English professor Michael Clune (Case Western) comments at length (in an article behind the CHE paywall, alas [UPDATE: a CHE editor kindly sent along a non-paywalled link, which will be good for a week]); an excerpt:
The literature program — especially at the most prestigious universities — became a kind of twilight zone. No longer a discipline, it was an entire bizarro world, in which every aspect of human culture and thought could be confidently explained with the theoretical tools wielded by star professors. But when the students left the seminar room, the faculty office, the literary journal, that world ended, those stars winked out.
I vividly remember my own rude awakening. Each year Johns Hopkins held a competition in which graduate students would submit ideas for a course. The courses would be evaluated by a board of professors from different fields, and the winner would get to teach it. I walked into the interview with my syllabus for a course that purported to explain urban decay, novels, the nature of free-market economics, and the political history of the 1970s in one brilliant synthesis. My interviewers — professors in political science and history — greeted my ideas with withering skepticism. I cited illustrious figures in my field. To my horror, my interlocutors were unimpressed. They actually asked difficult questions about the reasoning behind the stars’ dicta. All I could do was repeat the hallowed formulas about representation and language with decreasing confidence as I realized the heroes of literature-department economic, political, and historical thought had no currency here. Later one of my English professors advised me to forget the incident. "They don’t understand our discipline," he said.
The vampiric Avital Ronell flourished in this disciplinary twilight zone....Books like her own Crack Wars (University of Nebraska Press, 1992) — in which the obscurity of the prose occasionally parts to reveal an astonishing ignorance of the most basic facts about addiction — were presented as the new models. The eradication of disciplinary limits opened the way to unlimited tyranny. [Jonathan] Kramnick defines a discipline as "a body of skills, methods, and norms able to sustain internal discussions and do explanatory work." But in Ronell’s department, the star theorist’s words became the sole standard. Students were expected to cite Ronell or her master Derrida in every essay. And as the famous emails starkly reveal, the boundary separating the life of the student from the total domination of the totally liberated professor dissolved....
Disciplinary norms, skills, and objects represent for many humanists trained in this era the face of the oppressor. The influence of Foucault — whose most famous book conjoins the words "discipline" and "punish" — shaped an emphasis on systems of oppression, on how power weaves its way into disciplinary structures. Figures like Ronell serve as avatars of anti-disciplinary energies. While few of the signatories of Butler’s letter have written a book as extreme as Crack Wars, their reflexive identification with Ronell as a laudable source of resistance to power adheres to a broader, anti-disciplinary logic. Everything she represents — from her expertise-ignoring books to her administrative disregard of rules and boundaries — is an assault on the very idea of a discipline....
Literary studies’ anti-disciplinary thought led to an empty, despised professional discourse while covering an entirely unprofessional intellectual and personal tyranny over a dwindling body of students....
The influence of such faux-interdisciplinary "stars" on the wider intellectual culture of the university largely evaporated in the wake of the Sokal affair. Yet because the anti-disciplinary revolutionaries were careful to leave tenure and the traditional circuits of academic cronyism untouched, they continue to wield power and influence within the field. Because of this, literary studies has yet to truly confront the practices exposed by Sokal. Senior figures in the field routinely respond with denial or defensiveness when the topic is raised....
When pressed, the luminaries of the Sokal/Ronell era go to a political defense. We serve the cause of feminism and anti-racism! Any attack on our practices is an attack on our political ideals! Ronell’s defenders, for example, were quick to point to her status as a "feminist" scholar — though her colleagues described the absence of anything resembling feminist commitments in her publications. Similarly, the "grievance studies" hoaxes confusingly equate strong politics and weak interdisciplinary work. The hoaxers are chasing a phantom, and in the process reinforcing a malign and false equation between commitment to disciplines and hostility to justice. The implication many take from the "grievance" hoax is that our politics have led us away from scholarly neutrality, and we need to discipline our ideals. But the Sokal affair should teach us the opposite lesson: The viability of scholars’ ideals depends on the intellectual integrity of our work.
To turn the page on the era of Sokal and Ronell, we need to return to basics. Literary studies should be a discipline, not a bizarro world of universal knowledge. Our object of study is literature; our method is close reading. Responsible interdisciplinary work doesn’t begin by ignoring disciplinary boundaries, but by respecting them. As scholars like Frances Ferguson have argued, close reading is distinguished by a peculiar fusion of explanation and aesthetic judgment that sets us apart from the knowledge production of other fields. But the careful excavation of the complex formal objects that compose our material yields insights, the special quality of which can be ascertained by comparing them with the findings of other fields on shared topics. By making the case for the integrity of disciplinary boundaries, a new generation of scholars is doing the ethical and political work of bringing literary studies out of the twilight zone.
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