academic literary blogs, day after day."

• In my opinion, either 1) John is conflating non-academic literary commentary with literary studies, 2) I'm a snob to assume there's a difference, or 3) I'm misreading John's post. I'd like to (for now, at least) argue for the first possibility. "Literary studies" usually requires, in practice, an affiliation with a certain school of thought -- a predetermined theoretical approach, such as New Historicism or New Criticism. The approach helps decide which of a text's many aspects should be discussed, and often refuses to assess "literary value" or relate personal reactions, though a text's "value" may be suggested by its selection for academic treatment. On the other hand, non-academic literary commentary often hides or denies a theoretical affiliation, and is openly/actively involved in opinion-making (sometimes a scary combination).

  So, when John writes that literary studies can use blogs to generate more "interest and excitement" and then mentions (Cup favorites) Maud Newton and Old Hag, is he implying that these blogs are not only helping literature get more attention, but also helping the state of academic "literary studies"? In my opinion, the lit blogs I read are no better a model for "literary studies" blogs than most other blogs. When a blog's subject is as broad as "literature," the treatment of the subject becomes more important than the subject. Or, more to the point: I don't know how blogging affects the way a subject is treated, and it may be that blogs are better suited for shorter commentary than for longer pieces of scholarship.

• John writes that the answer to the question of why journals are less exciting than "non-academic literary blogs … is NOT ‘because the journals are so much more rigorous and concerned with constructing sophisticated arguments and so forth.’ Because that answer wouldn’t be true." So what is the answer? Is it that non-academic discussions are more "exciting" than academic discussions? Since the point of the post is that "academic discussions" should use blogs to become more "exciting," that can't be it. Is it that blogs make any discussion more "exciting"? I think that's what John's suggesting. Blogs, via links and trackbacks, encourage immediate conversation, and are easier to access and read than academic journals (and, without a library nearby, much cheaper, too). But, blogs are also appealing because their posts are, generally, shorter than articles and (obvs x 2) books. In that sense, and others, blogs are not a real replacement for journals and books, and I'm not sure that the technology points out a way journals, without becoming blogs, can become more exciting.
  

UPDATE: After I posted this entry, I spent some time reading the blogs listed under "Literature, language, culture" on Crooked Timbers' sidebar. Most of the blogs, written by graduate students or professors, are diary repositories or anti-Bush portals. I bookmarked the exceptions, and will try to link to some of them soon; for now, I'm linking to just one, Critical Mass. CM's author, Erin O'Connor, has also posted a response to John's post, and the response, unlike mine, benefits from a current and first-hand knowledge of academia. It applauds most of what John wrote, but also expresses "reservations about whether the blog-induced revival Holbo envisions is possible, given academic literary studies' attitudes toward technology and transparency." Erin continues, further down in the post: "…one sign of the systemic disorder of literature departments today is that their members are positively hostile to the idea that their relevance may and should be assessed by--horror of horrors--uncredentialled laypersons, the great nonacademic unwashed."
Meanwhile, the comments on John's post are piling up, and John's responding to them with clarifications and extended definitions. John wants literary scholarship to participate in more "bookchat," a term taken from this speech by Scott McLemee. John summarizes "bookchat" as "saying what you like, what you are enthusiastic about, trying to be smart about it, trying to interest others, but not really worrying about the Big Picture right this second." That's what non-academic lit blogs do, and what literary scholarship, in his opinion, needs to learn to do more often. To that, Chun (link goes to Chun's blog, not his CT comment) responds,

What does trouble me is the repressive tolerance of bookchat Holbo endorses. I, Vidal, and all freedom-loving peoples use the term contemptuously. Like the masturbation it is, I often find reading 4500 empty words about the eternal verities of Henry Green pleasurable. A forty-five word blog-post pointing me to it is even appreciated. The idea, however, that it’s a catalyst for textual and historical scholarship on this novelist is astonishing. Rather, inane, evaluative bookchat is parasitic on scholarship—generally low-level, biographical scholarship—but scholarship all the same. It does not advance knowledge; it uses an appeal to taste and kulchur to sell a certain class of audience to advertisers.
Like all good educators, I’m an obscurantist. The circulatory function of bookchat that Holbo mentions is very real and dangerous. The blog can exercise chat. If there is a problem with literary studies, it’s that it isn’t sufficently phlegmatic. Consider Pinker’s parable about the elephant’s trunk, for example.

Heh. John writes back, "Chun wants literary studies to stay the same, only more so? Phlegm fatale."

Posted by nchicha at April 19, 2004 04:09 AM