Myths of the Prefix

In 2011, the Modern Language Association created an Office of Scholarly Communications, in order to respond to fundamental changes in academic research and exchange during the past decade. Its point was to move our attention away from the traditional product of scholarly activity—the monograph, the peer-reviewed essay, the self-contained thesis—to the process of gathering, producing, and sharing knowledge in an increasingly networked and digital world. Tenure and promotion committees will surely be as slow to catch up with the full impact of these changes as dissertation advisers or editorial boards of university presses. But to stress the act of communication over that of publication as the principal task of scholarly activity is to deemphasize the historical centrality of the single academic author, and instead to redefine him or her as a switchboard of open-ended conversations, arguments, and interpretations. It is to explore the productivity and immediacy of blogs, tweets, and crowd reviews; to endorse the ease of disseminating thought electronically and of inviting others to enrich and reshape it; to favor sharing over accumulating, a spirit of collaboration over the aura of originality, generosity over competitiveness; and in doing so, to radically question customary notions of academic work, relevance, progress, and prestige.

Though certainly idealistic in nature, the MLA’s accent on scholarly communications is promising and important. It asks scholarly communities, including that of German Studies, to rethink how we do and share our research, and how we build our curricula and careers around our scholarly exchanges. For decades scholars have been eager to debunk the concept of the literary author, the self-contained text, and the unity of aesthetic expressions. They have been far less willing, however, to apply such critical perspectives to their own academic practice, rightly fearful that more collaborative and fluid models of scholarly work might cost us institutional approval and support. The MLA’s move toward scholarly communications signals an important step toward generating conditions under which we can truly relax the concept of the sovereign academic author and explore the full spectrum of collaborative tools available today and in the future. Needless to say, it will require the concerted effort of university administrators and scholars of all ranks to attune academic research to the true potential of our digital universe and to produce the kind of pressure necessary to change current paradigms of evaluation and progress.

The development of German Studies in the United States since the 1970s situates us well to participate, and in fact take a lead role, in these transformations. German Studies, as we know it and as it shows itself at work in the annual convention of the GSA, can be described neither as a unified field of study nor as a homogeneous academic discipline. The concept of the network, with all its implications regarding fluidity of exchange, nodal connectivity, and malleable structure, is much more appropriate to describe the interactions of literary scholars, historians, art historians, musicologists, political scientists, film and media experts, and language pedagogues when discussing the dynamics of German-speaking cultures and sharing various perspectives on their research. And yet, German Studies should develop greater caution with regard to what I consider the recent adoration of inter-, trans-, or cross-disciplinary work as the sole good object of academic practice. While viable academic work today cannot ignore how digital culture fosters collaborative practice across different areas of specialization, there is no reason to believe that all future work will need to carry some kind of prefix in order to be of quality and make a difference. Let me make this case in some more detail.

Ours is a time of the in-between, of at once denying and fearing what may come in the singular, that which wants to stick to its limits and boundaries or does not question the very grounds of its identity. There are many good reasons for this, both historical and intellectual, yet it has led to academic conditions that often showcase its prefixes more proudly and energetically than what these prefixes are meant to qualify. Whether we profess to look at things from a transnational perspective...