December 9, 2011
Have we reached saturation point in literary studies?
by Melville House
In the Chronicle Review, Mark Bauerlein writes about the issues involving literary scholarship and the hard road ahead for authors trying to be heard in a field awash with theses. He writes, “Because after four decades of mountainous publication, literary studies has reached a saturation point, the cascade of research having exhausted most of the subfields and overwhelmed the capacity of individuals to absorb the annual output. Who can read all of the 80 items of scholarship that are published on George Eliot each year? After 5,000 studies of Melville since 1960, what can the 5,001st say that will have anything but a microscopic audience of interested readers?”
Is literary scholarship suffering from inattention? If so, how do we remedy this fact? Should research be as much a part of a professor’s job duties as it is currently, or should we lessen the collective output because we’re just creating piles of paper to sit, often unread, in libraries? In the end, should universities just give up on the “publish or perish” model?
One publishing corollary might be the saturation of slush piles. What magazines even give them attention anymore besides The Paris Review and some smaller literary quarterlies? It’s a shame that no one can read them and respond to all submissions but the pile keeps growing and there’s just not enough time in the day to sort through them all, resulting in form letters and crushed dreams. But is it better to not accept unsolicited submissions at all? What do you think, readers?
I’m curious to hear your thoughts.
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6 Comments
Instead of another monologue on George Eliot, how about a to-notch Featured Article on Wikipedia for Eliot, or whoever. It would be read by thousands of people *every day*, instead of a “respected” book that gets read by a few hundred people in its entire life.
Wikipedia articles don’t get you tenure.
I don’t think there is a remedy to the number of readers being eclipsed by the number of writers.
Some of the articles, I think, aren’t read because the subscription cost for some academic journals is outrageous – and library cutbacks and restricting journal access. As a grad student (in literary and cultural studies), I have observed a subtle push to cite only recent (within the last five to eight years) articles, and to not pull older work for my own research papers. The ‘you must publish’ imperative is strong; I’m only an MA student but I’m supposed to have published. And I have…though I doubt anybody will ever look at my article. It would have made a bigger impact and been more widely read if it had been, say, an article written for Boing Boing. The research is moving away from pay-to-play journals and anthologies to open source and open access. Or at least, it should be.
Oddly enough, it’s also been difficult to find supervisors who will entertain literary studies that mixes in ‘non-literary’ genre work – my research is about zombies, and though I’ll be allowed to pull in zombie movies and gaming into the final analysis, I’m expected to find something literary. Something. Anything. The research leading up to the thesis has looked at the horror genre – popular horror, not swoony Victorian horror – and there’s little to no good research on it – and even less on topics like YA dystopia. The research writer bots are busily repurposing the classic works and largely side-stepping popular and vernacular literature – and it’s a real shame.
Says I, at least. I can’t tell you how many times the Herman Melville and the George Eliot groupies have rolled their eyes when I talk about horror and science fiction. I don’t think literary scholarship has necessarily reached saturation – I think it’s overly saturated in some areas, and parched in others.
One of the problems with publishing a book is that one gets unsolicited advice from people one knows nothing about. Academia is relatively transparent: you can pick a research topic with a view to avoiding people you don’t want to work with, attracting those you do; you can apply to do graduate work at universities with departments you like; you can assess the intellectual stature of the people you might work with on their publication record, on classes, lectures, seminars, on reports from other people who have worked with them. In the publishing world there is normally no way to know whether an editor is a good fit until after the contract has been signed, comments received, book seen into print – when it is, of course, too late to act on the information.
One solution might be to have detailed information about publishing staff – CVs, intellectual profiles, editorial comments on books published, data on management of process – available for subscription online. An imprint’s staff often read more widely, have more diverse interests, than can be known from what is published (the market for work in translation is small; publisher unlikely to devote a book to every indie band on staff iPods; and so on); the line between editorial and other staff is often fluid (my current publicist at New Directions used to be an editor at Penguin . . .); and it’s no more possible to guess at the quality of editorial comments from a meeting or agent’s briefing than it is to guess the quality of a book from having lunch with its author or author’s rep.
So, maybe the publisher charges $50 for one-week access, $10 a month for year’s subscription . . . If it’s getting 10,000 submissions a year, $500,000+ pa would presumably cover the cost of paying people to read them – and, on the other hand, the number of submissions might drop, those made be more selective, if writers were better informed. (The publisher might make a basic subscription a prerequisite for considering unagented submissions. No worse, surely, than colleges charging an application fee.)
I agreed with everything you’ve written. As someone who wrote a paper on Eliot, I think it’s not about over saturation, but a limited focus that makes us believe there is over saturation. I doing my thesis on a novel that was published in 2008 and there is literally nothing published about it. Will it be a lot more work? Of course, but I will have a lot more fun researching, saying something new and finding my own voice.