The Transom: Too Many Cookbooks Spoil the Stupor

Abstract

The Modern Language Association has released a report on ‘scholarship for tenure and promotion,’ which asserts that two-thirds of those persons with PhDs in English do not obtain tenure and that the successful third has achieved the goal of permanent employment by publishing monographs, a harder and harder thing to do because ‘university presses are under increasing pressure to produce cookbooks and local interest publications instead of monographs.’ I quote not from the MLA report but from a notice prepared by a historian who believes that we in the humanities should get busy and do something about helping new PhDs to publish, because what’s happening in English departments will soon happen to the rest of us. It would be useful, he says, if we agreed to consider ‘the range of forms new media scholarship can take,’ so as to pick a few we could consider worthy of replacing sewn signatures between boards in the must-have category for tenure candidates. I am not sure what ‘new media scholarship’ is, but if it can take a ‘range of forms,’ it must be substantial stuff. Given the rapidity with which technology (and, it would seem, the attendant vocabulary) changes these days, I’m afraid that by the time I learn about ‘new media scholarship,’ it will be as old and obsolete as yesterday afternoon’s computer. I used to think, for example, that ‘electronic publishing’ was a good, useful term; but the historian discussing the MLA report refers ‘digital scholarship,’ by which, I gather, he does not mean the kind produced by people who use their fingers to push pens or pencils across paper or to depress keys on typewriters. I had hoped that he did, so that I could qualify as a ‘digital scholar,’ but upon reflection I have decided that he’s simply trying to be