Good Thinking; Whither Rigor?

(What follows is a posting-in-progress to which I will add as time permits over the next several days....)

An Academy of Readers, when such a thing becomes a reality, is an Academy of Thinkers. Such a conceptual and institutional space will differ from the university, as the university's intellectual practices are carried out today, at least in the United States. Before imagining the procedural differences from the university of an Academy of Readers a.k.a. Academy of Thinkers, imagine this:

• A graduate student in English Literature at a prestigious American university is asked, in his orals, "In your own words, with allusions to a particular theorist or theoretical paradigm only as a last recourse, what is power and how does power work?"
• At world-reknowned ____ University, first-year graduate students in the humanities form groups based on similar research interests in order to generate a bi-annual publication, until they formally begin work on their dissertations, of their individual selected papers-in-progress that includes their comments on each other's work, and their questions and expositions of their research and/or writing struggles. The publications are available in the library and online for the university community to read, use in other research, and comment upon.

By asking that you imagine those two scenarios, I'm asking you to imagine what it might feel like to inhabit each of them. Imagine how you would respond if asked what power is and how it works. Imagine how you would thumb through the variegated lexicon and catalogue of imagery in your mind, searching for ways to gather into a fresh vocabulary all your knowledge--not the named and structured knowledge-nuggets fed you in the course of your graduate education (no regurgitation of Foucault allowed!), but the knowledge extracted from those nuggets, the juice that, one hopes, dribbled deep into the pitcher of your mind when the oranges were squeezed and twisted against the juicer of your frontal lobes--into your own unique expression, your very own idea, word-winged. Then imagine yourself as a first-year graduate humanities student at world-reknowned ____ University, shackled by the impotence of first-year naivete (so you feel) yet already your flawed and time-cramped writings are treated publicly as part of the scholarly discourse, to be debated, critiqued, even pulped as knowledge by the juicers of your colleagues' frontal lobes. How would you feel? Perchance would you feel...liberated?

Now imagine how you would feel if you were privy to, or participating in, these scenarios at the university:

• Agnes, a first-year doctoral student in Comparative Literature, tells Martha, also a first-year doctoral student in Comparative Literature, about a course in Russian suspense narrative she is taking. Martha smiles condescendingly and says, "Oh, I was going to take that course. But then my advisor said it wouldn't be rigorous enough for me." Agnes replies, "Really? You know, we're reading Barthes' S/Z right now." Martha is impressed. "Barthes' S/Z?" she says, incredulous. "Really? Well, but...are you reading allllll of it?" "Yes, all of it," Agnus affirms. "Hmmmm, interesting..." Martha muses.
• Two masters students in English reveal informally over dinner how thorough a reading of primary works each accomplished in preparation for formulating and writing their theses. One, writing on Willa Cather's My Antonia, claims to have read the novel multiple times--more than ten, at least--and select passages hundreds of times. The other, whose thesis is on George Eliot's Middlemarch, replies, "I only ever read Middlemarch once before composing my thesis."

These interchanges occurred in reality (except that here I have altered names and thesis subjects); I was a third-party witness to both. I imagine you might feel similarly to how I felt: disgust, contempt and irritation with the first interchange, incredulity with the second, regarding how such variance of emphasis on close reading could be condoned, even possible in the same degree program. If you felt differently, do please post a comment and let me know. Now, at first these two scenarios appear to be rather banal examples of the misguided arrogance of pseudo-intellectualism, on the one hand, and of one student's scholarly integrity and another student's lackadaisicality, or (depending on your point of view) one student's misuse of time and another student's efficiency, or one student's sophistication and the other's lack thereof, on the other. But if one attempts to discern the assumptions operant in these scenarios, the scenarios grow luminous, for no longer are they banal examples of behaviors most people take for granted in academia, they are symptoms of something profound that affects every intellectual enterprise. I say "something profound," because it involves such a tangle of assumptions, points of view, palimpsests of intellectual and cultural history and contradictory educational goals that it surely cannot be identified by a single, specific name. Part of this "something," I believe, is the emphasis of university humanities programs on teaching its protégés not mastery of crucial texts or ideas, nor fluidity in launching original and envelope-pushing ideas, but versedness in the most current and most widely embraced critical discourse. This emphasis may be yet another symptom of the "something profound," and not a cause--nevertheless it serves as a worthy site for examination.

The assumptions operant in the two scenarios above appear to suggest this emphasis of university humanities programs. In the first scenario, the two comparative literature students (and seemingly also Martha's advisor, if Martha is to be believed) correlate intellectual rigor with theoretical emphasis. Martha subtly denigrated Agnes’s intellectual competence and Agnes redeemed it by pointing out that Barthes’ S/Z is on the course syllabus. She pinned Barthes to her hood-in-the-making for the same reason the girl scout sews badges onto her uniform. She knew precisely what would restore her intellectual status in relation to Martha; not for a moment did she flinch, nor pause to consider what response would be most effective. It was automatic for her and for Martha: Barthes connotes intellectual rigor. Several works by Dostoevsky were on the syllabus; if Agnes had replied, “You know, we’re reading Dostoevsky right now,” she merely would have fallen into Martha’s trap. But why? Why doesn’t Dostoevsky connote intellectual rigor? That’s not entirely true, I know. Dostoevsky is one of the most universally-respected authors; no one would ever turn his or her nose up at Dostoevsky. So it is not Dostoevsky’s name itself that would have failed to impress Martha; it is the possibility that a course in Russian suspense narrative could be taught without inclusion of applicable theoretical texts. Neither Martha nor Agnes could conceive of a graduate literature course being rigorous when no theoretical texts are on its syllabus. They most likely would agree that Dostoevsky's work is challenging--but they also would agree that analysis and discussion of his work are not intellectually rigorous without proper contextualization and due invocation of applicable theory.

~To Be Continued~