خاستگاه مطالعات ادبیات آمریکا: تاریخ نهادی

Renker gives an account of the rise and fall of American Literary Studies (she dates their uncertain rise between the years 1880-1930, and then a period of relative stability between the years 1930-1980) but more interesting to this reader is her account of the rise and fall of university culture itself from the era of the professor and the classic curriculum to the current era of “disciplinary fragmentation” which she sees as marking the beginning of the end not just of American Studies but the end of the era where there can be any identifiable, fixed or flexible, curricula at all.

I am particularly intrigued by Renker’s focus in the last chapter of her book on what she calls “the Millenials” (those students born between 1980-2000 aka “screenagers” and “Net Generation” ). In the last twenty pages or so of her conclusion Renker disusses a reversal now or about to occur in the institutes of higher learning as a result of the influx of these new participants in educational life. She suggests that this new generation of participants, affiliated as they are with technology (their participatory prowess evidenced by knowledge collectives or wikis), no longer view themselves as passive consumers of knowledge but as creators (or co-creators) of content. And that the very notion of authorship/authority (what counts as knowledge, who creates it, who is entitled to create it; who controls and distributes information) has largely been undone by new practices. As a result, an old version of literacy is being replaced by a new version of literacy. Perhaps most interesting of all is Renker’s suggestion that we are living at the tail end of the age of the canonical text and the blockbuster film as well as the end of the age of the professional knowledge producer and tastemaker; and at the beginning of an age where abundance and amateurism are the rule and where niche writers, artists, and tastemakers cater to “niche markets”. In sum, Renker is suggesting that the time of top-down culture is past, and that we now live in a time when culture is created from the bottom up and production and consumption are no longer mutually exclusive terms.

Editorial:

Many of these predicted transformations of the academic sphere are changes that academics themselves (particularly new left academics in fields like cultural studies) will welcome because they are changes that their own work has helped to bring about.

I doubt that the university as we know it — that is as an institution that has the power to accredit scholars & legitimize scholarship — will altogether vanish; however, as the status of alternative knowledge communities and cultures rise it seems inevitable that the status of institutionally sanctioned knowledge communities and cultures will decline. There will always be traditionalists who want a university education and degree and so, although diminished, the institution will persist, but it will be just one personal and professional development option among many. I think there are plenty of thoughtful individuals who do original work precisely because they are not affiliated with any institution. And really, as Renker’s book reminds us, the idea of institutionalized knowledge and knowledge practices is relatively young (for some disciplines quite young). For the majority of human history the work of culture has been done by amateurs. I suspect that there will always be those who prefer the relative safety and security of institutional living and learning to the alternative. And I suspect that (some of) these institutional types like the institution because it allows them to think of themselves as a cultured elite and knowledge and culture as something that belongs to them and their hallowed fellows. But knowledge and culture and humans are most vital when they are not contained within or contaminated by the stink of the institution. Renker is also very good at reminding us how compromised institutions really are by their affiliation with and reliance upon the corporate culture that they purport to critique but that they, in actuality, mimic (and rely upon for funding). The past and the future belong to the new breed, the unaffiliated individuals (who are more in touch with global realities and practices and other humans than professional academes will ever be) who follow their own ethic and are distrustful of institutional professionals (in news media, in film, in publishing, in education, in politics…) whose sole objective seems to be to maintain the status quo of their institutions and continue to confer status upon one another. Here here to the rise (again) of the writerly and scholarly amatore!

The profession-oriented experts, the insulated institutional humanists, situated as they are at research universities with loads of funding live at a safe remove from humanity. They live in privileged status societies of their own making, and though they are free to be as liberal as they want to be (marxist if they like), they are also curiously ineffective when it comes to real politics because they only impact those that occupy the same privileged social station that they do. The return of the amatore would (ideally) signal a deliverance of the humanities from these “experts” and return them to real humans interested not in building and managing status communities but in building and managing communities based on common concerns and common political objectives.