You might be interested in this oldie but goodie: Elif Batumen's review of Mark McGurl's The Program Era, in which she argues that shame is a driving force in the academic study of creative writing. Reading your piece, I had to wonder why someone like Greenblatt would deny his own intellectual life, and I kept landing on shame as the answer (projection? perhaps). "Taught for too long and fallen out of love with the material" also makes sense, as Gnocchic Apocryphon writes below, though I find the Greenblattian attitude in junior faculty and graduate students, too.
Wow thanks this inspired me to read Elif Batuman's essay, which I think I've read before. I am not totally convinced either by her assertion or mcgurls that the mfa has a homogenizing effect on fiction! They bother overlook the strong effect of the publishing industry. I've had multiple mfa classmates who wrote beautiful novels, deeply conversant with literary history, but that just weren't in fashion and so didn't sell.
I have though noticed that sense of shame. I don't really get it, maybe bc I started out in commercial fiction, so I don't feel writing is that elite. Writing is great, it makes people happy, it provides value to the world. It doesn't need to justify itself! Not sure if people's expectations are just too high or what (does everything need to be liberatory, isn't helping just one student enough? Or at least more than a lot of middle class professionals get to do?)
I find that I can't resist your posts, which is a good thing! I paused at this line: "If the group of people responsible for stewardship over the canon has thirty-one Democrats for every Republican, we have to at least consider the question that reading and thinking about the canon is far more likely to make you support Democratic, rather than Republican, candidates." Because I think the essay conflates the Great Books canon with the canon represented by, say, the Norton and Heath anthologies. And there is something of a war between those two big publishers. The Norton has hewed a bit more to the conservative canon with a bias toward longer and more complex narratives. The Heath has been (or at least was during my tenure as a lit professor) the standard-bearer for the expanded canon -- Pratt's contact zone as against Crevecoeur's melting pot. The Heath is much more likely to privilege a fragment, for the sake of reading against the grain of master narratives, than it is to publish a classic text in full. Some of this is market-driven, with an eye toward undergraduates with waning attention spans, but a lot of it ties to the larger debates you mention.
I suppose what I'm trying to say is that there hasn't been a singular canon for at least twenty years. There are a few different canons, one might say. In the more liberal canon, Life in the Steel Mills and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl are right up there with Rappaccini's Daughter and "Self-Reliance" (Moby Dick is omitted altogether). I taught the transcript of Anne Hutchinson's trial alongside Winthrop's "Model of Christian Charity." Conservatives might teach Winthrop and Bradford with no competing voices, overlook the oral tradition that preceded European contact, and ignore the fascinating echoes between Margaret Fuller's "Great Lawsuit" and Emerson's essays.
I suppose even at a distance, nearly three years removed from my last American literature survey course, I think there is civic value in thinking about those clashes between different ideologies and different voices. I think even now I'm more with Pratt than with Strauss. And perhaps unsurprisingly I am a Democrat, although not in entirely predictable ways. I supported Bernie Sanders and Amy Klobuchar, who both speak to the disaffection among working-class Americans. And I'm vehemently against things like labor-based grading, which represent the most radical extreme.
It's true there is disagreement about what constitutes the canon! But surely there is substantial overlap between the Great Books and the multicultural canon, no? I assume middlemarch, Shakespeare, Milton, etc are in both. Im not sure I buy that there are two canons! If Moby dick is no longer taught in universities, I just don't think it'll survive the next few generations.
Guillory also makes a distinction between works that are taught as canonical VS those taught as counter canonical--like if some class teaches a class on popular fiction, that doesn't make those books canonical, unless they're presented as being unfairly underappreciated classics, but I would feel totally comfortable with having incidents or life in the iron mills in the canon, and I don't know how many people in 2023 would really be motivated to argue against them
I understand your critique of Greenblatt's comment, but we don't know what else he said in the interview. More important, his point about long form television is exactly what I'd expect to hear from a historically oriented Shakespeare scholar. What Shakespeare did was take an existing popular medium that produced mostly forgettable entertainment (Marlowe aside) and elevate it to great art. Greenblatt is arguing that something similar is happening in our time. He's thinking about what interests him, not what interests the journalist interviewing him.
I don't think that's what Shakespeare did at all! Many of the Elizabethan dramatists were great artists--I like Ben Johnsons plays more than Shakespeare's personally. And he was also writing at the Renaissance of secular theater! It wasn't really something that existed before his lifetime. It didnt really displace any preexisting literature (save perhaps the passion play).
That aside, if Greenblatt is really arguing that TV is displacing Shakespeare, and is more interesting and worthy of study than Shakespeare, then he is not fulfilling his social role as the world's leading Shakespeare specialist and the editor of the Norton anthology of English literature!
On Elizabethan dramatists, timing is important. Jonson was about a decade younger than Shakespeare and Marlowe, who were both much better than their contemporaries and the people who preceded them. (I'm a Marlowe partisan personally.) The Spanish Tragedy, ugh. Not to mention stuff in jog-trot rhyme schemes.
My point is that it's not surprising to find that someone fascinated by the drama of that period would also be fascinated by what's happened in long form TV recently, because the phenomenon is similar. Greenblatt is a brilliant scholar, but he is less a Shakespeare partisan than someone interested more generally in the period. His landmark book was Renaissance Self-Fashioning, which wasn't about Shakespeare per se. He isn't Harold Bloom or Samuel Johnson!
But I don't think he's arguing that TV is displacing Shakespeare. He's arguing that a Shakespearean mind would be interested in applying itself to newly emerging art forms, whether the novel or TV. He's also implicitly reminding us that Shakespeare was commercial art. But maybe you should interview him for your book.
I think we are on the same page. I just think he SHOULD be a Shakespeare partisan. And the fact that our main explicator of Shakespeare isn't a Shakespeare partisan is a symptom of a kind of cultural sickness
Like it's fine for him to be whatever he is, but our culture elevated someone who has a certain relationship to the culture. Our literary society incentives scholars to not be partisans for the ppl like Shakespeare or Milton, and I think that's silly, because if Shakespeare isn't great, there is no reason for me to even know Greenblatt's name
You want message discipline from a scholar. That's a tough ask. Also, keep in mind that the subject of the article was English majors, not great literature.
I wonder how he would answer if simply asked, Is Shakespeare great? Is he greater than Wyatt or Spencer? Why or why not?
No he should just acknowledge the premises under which he has any importance at all. Why interview him for this article and not the world expert on Breaking Bad? If Shakespeare isn't more worthy of study than television, there needs be no English major, and there needs be no Greenblatt either.
There's a fiddling while Rome burns quality, like the anti poverty experts who say, well, global poverty is way down, if you count China. That's true, but it's not anything THEY did. In the part of the world for which they are responsible, poverty is not particularly down. They have failed.
Someone I read in the last year-I can't remember who right at the moment!-described the kind of attitude Greenblatt takes in that excerpt as the sort of pose professors take when they've taught for too long and fallen out of love with the material! And yes, the spiritual bankruptcy is maddening. When I was in school the default left-liberal excuse for why you should read the great books was still that "they teach you to be a good person/have empathy" which isn't an answer I particularly agree with (imo at least Nietzsche will not teach you to be a better person) but it is at least an answer!
The problem with the empathy argument is that unless it's paired with a defense of greatness, it doesn't function as a defense of the traditional canon. Like in what sense would reading Milton teach us more empathy than reading, say, Chimamanda Adichie? The only possible retort is that Milton is the better writer and so, despite his whiteness and maleness, we gain more empathy from his work. But if you are defending the concept of greatness, then you don't need the empathy defense, because greatness is it's own defense! Anything that excels is worth studying merely because it excels!
Yes, that's exactly the problem. I think maybe part of it is the need to be trendy and up-to-the-minute? Your guess is probably much better than mine though, learned most of the lit-world stuff I blabber about by myself, I can't say what goes on with pedagogy inside academia
You might be interested in this oldie but goodie: Elif Batumen's review of Mark McGurl's The Program Era, in which she argues that shame is a driving force in the academic study of creative writing. Reading your piece, I had to wonder why someone like Greenblatt would deny his own intellectual life, and I kept landing on shame as the answer (projection? perhaps). "Taught for too long and fallen out of love with the material" also makes sense, as Gnocchic Apocryphon writes below, though I find the Greenblattian attitude in junior faculty and graduate students, too.
Wow thanks this inspired me to read Elif Batuman's essay, which I think I've read before. I am not totally convinced either by her assertion or mcgurls that the mfa has a homogenizing effect on fiction! They bother overlook the strong effect of the publishing industry. I've had multiple mfa classmates who wrote beautiful novels, deeply conversant with literary history, but that just weren't in fashion and so didn't sell.
I have though noticed that sense of shame. I don't really get it, maybe bc I started out in commercial fiction, so I don't feel writing is that elite. Writing is great, it makes people happy, it provides value to the world. It doesn't need to justify itself! Not sure if people's expectations are just too high or what (does everything need to be liberatory, isn't helping just one student enough? Or at least more than a lot of middle class professionals get to do?)
I find that I can't resist your posts, which is a good thing! I paused at this line: "If the group of people responsible for stewardship over the canon has thirty-one Democrats for every Republican, we have to at least consider the question that reading and thinking about the canon is far more likely to make you support Democratic, rather than Republican, candidates." Because I think the essay conflates the Great Books canon with the canon represented by, say, the Norton and Heath anthologies. And there is something of a war between those two big publishers. The Norton has hewed a bit more to the conservative canon with a bias toward longer and more complex narratives. The Heath has been (or at least was during my tenure as a lit professor) the standard-bearer for the expanded canon -- Pratt's contact zone as against Crevecoeur's melting pot. The Heath is much more likely to privilege a fragment, for the sake of reading against the grain of master narratives, than it is to publish a classic text in full. Some of this is market-driven, with an eye toward undergraduates with waning attention spans, but a lot of it ties to the larger debates you mention.
I suppose what I'm trying to say is that there hasn't been a singular canon for at least twenty years. There are a few different canons, one might say. In the more liberal canon, Life in the Steel Mills and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl are right up there with Rappaccini's Daughter and "Self-Reliance" (Moby Dick is omitted altogether). I taught the transcript of Anne Hutchinson's trial alongside Winthrop's "Model of Christian Charity." Conservatives might teach Winthrop and Bradford with no competing voices, overlook the oral tradition that preceded European contact, and ignore the fascinating echoes between Margaret Fuller's "Great Lawsuit" and Emerson's essays.
I suppose even at a distance, nearly three years removed from my last American literature survey course, I think there is civic value in thinking about those clashes between different ideologies and different voices. I think even now I'm more with Pratt than with Strauss. And perhaps unsurprisingly I am a Democrat, although not in entirely predictable ways. I supported Bernie Sanders and Amy Klobuchar, who both speak to the disaffection among working-class Americans. And I'm vehemently against things like labor-based grading, which represent the most radical extreme.
It's true there is disagreement about what constitutes the canon! But surely there is substantial overlap between the Great Books and the multicultural canon, no? I assume middlemarch, Shakespeare, Milton, etc are in both. Im not sure I buy that there are two canons! If Moby dick is no longer taught in universities, I just don't think it'll survive the next few generations.
Guillory also makes a distinction between works that are taught as canonical VS those taught as counter canonical--like if some class teaches a class on popular fiction, that doesn't make those books canonical, unless they're presented as being unfairly underappreciated classics, but I would feel totally comfortable with having incidents or life in the iron mills in the canon, and I don't know how many people in 2023 would really be motivated to argue against them
I understand your critique of Greenblatt's comment, but we don't know what else he said in the interview. More important, his point about long form television is exactly what I'd expect to hear from a historically oriented Shakespeare scholar. What Shakespeare did was take an existing popular medium that produced mostly forgettable entertainment (Marlowe aside) and elevate it to great art. Greenblatt is arguing that something similar is happening in our time. He's thinking about what interests him, not what interests the journalist interviewing him.
But your point is taken that the reporter went out of their way to make him look ridiculous. So we don't know what other context there was
I don't think that's what Shakespeare did at all! Many of the Elizabethan dramatists were great artists--I like Ben Johnsons plays more than Shakespeare's personally. And he was also writing at the Renaissance of secular theater! It wasn't really something that existed before his lifetime. It didnt really displace any preexisting literature (save perhaps the passion play).
That aside, if Greenblatt is really arguing that TV is displacing Shakespeare, and is more interesting and worthy of study than Shakespeare, then he is not fulfilling his social role as the world's leading Shakespeare specialist and the editor of the Norton anthology of English literature!
On Elizabethan dramatists, timing is important. Jonson was about a decade younger than Shakespeare and Marlowe, who were both much better than their contemporaries and the people who preceded them. (I'm a Marlowe partisan personally.) The Spanish Tragedy, ugh. Not to mention stuff in jog-trot rhyme schemes.
My point is that it's not surprising to find that someone fascinated by the drama of that period would also be fascinated by what's happened in long form TV recently, because the phenomenon is similar. Greenblatt is a brilliant scholar, but he is less a Shakespeare partisan than someone interested more generally in the period. His landmark book was Renaissance Self-Fashioning, which wasn't about Shakespeare per se. He isn't Harold Bloom or Samuel Johnson!
But I don't think he's arguing that TV is displacing Shakespeare. He's arguing that a Shakespearean mind would be interested in applying itself to newly emerging art forms, whether the novel or TV. He's also implicitly reminding us that Shakespeare was commercial art. But maybe you should interview him for your book.
I think we are on the same page. I just think he SHOULD be a Shakespeare partisan. And the fact that our main explicator of Shakespeare isn't a Shakespeare partisan is a symptom of a kind of cultural sickness
Like it's fine for him to be whatever he is, but our culture elevated someone who has a certain relationship to the culture. Our literary society incentives scholars to not be partisans for the ppl like Shakespeare or Milton, and I think that's silly, because if Shakespeare isn't great, there is no reason for me to even know Greenblatt's name
You want message discipline from a scholar. That's a tough ask. Also, keep in mind that the subject of the article was English majors, not great literature.
I wonder how he would answer if simply asked, Is Shakespeare great? Is he greater than Wyatt or Spencer? Why or why not?
No he should just acknowledge the premises under which he has any importance at all. Why interview him for this article and not the world expert on Breaking Bad? If Shakespeare isn't more worthy of study than television, there needs be no English major, and there needs be no Greenblatt either.
There's a fiddling while Rome burns quality, like the anti poverty experts who say, well, global poverty is way down, if you count China. That's true, but it's not anything THEY did. In the part of the world for which they are responsible, poverty is not particularly down. They have failed.
Someone I read in the last year-I can't remember who right at the moment!-described the kind of attitude Greenblatt takes in that excerpt as the sort of pose professors take when they've taught for too long and fallen out of love with the material! And yes, the spiritual bankruptcy is maddening. When I was in school the default left-liberal excuse for why you should read the great books was still that "they teach you to be a good person/have empathy" which isn't an answer I particularly agree with (imo at least Nietzsche will not teach you to be a better person) but it is at least an answer!
The problem with the empathy argument is that unless it's paired with a defense of greatness, it doesn't function as a defense of the traditional canon. Like in what sense would reading Milton teach us more empathy than reading, say, Chimamanda Adichie? The only possible retort is that Milton is the better writer and so, despite his whiteness and maleness, we gain more empathy from his work. But if you are defending the concept of greatness, then you don't need the empathy defense, because greatness is it's own defense! Anything that excels is worth studying merely because it excels!
Yes, that's exactly the problem. I think maybe part of it is the need to be trendy and up-to-the-minute? Your guess is probably much better than mine though, learned most of the lit-world stuff I blabber about by myself, I can't say what goes on with pedagogy inside academia