The Old Order Changeth
27th April 2012
Stanley Fish has some fun with ‘literary studies’.
I was pleased to see that the program confirmed an observation I made years ago: while disciplines like physics or psychology or statistics discard projects and methodologies no longer regarded as cutting edge, if you like the way literary studies were done in 1950 or even 1930, there will be a department or a journal that allows you to proceed as if nothing had happened in the last 50 or 75 years.
Absent are the titles that in the past gave reporters an opportunity to poke fun at academics who apparently had too much time on their hands. This year the only candidate for that kind of attention is “The Material History of Spider-Man,” but given the serious study devoted to comic books in a number of disciplines, there’s not much there to ridicule. By the evidence of this program at least, literary scholars are no longer gifting critics and pundits with an open invitation to skewer them.
Once again, as in the early theory days, a new language is confidently and prophetically spoken by those in the know, while those who are not are made to feel ignorant, passed by, left behind, old. If you see a session on “Digital Humanities versus New Media” and you’re not quite sure what either term means you might think you have wandered into the wrong convention. When the notes explaining the purpose of a session on “Digital Material” include the question “Is there gravity in digital worlds?”, you might be excused for wondering whether you have become a character in a science fiction movie. And when a session’s title is “Digital Literary Studies: When Will it End?”, you might find yourself muttering, “Not soon enough.”