I don’t think I’m going to make a very good academic. Good thing I already suspected that and didn’t sign up for the PhD program.

There’s an elitism that just about falls off the page of even the small amount of scholarly writing I’ve read, and especially from the introductory textbook we’re using in Bibliograpy and Research class. (Note: I don’t think all scholars are elitist, and certainly all aspiring scholars are not, because almost all of the students in the class were put off by the elitism in this book–Altick & Fenstermaker – The Art of Literary Research.) But here’s a quote to illustrate my point:

This moment is as appropriate as any to point out that it is a faux pas, no less deplorable than eating peas with a knife, to speak of our professional publications as “magazines.” Magazines are publications of miscellaneous content for the lay reader. Time and Smithsonian are magazines. The proper generic term to use is periodicals; if the periodicals are devoted mainly to research, they are journals; if to criticism, reviews. But never “magazines.” (Altick & Fenstermaker, footnote 6 on p. 162, italics and quotes theirs)

Of course there’s a distinction between general-reader magazines and specialist journals. But to term it in this way makes it sound as though the layperson is some total dunce who doesn’t wouldn’t know a journal if it smacked him upside the head, and as though magazines are so totally beneath the gaze of the “professional” scholar that they should barely acknowledge their existence, and if they do, it must be with an upturned nose and a dismissive flick of the hand. This is grossly elitist and I think wholly uncalled for, especially in a profession whose mission it is to increase and make accessible the sum total of knowledge in the world.

Or perhaps this is an inaccurate view of the goal of academic study. Perhaps this is solely my naive and idealistic goal. It certainly seems that way sometimes. If that were the goal, academic journals would be more easily available, and scholarly articles wouldn’t cost $40.00 a whack (just an example) to access, even when the journals distribute them on the web at all. The resources on IngentaConnect and Project Muse wouldn’t require you to affiliated with a university to use them. (Perhaps I’m too used to open-source.)

That’s not an isolated example either:

[T]he fact remains that behind the book [speaking generally of any literary work] is a man or woman whose character and experience cannot be overlooked in any effort to establish what the book really says. The quality of the imagination, the genetic and psychological factors that shaped a writer’s personality and determined the atmosphere of his or her inner being, the experiences, large and small, that fed the store from which such an artist in words drew the substance of art: all these must be sought, examined, and weighed if we are to comprehend the meaning of a text. (Altick & Fenstermaker, p3, italics mine)

Again, I agree that knowledge of the author’s background can be important to a text…some more so than others, simply because some authors are more personal than others. And I certainly don’t subscribe wholly to the reader-response theory, or New Criticism, or any of the other theories that completely throw the author out (and sometimes, throw the text out as well), but to state the importance of the author’s life and background (as well as historical circumstances, as they go on to in the next paragraph) as categorically as Altick and Fenstermaker do renders it useless to even read literary works unless you have a PhD in them! So keep that in mind, all of you (and me) who have not completed post-graduate work in literature, the next time you read any book. Until you have gained exhuastive knowledge of the author’s life, as well as physical and cultural surroundings, you don’t stand a chance of understanding the book. At all. *eyeroll* I’m sorry, but admitting that extra knowledge is helpful and good to have for better understanding is very different from saying that it’s necessary for any understanding at all (which is how I and most of the class read this page of the text).

The whole text is actually pretty good–I’m not knocking all of the good and helpful things it has to say, but the tone of some of it just brings up all the issues I have with the things I’m discovering about academia.

In some ways, I think academia has a negative influence on great literature; I really do. It takes authors who, in their day, wrote for mass audiences and puts them on impossible pedestals. (The flip side, of course, is that scholars also often rescue authors from obscurity, which is definitely positive.) Pedestals not impossible in the sense that the authors can’t live up to them, but impossible in that it makes it impossible (or seem impossible) for ordinary people to feel comfortable reading them. Shakespeare is the best example, but Dickens, Austen, Dante, all work as well. Dante wrote in the vernacular…the first major poet to do so! He basically standardized Italian because The Divine Comedy was so widely read that variant dialects started to disappear in favor of Dante’s Italian. He championed the use of the everyday language, as opposed to Latin, which by that time was only understood by scholars and clergy. Shakespeare wrote for a wide audience, ranging from kings to peasants. His plays were the popular form of entertainment at the time. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, if Shakespeare were alive today, he would probably be writing for television–the current mass-market equivalent of the Elizabethan stage. Dickens’ novels were originally published serially in periodicals (or, hey, “magazines”!) and were read by essentially everybody at the time. Yet today, these authors are dreaded in high school, suffered through in college, and mostly discussed by academics trying to secure tenure.

Part of that is due to a falling literacy rate (literacy not just in the sense of reading itself, but in the ability and inclination to read above an 8th-grade level), and a profusion of other entertainments beside reading. But academia, in making its goal the proliferation of scholarly texts for a scholarly audience and increasing the separation between academics and laypeople, isn’t helping matters. I dreaded Shakespeare in high school not because I’d had difficulty reading him, but because I had such an awe-filled mental image of him, because I knew his work had been studied so much and for so long by so many people with so much knowledge that there was no way I could ever hope to understand him enough to enjoy him. It’s a mental block that academia, more than anyone else, should be working to strip away, not to increase. We should be working to increase the general level of education, not strengthen the bar separating academics and laypeople.

That’s what I want to do. I want the stigma that good literature often has to be eliminated–whenever I’m in a public place reading a classic book, people ask me what class I’m taking, as if the only reason anyone would ever want to read a classic is because they have to. That’s so silly. (On the other hand, why do I feel embarrassed if I’m seen reading the latest bestseller? I also have innate elitism that I’m working to get rid of…) I want to take literature away from the lofty halls and ivory towers and give it back to the people. It seems the ivory towers want to hang on to it. I’m not sure where the right place is for me to ultimately be, but I’m getting more and more sure that it’s not in academia, at least not as I’m currently envisioning it–I only hope graduate study will help me to gain some of the tools I need in order to do what I want to do. (Last qualifying note, I promise: I do understand and think necessary the work that scholars do within academia, as far as working to produce the best possible text, and give the best possible account of an author’s life, and even applications of literary theory which are intended for a scholarly audience; I just resist strongly the idea that ALL, or even most, academic writing should be written with a scholarly audience in mind, because if it is, academia is little more than an echo chamber.)