Thomas Gray's window

The story goes that Thomas Gray had mortal fear of fire and installed a metal bar outside his window at Peterhouse in case he would one day have to climb out. He was said to be a lazy professor while at Cambridge and would often not show up to his classes. To get even, some of his students decided to play a practical joke on him. One night, they stood outside his window with a tub of water and began shouting "Fire!!" Gray panicked, tied his sheets to the bar, and let himself down. But the sheets weren't long enough for him to reach the ground, and so he had to let himself drop...drenching himself in the process. I don't know if this actually improved his attendance, though.

Narrow and constraining

Dan Green rolls up his sleeves:

In a recent profile in The Chronicle of Higher Education of M.H. Abrams, Jeffrey Williams comments in passing that "Today the New Criticism, the dominant approach to close reading from the 1940s until the 1960s, seems narrow and constraining." New Criticism was constraining only to the extent that to use it meant to attend entirely to the literary qualities of literature, to withhold biography, history, and politics as subjects tangential to the focused analysis of literary writing. Presumably those more interested in history or politics than in literature would indeed find New Critical close reading "narrow and constraining," although one could ask why such scholars chose literature as their course of study as opposed to, say, history or politics.

The cultural apparatus and "French Theory"

Scott McLemee on François Cusset's French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States (translated by Jeff Fort):

To put it another way: the very category of “French Theory” itself is socially constructed. Explaining how that construction came to pass is Cusset’s project. He looks at the process as it unfolded at various levels of academic culture: via translations and anthologies, in certain disciplines, with particular sponsors, and so on. Along the way, he recounts the American debates over postmodernism, poststructuralism, and whatnot. But those disputes are part of his story, not the point of it. While offering an outsider’s perspective on our interminable culture wars, it is more than just a chronicle of them.

Instead, it would be much more fitting to say that French Theory is an investigation of the workings of what C. Wright Mills called the “cultural apparatus.” This term, as Mills defined it some 50 years ago, subsumes all the institutions and forms of communication through which “learning, entertainment, malarky, and information are produced and distributed ... the medium by which [people] interpret and report what they see.” The academic world is part of this “apparatus,” but the scope of the concept is much broader; it also includes the arts and letters, as well as the media, both mass and niche.

A handful of links

• Inside Higher Ed discusses the "Next Chapter for E-books"--affordable text access for university students. Although I loved the legitimate "excuse" for buying expensive Norton Anthologies and other lit texts, this sure could've come in handy for Psych 101!
• Mark Thwaite mentions Yale's exciting move of putting certain Open Courses online. Sit in on intro classes in Astronomy, English, Philosophy, Physics, Political Science, Psychology, and Religious Studies. This reminds me that a while back I found out about Harvard@Home--a similar idea. (My favorite is Helen Vendler's lecture on Yeats.)
• The Literary Saloon announces that Reading the World 2008 has gone live. Many wonderful books will finally be getting the attention they deserve.
  
• They also mention that the new issue of Poetry magazine is devoted to translated works. (I do miss being able to read the original Spanish, though. They should consider putting them up on the website, if nothing else--like the Poetry International Web does. But adding the translators' notes is a very nice touch.)

More on the state of things

Frank Kermode on English studies:

Looking back over the field he has dominated for half a century, Kermode's words are unminced. Universities, he says, "are being driven by madmen". And education in general "is being run by lunatics".

The recent A-level and GCSE statistics, I point out, would indicate that at one level, at least, his subject is increasingly popular. "Well," he replies, "I don't know what they call 'English' now. I can understand the attractiveness of it. But I don't hold the view that reading English is a soft option, or at least it shouldn't be. It should be a severe option, restricted to those people who are qualified to do it. I've been out of touch with student life for a long time. But I don't believe that many people nowadays get many visible benefits from studying English. It doesn't do them any harm, of course."

Is he suggesting that English should be re-engineered to be more in line with currently unpopular "hard" subjects - like physics? "Yes. I discovered just today, for example, that it's no longer compulsory at GCSE to take a foreign language. This seems to me to be a monstrous decision." [...]

"Looking back at the study of English in universities over the years the first thing that occurs to me is how very important the subject once seemed. In America the New Criticism - a school led by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren - argued that the close study of poetry was a supremely valuable thing. This was a view that was then accepted generally. And the leading academic literary critics were, in those days, very famous people.

"Think, for example, of Northrop Frye. Frye's is now a name that you never hear mentioned but which was then everywhere. CS Lewis, who is now famous for fairy stories, was then famous for being a scholar. Tolkien too was famous for being a scholar, not for elves and so on. There is no prestige associated any longer with being a good critic. There are people writing now who seem to me likely to be as good as those critics I've been mentioning but they won't be as famous nor as influential. There's some very good scholarship in the subject still going on. There's also an immense amount of rubbish."

(via The Page)