Nonsense Drives Them Away

[Valin]

First Things:

Edward T. Oakes, S.J.
6/11/10)

Gary Saul Morson, a professor of Slavic languages and literature at Northwestern University, teaches a popular course on the Russian novel at this renowned school in Evanston, Illinois. As such, he might be expected to welcome a defense of the humanities from any quarter. But in his review of Martha Nussbaum’s latest book, Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities, he shows how some self-styled friends of the humanities are to a great extent the cause of the doldrums into which they have fallen.
The standard diagnosis now being invoked for explaining declining enrollment in college-level humanities courses is economic. Whereas in the sixties the lament placed the blame on the philistinism of American culture, now market forces are made the scapegoat.

As David Brooks deftly puts it in a recent column: “When the going gets tough, the tough take accounting. When the job market worsens, many students figure they can’t indulge in an English or a history major. They have to study something that will lead directly to a job.” Adding to the chorus of lament, Harvard’s president Drew Faust worries that “the market model [has] become the fundamental and defining identity of higher education.”
Morson isn’t buying. Since he teaches the most popular humanities course at Northwestern, he has ample opportunity to ask his students why they avoid taking more such classes. “Not materialism but a nose for nonsense drives them away,” he finds. That nonsense takes three forms: condescension, literature taught as a crossword puzzle, and historicism.

Morson isn’t buying. Since he teaches the most popular humanities course at Northwestern, he has ample opportunity to ask his students why they avoid taking more such classes. “Not materialism but a nose for nonsense drives them away,” he finds. That nonsense takes three forms: condescension, literature taught as a crossword puzzle, and historicism.
By condescension Morson means the tired trope of measuring Shakespeare, Milton, or Tolstoy against “our” values, which of course would be the norms of the academic left. Should the author in question not have denounced heterosexism or colonialism, he is denounced as “reactionary.” In other words, read in this way, “literature can teach us nothing because it presumes that the truth is already given.”.
He even more deftly describes the crossword-puzzle approach, a paragraph so droll it must be quoted in full:
"Even more often, interest in literature suffers because it is taught as a sort of crossword puzzle. The idea is that, for some reason, authors do not express anything directly, but instead devise a complex code of images, alliterations, obscure references, biblical allusions, interlingual puns, concealed quotations and—above all—symbols. Students rapidly learn how easy it is to find symbols. As a last resort, there is always water, because no matter what the story, somebody sooner or later is bound to wash and drink. And off the student goes, discovering allusions to baptism, the flood, or amniotic fluid. He earns his A and never again picks up a work of fiction.".......(Snip)

[pollyannaish]

Excellent and the comments are good too. Makes me want to go pick up the book which will go in the stack of things I intend to read. Perhaps I should pick up The Intellectual Life first.