State of the Profession Colloquium (Part 3) February 28, 2008

Stein Sture, the Vice Chancellor and Dean of the Graduate School, introduced this third session of the colloquium. He noted that his background is in Engineering, but remarked that the rapid change the applied sciences take for granted also seems to have affected the Humanities. The rise of new networked media and electronic archiving—in short, the phenomenon of the digital humanities—as well as the inexorable rise of English as the predominant global language make the current self-study in English and across the Humanities especially timely.

Jeffrey Robinson then framed the day’s events with a reflection on the legacy and mission of progressive educational practice, a subject that we have yet to address in the colloquium. He traced a tradition of pedagogical theory back to Rousseau’s Émile, and thence through Schiller, Emerson and Dewey, in which nature and the wise guidance of elders combine in the development of the self. Such a program, radicalized in the 1960s, promotes a movement from filiation to affiliation, from a conception of reading as emplotment to free association within textural pathways, from an education-in-solitude to education-as-collaboration. We need, Jeffrey suggested, to view education in the light of the “vigilance of a continual reawakening” to an unfamiliar reality (the phrase is from Levinas). After evoking the significance of radical pedagogy, Jeffrey closed with two questions particularly pertinent to the discussion broached by the colloquium: (1) what is the relationship between literary studies and the “real world”? (2) how should we think about collaboration and interdisciplinarity? do they facilitate the acquisition of new knowledge, or encourage something closer to dilettantism?

Ann Kibbey introduced the afternoon's first speaker, Melissa Mowry of St. John's College, New York. Professor Mowry's book The Bawdy Politic in Stuart England, 1660-1714 (Ashgate, 2004) looks at the uses to which the loyalists put sexual satire and pornography during the restoration and after.

In addition to outlining Mowry's work and achievements, Ann also took the opportunity to make the point that the work of the profession is not primarily "gatekeeping." She called for a vocabulary adequate to the cultural changes that follow from globalization.

Melissa Mowry opened her presentation by contending that form is the most durable of critical categories; she noted the prevalence of formalist approaches in the history of criticism over the past half century, from Ian Watt's groundbreaking study of the rise of the novel in the eighteenth century to the recent rise of the so-called New Formalism. One consequence of this critical emphasis on form, Mowry claimed, has been the repression of the collective dimension of culture and literature. When Watt, for example, made his seminal argument about the novel and the formation of the bourgeois subject, he perceived collectivity as a threat, perhaps in part because he was writing in the immediate aftermath of World War 2. Formalist approaches employ a "dystopian hermeneutics" which privilege the singular, proscribe the affiliative and stigmatize non-elite practices.

Mowry offered a detailed illustration of the institutional repression of collectivity by looking at the court records for Bridewell Hospital in the middle of the seventeenth-century. Archival study of these records, recording the incarceration and punishment of subaltern women, dissenters, and prostitutes, shows, in contrast, how the work of enlightenment formalism masks and suppresses collective affiliation. Mowry suggested that reading such material with an awareness of its silences and elisions allows the cultural historian to retrieve the multiple and variable from restrictive models of the self/other dyad. Indeed, one might begin to envisage a hermeneutic of collectivity that holds open questions of identity and agency. And this, Mowry concluded, might well inform our teaching as well as our scholarship.

Cheryl Higashida introduced David Palumbo-Liu who is a Professor of Comparative Literature at Stanford University. Among Professor Palumbo-Liu's many publications are The Poetics of Appropriation: The Literary Theory and Practice of Huang Tingjian (Stanford UP, 1993), The Ethnic Canon: Histories, Institutions and Interventions (U of Minnesota P, 1995), and Asian/American: Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier (Stanford UP, 1999). Palumbo-Liu's work has been at the forefront of developments in East Asian Studies, Asian Pacific Studies, and Transnational Studies. His efforts to denaturalize U.S. identity are particularly pertinent and especially necessary, Cheryl remarked, in light of the latest outrageous eruption of hate speech on the CU campus, in this case the publication of a supposedly "humorous" editorial in the student newspaper trafficked in racist stereotypes of Asians.

Professor Palumbo-Liu began by situating his talk under the rubric of globalization and otherness. He recalled the familiar argument that literature allows us to step out of our own situation to inhabit other worlds. From George Eliot, who wrote of the novel's "extension of sympathies," to Martha Nussbaum, literature has been described in terms of the presentation of otherness. Palumbo-Liu noted that the era of globalization has increased the points of contact between culturally and ethnically heterogeneous peoples, thus making the encounter with otherness more common. In this situation, it is important to think about the limitations of the idea of literature as a medium for presenting and mitigating otherness.

With reference to a wide range of writers, including Judith Butler, Reed Way Dasenbrock, and J.M.Coetzee, Professor Palumbo-Liu noted that the encounter with otherness may involve facing up to the illegible. There is no a priori reason, he observed, why the encounter with otherness should necessarily be empathetic and productive. We need to recognize that the encounter with the unintelligible disrupts our own certitudes, our selfsameness. What literature can do, through such unsettling moments, is to make us encounter our criteria for relating to otherness.

The question and answer session focused particularly on ideas of form. Should form be seen as a container for meaning, or as something more like a meeting-place? John Stevenson raised the question of how one recognizes the completely new. How can we think of the encounter with otherness as a form of discovery? David Palumbo-Liu suggested that we might consider the interplay between individual and type as a way of examining our preconceptions.

Lunch Discussion February 29, 2008

Jeffrey Robinson started the conversation by asking about the larger questions of the profession and the institution. Where, he asked, might the discussions in the colloquium lead us?

Much discussion on the problems and opportunities of indisciplinary study followed. Elizabeth Robertson spoke of her experience team-teaching and organizing conferences on subjects in medieval studies that have enlisted instructors and speakers from a range of disciplines (including history and art history). The questioning of disciplinary boundaries might be worthwhile--indeed, essential--for research, but undergraduate students often find it frustrating; it ill fits the commodified conception of learning that is prevalent within the university. Later, attendees turned again to this issue. David Palumbo-Liu spoke of the difficulty of overcoming the fear of venturing into new disciplinary territory, but we shouldn't let the anxieties of expertise prevent us from embracing the new possibilities of interdisciplinary and collaborative study. Some uncertainty about the current climate of the university was expressed: what can we expect from new institutional initiatives and, indeed, from the new President?

An exchange on form, once again, continued the discussion from the previous day, focusing in this instance on the pros and cons of different conceptions of form.