Smoldering Hecatomb

A friend sent me this today. It's a quote from an article in the latest issue of The Nation:

There's no better way to take the profession's temperature, it seems to me, than by scanning the Modern Language Association Job Information List, the quarterly catalog of faculty openings in American English departments. If you want to know where an institution is at, take a look at what it wants. The most striking fact about this year's list is that the lion's share of positions is in rhetoric and composition. That is, not in a field of literature at all but in the teaching of expository writing, the "service" component of an English department's role within the university. Add communications and professional and technical writing, and you've got more than a third of the list. Another large fraction of openings, perhaps 15 percent, is in creative writing. Apparently, kids may not want to read anymore, but they all want to write. And watch. Forward-thinking English departments long ago decided to grab film studies before it got away, and the list continues to reflect that bit of subterfuge.

That rhetoric and composition in the teaching of English (RCTE) is in demand is not surprising. I remember at The University of Arizona rhet-compers were an exceedingly efficient outfit, first attaching themselves in their vulnerable infancy to English departments, then growing stronger on the budgetary pap they were able to divert from literary studies. Literature people should blame themselves for their hauteur, complacency and lack of vigilance when it came to these vipers they nursed at their breasts. I know I stand guilty.

I therefore think that the only way literature can survive is by decoupling itself from the university. Otherwise it risks being stinted and starved in the inhospitable climate of bottom-line oriented thinking characterizing today's institutions of higher learning. The survival of literature as a more or less coherent discipline (if indeed one could claim it ever was that) depends on its retreating to the "long tail" beyond the threshold of the university's brand identity, which has become narrowly pragmatic and experiential, and which has in its sites the large bands of anxious, philistine middle-income earners. This means literature will likely become a boutique field of study, but c'est la vie. Besides, it's overrun by careerists anyway — nest-feathering technicians who in their ever narrowing concerns are destroying whatever the rhet-compers have left untouched.

At any rate, it's been some time since I hung my hopes on finding a fulfilling job in academia. Better to 'blog about literature than to profess it, I say. At least then you don't have to compromise your ideas to suit fashion or banal necessity.