xkcd on literary criticism

So, here’s Friday’s xkcd, called “Impostor”:



The basic joke is that lit crit and sociology aren’t hard sciences, and the farther any field is from the hard sciences, the easier it is for any idiot to pretend to be an expert in said field. In addition to this explicit content, the subtext for the joke is that even the “experts” in these fields aren’t experts in the way that an engineer is an expert.

Now, I don’t think that literary criticism is a hard science. However, I think the joke becomes a bit of a cheap shot when this subtext is investigated. The joke is about knowledge communities in that the protagonist is seeing how long it takes for each group to realize that he doesn’t share the knowledge of their subfield.

While we can all debate the merits of literary criticism,—I myself have some doubts about its usefulness—what xkcd’s author Randall Munroe is charging here is that the knowledge community created by literary criticism has no boundaries, but is rather merely a set of cleverly-arranged buzzwords like “deconstruction” which are used to dazzle and distract instead of increasing knowledge. At this level, the joke also seems to be a sly reference to the hoax Alan Sokal perpetrated on Social Text, the cultural studies journal where he managed to get a “phony” article published.

The reason I think this joke gets its laughs cheap is that it is targeted at grad students. Of course English grad students can be easily bamboozled—they are also new initiates to the lit crit knowledge community, and like the protagonist of this strip they are unable to tell what fits into the field and what doesn’t. It would be slightly more difficult for him to pull this stunt with an English professor. This perspective flips the joke somewhat in that if Engineering grad students can be completely initiated into their knowledge community so quickly, it must not be as complex as the knowledge community of literary criticism.

Humanities: In the future!

Here’s a pretty slick presentation by Richard E. Miller, the head of the English Department at Rutgers, on the future of the humanities.

I like what he has to say about new media and the humanities (I want a colaboratory), but he somewhat distressingly seems to ignore the role of rhetoric, writing studies, and technical writing in the same. The only scholars mentioned in the presentation are literature scholars, and the type of writing which Miller spotlights is creative writing. According to Miller, what the university has to offer the Wikipedia generation is

sustained study and deep understanding. when you add that to the picture you get human creativity put at the center of the humanities[. . . . The] real function of the humanities is to engage in the act of creativity moment by moment to improve the quality of the world we live in.

The talk sort of reminded me of the ridiculous hand-wringing over the death of reading, where “reading” means “reading literature,” whatever that might be—no one ever seems to get worked up over the death of email at hands of text-messaging or the sad demise of the online message board. Definitions are similarly limited in the presentation, where it appears that the goal of the English Department is to study “literature,” whatever that might be, and the only type of writing worth mentioning is creative writing.