So I have been busy in another controversy, but I have been meaning to chime in on the "Hanging Out" piece on the "literary studies" (quote quote) and how frustrated I felt when reading (a thread) chronicle.com/interactives/h…
I consider @V21collective , @Jeannemarie_1 and @seeshespeak dear friends, and I also love the work of Jonathan Kramnick and Edgar Garcia, so my objections are not to them or to anything they have to say. They all speak thoughtfully from their perspectives
But the framing of these pieces is infuriating. I am sick and tired of the Chronicle and other publications to conflate "The humanities" and "literary studies" with the field of English and Complit. This piece has four English professors and one CompLit professor.
If the reporters bothered to look beyond their comfort zones and networks at the MLA, they would find a lot of professors in the various fields lumped under the "Foreign" or "Modern" languages.
After English, the second largest set of programs in "literary studies" is Spanish. And even though we are boxed as a foreign language, we are not, in fact, if you count both native and heritage speakers, the US has over 50 million Hispanophones.
And boy do literary studies and the humanities looks very different from here. Our job market is terrible but not as catastrophic as in English, and for many of our graduates the "alt-ac" job is not outside the academy necessarily, but as language teachers in K-12 and higher ed
In positions where their role as scholars of literature gets erased. Because our main challenge is to get our admins and students to even register that we exist as a research field and not as a service field for pre-meds and business majors to learn to speak.
We also deal with the task of teaching students to read literature in their second language when they do not read in their first. And increasingly have the task of teaching Latinx studies about their roots and heritage in institutions that do not consider them subjects of culture
While I love my English peeps (and I have many), it is certainly true that it is by and large an astonishingly provincial field, and it is way more likely for a foreign language or a Spanish scholar to know about Anglophone literatures than for English profs to know about others.
Why does it annoy me so much? Because much as one can object to the Chronicle, the fact is that out admins read it, and the wrong ideas that often show on "literary studies" either by bad framings of the field by the journalists as the case in this piece,
or by the occasional musings of some provincial English prof (as it happens in some but not all of the Endgame pieces)
contributes to making our fights to grow, or even survive worse. Because if you have not heard, may foreign languages are down to the wire of extinction and entire fields are being wiped out of "the humanities," something that will certainly not happen to English anytime soon.
Beyond this, as a faculty member with one of the most privileged jobs possible in the humanities, I must note that we tenured professors do not represent the humanities and literary studies when the vast majority of people in our fields are non-TT, in precarious positions
I do not have any magical things to say. We are dealing with an existential threat. And mischaracterizing the totality of the humanities and literary studies by generalizing a subset is extremely unhelpful
