A while back I attended a conference at the university on the subject of censorship. The plenary speaker began her paper by reading a particularly explicit passage, one that had evidently irked censors past. It was truly salacious, and I certainly won’t reproduce it here. But before the speaker identified the passage she asked if anyone recognized it.

Only one person did (and it wasn’t me).

Now, James Joyce’s Ulysses is routinely listed near the top end of those “best books ever written” lists, and yet here, in a room full of graduate students who all study English literature, it only received the faintest gleam of recognition. You can draw your own conclusions from that, I suppose.

But back to the quotation for a second: this tactic of arresting audience attention by using a brazen and cheeky passage right off the top seems a little off-putting to me; isn’t it the literary equivalent of advertisements that rely on pictures of scantily clad women to sell unrelated products?

~

On a side note, there’s a recent and good article in the Boston Globe by Anthony Kronman that addresses the subject of “directionlessness” in the humanities. And I quote:

Conservatives who bemoan our schools’ disengagement from spiritual questions often point a finger at political correctness, a stifling culture of moral and political uniformity based on progressive ideals. But to blame political correctness reverses the order of causation. The culture of political correctness is only a symptom, a discouraging response to a larger sense of directionlessness in the humanities.

…and again:

An important goal in humanities departments everywhere is not only research, but instruction, teaching, encouraging students to become comfortable talking and thinking about the Big Questions.

It seems to me that a significant problem with focusing on research and abandoning the Big Questions is not only that it gives pedagogy a short shrift, but it also makes for research that is dead boring!