1) A crucial insight here I'd like to expound upon. There's a fundamental mismatch between the purposes for which English departments were set up and the charges of knowledge work today. Neither avoidance nor activism can change that. ...
https://twitter.com/2drdave3/status/1353137823554088960
2) The institution of Literature is not the way it was when knowledge was re-organized and departments created to specialize in the study and close reading of Literature. That's not so say literature isn't important today, but that it's not an institution as it once was. ...
3) I know people think the problem is simply a lack of justice or appreciation for our work and we can awareness or activist our way out of the problem, but I think that's wrong. The institution of Literature is not coming back in the form that engendered our departments. ...
4) The most obvious manifestation of this is the pivot from close-reading Literature to close-reading culture (Cultural Studies). Even if this (has been) the solution (I don't think it is), the mismatch remains: depts. still organized by traditional Literature categories. ...
5) ...still studying Literature while holding up great TV, film, pop music, public performance, etc. as justification for relevance of 'the humanities,' and then not organizing research around those things (to be clear I don't think we should either). But that's the mismatch. ...
6) For me, none of this means that English departments are dead nor should be. Far from it, in my view. But it does mean we need to change to meet the demands of the knowledge work that actually has to be done. In many ways we have, for example ...
7) The shift toward work meant to address concrete problems in the world, such as medical ethics and practice, or environmental humanities. I have my issues with *how* we go about doing those things still, but they reflect important shifts in purpose. ...
8) Likewise much of the work I've been doing lately on method has been about creating the conditions for knowledge production in lit. studies that would enable us to work usefully in tandem with researchers in other fields. ...
9) This is the point at which someone inevitably wants to jump in and say some version of 'don't internalize blame, the problem is neoliberalism all the way down.' But even if we accept that premise (fine with me) it doesn't undo the mismatch I describe above. Likewise ...
10) it doesn't undo the basic hypocrisy of claiming we need to fight for this thing and for jobs in this thing while completely refusing to justify the value and purpose of doing the thing in the first place, beyond those offered 50 years ago. ...
11) Which is to say it will take work, organizing, activism, but not without changing what we're organizing around, and changing the attitude that everyone else out there who doesn't value our work is just naive or simpleminded and we're the ones with the true insight, etc. ...
12) In my dept. we've been working hard not only to communicate our value but also the produce a curriculum oriented toward knowledge problems in medical humanities, climate justice, datafication, the 'global' past, etc. These are my glosses; the work is much richer. ...
13) And for what it's worth, our majors and minors have gone *up* in the past few years. I don't claim simple causality here, just that we're working really hard to listen to our students and think strategically about what kinds of things are asked of us today. ...
14) A final caveat: I think a lot of people think equating scholarship with social justice is the way forward. I don't think that saves English departments. I think we should do social justice bc it's just; be inclusive bc it's the right thing to do and makes us stronger...
15) But the ability to lay some knowledge groundwork for social justice activism doesn't distinguish English depts. from any other; nor is it even clear activists need or care about our readings. It won't be enough. ...
16) But I'd like to end on a more positive note: Plenty of exciting teaching and research going on in English departments. Plenty of ability to meet the new challenges. But not without recognizing them first and seeing them clearly. /end
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