At Fault: Joyce and the Crisis of the Modern University by Sebastian D. G. Knowles

Abstract

Reviewed by: At Fault: Joyce and the Crisis of the Modern University by Sebastian D. G. Knowles Colleen Jaurretche (bio) At Fault: Joyce and the Crisis of the Modern University, by Sebastian D. G. Knowles. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2018. xv + 296 pp. $79.95. Two decades back, I wrote about the diminishment of graduate specializations in a single author and the fading of jobs in English departments across the land.1 Sebastian D. G. Knowles's own subtitle, Joyce and the Crisis of the Modern University, suggests a conundrum as complex as the intricate readings of Joyce with which Knowles dazzles us in the body of his book and as resistant to resolution as his thesis: that risk has been removed from university education to the detriment of faculty and students. At stake in Knowles's argument is the conviction that the studies of humanities generally, and of Joyce in particular, are not for the faint of heart. Rather, they must be approached boldly, innovatively, and without constraints placed by a system-wide culture that inhibits teacherly expression and student exploration. What we stand to gain from taking such risks is the subject of his book. Since I wrote my essay a generation ago, the "crisis" in Knowles's title has become indisputable. Most recently, Stephen Marche wrote in the Times Literary Supplement about his brief return foray into academia, only to find that the profession he left for the career of writing had become one of grotesque obsequiousness, advertising culture (such as graduate students gaming the names of their dissertations in order to attract hiring eyes), systems of patronage and favoritism that rival medieval Italian city-states, and all-but-vanished employment prospects that leave young (and not so young) Ph.D.s working for scraps from the academic table.2 Such screeds are not unique, but in the last decade or so they have appeared with regularity, alongside other pieces that decry curricular shifts away from canonical literature or criticisms of syllabi that have been sanitized to protect students' feelings. Marche's position is that the decay of academia both produced, and is the product of, the decline in the humanities, and his remedy is that [End Page 200] everyone read widely and deeply to overcome our suspicion of one another and to restore knowledge to culture. When Knowles takes up the subject of risk, he is really writing about the same thing. But some may say that he reaches only the outskirts of the ascent of race and gender at the core of much of the humanities' departmental infighting and power-jockeying. Knowles's introduction defines being "at fault" as the governing trope of an intellectually vibrant academic. He tells us that the term is from fox-hunting and refers to the Oxford English Dictionary definition of a foxhound's eagerly, joyfully overrunning "a line of scent owing to its irregularity" (2).3 He styles Joyce as the ultimate "[o]utlaw," whose "at fault" works resist categorization and circumscription (1). Joyce's interpreters, he argues, also must transgress boundaries in their scholarship and pedagogy. Similarly, he contends, the university ought to push students outward and away from more comforting modes of interaction. "A university," he writes, "must be a centrifuge: it is the job of higher education to take students out of themselves, to embrace risk, to search, as [Ralph Waldo] Emerson says, 'for the extra.' Joyce points the way out of our current crisis of conformity" (21).4 Like Joyce, Knowles's desire is to produce a book that is an instrument of "openness and engagement," in the service of the "comic principles of empathy and delight" that he finds at the core of Joyce's writing (23). He achieves his goal. The genius of this book lies even more in its first chapter than in the extraordinarily learned and clever readings that occupy its middle portion. This first chapter argues that the function of the university is "to unsettle, to never settle, to always and at all times provoke the mind" (28). And here is where Knowles sounds the alarm: universities, he says, are doing the opposite, supplying students with curricula and cultures...