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Thoughts on Graff

Some reflections after yesterday’s class:

First, in addition to hoping I didn’t offend anyone by asking whether comp classes are remedial, I wonder if classes that cater to struggling students actually do the most good for the world. Helping a poor student learn to write a fair paper might be a greater contribution to civilization than helping a good writer learn to be even better (normative judgments galore, so please feel free to suggest alternatives). But talented and even privileged students need teachers too, and maybe there’s no way to quantify the relative social value of each position. Nevertheless, maybe it’s useful to think about this odd question. As Iris mentioned in class, people often ask us, “why literature,” and further, “why literature in a world so fraught with suffering and injustice?” I think those questions should be front-and-center. Questions about why the humanities matter, and more specifically, why our work matters both locally and globally, are uncomfortable and even a little embarrassing, but from my nascent standpoint in this program, we should embrace them. We have some good answers, even if they’re difficult to articulate to a board of trustees.

Do we avoid these questions because any answers that would validate the profession to those outside of it would seem too elitist or encrusted with naive humanism to those within it? The word “humanism” vexes me, mostly because the threat of being attached to it stymies some potentially fruitful inquiries. The act of considering the value of one’s profession should transcend its products. In any other profession, if you propose that your work has broad, indirect social value, you are not automatically associated with Matthew Arnold or a 400-year-old historical pedagogy with all of its bells and whistles. It seems to me those uncomfortable questions about value and legitimacy already rumble below the surface of many other conflicts, and skirting those underlying questions produces a lot of alienation and anxiety—perhaps the same alienation and anxiety that causes departments to fragment and isolate themselves from one another’s potential accusations of invalidity. Do fears of annihilation and the lurking thought that others doubt our right to exist explain the reluctance to “teach the conflicts?” In that light, the sand looks like a comfortable place to put one’s head.

On a separate note, I wanted to mention my favorite part of Graff’s book: the description of the later career of Hiram Corson, the professor who inspired his students to grand poetic rapture at Cornell. On p. 49, Graff describes Corson’s increasingly erratic behavior, which included conducting séances in class “with a chair set for Tennyson or Browning, solemnly recording their poetic messages from the other world.” That is very funny, of course, but it also raises questions about the value of boldness, eccentricity, and personality in the context of academia. My favorite law school professor was a notorious—tenured, natch—eccentric, and while I never saw him resort to antics as outlandish as Corson’s, he did plenty of totally unorthodox things in class that were intelligent, inspiring, and exceedingly rare. Is this a dying phenomenon now that tenured positions are growing so scarce? We all know about the threats to academic freedom and innovation in research, but what about pedagogical creativity that challenges students’ ideas about authority and academic structure? And are academics their own enemies, driven to police each other for idiosyncrasies in the competition for limited resources?

It’s worth noting that Corson’s classes are still being written and thought about 140 years later, and it’s not because of his research. His teaching was—quite literally—legendary. Even if his behavior was insane or the worst kind of showboating, one thing is clear: Corson made people think, and he’s still making me think right now in 2014. Is he a dead white guy unworthy of our attention? Probably. Have there been plenty of other teachers more deserving of our attention whose careers have disappeared in the folds of racist, sexist history? Absolutely. But I’d argue that Corson hacked some chinks in the walls of a hegemonic system that actively suppressed independent thought. And that makes one damn good answer to the question, “why literature?”

Racism and the (History of the) Teaching of English Literature

An image of a blue, black, and white book cover, with the title "Professing Literature: An Institutional History" and Gerald Graff's name on prominent display. The image in between the title and author's name is a book splayed open, seen from the side, on a solid black background.

from http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41xnXzmzpGL._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

This discussion of Professing Literature: An Institutional History by Gerald Graff[1] is based on the idea that, as stated by David Gillborn, “the most dangerous form of ‘white supremacy’ is not the obvious and extreme fascistic posturing of small neo-nazi groups, but rather the taken-for-granted routine privileging of white interests that goes unremarked in the political mainstream” (485).[2] This subtle, heightened form of white supremacy can be found easily throughout the history (and contemporary) teaching of English in the United States, yet – disturbingly – in his history of English studies in the U.S. academy, Graff elides and sometimes even excuses this racism.

Graff paints an idealized history in which the field-coverage principle[3] allows for the accommodation of “disruptive” areas such as “contemporary literature, black studies, feminism, Marxism, and deconstruction” without “paralyzing” the whole of the department (7). (Ableist use of dis/ability as a metaphor aside, shouldn’t the goal of these areas and methods of study be precisely to disturb the entire department structurally, rather than to merely be ‘tacked on’ to avoid challenging anyone’s privilege?) He writes that newer (and presumably, according to his analysis, less racist) critics in English will encounter protests from “senior” (and presumably, according to his analysis, more racist) faculty members, but when these people (men) retire, “his replacement [will] most likely [be] somebody who had quietly assimilated the [new] critical methods, with the offensive prejudices smoothed away” (194).

The narrative this creates is one of relentless positivism: it creates a story in which the history of English teaching is shaped by a linear progression of always getting better, always getting less racist, misogynist, etc., simply by the progression of time and the waiting for racist, misogynist, etc., faculty to retire. This is enormously problematic, as is any argument that constructs history as a progressive “it gets better” (Dan Savage? Ick!) narrative.

(“‘The civil rights movement happened, Obama got elected, hooray, let’s all be ‘colorblind’ and postracial!’

‘NO. BECAUSE MASS INCARCERATION THOUGH.’”)

Equally alarmingly, Graff dismisses concerns about the whiteness and maleness and straightness and ableist-ness and middle classness and need-I-go-on-ness of the literary canon. He comforts readers by claiming that, “it was up to each instructor (within increasingly flexible limits) to determine method and ideology without correlation to one another” (9). In other words, a hegemonic canon is fine, because you never know who’s teaching it: you might have an anti-racist professor in there somewhere, and that makes it all better.

A still from the movie Toy Story with Buzz Lightyear gesturing outward and Woody looking despairingly in the direction he is pointing to. The text readers "RACISM... RACISM EVERYWHERE."

from http://www.memecreator.org/static/images/memes/248743.jpg

Oddly enough, Graff acknowledges later that there is a question of “whether the effectiveness of teaching can be fairly measured apart from the institutional forms that shape it” (227). Surely not. Surely an evaluation of all teaching is subject to an evaluation of the institutions in which this teaching occurs. And if this is the case, it is a problem greater than relying on individual teachers to subvert it that the canon is what the canon is, with the occasional obligatory Baldwin and the rarer, partially obligatory Walker tacked on.

Tacking on has been a revolutionary, radical starting point – for example, adding women’s studies programs into English programs, as Graff mentioned above – but that is what it has been: a starting point. We cannot write off the vast history of oppression within English education (and education more broadly) – Who are most of our professors? What texts do we make our students read? What dialect of English do we make them write in? Who has and has had unfettered access to “higher” education,  anyway? – by taking permanent solace in a starting point.

A picture of white male politicians in suits laughing hard with drinks in hand. White text reads "AND THEN I SAID LET'S LOWER TUITION!"

from http://carmenkynard.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Screen-shot-2012-02-15-at-1.04.04-PM.png

So what do I propose? That any history of English education in the U.S. examine that history through postcolonial, queer feminist, and critical disability lenses. The results will be more complicated than narrating the debates between white men over the years (which is most of Graff’s book), but such a reading would also be infinitely more rewarding.

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[1] Graff, Gerald. Professing Literature: An Institutional History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008.

[2] Gillborn, David. “Education Policy as an Act of White Supremacy: Whiteness, Critical Race Theory and Education Reform.” Journal of Education Policy 20.4 (2005): 485-505.

[3] This principle states that the prominence of different fields within English departments encourage an expanded breadth of coverage of topics while discouraging interaction between interrelated but discretely listed fields (6-7).