Composition: History & Theory: 1980 - 1989
Graff, Gerald. Professing Literature: An Institutional History. (1987)
Description
“The college student at his best was ‘a careless boy-man who is chiefly anxious to have a good time, and who shirks his work and deceives his instructors in every possible way’” (26).
“The older members of the faculty looked upon [a young teacher of Latin] with suspicion. He made Latin interesting; and they got rid of him” (33).
In Professing Literature: An Institutional History (1987), Gerald Graff’s thesis, is that the professionalization and instutionalization of literature studies in English Departments has stratified faculty members into isolated compartments. This isolation is convenient for departments, but students are not aware of why things are this way and there is no communication between compartments (which Graff sees as bad things). “The idea that literature could or should be taught—rather than simply enjoyed or absorbed of part of the normal upbringing of gentlefolk—,” Graff explains about the formation of the field, “was a novel one and no precedents existed for organizing such an enterprise.” He asserts that we (as in his contemporaries) take the organization done by the establishers of the discipline for granted and have no dialogue about the implications and conflicts that are resultant of these choices. According to Graff: Theory is not the enemy! He argues that students need concepts, contexts, and some form of theoretical framework to engage literature. It seems logical to Graff that Matthew Arnold’s educational concept of “humanism” is the backbone of modern English departments, but from the outset there were fundamental disagreements on how “cultural tradition” and “humanism” should be implemented. Graff explains that cultural interpretations of literature (following Arnold’s model) were staunchly against the philological and historical modes that initially dominated English courses following the move away from Classics studies. Traditional humanists disagreed with the developed “fields” of literary study because they undermined an attempt to observe “broad general culture.” In the introduction to the text, Graff also outlines the battle of teaching versus research, which is connected to the cycle of humanistic condemnation against scientific research models. The process of institutionalization, according to Graff, affects the outcome of theoretical goals. In the classroom, Graff feels like there is not enough attention drawn to the conflicts created from attempting to organize and teach literature. This propagates the myth that students should only be exposed to the results of academic controversies and not the controversies themselves. The major conflicts he explores are those between critics and scholars (he defines scholars as those researching verifiable facts and critics as those concerned with interpretations and values).
Graff also examines the development of the “field coverage” model implemented by literature departments (hiring one person to teach Shakespeare, another to teach American lit, etc.). He explains that it is not the compartmentalization that is the problem, however. It is the issue of disconnects in the department and the lack of interaction between various theorists. Professionalization, Graff argues, did not turn academic literary studies into an instrument on nationalistic ideology. “The story of academic literary studies in America is not a tale of humanism, nationalism, or any single professional model,” he writes, “but a series of conflicts that have tended to be masked by their very failure to find visible institutional expression.”
In chapters two and three, Graff presents a historical account of the academic literary studies in the United States in the nineteenth century. He traces the development of the study of literary texts “in college classes in Greek and Latin, English grammar, and rhetoric and elocution” (1). Graff defines, analyzes, links, and evaluates the outside events (social, cultural, and historical) that took place in the nineteenth century and their influence on the creation of English departments. He also describes the observations and conclusions of different scholars and historians in the field of rhetoric and composition. Graff uses an informative tone to report the major events of the period in an attempt to educate his audience about the history of literary studies. He supports his points with specific examples, details, and testimonies. Graff has an enjoyable storytelling technique, and he supports his historical account with testimonies of students who lived during that period. He made reading history very engaging. For example, according to Graff, a Yale student admitted to “locking an instructor in his recitation room…, throwing water upon him, stealing his clothes or other property, upsetting his chair in recitation or stripping him up outside” (25). It seems that students were students after all.
In chapter 15, “Tradition versus Theory,” Graff explains that over time the conflict between theory and traditional humanism has resolved into an “armed truce” where theory is an option for graduate students and advanced undergraduates, but should mostly be kept away from normal students. He explains that current traditionalists (a theory used in both literature and rhetoric and composition studies) argue that we should put theory behind us and return to the study of literature itself. Graff explains, however, that the institution has a very short memory, for “yesterday’s revolutionary innovation is today’s humanistic tradition.” There is a contemporary push to hire theorists so that they can be subsumed, marginalized, and ignored by the existing compartments (theorists replace the feminist hired last week and the African American studies person hired the week before that). The system, according to Graff, avoids the stagnation in the department in the 19th century, but ultimately avoids the conflicts it raises. The current model deemphasizes hiring instructors who have similar interests because the department “already has Y to do X.” In this chapter Graff also returns to students’ perspectives on these conflicts, writing: “In a period when literary studies have gone through the most fundamental conflict of principles in their history, that conflict has informed very little of the average student’s study and is still generally regarded as little more than a tempest in a teapot.” Literary theory, as defined by Graff, is: “a discourse that treats literature as in some respect a problem and seeks to formulate that problem in general terms.” “Theory,” he continues, “is what is generated when some aspect of literature, its nature, its place in society, its conditions of production and reception, its meaning in general, or the meanings of particular works, ceases to be given and becomes a question to be argued in a generalized way.” “Theory,” he writes, “is what inevitably arises when literary conventions and critical definitions once taken for granted have become objects of generalized discussion and dispute.” Thus, theory is unavoidable in literary studies. For Graff, there must be context; and, the only remedy for “bad contextualizing of literature has to be better contextualizing, not no contextualizing or random contextualizing.” Texts are NOT autonomous or self-contained, their meaning is dependent on a comprehension of prior texts and situations. Teaching the cultural text around a text requires that the university is aware of the history of its own self-divisions. Graff argues that it will be difficult to precipitate a structural change in the department because the current system is so easy to administer.
Professing Literature: An Institutional History (Reviews)
Robert Scholes: Shortly after the release of Professing Literature, Robert Scholes published a review of Graff’s work along with two popular, best-selling books: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished Souls of Today’s Students by Allan Bloom and Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know by E.D. Hirsch Jr. The article title says it all: “Three Views of Education: Nostalgia, History, and Voodoo.” Essentially Scholes condemns Bloom and Hirsch for buying into anti-educational conservative hype by telling “their audience that teachers have failed to teach what is necessary for students to learn at the elementary level, the secondary level, and the college level” (323). Scholes is livid that Graff’s book, the first full historical account of the development of literary studies, is being ignored while Bloom’s book, the work of a cranky humanist who, “[l]ike many self-styled humanists, he is devoted to humanity but does not like people very much,” and bemoans the loss of the classics in the university without providing any clear pedagogy to support his claims (326). In the rest of the article, Scholes foams at the mouth in regards to Hirsch’s work, which he considers to be a form of voodoo education (similar to voodoo economics) in which large problems can be solved with simple and simply ridiculous methods. In this case, Hirsch uses misinterpreted data and misrepresented sources in order to prove that knowing 5,000 words, dates, phrases, names, and even literary clichés are all students need to learn before being able to learn (?), claiming that learned skills are not transferable, and completely disregarding the role of the teacher as well as the ways students actually learn—through being taught, not through memorizing random snippets of trivia sold in “bizarre and dangerous” books written by educators who flub their own data in order to make a profit (332). The educational context of Graff’s work is made clear when Scholes writes: “That this truly weird intellectual grab-bag would be offered as the result of a “scientific” study of America’s educational needs would be amusing—if it were not for the fact that the book is being attended to seriously by members of the public and the government alike” (331). Bloom’s elite approach to education paired with Hirsch’s crackpot theories on information make Scholes stand up for Graff, demanding that if English educators are going to champion any of the three, it should be the historian whose work, because it gives pedagogical solutions to real problems, deserves more time and attention. [Scholes, Robert. “Three Views of Education: Nostalgia, History, and Voodoo.” College English. 50.3 (1988): 323-332.]
Don Bialostosky: Hailing from the University of Toledo, Don Bialostosky praises Graff for having “the most comprehensive account to date of the debates that have shaped the field of English” because knowing these stories helps eliminate some of the self-serving stories often told in the department to validate one field over another (269). Bialostosky is first to point out that the word “Rhetoric” does not appear in the book as a heading, but covers this fact over by claiming that the book is shaped by rhetoric and is concerned with the rhetorics of a department that (one could say willingly) remains clueless of its own development in order to apply the arguments of the past to present opponents (269). Bialostosky sees Graff’s work as an ironic story of co-opting in which “the institution of the department or the university has regularly intervened to diffuse controversies by admitting each new radical position to a legitimate place alongside the positions it opposed” (269). Bialostosky, although appreciative for Graff’s work, wonders if controversies actually can be raised in the field because it is, after all, an academic institution, so the debates would be inherently academic, shaped by the institution to which the English Department belongs. He also asks whether or not courses in literary theory and criticism already bring controversies to the forefront of the department. He disagrees with Graff that this co-opting is, in all cases, negative because it does bring in new scholars and theories which then, in turn, help shape the dynamic of the department (270). He thinks that Graff has ignored wider “cultural and political debates” and how those effect the university, and calls for scholars to build on Graff’s work for a better, more complete history that takes these issues into account. [Bialostosky, Don. “Professing Literature.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly. 18:3/4 (Summer-Autumn 1988): 269-271.]
Alan Golding: Alan Golding, writing to Modern Philology from the University of Louisville praises Graff for his thoroughness in addressing the time period from the Yale Report of 1828 to the waning of New Criticism in the 1960s, and he is quick to point out that Graff is not a conspiracy theorist because he explains “diffusion by the very structure of the American university” (411-412). Golding reads Graff as implying that the English Department “suppresses conflict to keep its own organization (or lack thereof) a mystery to outsiders” so that “it can disarm questions, and repress its own self-doubts, about its cultural value and purpose” (412). He finds the incoherence and confusion in the Department as a form of control. Golding does think, however, that Graff leaves human beings out of his equation. [Golding, Alan. “Review: Institutionalizing Literature.” Modern Philology. 86:4 (May 1989): 411-416.]
Christy Friend: In “The Excluded Conflict: The Marginalization of Composition and Rhetoric Studies in Graff’s Professing Literature”, Christy Friend, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Texas, speaks out against scholars who see Graff as a “revolutionary critic who provides a model for making fundamental change within the discipline of English” because he purposely excludes Rhetoric and Composition Studies from his work as a viable, intellectual field and thereby ignores one of the largest ongoing controversies in English Studies between “those who would focus exclusively on teaching students to be passive receptors of texts and those who believe that it is equally important to be active producers of texts” (276). Friend contents that this treatment of Rhetoric and Composition directly conflicts with (and in a very real way, also supports) Graff’s assertion that the English Department is not a “neutral, stable entity, but [is instead] a social practice which empowers some viewpoints and marginalizes others”, namely Composition Studies (277). She blames Graff’s negligence on the fact that he is a member of the dominant discourse of English Studies who refuses to step back from his position as a literary scholar, thereby upholding “a pervasive kind of oppression within English Departments” (278). She calls on Berlin to show that English Departments have never been “about literature” since rhetorics and poetics go hand in hand. She is appalled by the fact that few scholars have raised this point about Graff’s work because their silence “shows the extent to which our profession privileges reading over writing—or passive consumption over active construction of texts” which, she argues (drawing the work of Robert Pattison, Berlin, Paulo Freire) serves the needs of the dominant culture (capitalism) by creating students who know enough to read orders but not enough to create revolutionary texts capable of enacting change and potentially threatening the system (281). She ends her essay by saying that Graff’s work provides a starting point and an interesting framework for studying the marginalization of Rhetoric and Composition studies and by making the claim that as long as “writing skills are devalued by the profession whose job it is to teach them, language education is this country will continue to teach criticism, not action; reflection, not revolution” (284). Only by including Rhetoric and Composition, then, can departments truly embrace Graff’s idea of oppositional pedagogy. [Friend, Christy. “The Excluded Conflict: The Marginalization of Composition and Rhetoric Studies in Graff’s Professing Literature.” College English. 54:3 (Mar. 1992): 276-286.]
Date of Upload
3/14/09