I just received my latest edition of PMLA, the official journal for members of the Modern Language Association. Always curious to see what academics think is interesting and just how far removed they are from anything resembling the interests of regular people, I cracked it open and began leafing through the glossy pages of esoteric erudition. It didn’t take me long to find passages in nearly every article that are practically unreadable, both in the difficulty of the language and in the generally useless nature of the information therein. This is not uncommon in academic literature, of course, as such opacity, as Calvin here demonstrates, is a well-worn comic punchline.
Here are a few excerpts from the journal:
On the experimental poetry and philosophy of Wallace Stevens: “Stevens attempts to ameliorate the implications of the fact-value dichotomy by convincing himself and his readers of the adequacy of relative judgments of value.”
Okay, not terribly difficult so far.
On the transnational qualities of Jewish literature: “The notion of world literature in the Goethean sense emerged alongside the ‘philological knowledge revolution’ associated with the rise of nineteenth-century orientalism: the infusion of orientalist languages and cultures into European literature helped produce the so-called world literary space, which was in fact a European literary space.”
Can we all agree that using the word space doesn’t actually mean anything?
An analysis of a discussion on modernism among artists in Paris in 1922: “This diachronic reading of texts and history would attempt to re-create “the present in its ‘presentness,’ in its purely instantaneous quality,” to borrow Matei Calinescu’s analysis of Baudelaire, but it would also seek to understand the continuing attractions (or failures to attract) of a work after its time of emergence passes and one confronts it in different circumstances and with different critical, moral, and cultural understandings.”
Wait, was all of that really one sentence?
An abstract for an article on the historical role of audio recording as a theoretical and literary device: “Revisiting Derrida’s “Ulysses Gramophone” thirty years on, this essay finds there a proleptic critique of the gramophonocentrism Derrida’s piece has helped underwrite in sound studies.... Ulysses’s pianola at once incarnates the novel’s virtuosic recall of its own language and insists on the ineliminable role of exchange and of the gendered and laboring body in any performance of stored data.”
Gramophonocentrism. Sure.
And we have the audacity to wonder where all the English majors have gone? In our current climate that sees a steady declination of interest in English as a major and a lack of connection between English studies and workforce productivity, one has to question the virtues of complicated scholarship in a publication no one in the general population—and, let’s be completely honest, very few in the field of English—actually reads. Is this really the height of culture and intellect? This is not to say that we as researchers and authors should not explore new territories or dumb down our findings for laypersons, but are we truly making strides in bringing the pleasures of English to as many people as possible? While trying to prove our own importance, it seems, we’ve managed to render ourselves nearly obsolete.
The study of English is one of the most vital forms of democratization, for both the Education industry and for the, well, industry industry. Knowledge and wealth are inextricably linked to it. For anyone concerned with how our young people will gain awareness of the past, understanding of the present, and motivation for the future, surely we can find more important things to write, or at least more accessible ways of writing. Literature should be for all who seek it, not just for elitists trying to impress each other with made-up words and made-up spaces. And if I ever have to type the word gramophonocentrism again, it will be too soon.
Here are a few excerpts from the journal:
On the experimental poetry and philosophy of Wallace Stevens: “Stevens attempts to ameliorate the implications of the fact-value dichotomy by convincing himself and his readers of the adequacy of relative judgments of value.”
Okay, not terribly difficult so far.
On the transnational qualities of Jewish literature: “The notion of world literature in the Goethean sense emerged alongside the ‘philological knowledge revolution’ associated with the rise of nineteenth-century orientalism: the infusion of orientalist languages and cultures into European literature helped produce the so-called world literary space, which was in fact a European literary space.”
Can we all agree that using the word space doesn’t actually mean anything?
An analysis of a discussion on modernism among artists in Paris in 1922: “This diachronic reading of texts and history would attempt to re-create “the present in its ‘presentness,’ in its purely instantaneous quality,” to borrow Matei Calinescu’s analysis of Baudelaire, but it would also seek to understand the continuing attractions (or failures to attract) of a work after its time of emergence passes and one confronts it in different circumstances and with different critical, moral, and cultural understandings.”
Wait, was all of that really one sentence?
An abstract for an article on the historical role of audio recording as a theoretical and literary device: “Revisiting Derrida’s “Ulysses Gramophone” thirty years on, this essay finds there a proleptic critique of the gramophonocentrism Derrida’s piece has helped underwrite in sound studies.... Ulysses’s pianola at once incarnates the novel’s virtuosic recall of its own language and insists on the ineliminable role of exchange and of the gendered and laboring body in any performance of stored data.”
Gramophonocentrism. Sure.
And we have the audacity to wonder where all the English majors have gone? In our current climate that sees a steady declination of interest in English as a major and a lack of connection between English studies and workforce productivity, one has to question the virtues of complicated scholarship in a publication no one in the general population—and, let’s be completely honest, very few in the field of English—actually reads. Is this really the height of culture and intellect? This is not to say that we as researchers and authors should not explore new territories or dumb down our findings for laypersons, but are we truly making strides in bringing the pleasures of English to as many people as possible? While trying to prove our own importance, it seems, we’ve managed to render ourselves nearly obsolete.
The study of English is one of the most vital forms of democratization, for both the Education industry and for the, well, industry industry. Knowledge and wealth are inextricably linked to it. For anyone concerned with how our young people will gain awareness of the past, understanding of the present, and motivation for the future, surely we can find more important things to write, or at least more accessible ways of writing. Literature should be for all who seek it, not just for elitists trying to impress each other with made-up words and made-up spaces. And if I ever have to type the word gramophonocentrism again, it will be too soon.