Into the COLA-verse: Office Hours Session I: Has Academia Ruined Literary Criticism?

[00:00:00] Dan: Hi, and welcome to Into the COLA Verse, office Hours, an open form podcast that takes us deep into the minds and work of our faculty here at the College of Liberal Arts at UT Austin.

[00:00:14] Frederick: Join us your host, Frederick Luis Alma and Daniel Oppenheimer. As we look, we learn of the many issues discussed and deliberated by our cutting edge faculty who are transforming the world today.

[00:00:33] Frederick: Welcome everybody. Thanks for, you know, jumping in here. I know we’re all excited and interested to talk about this subject, um, literary criticism, but I think coming from all sorts of different fields, we all have, you know, probably our, our individual responses to something like this. Merv Emory’s. Um, piece, um, into the Colli verse.

[00:00:54] Frederick: Well, I’m Frederick Luis Salma. I’m in the English department. I am the founder and director of the Latinx Pop Lab on campus. I also am host of, into the COLA verse, came up with this idea and Dan, um, you know, with Dan’s help, we’ve got this off the ground. Basically, I am, you know, talking with each of you, um, hopefully all of you at some point in.

[00:01:18] Frederick: Space with us today and this sort of public square space, um, will be on it. But yeah, just sharing our journeys, sharing your journeys, your work with a bigger, more kind of general audience. And yeah, just to kind of shout from the rooftops all the really cool stuff that we actually are doing in the academy.

[00:01:38] Frederick: Um, all the very varied things that we’re doing in the academy to enrich our understanding of the world, um, and how it works and what we do in this big. World that we live in. So the, just to summarize very briefly the article for some of some of us, and I have not read Gil’s Bo book, so let me just say that I did read his original book when I was a graduate student.

[00:02:09] Frederick: At Stanford, the one that is mentioned in the piece, but I haven’t read the new one. So now me, Emory. And I think, I think the best way for me, for us to have our discussion is actually to just take the big role, bigger general points that are made and maybe some of the things that I, I might consider to be some confusions.

[00:02:30] Frederick: Um, but basically the idea is that Emory building on Gil. Talks about this sort of history of literary criticism and kind of taking us back to the 18th century when we had a split say between the impulse to inquire or to interpret, and the impulse to theorize. Um, and then following. Through a history of basically, you know, uh, ballistic tradition pH rhetoric B uh, uh, the new critics New York intellectuals to quote unquote the strident culture warriors past and present.

[00:03:16] Frederick: Um, and really the thesis is that the kind of more specialized, um, we have become. And by the way, I’m not including us in this. We, um, I’m mentioning we as, as in coming from the article, more specialized, the less impact our work has become, you know, beyond the, say, ivory towers. The other part of the argument is that given the increased economic uncertainties, the cultural capital of literature, Per this sociology of, of literary criticism that Guillory provides is less valuable.

[00:04:00] Frederick: So economic uncertainty, cultural capital of lit literary criticism is less valuable. So we need to, in the words of Emory, um, take this as an opportunity to reform, um, our deformed selves. So there you. . So,

[00:04:20] Dan: so let me just hand it off to Domino and, and Steven, I, I, I guess to respo thank you for that summary.

[00:04:25] Dan: Uh, that was a ni, that was a beautiful, I wasn’t sure how you were gonna pull it off, but that was a beautifully efficient, um, summary of a long essay, um, of a even longer book. Domino. And Steven, I guess maybe just respond to that. I mean, what do you. Is Emory and I guess by extension, Guillory, are they right?

[00:04:41] Dan: Are they wrong? Is this a useful E Even if they’re wrong, is it a useful way of framing kind of where we stand or is it a destructive one? Either one of you can kind of start off. I should point out also, Stephen wrote a review of the Guillory book as well, um, that I think I linked to in the first email I sent out announcing this.

[00:04:58] Dan: But, but, but Domino, let me, why don’t we start with you and just kind of just thoughts, responses, you know, how do you come to this essay? Yeah. So

[00:05:07] Domino: first of all, thank you very much. Thank you Frederick for that, um, overview if you will. My name is Domino Perez. Uh, I’m the senior associate chair of the Department of English, and I’m an associate professor of English and the Center for Mexican-American Studies.

[00:05:21] Domino: So as a first generation college student and a first generation PhD student, moving forward with my PhD or throughout my education to get my PhD, I didn’t necessarily have any particular kind of tradition to uphold, uh, and I certainly didn’t have a literary tradition to uphold, and everything was new to me.

[00:05:43] Domino: It was all full of possibility. And so, What I wanna say is, from my perspective, this is, this is my interpretation. I’m not trying to represent anybody else’s point of view, and I’m not trying to offer something that’s prescriptive. In reading over the essay, I, I felt it was almost anachronistic in the sense that, I don’t know what time period he’s talking about in terms of that this is happening in the classroom because this is not my classroom.

[00:06:12] Domino: This is not the classroom of so many of my colleagues, not only in the department, but across the university. Uh, we all, I think what, what strengthens our department is the different kinds of engagement that we have with these texts. Some folk. Just incredible theorists and, and that is what they bring to the conversation.

[00:06:35] Domino: Other people have managed to find the intersection of teaching and scholarship and theory, and that’s fantastic as well. And I think every time our students encounter that different position from which the instructor is coming, it strengthens their overall knowledge. So I just, that’s my initial reaction to it.

[00:06:55] Domino: But I also wanna say just very brief. Two things. So one, I am, I am not theory hostile. I am theory skeptical. And it’s not that I don’t know the theory. I think you have to know theory to be skeptical of it, to be, uh, you have to know what it is that you don’t exactly trust. But I remember once as a junior scholar being at a conference with a.

[00:07:22] Domino: Mayan literature scholar, and this individual was talking about the difficulty he was having placing his work in academic journals and this. Frenchman stood up and said very loudly, the problem with you people is you have no theory. And for me there was so much privilege in that statement. Uh, there was so much privilege in that assertion and, you know, to me, my distrust and, and sort of questioning of theory only deepened as to why people clinging to it so much and are so worried about.

[00:08:06] Domino: And I think that is the one thing that the piece gets right, that it is try, it is tied to stature and place. And there are people who are so anxious to defend that place. And I think that is one of the reasons that, you know this question about what is the state of theory, um, has, you know, have we ruined it?

[00:08:26] Domino: And the other thing I would say is that I made a decision. Very early on in the writing of my first monograph that I wasn’t gonna write anything in such a way that my own mother or people in my community couldn’t read it because I wasn’t writing for other academics. And so that in and of itself undermines the very argument.

[00:08:48] Domino: That is being made that we, it’s, you know, it’s this aerody form that’s written for other academics. Again, this doesn’t represent my experience in the academy. It doesn’t represent my experience in the classroom, and so I was a bit puzzled by again, what felt like. Anachronisms in the piece. That’s

[00:09:09] Dan: really fascinating and I, I, I wanted to sort of hand it over to you, Steven, and, and, and I guess in the, in this, maybe just with the, with the attempt at connect it to what Domino was, was saying, which is you, in your review, you’re, you’re pretty laudatory of Hilary’s book, so at a kind of macro level, I, I think you agree that there’s some, there’s some relationship or there’s some story about not just literary criticism, but, but, but the humanities, cuz you’re coming from the history department.

[00:09:34] Dan: That’s true about ways that it’s kind of distance, distance itself from the common reader or, or, or changed in some fashion since whatever the, you know, whatever since the fifties or something in a way that maybe has kind of alienated it from the public in some way. So I think that. That you agree with that kind of macro argument.

[00:09:52] Dan: I’m interested if you, if there’s a way you can, you can do that while also kind of, you know, reckoning with what Domino was saying that maybe there was a kind of simplification of what’s happening in the Academy or maybe just in anachronism that what, that what was being described in this article and book was true at one point, but is no longer true, if that makes sense.

[00:10:12] Dan: As a question,

[00:10:13] Steven: if you wanna know why Gil Reese’s book has gotten so much attention, the answer is simple because it’s a eulogy. For a discipline that has lost its audience and has lost its way. There’s a pervasive sense among many people who have degrees in the humanities that in the wake of deconstruction, post-modernism, the discursive term, uh, the core humanities disciplines are in deep trouble.

[00:10:41] Steven: And it’s true academic criticism and serious literature have lost their audience. The discipline of English, like the discipline of history is fractured and fragmented. We’ve experienced a dramatic decline in majors, 50% in our fields in the last 10 years. The PhD programs cannot place their students.

[00:11:07] Steven: Literary criticism is regarded by large segments. The educated public, excuse my phrase, as mental masturbation, perform. Self-promoting opaque jargon ridden. The discipline focuses more on the present than it does on its own history, and the villains, of course, not Fuko or de Da or spk or Butler. Its academic, hyper specialization, professionalization, and the ization of literary c.

[00:11:46] Steven: Uh, worse yet is our fields. The humanities fields are marginalized in our own university. They’re treated increasingly as service departments, and were regarded, I think, horribly mistakenly by our own colleagues as lacking rigor and that our fields are becoming cinema studies, light ethnic studies, light indigenous studies, light women studies.

[00:12:15] Steven: and so I take what Gillary has written very seriously. I think he’s talking about issues that we really need to ponder. The humanities. Golden Age was very brief. As soon as women had more options than they did in the 1960s and early 1970s, that’s when the decline of enrollment at the humanities began to really surge.

[00:12:45] Steven: And new alternatives to humanities disciplines have emerged. Asians, American studies, black studies, gender, sexuality studies, Latinx studies, women studies, but also arts, technology and communication, environmental studies, linguistics, sustainability. We’re not even controlling our own turf in the humanities any longer.

[00:13:14] Steven: This push towards a 20th and 21st century focus is really damaging to many of our disciplines. This is inevitable, and in many ways it’s a really good thing, right? The insularity of our disciplines in the past was bad, but how are we in a context of shrinking faculty size, going to have coverage? Of all relevant areas and do new things too.

[00:13:49] Steven: Again, this is what Gil’s concerned about. Let me just stop right there.

[00:13:54] Dan: Well, thank you Steven. I see your hand, Frederick, I, and, and I won’t get in the way of what you wanted to say, but, but thank you Steven, for sort of stating the case kind of boldly and, and, and confidently. I think that’s really useful, I guess to Frederick and, and Domino.

[00:14:06] Dan: I guess my question is, I guess your response to Steven, and just another way to frame it is, you know, I think in the Emory assay and in the Guillory book, I, I assume the argument is that, you know, the decline in the humanities, which I think we probably would all agree, that just empirically is the case, is in some substantial part, a result of actions taken by the academy, that it’s a reaction to ways in which the discipline has changed.

[00:14:33] Dan: And I guess one question I have for you guys with that, Is whether you think that’s true, I mean respond to Steven’s kind of argument in general, but also like, or, or is it true that the humanities have declined, but the reasons are external to the academy? They have to do with macroeconomic trends and cultural cleans, CRE trends and broader declines in just the cultural capital of literature that have nothing to do with what’s happening at the university level.

[00:14:56] Dan: So, Frederick, I mean, do you wanna start and then maybe go over to Domino?

[00:15:00] Frederick: Yeah, Steven. Um, so just. Let me just say a couple of things here. Um, I’m more on the side, Dan, that you just presented. Okay. Period. Which is to say that when we have, we basically have the. You know, I’ve, I’ve got students who’ve li are living in cars because they can’t afford to live in Austin.

[00:15:23] Frederick: I’ve got like students who can’t, you know, barely pay the tuitions cuz it’s gotten so crazy. We’ve got, you know, AP history now that’s being like reshaped, you know, because of pressure from people you. That shouldn’t even be in the room talking about what black history, you know, college board stuff should be, uh, et cetera, et cetera.

[00:15:45] Frederick: But we don’t even have to look, we can look elsewhere. We can look at places like, you know, Brazil with Bolsonaro and his like luxury tax that he put on books, you know, and fortunately someone like Lula DeSilva is like, you know, admin saying, no, we’re gonna support libraries, publishers within the arts, just like we hopefully are doing right.

[00:16:02] Frederick: Um, as things are being pulled from un under us. So yes, I see macro as the big thing. Now to Steven’s point, there is a miscon, a very deep misconception of what happens in the classroom. And this is going back to Domino’s point. Um, you know, the. Yes, there was a day, and I remember at Berkeley when someone like Steven Greenblatt would walk down the hallway and he have, would have his entourage of graduate students opening doors and stuff.

[00:16:34] Frederick: um, right. I mean, yes, we saw it. I know. You know. Um, Sam Baker’s in the room. I know he can talk a lot about like this kind of stuff. Avita Ronnell over in Delle Hall who had 5,000 people pouring out of this lecture hall and you know, people like, I don’t know, Robert Al Alter over in another room teaching, you know, really kind of fun, deep cult, you know, close readings had three people including me.

[00:17:01] Frederick: Okay, so my point is though, let me, let me just say something really important here. There is a fundamental confusion and conflation in this piece. I think, and I don’t know if it goes into GUI or not, around what interpretation or literary criticism is. And its aims and its goals and theory now. Yes, there was high theory, there was the stuff that Steven just talked about with deconstruction, post-structuralism, and then so on and so forth, where it became much more concerned with kind of theory, uh, a theory of theory.

[00:17:39] Frederick: But there was a long and has been a very long tradition in the study of literature and we can go back to the Russian formalists and even Aristotle way before that. That asked questions that attempted to understand on a much deeper level the the difference say, or how literature is built differently to say, I don’t know, art or uh, a car, et cetera, et cetera.

[00:18:06] Frederick: That is to say getting at the roots. Of something like literature and trying to understand what at one point was called literariness, and then a lot of people abandoned it because it just became very difficult to identify something that on a theoretical level, level could be a system. Right. And then there’s interpretation and this article confuses the two.

[00:18:32] Frederick: There are, there’s nothing, I’m not putting any value on one or the other. I’m just saying. Theory and criticism are two different things, and they’re two different kind of animals, and they have two different kinds of goals in mind. And there are ways that we’re seeing theory being, um, developed in this kind of convergence and emergence of knowledge today.

[00:18:57] Frederick: You know, a lot of our colleagues are doing it, but we are also doing interpretation and we’re doing a mixture and we’re doing all sorts of this kind of stuff. So, you know, to say that somehow literary criticism that it’s the marginality or the marginality or the margins that have somehow ruined literary criticism or what we’re doing in the classroom is actually inflating all sorts of things here that are.

[00:19:27] Frederick: Um, realistic or even representative of what the field, the richness of the field itself. And I’ll leave it there.

[00:19:36] Domino: Yeah. So thank you so much, Frederick. I really appreciate what you said. And I think the distinction between, um, theory and criticism is hugely important because actually you don’t need theory to do literary criticism.

[00:19:47] Domino: So I appreciate that. Um, and I also, uh, appreciate Steven’s clarification of, um, what makes this piece so popular, or rather the book so popular, the idea of, um, that it represents a kind of eulogy for the discipline. And that I think is, I think that’s absolutely correct, which leads me to say, but it’s also eulogizing a very exclusionary system.

[00:20:14] Domino: And I don’t think that there’s anything additional that I could add to what Fred said, but I do wanna say that rigor and accessibility. And disciplinary expansion are not mu mutually exclusive. I think to have good literary criticism to effectively convey or engage rather, not convey, rather to effectively engage with the text.

[00:20:38] Domino: You need all of those things. And you know, I think that one of the things that I do find is that there is this. Tendency, I believe. Speak to the other part of the question that, that you asked Dan. Um, why has interest in, in English and, and history and the humanities in general fallen off? I, I, I think that there is an anti-intellectualism that pervades our current cultural moment, and it’s been that for a while now.

[00:21:12] Domino: But, you know, the, the, the question that I think. Poisoned the well of the humanities is, you know, what are you gonna do with it? And the, the, um, the sort of reference to, you know, oh, I have a history degree and you know, that’s qualified me to be a barista. Right. Uh, and I think it, those kind of conversations, I think, talk about they, they, they bring to mind.

[00:21:39] Domino: These ideas of like class struggle and, you know, elitism and you know, where we place cultural value on certain forms of thought and certain forms of expression. I think that anymore it is about this worry, this genuine worry and preoccupation that, you know, what am I gonna do with a, with a humanities?

[00:22:07] Dan: Yeah. And that’s, that’s a real question that people have to ask themselves and not want to be dismissive of, even if the result is that they major in something we wish they, when we wish they would major in the humanities. I guess, cuz I wanna get to the question soon. Let me ask my, my, my last sort of official question, which I told you guys I was gonna be asking, which is, which is, um, if you were emperor of the discipline of English, or the discipline of history in Steven’s case in the United States, and you had the power to sort of single-handedly restructure the entire edifice of teaching tenure, promotion and scholarship.

[00:22:37] Dan: You know, what would you do? What or, or what are a few things you would do, because I assume, however, each of you responded to this article and as particular critique of the discipline, there’s no reason to assume that where we are at the moment is precisely where we should be or where you would want us to be.

[00:22:51] Dan: So, so what’s your disciplinary utopia? Or at least some elements of it. And, and maybe, um, Frederick, I’ll start with you and then go to Domino and, and Steven.

[00:23:02] Frederick: Well, for us to get to that utopia, we need to have certain things in place, which are the things that we were just. Defending, um, on a really basic level.

[00:23:13] Frederick: So one, you know, um, higher education shouldn’t, shouldn’t become a burden to our students after they graduate, right? Um, that is to say that when they enter, they come through the front door, there should be the sense that this is a place where they can explore to. All of their potentialities, right? Um, without this sort of pressure that domino made so clear and that we all know by, you know, spending time with our students.

[00:23:42] Frederick: Um, the, that is to say the, the financial pressures, the burdens. So that’s one thing. I mean, these are all macro things, so we need to take care of some really basic, kind of macro level stuff before we can get to that utopia is what I’m trying to, I guess say, the other thing that I wanna say is that, um, we need to, I’ll be, I’ll just be honest.

[00:24:02] Frederick: We need to be better at. Getting our message out. I am. I go to these p t o meetings and it’s really easy for people to get a simple message that’s in reaction to something. Right? I hate, this is really easy. I like this. Is is harder. Okay. So, and I like this, especially coming from us, all of us in this room is, I like this because, It leads me to ask questions.

[00:24:35] Frederick: It leads me to ask questions that hopefully will, with others, generate new knowledge about this thing that I’m interested or asking questions about that’s in the world, and how this thing in the world exists and by in its existence. Transforms who we are and what we do in this world now that getting our message across about that is much harder.

[00:25:01] Frederick: So we need to simplify that message. You know, Steven was really excellent at articulating the mainstream misunderstanding of what it is we’re doing and what it is that we have in mind and what we actually accomplish with our students. Right? And that is to create a, uh, kind of sanctity of learning space that.

[00:25:30] Frederick: Allows for us to ask questions, other questions that may have not have been asked to provide the tools for enriching our understanding and clarification in the general goal of the, what we might call the convergence and emergence. Of new knowledge knowing that this is baby steps and that it is also a knowledge that is continually, kinda retroactively revising itself.

[00:26:03] Frederick: Period.

[00:26:04] Dan: Domino, your disciplinary utopia, emperor of English in all the United States.

[00:26:11] Domino: I’m not an empress. I don’t work in a utopia, and the academy will never be a utopia. That being said, I’d much rather say what I would like to see happen in the, in that context of knowing that it’s not a utopia and it’s really very simple.

[00:26:31] Domino: I would like to continue to do what I do for as long as I can do it without state interference.

[00:26:38] Dan: Steven. Number

[00:26:40] Steven: history, you mentioned the tension between the macro forces and the micro forces, but the fact is we only control the micro forces. And so here’s four steps that we should take. Number one, we need to become much more cross-disciplinary.

[00:26:57] Steven: We need to hire people who connect to the various fields that our students are most interested in. Those are not all in the science. But if we can’t connect ourselves to those, we’re gonna be increasingly marginal on our own campus. Second, the area where we have by far the most control is gen ed. And we should, I think, get away from disciplinary based narrow introductory courses and think much more about the interdisciplinary.

[00:27:32] Steven: Issues, humanistic issues that our students are really concerned about. These issues have to do with identity. They have to do with power, they have to do with equity, they have to do with freedom. They also have to do with existential issues like grief and loss and the like. Third, we’re responsible for the most important skills, and I don’t see it fewer than half of our students at our campus take freshman composition ut, and it shows in their writing.

[00:28:07] Steven: And we should not dismiss this. We have a genuine responsibility to improve our students writing. And when I’m teaching 800 student. Come on. Those students aren’t getting the feedback that they need to improve their writing. Fourth, next, we really have to emphasize what’s called the para literary, or I would call the paras history.

[00:28:33] Steven: That is, there is a lively interest in what we do in the real world, and we’re not well connected to that world. We are to a certain extent entre. In the ivory tower. I will remember times when Lion Trilling or Harold Bloom, or Edward Sayid spoke to a public audience, and I think you’d be hard pressed to find a single literary critic and not very many historians either who can.

[00:29:08] Steven: Right now, truly connect to a broad educated audience that’s on us. That’s not just a matter of macro forces.

[00:29:20] Dan: Uh, thank you, Steven. Let me open it up. Th those are all great. Let me open it up to the audience. If you’re interested in saying something. Um, please kind of raise your hand in the, I think it’s in the reactions, uh, is that right?

[00:29:33] Dan: In the reactions thing at the bottom? And I will call on you. Oh, Nina. I see Nina Gat. Do you wanna unmute and ask?

[00:29:45] Nina: Uh, yes, thank you. And thank you for sending me the invite. It was kind of very recent, so I did not have an opportunity to look into the essay or the um, book, but I’m very interested in these conversations and these issues.

[00:30:03] Nina: Because I face it, uh, not only in my, uh, research, my writing, but also in my life in a very big way. And, uh, and now have strong opinions about it, . So I think I wanna, um, uh, Just to keep it short and everybody’s here, uh, to participate. So I’m just gonna make one comment and I wanna start with, um, the presentation from, uh, domino Paris.

[00:30:33] Nina: I, I, I really, really see the point of what, uh, Paris. Uh, is, uh, going toward, which is, uh, as you mentioned in your example, you would, uh, when you write something and your research, it must speak to your community. It must be understood by your mother. So, but I feel that, and here I’m wanting to shift to the position that others have taken, Stephen and Frederick, uh, Adamma also because, It has not accepted yet widely that that perspective that you want to have in talking to your mother in your research and have it be respected as major groundbreaking research.

[00:31:24] Nina: Why it is so. And I think that can only be explained by getting into the trenches of what theory is what, where it is coming from, where are we in this moment, and where are we going and where do we want to go. I think that’s a very important question and, and this whole conversation is, We’re in a bizarre moment.

[00:31:50] Nina: People are, uh, losing interest in theory, losing interest in, uh, quality, losing interest in, uh, raising the bar. I think those are the points that have been made, and I completely, completely understand. But how do we get there? I, I think we have to have the conversation. Where are we wanting to go in this sort of a broken moment when we are dealing with a lot of disruption and uh, new ideas?

[00:32:21] Nina: And a lot of marginalized, previously marginalized voices wanting to be at the center table and be a part of this conversation on how we get theory to respond to research and literature being put in, put out. So I think I wanna take what Paris said. To, uh, a different place. So here I think I slightly disagree that it’s enough to just do that, uh, to, to speak to my mother and to speak to my community.

[00:32:55] Nina: I think we need to do more than that. I need to show why speaking to my mother and my community is extremely important under a, uh, legitimate. And more universal to radical perspective, which we all must be a part of and be allowed to, to, uh, to have on the table. So that’s kind of what is, uh, uh, Yeah, my sense of, um, where we need to go.

[00:33:28] Nina: So I think I’ll just end there and maybe there will be more down the road if I’ve made myself understood so far. That’s, that’s good. Thank you. Thank you,

[00:33:38] Dan: Nina. And I was gonna say, I forgot to remind you, I’m just, I, I Googled you. You’re a, you’re a doctoral student in, in, uh, department of Asian Studies, and I was gonna, so Adela, why don’t, can you unmute and, and talk and just introduce yourself for, for Ann?

[00:33:49] Domino: Can I to? I’m sorry. Of course. Can I, of course. Can I have an opportunity to respond to. Nina, I I absolutely agree with everything that you said. The what, what I do in my work and the decision that I made is not exclusive of that. Right. Of identifying why it’s important, right. Uh, to expand our, expand my work in the way that I, that I, that I have and to talk about how my work was constructed.

[00:34:16] Domino: Um, and that is very much a part of. My most recent book that talks not only about the work that we do, but how research is made, what gets valued in that process, what are the epistemic forms that are elevated, and what are ones that are sort of erased and sort of bringing all of that into conversation.

[00:34:40] Domino: So I absolutely agree with you. And the other thing I will say is that the moment was this idea of. Writing for a particular or particular audiences I. One of the things that I wanna say about Professor Alma’s work, and I, he’s too humble, I think, to, to bring it up himself, but one of, one of the things that I find so important about what he does in the Latinx Pop Lab is that he takes.

[00:35:08] Domino: Some of so much of the work that we do and brings it to a wider audience. He brings it to, you know, non-academic specialists. He brings it to the Twitterverse, he brings it to social media. He engages people with the kinds of conversations that we’re having, and people get excited about that. . And so to me the work that Professor Alma’s doing is exactly the kind of work that Stephen called for.

[00:35:36] Domino: Right. It’s already in existence. Some of us have already been doing it and some of us will continue to do it, but I just wanted to point out, Nina, that I agree with you. It’s, but given the time constraints, I didn’t have the time . I didn’t, I didn’t wanna take up too much time explaining. So thank you.

[00:35:53] Domino: Thanks Domino.

[00:35:54] Dan: Adela. Yes.

[00:35:56] Nina: Um,

[00:35:56] hi

[00:35:57] Adela: everybody. I am Ada. I am a professor of Spanish Literature LA America Literature, and I’m the director of Lila currently. And thank you for the invitation. I did read the article, um, uh, a week ago, so, and I actually was, commented it with my husband. Um, and I, I wanna just comment on from a historical perspective, right, like, I think the article is also very focused on the idea of modern literature.

[00:36:26] Adela: Um, the moment when literature in the west. Came a specialized discourse of inquiry from an aesthetic point of view and where we could ask what the literariness was, right. That literature has existed well beyond the 19th century, but in the moment when critics and writers came together to ask the questions of like, what differentiates literary language from all, all other type of writings, west is also a social phenomen.

[00:36:56] Adela: It had to do with the division of labor in the west and in also in other countries. Meaning what is the writer for, what is the writer going to achieve and why is it that civic writing is not the same as literature? Right? And I think this was the beginning of the highly specialized language of criticism and then theory, meta language about what literature in itself is and what is criticism in itself that permeated.

[00:37:24] Adela: The 20th century and created the institution of literary studies within universities. I think there was also in that institution, the possibility of a job market. Students could go and find a job and we could like train them easily. Now, I think what I think is very interesting in the article, it is true, is the ization of the profession.

[00:37:49] Adela: When our PhD students go and try to find a. And there is, and this is why we now subsume literature to a wider domain, you know, in interdisciplinary nature, which is healthy, you know, through cultural studies, et cetera. But that doesn’t mean that the humanities are at risk because we are actually making them mani to.

[00:38:12] Adela: The problem of society that has to do with this hyper specialized, uh, tendency toward knowledge, becoming it more technical, like it is more about skills and about knowledge in general. That’s like, that’s the pace and we are like faster learners, et cetera. The other thing I wanna say, that even though we are more inclusive and we try to be inclusive, the university as institution in itself is not inclusive.

[00:38:41] Adela: Only because it’s so expensive and if we would like to actually make literature or any humanities discipline more democratic, this problem needs to be addressed. Even though we would like to reach out to more people. What is the per percentage of students who can actually have access to the university?

[00:39:00] Adela: That’s an a broader. Finally the role of the writer as a public intellectual that Professor Mince was talking about. I think this is also a question of the change of the status of writers and public intellectuals. I think with new social media, the idea of the public intellectual is not the one we had in the 20th century where you could use the, the symbolic capital of your knowledge of literature or, or whatever field it was to speak.

[00:39:32] Adela: Um, in politics in society, right? We now have community of writers through social media, networking, et cetera. So I think all these factors should be taken into consideration to assess the future of the study of literature within the

[00:39:48] Dan: university setting. That was a pretty Thank you, Adele. That was a pretty, kind of brilliant kind of synthesis of a lot of these, the sort of macro currents and, and the sort of creation of the discipline and, and maybe a sort of brief period when it was, when it had a kind of coherence in response to maybe its size and also what was going on culturally.

[00:40:07] Dan: Um, Patrick, do you wanna, uh, ask your question? Actually, Frederick, why don’t you, uh, it looks like you have your hand up. Do you wanna respond? And then, and then when we can, Patrick, we’ll get to you.

[00:40:18] Frederick: So I think what we need to also keep clearly in mind in this piece, and I don’t know if this is generated from the GUI or not, but there is the, yet again, a conflation between this idea of more specialized, less impact.

[00:40:38] Frederick: That is the more specialized is also linked in this piece to those who. Use theory as political surrogacy and that have single-handedly ruined the academy. There is a danger in this conflation, not only in the peace, but in the world and in our engagement with the world at large. And this is. It gets it wrong, but it feeds a machine that is already operating on misrepresenting what we’re doing.

[00:41:18] Frederick: That feeds a machine that undermines. The funding that we so desperately need, not just in the academy, but in the N e h, in all the academies that support our poets in our classrooms, in our libraries, our local libraries, our K through 12 libraries are adjuncting, gigging, prof, you know, of the profession.

[00:41:42] Frederick: Our hiking of tuitions, it feeds that machine. So, We need to be careful. We need to understand what is being said and what is being dangerously conflated and how this yet again, is pitting intellectuals, if you will, people who are, you know, Let’s say spend their time, their professions doing and thinking and creating in these spaces against one another.

[00:42:10] Frederick: And I just think that we need to put the brakes on. This is something that I wrote about, I’ll just pull it up here, way back in, what 2008 people have been writing about this, you know, now for like several decades. What we really need to do is actually put the brakes on. Ask for clarification and then get on the same side of the table, even if we are all humming from different places, because if we don’t, it becomes artillery.

[00:42:42] Frederick: It becomes the kind of the, the, the, the gasoline, if you will, that powers a machine that is going to send us into a kind of oblivious oblivion of totalitarianism.

[00:42:56] Dan: So I’m gonna go to Patrick, but I wanna just to sort of stop for a second cuz that there’s a word you use right at the end there, Frederick’s sort of clarification and you put a lot of emphasis on it.

[00:43:05] Dan: And I feel like that’s, I think I know what you’re talking about, uh, like that we need clarification and, and I wanna kind of push you and Steven and Domino, um, on what, whether they agree with that and what that would look like. But Patrick, you’ve had your hand up for a while. Do you wanna say something or ask a question?

[00:43:20] Dan: Yeah.

[00:43:21] Frederick: Uh, I, I, I have two brief questions for

[00:43:23] Dan: Oh. Introduce yourself and kind of your affiliation.

[00:43:25] Patrick: Sorry. My bad. Uh, I am Patrick. I am a deal master student in English and information. And, uh, my first question is, uh, about social media. Um, so like it or not, right? My generation is more or less hot onto it. And, um, but on the good side, right?

[00:43:42] Patrick: We. Young people who are very attuned to, uh, narratives and narrat authorizing their own lives, right? Somehow we are not harnessing this attunement that is kind of digitized, right? Um, so what do y’all think about, you know, like ways in which we can, you know, Uh, move, uh, in, you know, like, uh, to not fight against the trend, but to see what we can harness from it, right?

[00:44:08] Patrick: Uh, for instance, does that mean a closer collaboration between the criticism side of the department and the creative writing side of the department, which doesn’t exist that much, right? Um, and the second question, uh, has to do with, uh, something, uh, Steven said earlier about, you know, The most valuable thing we’re able to teach, uh, is writing, right?

[00:44:31] Patrick: Writing skills, um, that seems to be like, uh, something that we all kind of believe in to a different extent, right? I was a huge believer of this, um, until I took the research job in science, uh, and uh, then I realized that first of all, the, the problem here is that we’ve been treating writing skills as a monolith, right?

[00:44:50] Patrick: That what we are able to offer and teach will directly transfer over to, let’s say, Like a, like a, like a scientist writing, uh, like a grant, right? Uh, turns out it’s not that way at all. It’s, uh, entirely different skillset, right? Uh, in fact, what I was able to bring into that job, some of it I have to unlearn right to, uh, to be effectively able to operate on it.

[00:45:13] Patrick: And the other thing is, um, scientists, uh, and you know, like, uh, especially scientists, like also business people as well, uh, are a lot less skeptical to what things I chat G B T could do for them. , right? So, um, regardless of what it would actually do or not, right? They, there are a lot, it’s, it’s easier for them to believe that it could replace what V would offer, right?

[00:45:34] Patrick: So in other words, I, I’m suspicious that this wouldn’t be a very sustainable narrative for the future, right? Uh, because at the end, this is kind of like going against the, the tide, right? Uh, like, um, on some level we can try our best to instill a sense of suspicion, right? For our students against, you know, just relying on ai, right?

[00:45:53] Patrick: But. At the same, at the same time, should also try to, you know, like consider ways of how, how do we teach alongside of it, right? Because, uh, uh, otherwise, like this notion that we monopolize, you know, writing pedagogy will do obsolete very soon, uh, with, you know, counseling, evolving technologies that you, you,

[00:46:14] Frederick: thank

[00:46:15] Dan: you, Patrick.

[00:46:15] Dan: And I think that actually does lead in, in a kind of natural way to the question I was gonna ask of the panelists. And I, and I want to go back to, Frederick used that word clarification. And I guess what I heard, and you can, you can correct me if this isn’t what you meant was we, we as a discipline, as kind of humanists, we need to, to get on the same page or have clarity about what we’re doing, kind of why we’re here, what we’re trying to do as teachers, what we’re trying to do as scholars and, and I think, Patrick, what you were saying about kind of, it’s not a sustainable narrative.

[00:46:45] Dan: If I think of this way, if we try to sell ourselves as sort of. Kind of, uh, instructors and skills that are applicable across disciplines or some, you know, if, if that’s not in fact true, but, but I guess the question I’d put to you guys, and, and let me start with you, Frederick, and then, and then Steven and Domino, like, what are we trying to do?

[00:47:03] Dan: Is that an important question to answer or is in fact not an important question to answer or an an impossible one to, to answer because we are not all on the same page and it’s kind of utopian. , um, to imagine that we could be, but, but Frederick, let me, let me start with you cuz you were the one who kind of used the word that, that pointed me in this direction.

[00:47:21] Frederick: Okay. ? Yeah. Thanks. I’ll just be really brief. Uh, yeah, thanks Patrick as well. Um, let me just say really quickly, there is an assumption and there has been an assumption kind of in the water that. The university and then the kind of greater society itself has had that somehow liberal arts education. And there’s reason for this, if we go back to like late 19 teens and the great war and our involvement in Europe and so on, that liberal arts and its function was to create.

[00:47:54] Frederick: Functionaries. Hmm. And that has n some. That has been some. It’s a legacy that has been hard to shake and that continues to be part of the discourse that Patrick is actually replicating or criticizing or being critically replicative. That Steven mentions in the big lectures in the kind of bread and butter, you know, writing courses and so on, and that Patrick, in a very elegant and very gentle way is saying, actually, we need to kind of reconsider that, but.

[00:48:29] Frederick: Even more deeply. Is that all we do? Are we creating, are we con, are we 1917 creating our ob the object of the aim of our kind of western civilization course in 1917 to create mandarins, to create functionaries that will be placed abroad, et cetera, et cetera. We can say the same thing of the kind. Man, rising Mandarin of Latin America during the sixties, et cetera.

[00:49:00] Frederick: Chomsky talks about the war, et cetera. I, no. And so fundamentally, we need to change that narrative.

[00:49:09] Dan: Do we need to let, just let me push you, which is so granting that, do we need, do we, I guess speaking as a kind of collective profession or, or college or, or humanists. So if that’s not the answer, do you feel like we need to come up with an answer and do we need to get on the same

[00:49:25] Frederick: page?

[00:49:27] Frederick: We absolutely do need to come up with an. Um, and we do need to be on the same page. And it’s because precisely if we don’t, it’s gonna continue to be the divide and conquer. And before you know it, we won’t have anything tomorrow. Um, and that, that same message may be that we all bring different things to the table, but we have an end goal in mind in general for the students that come through Cola.

[00:49:54] Frederick: So,

[00:49:56] Dan: Steven, let me, let me put the same question to you. Do you, do we all need to be on the same page and, and, and then sort of take it one step further, kind of what Page does, if the answer is yes, what page does that need to be from your perspective?

[00:50:11] Steven: Daniel Mendelson, the great classicist who really can speak to a public audience, said this about the human.

[00:50:19] Steven: When your father dies, an accounting degree will not help you process that event. What we need to do, it seems to me, is not be a repetition of high school, but to really engage with our students on the issues concern them. For example, students today are really interested in the history of race. That would require, you know, moving from the classical era to the contemporary era, do we offer that?

[00:50:56] Steven: Not really. They’re really interested in issues of equity. How do we address that? They’re really interested in issues of power, not just power that’s exerted economically or militarily or diplomatically. But power that’s exercised through discourse power, that’s exercised through language. I think that the time has come for us to radically rethink the kind of courses that we offer that speak more directly to the concerns of our students in the humanities, and that way we can demonstrate that the humanities have great.

[00:51:39] Steven: Not vocational value, but in being a human being. Gil’s book ends with a plea to bring humanities back to its earlier root, which is the art of living. I say right on. .

[00:51:58] Dan: So Domino, let’s, let’s end with you. And I guess I’ll just ask the question to you, like, do we need to be on the same page? I, if so, is it something like the page that, uh, Steven just articulated and if not, um, why not?

[00:52:18] Domino: I was thinking about what both Fred and Steven said, and I think that on the one hand, I agree with what Fred is saying about, we need to think about what it is that, like, what is our objective? What are we trying to convey? Um, and I think what needs to happen that can be really productive is that departments need to ask the questions that we are asking each other.

[00:52:54] Domino: We need to have these conversations and our students need to be present and, and, and witness those conversations so they can understand, right, what these difficult conversations can look like. The shape that they can take, right? And how they can be generative. In other words, this is a real opportunity to model, like how can we move forward, right?

[00:53:17] Domino: How we, how we can move the discipline forward in terms of, The quote that, that Steven offered about, you know, account an accountant not being able to, an accounting degree, not being able to help someone process grief. I was thinking about how many programs that the university establishes and has for.

[00:53:44] Domino: People who have degrees in, in things other than the humanities, but they can pay to come back and get humanities degrees at the highest level. So they have things to talk about so they can connect with other human beings in the world. Right? And I think that that connection, that connection is so hugely important.

[00:54:04] Domino: Um, and I, I’m, I, I think about, I can’t remember what it is, but there’s the competition that the students had, the students have every year where it’s somebody from, they pick three different disciplines and they have to argue. The professors from each of the disciplines have to argue like there’s been an apocalypse.

[00:54:26] Domino: What do you need to. Rebuild the world. And you know, the engineer will say, well, you need basic tools and you need, and you know, the artist will say something else and then the literature person has said something else. And I think about the fact that somebody from the humanities has actually never won that.

[00:54:45] Domino: Hmm. And it, to me, that says something about the value that people place on it and they don’t see the generative possibilities of, of literature. And I think that looking at those generative possibilities to me, That’s where we need to get on the same page, because it can do what Steven said. It can do exactly what Frederick says.

[00:55:11] Domino: And I just think that we need to model those difficult dialogues for our students, and we need to have them for ourselves or deal with the consequences of not having them at all.

[00:55:22] Dan: Frederick, do you wanna close this out as the, as the host of this, uh, conversation slash podcast.

[00:55:30] Frederick: Just say that this is a model, uh, the precise model that Domino’s talking about.

[00:55:35] Frederick: And you know, it’s good to have tough conversations. It’s even good for us to get a little bit, kind of have our feathers ruffled. Um, but in the end I think it’s, it’s really, really, if we do not do this as Domino had just said, tomorrow we will not have the space to do this. We will not. The kind of sanctity of learning spaces that you know we have today.

[00:56:03] Frederick: And, you know, fundamentally we will suffer, um, and society and civilization will, will, will, um, suffer the consequences. So, and by the way, I will say this. It’s not just what we do in the classroom, it’s also what we do out in the classroom of the classroom. And it does require us boots on the street stomping and standing in solidarity with all of those who are fighting to protect the freedom of learning, of intellectual exchange and of knowledge generation.

[00:56:42] Frederick: And if we don’t do that, then we will be in a sore place. Thank you. And,

[00:56:49] Dan: and, and thank you for sort of ending on a note of urgency, which I think is, is kind of the reason why you and I thought it was worth it to do this in a sort of do this at all, but do it in a collaborative sort of discussion sense.

[00:57:01] Dan: So thank you, Frederick. Thank you Domino. Thank you Stephen. Thank you to all of you who participated. Uh, we’ll take this, we’ll edit it in, we’ll, we’ll disseminate it as a podcast and hopefully we’ll do more of these in the.

[00:57:16] Frederick: Into the Colli verse is produced by the University of Texas at Austin’s College of Liberal Arts Sound Engineering by the Liberal Arts Instructional Technology Services. You can find into the Colli Verse Podcasts on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher. Thanks for listening and see you next time.