Title: Disciplinary Panic: A Response to Ed White and Michael Drexler
Abstract: Many of us have been melancholy for a long time without understanding exactly why. Ed White and Michael Drexler help pinpoint the sources of a malaise that stem from feeling alone, so alone, as literary critical work in the field of early American studies is relegated to the status of an oddity or simply ignored. In assessing feelings of historical inadequacy (does one's article have enough footnotes to satisfy empiricists?) that compete with those of literary cowardice (why is work in early American studies often maligned as glorified social studies?), White and Drexler outline a sickness that is at once professional and metaphysical. Their vision invites a Joycean diagnosis: History, we might say, is a discipline from which we are trying to awake. Suffering under an “unspoken apprenticeship in the guild of History,” literary critics become other to themselves, toning down the inventiveness of stylistic and formalist analysis while doing their best to appear comfortable in the guise of the historian. The condition is one of disciplinary panic: effeminate traces associated with the literary must be purged even as compulsory historicity takes over by “beefing up” footnotes and “regularizing” expression.
Publication Year: 2010
Publication Date: 2010-04-02
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 1
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