How do you explain what research in literature is?

[Yanaka]

Hi all!

Tonight after my roommate made me say that I got into Rutgers, her friend asked me the unanswerable question: “what do you research in literature?”

(Insert here groan, annoyance, and wish to answer “what do you think?” to this Chemistry graduate.)

I’ve been asked this multiple times, including by people who are not familiar with academia at all. I don’t know how to answer. It’s like when I was vegan and people asked me what I eat (and still now as a vegetarian!): huh, food? 

What’s the answer? For a rude chemist who doesn’t get literature, and for someone who doesn’t know what people do in graduate school? That should help me with family members, too! (Insert here the drunken uncle who asks you what’s your purpose on earth and if I’ll still be paying for his retirement)

Edited February 9, 2018 by Yanaka

[a_sort_of_fractious_angel]

For kindly non-ac people/friends/family, I've switched from version (1) "I focus on transnational identity formation at the intersections between contemporary Caribbean and 20th- and 21st century American literature" to version (2)  "so, you know how you have a story you tell about yourself and your life? And maybe a story or two about your family - where you all came from and whatnot? I look at how people tell those kinds of stories about themselves and others through books."

No one has ever knew what to do with version 1 but version 2 seems to go over OK with everyone who is not hip to the things. One time, my mom's friend cautiously offered up a book she had read for her book club as a kind of "I have read a book in which a person discusses their identity" and I was like, "yes. good. yes. brilliant. you got it."

For the science people, I like to tell them that they do research and we do scholarship. At which point, many are like "so that is the same thing?" And I'm like "no, n00b, it is not. I am a scholar - I scholate things. You merely research them. Leave me to my books." If I have a book at hand, I toss it to them and say "you figure it out because, honestly, I'm not sure."

For the drunk uncles - honestly, I just double down. They're always like "you're never gonna get a job" at which point I remind them that "where I'm going, I don't need jobs."

Edited February 9, 2018 by a_sort_of_fractious_angel

[mk-8]

When people ask me what it means to research rhetoric/writing/composition, I give them this:

Aristotle defined rhetoric as "the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion." What Aristotle never saw coming was the Internet, cell phones, and women talking about rhetoric. So I'm trying to figure out WTF is going on with all that.

[FreakyFoucault]

This is a great topic, @Yanaka! Because I hope to study this seriously some day, I'm going to try to offer something of a cogent response. But be forewarned: it's gonna be a long-ass answer that probably won't make sense because I'm at work and should be doing actual work. Also, some of this is going to come from my undergrad thesis, so it's not as if I'm pulling all the material straight out of my head. Here it goes!

“What do you research in literature?” is a simple question, right? Physicists, for example, study matter. How do they study matter? Well, as we all know, it took awhile (thousands of years) for scientists to devise a reliable method to study natural phenomena, but nowadays, such a method has been codified and is extremely powerful. So, when physicists want to "do science," they make observations, formulate hypotheses, come up with predictions, conduct experiments, record findings, compare the data with their hypotheses, and develop general theories. Clearly, that's a simplified account, but it more or less describes the scientific method. Of course, we're not natural scientists. So how does the method change when the object of inquiry isn't amenable to scientific manipulation? On that note, what is the object of our inquiry? At the most basic level, literary theorists like ourselves study texts. Okay, so, what's in a text? Words, yes. What do the words signify? It obviously depends on the text. If it's fictional literature, the words are involved in creating some sort of artistic discourse that can run the gamut in terms of aesthetic concepts. The literary theorist, therefore, is tasked with understanding these concepts. How do we do it? As undergrads, we're taught to form a thesis statement, back up our argument with evidence from the text, and possibly cite outside opinions if we're working on a research paper. That sounds straightforward, right? It really isn't. First, how do we even come up with a thesis statement? Well, we certainly must read the text several times and try to begin to understand its internal composition. Admittedly, this introductory step kind of resembles the first part of the scientific method: making observations. Fine. Now what? We've annotated the text and are beginning to form some semblance of an idea about how to interpret it. We may now have what looks like a thesis in the making. But how do we know that our thesis is correct? How do we confirm our findings? We can't really conduct an experiment, for the text doesn't respond to our demands. We can't exactly put it over a Marxist Bunsen burner and expect some tangible result... 

"It's subjective, dummy!" our physicist friend might point out: "Correct" doesn't belong in the interpretive analyses of aesthetic works! Perhaps, but the argument ought to be reasonable, no? For example, would it be acceptable to read Charlotte's Web as a cautionary tale of the dangers of nuclear proliferation? Most definitely not -- I wouldn't argue that in a paper. That's an extreme (and comical) case, though. What about a borderline instance in which a given text offers a range of interpretations, some of which conflict but may ultimately be consistent? Put differently, how do we decide whether an argument is reasonable? This is probably where the first layer of our problem ends. As undergrads, we don't need to consider the issue. Rather, we simply (although not often easily) devise a clever thesis statement and look for textual evidence. It is our hope that the former accords with the latter in some logically congruent fashion and we get an A+ on our assignment. We, the future grad students of tomorrow, however, must instead make the transition from "How do we interpret this text" to "How is it possible to interpret this text?" When we ask "How is it possible to interpret this text?" we begin to enter the territory of the German Enlightenment. We therefore can't go much further without mentioning Friedrich Schleiermacher, who was arguably the most important literary hermeneutician of the nineteenth century. 

For Schleiermacher, hermeneutics (the study of interpretation) deals only with the art of understanding; in fact, he equates the two terms almost synonymously.[1] Schleiermacher argues that, since the medium of understanding is internal speech (or “thought”), and the objective realization of thinking is external speech (or “writing”), it follows that hermeneutics is “a part of the art of thinking."[2] Moreover, all speech-acts are necessarily related to the “totality of the language and the totality of the speaker’s thoughts."[3] In order to understand what a speaker says, one must consider two psycho-linguistic aspects: (1) the grammatical—“to understand what is said in the context of the language with its possibilities”; and (2) the psychological—“to understand it as a fact in the thinking of the speaker."[4] Schleiermacher’s distinction between the grammatical and psychological moments of hermeneutic understanding is crucial because it situates both author and reader in a reflexive-communicative relation. In other words, Schleiermacher realizes that the author’s meaning originates ab intra, but at the same time must be related to the reader ab extra through a common medium, namely language. The important conclusion here is that the interpreter must grasp both psycho-linguistic moments—the psychological and grammatical—in order to discover the author’s meaning. Schleiermacher’s second major development was to distinguish a word’s meaning [Bedeutung], or “what the word is thought to mean ‘in and of itself,’” from its sense [Sinn], or “what the word is thought to mean in a given context."[5] The difference between a word’s meaning and sense is significant because it allows for an evolving interpretation of texts within the temporally fixed act of symbolic denotation. In other words, although a word’s meaning “in and of itself” remains static in a specific text, its sense (or “connotation”) may indeed develop as audiences change over time. 

Now, this line of thinking is all well and good, but we know that the task of understanding interpretation became much more problematic after subsequent theorists began to pick apart the rational assumptions of the Enlightenment hermenuticians. I'll give you two examples. First off, it's not entirely clear that there even is a linear relation between text and speech. Derrida, for instance, made it evident through his neologism "différance" that the textual signifier and conceptual signfied unravel into a duality between time and space; that is, they tend to fall into a system whereby each word-concept refers to a related word-concept, eventually forming a recursive chain that advances ad infinitum by way of the systematic "play of differences." Second, Schleiermacher's grammatical-psychological distinction barely acknowledges the issues of prejudice and prejudgment. According to Gadamer, prejudice [Vorurteil] means a judgment that is rendered before all the elements that determine a situation have been finally examined.[6] We are reminded here of the Latin etymology of "prejudice"—prae-judicium—which literally means “pre-judgment.” Construed this way, prejudice works more as a pre-understanding or fore-meaning concerning the object one wants to understand. For example, if a new text attributed to Chaucer were discovered, literary scholars would require at least some fore-structure of Chaucer’s prior work, medieval chivalric romances, the chanson de geste literary form, and so on, to fully understand the piece in the context of 14th-century English literature. Because pre-existing ideas can have either positive or negative values, prejudice, therefore, does not necessarily involve a negative judgment. In fact, the “historicity of our existence”—our being in the world—would not be possible without prejudices (in the Latinate sense), which constitute our ability to experience phenomena. Put differently, prejudices are biases of our openness to the world. They are merely conditions that enable us to experience something and receive whatever is said to us. Of course, Gadamer does not favor racial, cultural, or religious prejudices. In fact, he maintains that one should certainly try to discover one’s prejudices and purge those that are undesirable.[7] 

In my opinion, the real nail in the hermeneutic coffin came with the publication of Gadamer's Truth and Method in 1960 (which I've already cited here). In that mammoth of a book, it becomes clear that there really is no straightforward answer to related the question: Is there, or can there be, an inquisitive approach in the humanities equivalent to the scientific method? It should be fairly easy to understand why from what I've included above. In the hands of a literary theorist, texts are not scientific objects. We can't subject them to experiments that reveal their inner "nature" since this inner "nature" exists in a strange relationship between 1) psychological prejudices of the reader and the author; and 2) the deferred presence of written language. Gadamer suggests that we instead look to achieve a “historically effected consciousness” [wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewußtsein]. I'm not a Gadamer specialist, so I'm often a loss for what he means by "historically effected consciousness." But my guess is that Gadamer believes we are always involved in some hermeneutical situation in which we establish a certain perspective for ourselves as individuals and groups of individuals. He calls these perspectives "horizons," which, he argues, are quite fluid since nobody is bound to any particular standpoint; the horizon, therefore, is “something into which we move and that moves with us."[8] 

Going back to the original question: "What do we research in literature?” Well, in a simplistic sense, we study the horizons and perspectives that are laid bare in literature. We use many different historical and theoretical methods (Marxism, feminism, psychoanalytics, etc.), but it really isn't the case that we have one rigorous, unified tool that can dissect all textual discourses. Instead, we generally acknowledge that our domain (the mind) is filled with problems, and we do the best we can as limited subjects to understand them. Perhaps a "Humanistic Method" is out there -- if any of you finds it, let me know. In other words, don't hate us, science people! Pity our Sisyphean task of understanding why we and the aesthetic objects we produce are so messed up! 

Caveats: I didn't mention here (for lack of space and ability) the Pre-Socratics, Plato, Aristotle, T. Aquinas, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Husserl,  Böckh,  Droysen,  Dilthey, Heidegger, or Ricouer. So obviously this is a heavily limited response. But, my real point is to demonstrate that Yanaka's question is probably the most complex problem we face in the humanities and that there is no clear answer.

Notes:

[1] Friedrich D.E. Schleiermacher, “General Hermeneutics,” in The Hermeneutics Reader: Texts of the German Tradition from the Enlightenment to the Present, ed. Kurt Mueller-Vollmer (New York: Continuum, 1985), 73.

[2] When he mentions “speaking,” Schleiermacher also includes “writing.” Schleiermacher, 74.

[3] Schleiermacher, 74.

[4] Schleiermacher, 74. It is interesting to note here the similarity between Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics and Saussure’s linguistics. Saussure more or less makes the same distinction between the individual speech-act (parole) and the totality of linguistic possibilities (langue) nearly forty years later. 

[5] Friedrich D.E. Schleiermacher, “Grammatical and Technical Interpretation,” in The Hermeneutics Reader: Texts of the German Tradition from the Enlightenment to the Present, ed. Kurt Mueller-Vollmer (New York: Continuum, 1985), 86.

[6] Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall, 2nd, rev. ed, Continuum Impacts (London; New York: Continuum, 2004), 273.

[7] Ibid., 271.

[8] Ibid., 303. 

Edited February 9, 2018 by FreakyFoucault

[Yanaka]

Definitely a read for tomorrow  thank you for your insight, people!!

[bumbleblu]

Excellent responses, all, @a_sort_of_fractious_angel! Will modify and save for later. 

 

[CulturalCriminal]

It really depends on methodology, which is where the humanities do significantly depart from other disciplines. For me, research is all about contextualizing texts with the socio- and geo-political discussion of identity in culture. Thus my research can (beyond a structural reading of a text) pull from social science data, archival research, and philosophical discussion (aka theory). For other people, research looks quite different. I know someone who does hard science research in conjunction with discussion of bodies in a text. That transdisciplinary variety is what I love about the field.

[Melvillage_Idiot]

Recent lurker here (I'm @FishNerd's partner, so I've been seeing things through her), popping in to add something that might be helpful as well.

When I was doing my MA thesis and getting asked all those questions, most of the folks asking me wanted to know some practical, real-world application. The sort of abstract, soul-searching things we literature people do (or at least try to do) don't really meet that criteria in their eyes, but I found that if I had something with some statistics behind it, I could usually both answer their questions and hold their attention for a little bit. In my case, one big chunk of my thesis project was a sociological look at migrations out of the American South into the Rust Belt, and if I led with that (even if it wasn't the "real" focus), it seemed to answer their questions and even assuage those worries that I'm off doing nothing worthwhile with my life.

After that, just tack on a "And, you know, I'm applying all this to a novel," and most people seem pretty satisfied.

Obviously, this approach doesn't work if your project is really theory-heavy or abstract, but if you have something even vaguely applicable to another field, it might be worth letting that be front-and-center.

[immanentfields]

If you stare too long into the navel, the navel gazes back into you.

[mads47]

I've started just telling people that I am studying to write books about books. 

[Yanaka]

14 minutes ago, mads47 said:

I've started just telling people that I am studying to write books about books. 

That’s what I usually say. But they still have that dead eye xD