How to Distinguish a Literary Scholar From a Literary Blogger?
Jeanne-Marie Jackson wonders about the public intellectual today, when "most academics working in the humanities prefer the posture of reaching out to the public, 'applying' their interpretive skills to remind us of social and political causes," as she writes at 3:AM Magazine.
Here's the real Q: "To be clear, the politics themselves are not the problem – I am not . . . interested in a return to socially disengaged belletrism. The burning question, rather, is how we imagine the literary scholar to be different from the literary blogger."
Jackson invokes an essay by Mark Greif in the Chronicle of Higher Education last year, where he considered the fate of the public intellectual in "post-Partisan Review" America.
What is most glaringly absent from Greif’s discussion of the evolving role of the public intellectual, and from the many PR obituaries before it that took up these same issues, is any consideration of comparative literature, or just “comp lit” to its wayward familiars. Discussed as much these days for its institutional recession as for its lasting contributions, it’s in the background of n+1’s founding, for example, at a few different levels: founding editors graduated from both Yale’s comp lit doctoral program and Harvard’s idiosyncratic but related History and Literature major. Just as importantly, comparative literature is the unspoken cultural subtext of the late-PR intellectual climate in the 1960s through 80s. These decades saw the unprecedented American flourishing of a discipline usually seen to have originated in Europe in the late nineteenth century. Technically, the field amounts to parallel study of two or more literary traditions but, in practice, it’s a more complex and controversial institutional phenomenon.
Later, Jackson notes that she isn't a typical comp lit scholar, not having been raised Ivy League:
All the same, this scholarly investment did stem from something else a lot of people might equally scorn as elitist or exclusive. Here is where I part ways, though: I don’t think every form of exclusiveness must be inherently bad (nor is indiscriminate inclusiveness a good). In studying comparative literature, I was motivated by an out-of-fashion addiction to feeling stupid and infinitely small in order to eventually prove myself as just slightly larger; to anxiously working out the dazzling entanglements of social and philosophical interpenetrations. Reading Tolstoy for the first time was nothing short of a conversion experience to a world whose meanings for me were yet to be determined as good or bad. In just the way that the Partisan Review writers Greif describes aspired to be taken seriously by their French counterparts, I wanted to be able to hold my own with people in Moscow, to earn the right to engage with them on something approaching their terms.
This is what comp lit is to me, then. It is the ongoing head-rush of feeling overwhelmed by forms, before you can begin to reckon with their implications: a feeling, I imagine, that is probably familiar to mathematicians and physicists, too. I suspect that at heart, if you didn’t grow up with hyper-educated parents and a straight path to the École Normale, this is what draws comparatists to do what we do. We cultivate a perennial imposter complex, toggling between a slight sense of superiority vis-à-vis our less-equipped (and better-employed) English department counterparts, and an almost crippling sense of inadequacy in relation to the native speakers on the other end.
This, I think, is the truly democratizing element that’s missing from any account of the relationship between academic and public-intellectual discourse right now. Comparative literature in a real sense has been a “safe space” for many precisely because it is so full of uncharted risk...
If you're into it, read on here. And if you want to hear the pages flip at the Partisan Review's newish online home, check out every issue (from 1934–1999) here.