Intellectually, I’ve been lucky. Well, and I’ve been lucky in umpty-’leven other ways, as well, and I know that, but at the moment, I’m talking about one specific aspect of my good fortune. When I started being intellectually curious, or at least when my intellectual curiosity overcame my indolence, or at any rate, when I hit my intellectual stride in my late twenties, I had access to one of the world’s great libraries. Borrowing and browsing access. Convenient access. There were very few books I could not get of a lunchtime.
The timing was also magnificent as the great on-line collections had begun. As with the book library, I had access to many of these collections through the late eighties. As my work was not unconnected to those collections, I had some leisure to drift through them, looking at whatever interested me, in addition to the pleasure of noting what was juxtaposed to the thing I was being paid to look for. In the last few years, as those collections have grown, I have retained some (more limited) access to them. As a result, I can read my choice of some millions of articles in scholarly journals and mainstream periodicals.
So when Kwama Anthony Appiah’s new book on Cosmopolitanism came to my attention, in addition to noting it as a book to perhaps borrow from some library and read carefully, Your Humble Blogger thought that much of Prof. Appiah’s work must be available in journals here and there, and that perhaps I didn’t need to wait for the book to turn up to get a sense of what he was on about. And, in fact, the text of Ethics in a World of Strangers, a talk he gave this past summer on W.E.B. Du Bois is on his web site, and I was able to read a few old articles. The essays from the New York Review of Books aren’t accessible to me, alas. And it turns out that really, there isn’t very much there, at least not recently.
Now, the next thing: An article in a recent Chronicle of Higher Education called Radical Change for Tenure reported on a special panel at the MLA conference that aims, among other things, to end ‘the fetishization of the monograph’ as a tenure requirement, or indeed as the sine qua non of academic achievement. I’ve had a couple of conversations about the article (and several on the general subject), and on the whole I think it would be a very good thing if academic departments and administrations got off the monograph kick.
What struck me, though, is that I have read two reviews of Mr. Appiah’s new book this week, one in the Nation and one, if memory serves, in the New York Times. Those periodicals have regular book reviews. The reviews in the Nation and the Times (and in the New York Review of Books, of course, and the London Times, and the Guardian, and a few score other general mainstream newspapers and magazine) are substantial essays, often combining reviews of several books into a coherent statement of the state of discussion on a broad topic. You don’t need to read the book in question to get a good deal of value out of the review, nor is the review viewed primarily as an answer to the question what’s this book like? Not every book gets reviewed like that, of course, but there are a large number of serious books seriously reviewed in that manner, and because Mr. Appiah’s book was one of them, I started looking into his work.
Now, the New York Times did not review Mr. Appiah’s twenty-three page article in Critical Thinking in 1997. That article held most, if not all, of the ideas to which the reviewers I read responded. I’m sure the book goes into more detail, is more rigorous, provides more, clearer and better examples ... no, wait, I’m not sure of that at all. What I am sure of is that by virtue of expanding his essays into a book, Mr. Appiah brought the ideas into the public conversation. Because there was a book, the argument was admitted to be of public interest and worthy of public scrutiny.
Oh, now and then a nice long magazine article in the New Yorker or the Atlantic will spark a conversation, but usually that conversation acknowledges that it is treading water until the book comes out. Malcolm Gladwell’s essays are ever so much better than his books, but who read them? Harry Frankfurt’s essay On Bullshit became a nine-day wonder and, of all things, was on Entertainment Weekly’s list of 2005’s best books, but it was a book in 2005 because some people decided, essentially, that it was too good to be an article. Then, when it was a book, it got reviewed as a book, got discussed as a book, entered the public sphere as a matter of weighty import. Sure, there was nothing in it that wasn’t in it thirty years ago, but who read the article? Of course, who reads books, too, but that’s not important. The public conversation about serious matters has to close its eyes to its insularity or it will never happen at all.
All of which is to say, I think the MLA gang are up against something more intractable than even a dean or an Old Guard prof. They are up against cultural expectations, a sense in which a book signifies substance, where a not-book signifies, well, lesser substance. Sure, there can be and there are arguments held over years in the pages of academic journals. Bitter and hard-fought arguments. Sure. But they are assumed to be of interest only to specialists, like the rest of the stuff in there, and are only brought out for public gnawing if one or another gets a book out. Or if, a generation or two later, somebody writes a book about the whole thing. There has to be a book, between covers.
I’m not saying that this has to be the case forever, or that it isn’t already changing. In fact, it seems to me that the book, as a symbol or signifier of some level of cultural importance, is probably very recent and probably not going to last much longer. Already I am perplexed by novellas coming out between hard covers, as I’ve mentioned here before, and unable to come up with any reason why that seems wrong. I suspect, now, that it seems wrong just because I have a cultural sense of what constitutes bookdom, and a hundred pages isn’t in it. Still, if I read a novella between covers, I do a Book Report on the novella; if I read a novella in a collection, I do a book report on the collection. If I read a collection of Studs Terkel interviews between covers, I do a Book Report; if I read an interesting interview on-line somewhere, I may blog it, but I won’t Report on it.
Will people born after 1990 have that same cultural sense? Dunno. I suspect not, but I also suspect that those of us born before than will never shake it. I think that even if somehow academia explicitly codifies tenure in some way that de-emphasizes the monograph, committees will still, for another generation, venerate it whether they want to or not. Which is strange, but there it is.
chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.
I think that part of what’s going on is that the publication process is part of the big collective filter that keeps information overload at bay. A book is a physical sign that someone thinks an idea has legs (or at least some leverage with which to part fools from their dollars). Book reviews are part of the filter, too, but they’re also subject to feedback from other parts: it’s already impossible to review all books published in a year, much less all ideas generated in shorter or less-costly forms, forms that don’t send the signal “someone thought this idea was worth a material risk.”
It may be that different filters may slowly take over. At some point will a boingboing.net blurb carry as much net incfluence — though in different circles — as an in-depth review in the New York Times? Does it already? I know I don’t take the former quite as seriously as the latter, but I also don’t end up reading very many of the latter (not being a subscriber and all).
F’rex: Cory Doctorow’s review of Octavia Butler’s new book Fledgling a couple of days ago did, in fact, push me closer to thinking it might be worth coughing up for the hardcover. Has it been reviewed yet in the Times? I wouldn’t know.
Speaking as an MLA member but not as a representative of the MLA, the MLA’s recommendation should not be taken as an argument that publishing a book isn’t all that and a bag of chips anymore. Rather, it’s simply a recognition that, because of the decline in the publishing market for scholarly monographs of the sort that members of the modern language professoriate typically produce, the failure to place such a monograph with a publisher should not be viewed as a sign of scholarly inadequacy and therefore a ground for denying tenure.
I don’t think the MLA’s proposed change asks people to abandon the idea that books are more important than articles. It only asks academics making tenure decisions to abandon the idea that every assistant professor in the modern languages must publish a book in order to be granted the privilege of having a career in the field.
I expect our gracious host knows all this, of course, and is simply taking the MLA’s position as a starting point for a discussion of broader cultural matters pertaining to books. But (perhaps self-interestedly) I thought it would be worthwhile to also state the meaning of the MLA’s position within the Profession.
Thanks for the clarification, and yes, I was sketching out implications to the MLA proposal that they certainly don’t (yet) endorse. I do, however, think that the discussion will necessarily have to include just what it is about a book, as such, that makes it the pinnacle of achievement. I think the publication filter that Dan talks about is part of that, although in academia, a well-edited peer-reviewed journal (as distinct, say, from a Proceedings or such) has as much filter as a press.
I should also, as long as we are on or at least near the subject, say that although I like the book, myself, as either a pastime or a scholarly endeavor, it’s hard for me to endorse the idea that the distinction between a book and several articles as a criterion for tenure at a teaching post seems to me insupportable. Yes, they are different forms, and yes, the ability to sustain a book-length argument (although a book contract is scarcely proof that the author can sustain a book-length argument) is marvelous and admirable, but surely so is succinctness, versatility and breadth of interest.
No, what I’m getting at is that The Book has Prestige, or what we doctors call Mystique and Aura, that sense of itness that comes with the bag of proverbial.
Thanks,
-V.