'Something we were doing was working'

I went to grad school during the last days of theory. We started out in our first years with Derrida seminars and ended scrambling to become textual materialists. It became gauche (!), by the end, to go on about Lacan or Althusser, Foucault or Deleuze. But I also got my first tenure track job in the years of the "war on terror." True to form, true to my academic generation, I am a leftist who apologizes for mentioning Iraq in passing during my classes on Conrad, and who probably advances better critiques of Marx than appreciations of him. Such was the ideological weather on the day I was born to the professoriate - and it's grown to feel like the way the weather is supposed to be, has always been. There are times when I can tell that the students don't want me to pull my punches, but I inevitably do.

C.R. at Long Sunday has a long and very interesting post tracking the latest enrollment crisis in English departments against the decline of theory and the depoliticized classroom. (The same post is cross-posted here.) Is theory due for a big comeback? That would certainly be excellent news for those of us in radical-left-wing theory-heavy interdisciplinary graduate programs who even in these benighted days still spend significantly more time on Althusser and Lacan than Herman Melville or Jane Austin.

I feel the same impulse to pull one's punches as C.R., sometimes, but there's pulling one's punches and then there's pulling one's punches. I don't see it as my mission to evangelize to my students, and I (hope I) don't—but treating college students as if they need to be hermetically sealed off from all politics, as if these issues aren't in fact the air that they (and we all) breathe, is decidedly deluded. The classroom—especially the humanities seminar—should be the space where political and ideological issues can be brought out, problematized, and wrestled with; it's the space in which, among other things, students learn how to ask the questions they already have and where to start looking for the answers.

I don't see any reason at all to apologize for mentioning Iraq during the study of Conrad, as C.R. says he does; in fact it's rather hard for me to imagine how you'd be able to read and discuss Conrad in 2008 without saying the word "Iraq" and I don't see why you'd want to. These are college students, not children; it does everybody involved a disservice to pretend that we're all just in it for the aesthetics.

It's true that the purpose of academic study of literature and culture is not and should never have been about building new leftists. But encouraging people to think critically about the world in which they live will, fairly inevitably, encourage students towards a more leftist politics, as it always has—and there's no reason for us to shirk from that.

The article to which C.R. is responding, William Deresiewicz's review of Professing Literature in The Nation, also has some rather interesting observations (if often wrong-headed, for the reasons C.R. describes) on the state of the discipline, mostly tied to the MLA Job List. The key points come to two or three sentences:

The bleaker it looks for English departments, the more desperate they become to attract attention.... In other words, the profession's intellectual agenda is being set by teenagers.

This doesn't really strike me as such a bad thing, despite Deresiewicz's negative spin; isn't it high time the profession acknowledge that it mostly traffics in what interests teenagers, that it always has, and moreover that it needs to do so in order to survive in the college marketplace at all?

Teenagers are our business, like it or not. They're our bread and butter.

This bit, however, is much more disturbing:

Most professors I know discourage even their best students from going to graduate school; one actually refuses to talk to them about it. This is a profession that is losing its will to live.

Where were all these people when I was applying? I put all my chips on grad school. Now I'm sunk.