A week ago, the research group I currently belong to, Beyond Postmemory, held the seminar “Nature Remembers: War, Trauma and Environmental Postmemory,” in which we discussed how not only human beings but also nature can suffer, so to speak, from PTSD and show signs of trauma long after a conflict. Postmemory, a concept coined by Marianne Hirsch, refers to how subsequent generations inherit the trauma associated to conflicts they may never have lived. An example would be the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), a conflict that is still leaving a significant trail in current Spanish society, politics, and culture, even though fewer and fewer persons directly involved survive today.
What caught my attention is that out of eight presentations, four followed what might be called an unconventional format. Emeritus professor Andrew Monnickendam used his own holiday snapshots of Vietnam not just to illustrate his talk but to base it on them (he discussed monuments as traces of postmemory). I used artistic photos by professionals to create what I called ‘a sensorial experience’ of the novel by Cormac McCarthy The Road, in an attempt to a) foreground what the text does say about traumatized nature, which is plenty, b) complement McCarthy’s stark descriptions with a different artistic manifestation. That was also the method chosen by my colleague Nick Spengler, who read Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous juxtaposing it to an artistic video about the sea that, he felt, went well with this novel, although in fact it had nothing to do with it directly (great idea!). Our colleague David Owen decided to sing to us, very beautifully, an 18th century Scottish ballad that was later adapted to fit the circumstances of the Spanish Civil War, celebrating in both cases the demise of a courageous young, working-class soldier from Glasgow. The other four papers offered, as it is habitual, argumentation about a specific text in the context of a dense theoretical framework. The seminar was supposed to gauge our commitment to submitting a chapter proposal for a joint book that Nick Spengler will edit. However, I opened up a debate about whether the four less conventional presentations could be transformed into conventional academic essays, and why we had chosen to present something alternative.
At one point, already quite a few decades ago, there was much talk of hypertexts, supposed to be digital text files opening up onto other types of files, such as images, sounds, audiovisual narrative and so on. Quite optimistically, a number of scholars and artists started generating hypertexts, but they failed to take into account that the technology employed became quickly obsolete. We went, then, back to basics, using print with the occasional black and white photo, which often looks so poorly it might seem better to discard it altogether. Apart from the expense of printing illustrated academic books, the matter of copyright needs to be considered. Nobody will bat an eye if a copyrighted photo is used piratically in a seminar before a handful of colleagues, specially as we’re not making money from the event. But the expense of using just one or two full colour photos in a literature essay is just too much. Other files, such as sound or audiovisual productions would have to be linked externally, which requires maintenance of the corresponding digital archives.
You might think that just four scholars are not representative of any trend, but I’ve come across posts in @BlueSky challenging the idea that scholarly production should only be judged on the basis of standard printed academic publication. A computer engineer wrote that she would like to be judged on the basis of the code and the programmes she writes. And I’ve read posts by a researcher of autism who has generated choreographies based on the gestures produced by autistic persons. These two examples refer to scientific research, but the craving for creativity and the demand for a different type of evidence to judge our research leads to very many new possibilities. We, teachers of Literature, should be able to submit for assessment published fiction, poetry, drama, etc together with academic publications. The same applies to translations, adaptations of literary works into different artistic media, and other types of textual production, in the wide sense of the word, that I can’t even begin to imagine now.
There is also a growing tiredness with the current system of academic publication, a system which, many claim, is already broken. We are supposed to be constantly publishing (articles in particular), which has led to a brutal stream of publications nobody can follow track of anymore. Journals used to be based on the idea that you would subscribe and read them regularly to keep up to date in your field, but there are so many journals and so many articles that it’s impossible to keep up. In the end, we read whatever we might need to support the claims we make in our own articles, cheekily mining other scholars’ texts for suitable quotations.
We only read in more depth the key works that constitute our theoretical framework. Since, however, a solid theoretical framework can be constituted by any number of authors up to twelve or more, we are left with very little actual room for our ideas and hardly any at all for the literary text we’re supposed to analyze. Journal editors complain that they cannot find peer reviewers and, frankly, I’m not surprised. The texts we produce today are unexciting, and mostly second-hand in their ideas. So, for no payment and no merit to add to our CVs, who wants to employ their time perpetuating this appalling lack of real dialogue and the waste of academic energy?
Live presentation by researchers in seminars and conferences might be, or so it seems to me, the way to start deconstructing and altering for good how we communicate our findings about literature, yet we’re still stuck in the same routine: the twenty minute paper, often read in a monotonous tone that puts stones to sleep, followed by one or two questions, but very little real feedback (unless the coffee breaks are used wisely).
In the conversation that followed the presentations in the seminar, we agreed that a serious problem is how young scholars are being forced to accept static conventions by a gatekeeping system that is absolutely inflexible. If you want to get an accreditation, a grant, or a job, you must show specific credentials, and these exclude any minimally creative or slightly unconventional contribution. These means that tenured professors who have stopped caring about the rules, either because they are retired or because, like myself, do not care at all for promotion, are the ones free enough to alter said rules. At the same time, they are the ones setting them (at least the group in charge of the assessment agencies), so here we are. Well stuck.
In two weeks I’ll be attending a conference in person after six years without doing so, except online. I have nothing against conferences per se, except that highly polluting academic tourism is a main by-product, but I just can’t put myself anymore through the excruciating routine of listening to twenty-minute papers from 8:30 to 18:00 (Spanish conferences have long days!). I wish we had no presentations at all, or only creative ones, and that our time was employed in actually talking to each other. I’m now a senior academic, and chances are I will meet no one new, though I do look forward to meeting friends I have not seen in a while. In a more relaxed atmosphere, with more long breaks, there might be time to break the ice and meet younger scholars, perhaps do some mentoring (or learn from them). One thing I can tell for sure is that I will not see any young scholar dancing to their papers, basing them on holiday snapshots, or singing songs. That would be nice, though.
Inertia is the main enemy of scholarship. In Literary Studies we switched in the 1980s (or so) to the current theory-based model, and we’ve been practising it with no reflection about why we do what we do for 50 years, if not more. We have accepted rules which are alien to the Humanities, because we were told that we didn’t sound scientific or intellectual enough, even though that’s the whole point. I’m not a scientist, though I very much respect scientists. I’m an arts critic, specializing in literature and, secondarily, film and TV. I’m interested in what artists who write do, and I express myself also in writing. As a literature researcher, I follow the writers striving to do something new and interesting in their fields. Yet, I’m not allowed to alter the rules of my own writing and, in general, scholarship.
There was a belief that literary scholarship had been shaken out of its foundations in classic Humanist practice by the introduction of theory, and of the many political currents brought on by Cultural Studies, but the fundamental rhetoric has not been altered. As I have noted here again and again, we use now much more bibliography than, say, in the 1960s, and our essays tend to be more abstract, with far less textual analysis. But they are still stuck in the same model, with no chance of showing a personal voice, whether in anger or in a satirical vein. The authors hardly exist for us, their voices drowned by our darn theoretical frameworks, and we hardly exist, our voices lost in the noise all the scholars outside Literary Studies have brought to our field.
When one complains, one must act. So, perhaps I should organize a (meta)conference in which participants are forbidden to present papers and instead they should dance, sing, perform playlets, recite poetry, do stand-up comedy, or simply talk to the audience over coffee. The problem is that I can’t be bothered to organize a conference. The last time I did, back in 2011, the whole thing was quite a nightmare (courtesy of a students’ strike). I will insist, though, that if we begin by breaking the rules of conferences and seminars, we might break the rules of publication.
Yet, cowardly me, I’m ending here this post to go back to the book I’m writing, in which I’m breaking no rules for, guess what?, it has to pass peer reviewing and all the usual gatekeeping.
Be subversive, try please…