What’s Been Lost

Abstract

IT'S TOO SOON TO TELL whether the current boomlet in hiring is auguring a period of prosperity for Canadian universities. It's safe to say, though, that it won't bring about the long-promised wholesale renewal of the faculty, a rejuvenation that was supposed to occur in the 1990s and was to rival in scale what happened during the boon years of the 1960s. At least, it's beside the point to talk of rejuvenation in relation to a discipline like English, which isn't much like it was when hopefuls first began to predict the big renewal. Ere we had a chance to be reborn, we were restructured: departments have been downsized, classes have grown, journals have been cut, underemployment has risen, expectations have been lowered. I don't wish to present another litany of all the ways university life has been materially altered over the past two decades. I'm concerned, rather, with the intellectual consequences of these changes. My comments are speculative, since there's no way of knowing how things might have been different had the big renewal actually occurred. All the same, it seems insensitive to be issuing manifestoes on what's left of English studies without also pausing to reflect on what's been lost. We do not lack for diagnoses of what's happened to English since the culture wars or the heyday of high theory (see Berube , Williams). Most of these diagnoses deal with how literary studies is practiced among those who have secure jobs. Pew consider what effect downsizing has had not just on the conditions for teaching or research but on the nature of critical discourse. Clearly, the critical mass has gotten smaller: people have retired, been dissuaded from pursuing doctoral degrees, been blocked from publishing for lack of venues, dropped out of the market, or been forced into sessional work which affords them little time or incentive to contribute to debates in the field. At the same time, most graduate programs haven't been in a position to lower their numbers, given the ongoing need for teaching assistants to help staff undergraduate survey and service classes. This overproduction of PhDs relative to available positions has created a structural inequity wherein mid-career scholars appear outnumbered by their sessional, junior and senior colleagues. This isn't the case everywhere. But the inequity has affected most departments long enough that we may plausibly speak of a lost generation, an indefinitely large group of individuals who might have contributed to the discipline during the most productive period of their careers but who were prevented or discouraged from doing so. It's not easy to measure this group, though I'm sure I'm not alone in knowing people who gave up on English because the jobs weren't there. More difficult to assess is the effect of their absence on the discipline. One way of defining this lack would be to compare where the cuts have occurred with hiring patterns over the same period. Most departments did not suffer significant attrition before the mid-'90s, yet the subsequent cuts, in the form of non-replacements, hit shortly after the severest and longest job drought of the post-war era. For much of the previous two decades, there were almost no jobs, permanent or temporary. Those few positions that did open up were not commonly in the traditional period specialties (1) and, if they were, they were generally offered to candidates whose work applied theory to the interpretation of texts. Candidates were expected to announce their critical coordinates: Marxism, psychoanalysis, feminism, structuralism, poststructuralism and the rest. For a while, it looked like departments were moving to hire on the basis of methodology rather than subject area. One other notable hiring phenomenon of the decade was the emergence of the pure theorist who was hired to buttress a department's reputation in critical theory without necessarily being expected to use theory in praxis whether textual interpretation or social critique. …