The Use and Abuse of Literature - Marjorie Garber [32]
Specialists and Generalists
One of the recurrent flashpoints in the public discussion of the humanities is whether specialization is ruining literary studies, replacing generalists who know and love the canon and the great (and small) works across periods and genres with specialists, intensely localized and professionalized, who know every inch of a particular piece of literary terrain (the American nineteenth-century novel, or seventeenth-century religious poetry, or medieval drama, or Dickens) but who no longer command—or, it is implied, much care about—the larger picture.
Not long ago, that larger picture would have included the classics of ancient Greece and Rome (preferably read and studied in the original languages), Dante and Petrarch, French literature from (at least) Corneille and Racine through the nineteenth-century novel and the twentieth century, and many other works from what came to be known, too broadly, as the Western tradition. Time moves on, and—happily—writers keep writing, and so we now have not only a more global sense of world literature but also a constant consciousness of new work, poems and plays and novels and essays, that is published, reviewed, and read every day. No one can read all of this; no one can command it. And certainly no scholar can read the preponderance of scholarly work being produced today. A century ago the world of literary scholarship was smaller, more intimate, clubbier—riven by factions and sometimes astonishingly personal and intemperate in its expression, but at the same time rather self-protective, insulated as well as isolated.
We can’t go back to that time, nor—in the main—should we want to do so. The world of literary studies has become, to a great extent (though not completely), democratized and pluralized, with beneficial effects for scholarship and teaching. But the question remains about that elusive, and to some extent delusory, “larger picture.” The old divisions and categories—period, genre, author, nation—have all been questioned, their borderlines exposed as permeable (when does medieval begin or end? Do terms like epic and pastoral have modern and postmodern equivalents? How do we assess collaborative or collective authorship? Does it matter whether Beckett is an Irish author or a French author?). After decades in which master narratives were set aside in favor of the local, the particular, the outsider, and the idea of bricolage, there is an understandable longing on the part of students, and of some teachers and scholars, for a broader arc, a story if not a picture.
The language of specialist and generalist is sometimes deployed as a kind of code, implying that members of the former are technocrats (or even bureaucrats) and careerists, while the latter are genuinely committed to literary study and, as a strong and insistent subtext, to teaching, by which is meant the teaching of undergraduates (and non-majors) rather than graduate students. This divide, too, I think is false, and not only inaccurate but meretricious. It sets up the terms of apparent difference in a way that fails to understand or to value the continuum between teaching and scholarship, intellectual excitement and painstaking research, pleasure and profit, learnedness and learning.
My own education was as a generalist, and I am to a certain extent a generalist still, “dabbling,” as the dismissive term has it, in periods and others not “my own.” From time to time I have taught courses on Jane Austen as well as Shakespeare and Renaissance drama, on modern and postmodern drama as well as sixteenth- and seventeenth-century poetry, on detective fiction (from Oedipus to Agatha Christie to Crick and Watson’s double helix), on literary and cultural theory, and on ghosts in literature, as well