Confess

Literary Sins:

I think my favorite of these confessions is the professor who got top marks for his paper on Wuthering Heights. (H/t Arts & Letters Daily.)

This points to a serious problem with far more than literature theory, though: the academic world has become extremely derivative. Nothing will produce greater disdain than writing a paper on a work of literature or history, or a scientific topic, which does not show that you have read the important secondary works on the subject. In a way, this makes sense: if you aren't aware of the important work already done on a topic, how do you intend to build on what we already know?

Yet it quickly becomes the case that there is so much secondary literature to read that there isn't really time to read the primary sources. Instead, you become a specialist on a small handful of topics -- or less, even -- mastering all the secondary literature on that little demense. In doing that, though, your own mind is quite limited in its capacity to investigate the original work. How will you tell me about Bronte if you haven't read her contemporaries? You may know everything about her, but if you didn't read the works that influenced her... or know about the politics troubling her lifespan...

We are pushing against the limits of human capacity. There is a short span in which a man lives, learns, writes, and dies. The need to build on what has come before us must, of necessity, cut into our capacity to see the original picture. As we were discussing Sidney Lanier, look again at his capacities: Middle English and French, Welsh, Anglo-Saxon. A man who today wished to be an expert in Anglo-Saxon poetics, as he was, would scarcely have time for any of the others. He would be swamped in secondary sources.

What is the answer? A second ring of generalists of the old sort, to check the specialists against the bigger picture?