Gideon Lewis-Kraus writes an absolutely beautiful piece in The Believer about his four-day road trip through the 119th Annual MLA Convention, and more generally about literary academia. Read the whole thing!
The ultimate justification for the continued existence of the humanities, the big dramatic answer to what the humanities are for, is they aren't for anything, at least not in the usual senses. Their use lies in the reminder that there is a certain grandeur in speculative withdrawal, that there are still refuges—and this sounds terribly corny, but it's true, and it's important—where reflection trumps activity. A professor who studies metaphors of hydrophilia in medieval Ukrainian folk ballads isn't just teaching her students about those ballads; she's teaching her students that it's possible to live a life devoted to something as ostensibly trifling and pointless as metaphors of hydrophilia in medieval Ukrainian folk ballads just because you love it and have found others who love it, too. She's teaching that what seems meaningless may be a source of enchantment and connection, that our obsessive fervors may yet go unmuted.... And this is where the dark hollow of anti-academic unrest is laid bare: critics of the academy are not really afraid of explicit political indoctrination, they're afraid of these preserves of communal autonomy. They're afraid of the flowering of the arcane, the unmarketable, the unprofitable. They're afraid that their children will become scruffy bohemian types.
Comments