I Simply Do Not Have the Chops to Play in Their League...
When the English professors eat their wheaties and get their game on I just cannot compete. The levels of irony and indirection here leave my head spinning. I don't know what is going on.
Michael Berube:
The futility of the humanities: Deresiewicz’s essay contains a bunch of things I wish I’d said, like the conclusion of this piquant paragraph:
Again and again, Darwinian criticism sets out to say something specific, only to end up telling us something general.... Boyd devotes a hundred pages to the Odyssey without saying anything he couldn’t have said with Anna Karenina or Middlemarch or Proust. The discussion is nothing more than an illustration of Darwinian ideas, not an explication of Homeric meanings.... I have read any number of Darwinian essays about Pride and Prejudice (one critic calls it their “fruit fly”), but I have yet to read one that told me anything interesting. The idea that the novel is about mate selection does not count as an original contribution.
...I’m encouraged to see that Deresiewicz says that Boyd is “a clearer and more careful thinker than most of these other writers,” because those other writers are people like Denis Dutton, whose work has always seemed to me to be a variation on “the giraffe has a long neck, and the elephant has a long trunk, and therefore humans make abstract sculptures, just so! Thus I have refuted Judith Butler!” But... I do love Deresiewicz’s final sentence, the idea that the novel is about mate selection does not count as an original contribution. Besides, everyone knows that Pride and Prejudice is not about mate selection. Hart Crane’s The Bridge is about mate selection, as is Blake’s “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” and that’s where your literary Darwinism really comes in handy...
And then it starts:
alex 06.24.09 at 3:06 pm: “Besides, everyone knows that Pride and Prejudice is not about mate selection.” Sorry, can’t resist: I thought that was a truth universally acknowledged? But then I’m not a lit crit…
dsquared 06.24.09 at 3:10 pm: "The idea that the novel is about mate selection does not count as an original contribution." Ahhh those naive Darwinists! I am currently working on a massive book-length essay on Pride & Prejudice, analysing it for the first time from the standpoint of Freakonomics. You see, what the “humanities majors” have never really paid attention to is that Mr Darcy[1] is very rich, and this fact shapes a great deal of the other characters’ social interactions with him.
[1]I think that’s the right one; if he was in Sense & Sensibility then someone else, these books are all basically interchangeable.
Michael Bérubé 06.24.09 at 3:11 pm: Dang! A twofer. I am pwned with regard to Jane Austen and Darwinism, and pwned again with regard to objective knowledge. Thanks, Alex! I will go home now.
Chris 06.24.09 at 3:20 pm: "Honest to Moloch, I’m beginning to think nobody takes me seriously when I cite the Digest of Higher Education Statistics, and that makes me sad." Well, if it doesn’t contain any objective knowledge, why should they? It’s just a tool of the mathematical empire, or something. Their perception that the field is in decline is just as valid as the statistics that purport to prove it isn’t. Theory says so....
Michael Bérubé 06.24.09 at 3:25 pm: Good point about Darcy’s wealth, dsquared! People do tend to overlook these little things. Except for the Marxists, bless their hearts! Speaking of which, here’s another of the false notes in Deresiewicz’s essay: “If Marxist criticism is always about the rise of the bourgeoisie, literary Darwinism is always about mate selection or status competition.”...
John Quiggin 06.24.09 at 8:25 pm: What stuns me here is the literary Darwinist stuff. Is this some sort of elaborate Bérubé hoax speaking through an invented Deresiewicz? Or are there really humanities academics recycling 1970s-style sociobiology (the quoted examples don’t even make to the dismal level of 1990s-style Ev Psych) as lit crit? I’d lean to the first, except that everyone in comments seems to be playing it straight in this respect...
