I've just finished reading 520 applications to my English department's MA/PhD program (my reward for saying yes to the job of Director of Graduate Studies). That's a lot of raw data about the current state of my discipline. Here's what I've learned.
(1) The Great Recession hasn't changed anything. Nor has all the press lately about the terrible no good job market in the humanities. Our application numbers have stayed constant, and both applicants and recommenders pretty much proceed as if it's business as usual, except for the occasional aside "I know the market's awful but he / she / I will surely be the exception." Every other applicant in the pool, however, is a 4.0 student with 99th percentile GREs who's the best graduate ever from XYZ college or university. Hope springs eternal etc.
(2) Movies and TV seem to trump what we teach in the classroom when it comes to influencing future faculty. We have a sea of applicants wanting to study vampires, zombies, Harry Potter, J.R.R. Tolkien, Narnia, and Jane Austen--singly or in combination. Some of these files are absolutely first rate. Most aren't. Moreover, you read letter after letter of recommendation praising this or that student's marvelous facility with 17th century prosody, 18th century travel writing, contemporary Zulu praise poetry, or what-have-you intriguing subject, and then you flip to the writing sample and discover yet another Dracula-and-Twilight essay or Beowulf-and-Frodo MA thesis. There is good news for certain subfields. Old English and Old Norse appear to be booming--thanks, Peter Jackson and Angelina Jolie!--and the Janeites should be able to keep the Good Ship Victoria afloat for years to come. Hordes of undead-fanatics have been sighted shambling toward the long eighteenth century in search of Gothica.
(3) The theory canon seems to have closed, a little like the opera canon, or Scripture. I finished my Ph.D. in 2000, the same year that Hardt and Negri's Empire was published. Since then, judging at least by these 520 files, no new name has emerged that has rock star-like charisma or widely-worshipped intellectual oomph. You hear a great deal about Judith Butler, Slavoj Zizek, Homi Bhabha, Walter Benjamin, Gloria Anzaldua, and other thinkers who were already staples of "Introductions to Literary Theory" courses back in the mid-1990s. Otherwise, the name dropping has become quite field specific. Insofar as one can identify any new profession-wide theoretical trends, they tend to position themselves at the intersections between literary study and psychology or the natural sciences. Arriba trauma studies, affect studies, ecocriticism, and cognitive poetics! Oh, image-text relations are also huge. Generally as a pretext for analyzing The Watchmen, Maus, or Neil Gaiman's Sandman comix. Or to talk about World of Warcraft.
(4) A surprisingly large number of students and professors maintain that we have moved into a new literary period, variously called post-postmodern, post-9/11, or post-ironic. There also appears to be a truly remarkable degree of agreement concerning the Great Books of the present day: Cormac McCarthy's The Road and Blood Meridian, David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves, and Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Thomas Pynchon, too, is cited over and over as the harbinger and presiding genius of the New Period. I've read these books (including all of Pynchon's novels), but I never expected the emergence of such a matter-of-fact way of narrating the present moment in US literature, and I certainly would never have selected such a narrow, narrow cast of characters to represent the 21st century. Heck, this list doesn't even include David Eggers or William Vollman, neither of whom, despite their obvious points of contact with Wallace et al, were mentioned by a single applicant. If advocates of a diverse curriculum don't want to end up fighting old battles all over again, they might want to hurry up and generate a counter- or alternative narrative PDQ. Please! I don't want to have to read twenty more ecofeminist critiques of The Road next year, too.
Well, unless yours is well written, well researched, and you are interested in applying to the MA/Ph.D. program at the University of Washington in Fall 2010. In that case, come on down!
Brian, this is SO DEPRESSING. But you don't seem depressed by these endless monster-oriented writing samples. Are there any on poetry? Is anyone reading any foreign authors???? But it's interesting that the numbers haven't changed. I knew they wouldn't. When you're 21 and might get a T.A.ship at the lovely U of Washington, teach a bit, learn a lot, meet interesting kids and professors, rather than getting a job (and what jobs?), it still seems like a fun thing to do, no matter what's down the road!
Love from Marjorie
Thanks, Brian, for these fascinating data! I'm deeply impressed by the chipperness you're able to muster amid 520 files (not to say 520 files on similar topics). Intriguing that the numbers are constant. I heard some people say the numbers would drop (no jobs in academia) and others say the numbers would rise (no jobs anywhere else). Hmm, did the two factors just cancel each other out...?
Yes, what you say makes sense. The raw total isn't all that informative, I admit. There seem to have been shifts in who is applying, which would make for a more complex analysis, but I don't dare generalize without undertaking a closer scrutiny of the numbers, and tabulating them will take a while.
I'll repeat a comment I made at The Valve, where Aaron Bady has referenced this post.
Sometime in the last two or three years I read some Worthy Mandarin assert, in one of those "oh woe are we" pieces, that Judith Butler was that last of the Star Theorists. I thought Menand is the one who said this, but was unable to find it in the two or three Menand pieces I had on hand. In any event, someone said it, and now we've got another data point.
But: So what? On the one hand, as I've said too many times before (and will no doubt continue to say time and again), I turned to the newer psychologies over thirty years ago and have no intellectual regrets (though I'm not happy that that move is no doubt part of the reason I've had no career). It's clear to me that necessary work has been done in questioning the canon, getting a bit more serious about pop culture, feminism, and so forth, not to mention historicism, but I think those veins have produced all they're going to in the way of new ideas and approaches. There's no more there there. That's why there are no more Stars; the sky's finally not so much fallen as dissipated and there's no place for would-be Stars to shine.
That's a good thing. Literary studies doesn't need more disciples applying Star Ideas to texts. We need something else. I've got a lot to say on that, and have said more than a little here and there on the web (e.g. my paper on the study of form), but I think it would be a good idea to get used to doing some painstaking analytic and descriptive work with texts that's not the Humanistic Answer to Rocket Science (e.g. Star Turns), that doesn't pretend to take on Western Imperialism in a Single Bound, etc.
I'm all for some more analytic and descriptive work on form, but isn't there still lots of work to do on mass culture, the social as it relates to literature, and questions of history? Some of this work will involve the work of "Stars" from the hermeneutic and continental tradition, some of it will entail poetics rooted in the history of forms and norms, cognitive psychology, and more empirical approaches. After all, sometimes I am happy simply when I encounter genuinely interested and interesting thinking.
Oh, I certainly have no objection to work on mass culture. I'm my own case I've been interested in manga and anime for several years now and have written on both informally in The Valve and more formally in Mechademia. Nor do I see any opposition between historical work and careful formal analysis. On the contrary, as you seem to imply, I believe that a more detailed and rigorous understanding of forms will enrich our understanding of literary history. For those forms evolve, not in the biological sphere, but in the cultural.
I agree with Joel's take; while it doesn't seem necessary to mourn a lack of new "stars," it's less because the areas of inquiry that previous "stars" have been exhausted than because they remain so productive. Treating what we might now think of as old-school theory as over and done risks acceding to the worst accusations that were leveled at the humanities during the culture wars of yore: that, with ferret-like attention spans, we were interested in theory because it was bright and shiny and new. That may have been the case for some people, but I think an honest accounting of the history of criticism will acknowledge the ways in which the "stars" mentioned in Brian's post have permanently changed the way we approach criticism. The fact that one of these is chronologically not like the others (Walter Benjamin) speaks to the centrality of, as Joel puts it, the work rather than the star power.
You can pry my Benjamin out of my cold, dead hands, is what I'm saying.
"...will acknowledge the ways in which the "stars" mentioned in Brian's post have permanently changed the way we approach criticism."
Yes the have. And now it's time to take those advances and move on.
It's interesting that you frame what I've characterized as changes as "advances." Implicitly, I'm arguing that that's just what we can't do -- deracinate changes to criticism and treat them as items in a toolkit or stairsteps on a constant upward march. We recur to older texts not only because they have enduring value but because they themselves change as our reading practices change. There's no taking Plato's advances and moving on, for instance. A rich model of history is one of the great advantages of humanistic studies.
"Insofar as one can identify any new profession-wide theoretical trends, they tend to position themselves at the intersections between literary study and psychology or the natural sciences. Arriba trauma studies, affect studies, ecocriticism, and cognitive poetics!"
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I would have thought that interdisciplinarity in general would be an increasingly important trend for English departments, particularly if the field is feeling pressure to stay 'relevant' or tap into nontraditional funding streams. It's interesting that the academic crossovers you're seeing, Brian, are for the most part restricted to psychology and natural sciences.
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"The theory canon seems to have closed, a little like the opera canon, or Scripture."
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It seems to me that one signal of its closing will be when theory is understood as a literary/textual genre rather than a method of analysis--in other words, when theory itself is taught or deployed primarily within the socio-cultural and historical (or formal/mechanical) context out of which it arose (rather than what seems to be the more common practice of using theory to illuminate contexts in which literature is embedded). I appreciate the lull, though, and I'm glad to hear that little has changed since I went on leave. This makes it easier for me to catch up on my reading.
-Jeff Lawshe (one of the 520, incidentally)
Surely there's not much the Janeites can do to keep the Good Ship Victoria afloat -- Austen died two years before Victoria was born.