Fizz
There is an amusing post here by a blogger who is eccentric enough to read B&W. He’s just been reading a N&C from back in early January, the one about academostars – which sent him to an article by Scott McLemee in the Chronicle, which prompted some reflections on Stanley Fish’s Reagonomical views of the merits of overpaying academostars.
To be fair, Fish may have a point: his presence in an English department may draw starry-eyed grad students into the department and increase funding for more useless graduate seminars on esoteric topics that will prove of little or no use to anyone teaching at most universities. In this respect, the “material conditions” of the other professors in the department may be improved somewhat (though the graduate students and adjuncts will still be teaching the same thankless classes for the same poverty-level wages). But Fish will still be making 2-3 times what his colleagues do for far less work (most academic superstars teach one course a year, generally a graduate or senior seminar with a small enrollment). Very little of that privileged status will be trickling down to his colleagues.
It’s all very reminiscent of Robert Frank and Philip Cook’s The Winner-Take-All Society, an excellent book on the way minuscule differences in talent can make the difference between a hugely remunerative career and none at all (in professional sports, movie stardom, popular music, for example). Stardom does work that way. And often it has so much to do with – a kind of gas, really. Vapor, hot air, bubbles. Especially in the case of academostars. People become stars because people start calling them stars, and other people hear that and call them stars too, and more people do the same, and more and more. Mass hypnosis. Pretty soon it becomes unthinkable or socially unacceptable to ask ‘Why is this person a star? What’s the big deal? In what way is this one so enormously better than that one?’ It all seems to have far more to do with hype and silly showbizzy attitudes than it does with anything resembling intellectual interests or values.
It seems to me that the superstar system is just one aspect of a generally inflated sense of angst and self-importance in literary studies (I don’t remember it being like this 20 years ago, the first time I was an English major).
I’m inclined to blame Terry Eagleton and his book _Literary Theory_. He agitates for a concept of literary criticism as having the potential to radically transform society. Even when he makes fun of his critical forebears for their political pretensions, he’s galled not by their ambitions for political change via literary criticism, but by their failure to fulfill those ambitions.
I understand Eagleton’s book has been The Textbook in lit studies these last two decades. Maybe if I’d read it when I was a mush-brained 20-year-old I would have been filled with anxious zeal to make my generation the one to realize Eagleton’s vision. Maybe all these hyperventilating “fans” of literary “superstars” are just looking for an Eagletonian messiah.
Then again, Eagleton’s probably just another symptom of this whole inexplicable…grandiosity thing…
Love the Reaganomics connection.
Yep – inexplicable grandiosity thing, exactly. It needs some figuring out, that does. One could blame Leavis, I suppose? He did make some very grandiose claims for literature and criticism. But they were at least claims for literature as literature and lit crit as lit crit, not lit crit dressed up as philosophy and sociology and psychology and every other discipline besides only more omniscient than all of them. That’s a post-Leavis development, and it remains deeply puzzling.
OB,
Not directly related to Fish but regarding lit crit in general I found something that may be of interest. In your essay on Bad Writing you quoted from Critical Terms for Literary Study, edited by Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin. I came to know Lentricchia through another book “After the New Criticism.”
I was surprised then to recently find an essay of his entitled “Last Will and Testament of an Ex-Literary Critic” in “Quick Studies: The Best of Lingua Franca.” In it, he describes how he eventually turned against critical theory and adopted a much less pretentious teaching style. He now spends his time teaching undergraduates and writing novels.
Perhaps you’re already familiar with this essay, but I thought I’d mention it,
I found a shortened version of the essay here:
http://www.bu.edu/literary/newsletter/archive/1996-4/will-and-testament.html
Thanks very much, Chris – that’s a terrific article! I had heard that Lentricchia had recanted, I think, but I also think I’d forgotten the fact.