Open letter about the future direction of the program – Josh Wilner
Mario has asked members of the Executive Committee to make a particular effort to contribute to the discussion, so I’m doing so.
First, I have felt for a long time, and feel even more strongly today, that we should have a very strong offering in Rhetoric and Composition and be working to attract strong candidates in this area. CUNY is an unparalleled laboratory for the work that needs to be done. Not just for reasons of “profile,” but as a matter of addressing our mission and potential as a doctoral program, this should be four-square and center for us.
Once I get past that affirmation – which, were I do take the time I could find plenty of ways to complicate/elaborate – I find myself encountering very quickly fundamental questions about our raison d’être as a program, questions which are not so much specific to us as reflective of the state of the “discipline,” if it can even be called that any more, and the job market. All of the terms that defined the study of English Literature as a field are today deeply, and rightly, contested. The relationship of “literature” to textuality more broadly conceived is an open question in ways it was not even in the relatively recent past, though the pendulum continues to swing. As for what “literary history” is, or should be – specifically the extent to which it ought to be thought in some degree of distinction to e.g. social or political history – forget it. As for “English,” a) English departments tend to act as though all of literature is their domain and b) the global spread of “World Englishes” increasingly disarticulates the alignment of linguistic and geographical boundaries. There was a time – in the by no means distant past – when the study of English Literature took as its object literature written in England – not Scotland, not America, variably Ireland, maybe Wales. Even more fundamentally, the geographic and demographic spread of literature written in English since, let us say, World War II, makes the older history of literature written in English an increasingly narrow corpus, looked at merely in quantitative terms.
As for the job market, I will only cite City College’s experience at the moment, when we are searching for one Global Modernist and two specialists in Rhetoric and Composition. In the former case there are an enormous number of highly qualified candidates competing for very few positions nationally. In the latter cases there are, by comparison, a large number of positions in search of a comparatively small pool of highly qualified candidates; my impression is that most, perhaps all, of the people we’ve targeted in the Rhet/Comp search are actually or potentially looking at multiple offers.
I say none of the above in a spirit of complaint, but simply to register my sense that we find ourselves in the midst of a transition that is both prolonged and wrenching; bound whither is anybody’s guess. Justifications in terms of our particular area of expertise, i.e. the particular role we occupy within the academic division of labor, to me feel academic indeed in such a context.
Having said that, I would nonetheless insist that concern with the problem of language should be central to our efforts at self-definition. This may sound anodyne, but as a matter of scholarly and pedagogic practice, what I am somewhat evasively calling “the problem of language” is regular subordinated to various kinds of thematic concerns, be they political, cultural, historical, psychological what have you. I am hardly advocating an “apolitical,” “ahistorical” orientation in favor of a more abstractly theoretical or technical one. On the contrary I believe, and I’m sure many would in principle agree with me, that the political and the historical and psychological manifest themselves most deeply and acutely and dialectically – as shaping and shaped – in language – not in language alone, to be sure, but nor is this one area of human being-in-the world among other. To find one’s way to the places where all the pressure and complexities of those interactions can be felt to be occurring is not easy – which is one reason why we sometimes retreat to the security of more stable thematic orientations.
Little of the above points to positive recommendations about the “future of the program,” but I thought it might be useful for me to share some of my thoughts about all of the “disciplinary” assumptions which I find myself unable to take for granted as I seek to address that question.
