In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Transgression and Irrelevance:A Reply to Geoffrey Galt Harpham
  • Robert Markley (bio)

In his article, Geoffrey Galt Harpham suggests persuasively that the idea of crisis in the humanities has a long and significant history, both in understanding the institutionalization of humanistic inquiry and in recognizing its constitutive force in our collective identity as scholars. The more we contemplate this history, the more obvious it seems that there has never been a time when writers, artists, and scholars have not bemoaned the fragmenting of a supposedly common cultural heritage. One of the advantages of thinking about the humanities before their current incarnations in departments of literature, history, and philosophy is that even a cursory glance at the fulsome dedications that writers had to pen in the precopyright era leaves the impression that things could be, and have been, much worse for those of us who get paid to teach, write, and hand-wring about the liberal arts. In an important sense, the history of the humanities that Harpham describes is a long, contentious process of accommodation.

In 1700, William Congreve dedicated his last play to the fatuous Earl of Montagu and declared that "Poetry, in its Nature, is sacred to the Good and the Great; the relation between them is reciprocal, and they are ever propitious to it. It is the Privilege of Poetry to address them, and it is their Prerogative alone to give it Protection" (392). By "good" the Whig functionary Congreve means those who supported England's bloody and expensive wars against Louis XIV, and by "great" he and his contemporaries understood the rigid, if complex, structures of socioeconomic privilege, property ownership, and war profiteering that dominated early eighteenth-century politics. Admittedly, the genre of dedications lends itself to what Samuel Johnson, in his biography of John Dryden, castigates as "meanness and servility in hyperbolical adulation;" yet those of us who have received fellowships, grants, sabbaticals, and release time from our home institutions, private foundations, and national agencies [End Page 262] know all too well the complexities of mixing "politicks with poetry" (Johnson 404). Congreve was and is right. Poetry or what we now call the humanities can never escape the pressures to be "reciprocal," to succumb to "meanness and servility" in flattering privilege in a multitude of forms. In this respect, the humanities are always in crisis, always in danger of paralysis or fragmentation, because the moral stances of its practitioners exist in complex dialogical relationships with their (and their employers') sociopolitical and economic commitments to the "great." The great in 2005 may be no less fatuous than they were in 1700, but they still demand the ritual sacrifices that Congreve seems to have had in mind when he termed poetry "sacred." Were I a cynic, I would be tempted to say that Cole's call for today's humanists to embody the Enlightenment ideals supposedly held by the founding fathers stems from a willful misreading of eighteenth-century "values" and thus reinforces the dialectic that led Congreve and Dryden to celebrate the good while flattering the great. Because the humanities can neither escape nor transcend these often jarring commitments to morality and privilege, the problems confronting critics and scholars is how to negotiate a political landscape in which they are denounced as dangerous extremists or ridiculed for being irrelevant, or, if they are lucky, both.

In popular culture, the humanist almost invariably embodies this paradox of transgression and irrelevance. Take, for example, Donald Sutherland's character Professor Dave Jennings in that thoughtful examination of humanistic learning Animal House (1978). Although he is wearing one of the best brown, three-piece corduroy suits in film history, the professor has no luck in generating any response from a class of bored undergraduates to his questions about John Milton's Paradise Lost. What turns into a monologue of questions and clichés hinges on the ironies of Jennings's treatment of the canon. Paradise Lost, he acknowledges to his students, is "a very long poem, written a long time ago, and I'm sure a lot of you have difficulty understanding exactly what Milton was trying to say. Certainly we know he was trying to describe the struggle between...

pdf

Share