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Mar 5, 2023Liked by John Pistelli

Bravo.

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These essays have been brilliant of late. You’re obviously on a sort of roll, which I presume is related to the novelistic writing, so consider me pledged!

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I also thought of this in conjunction with your article. Not sure I agree with everything here, but much does indeed resonate.

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/why-english-departments-died/

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Your story of being dismissed from the academic precariate is disturbing. You and your expertise deserve better.

I've been thinking about that New Yorker piece, too. But I find myself deeply conflicted about what the remedy might be. I was an interdisciplinary scholar (still am, I suppose), and there are some lovely synergies possible between literature and the sciences. But near the end of my tenure at a liberal arts college I found myself leaning more toward positions like yours, advocating for the arts and humanities on their own terms. Even so, I find it difficult to stake an essentialist position, and there are a couple of strains of that in your post that I'm still mulling over.

I quite understand the defiance behind a stance of literary supremacy, but I don't think it holds up anymore than a STEM supremacist stance might. What I hear you saying that I agree with is that literature needs to have its own integrity -- it is diminished by becoming the host for parasitic theories or by trying to ride the coattails of STEM. What I despaired of ultimately was the loss of institutional belief in my discipline. It was one thing to face skeptical undergraduates with their transactional attitudes toward education. I could usually win them over by semester's end. Whatever they'd been told about the uselessness of the humanities typically fell apart four or five weeks in. But when the college itself began to sideline the humanities in its marketing, in its boilerplate language for press releases, and in its support for staffing, it was clear that the game was lost. When you win a grant for a creative project and the press release about it says the college is known for its excellence in STEM, that is straight bullshit.

As long as ROI drives decisions about curriculum, the humanities will have a hard time making its case. Stanley Fish captures much of that futility: https://www.chronicle.com/article/stop-trying-to-sell-the-humanities/. But while I agree with your point about not subjecting literature to theory or to the social sciences, but allowing it to stand on its own integrity, it is also true that literature often requires us to know other things: about religion, philosophy, biology, culture. And so I wonder about that notion of literature as all we need to study literature? As an undergraduate I wrote an essay comparing Shakespeare's kings to Plato's spectrum of leadership in The Republic, and I still think that kind of cross-pollination is worthwhile.

Anyway, more questions than answers, but thanks for raising the questions.

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