Programs without a postmodern/cultural relativist slant?

[Indecisive Poet]

I'm wondering whether anyone knows of programs that are not heavily invested in the more popular contemporary approaches to literary studies including feminist theory, critical race theory, deconstruction, etc. I don't ask because I'm opposed to any of these approaches or applying to programs built by them (they are incredibly important) but because my own most specific interests happen to be quite removed from these approaches (I'm just not driven by these kinds of questions). As a result I imagine I may have difficult faring as well as the majority of applicants, who are doing this type of work.

I know it's not very common to not be studying literature from a socio-political/social justice standpoint so I imagine I'll need to amend my approach to get in to programs. I thought, however, that I'd run this question by you all on the off chance there are any programs that you know of that might be interested in an un-amended me! I'm interested in aesthetic and broadly philosophical approaches, looking at things like genre theory, form, the history and function of literary criticism, poetry, etc (I know all of the above brands of critical theory have a role to play in all of these fields -- they are just not my subfields of interest).

[Bumblebea]

First of all, I don't think you're going to find an entire program *without* something pretty central to the discipline, like cultural studies or critical race theory.

Second of all, I don't think what you're asking is that unusual. There are a lot of people out there who focus on issues of form and genre. In fact, I think that most programs are recognizing that cultural approaches by themselves (Marxism, gender, queerness, race) are pretty tired, and that English departments shouldn't be history/social science lite--we need to focus on literature as a distinct expression. But the thing is, you can't just begin and end with formalist readings of texts. At some point you have to address history. For example, let's say you want to focus on the rise of the novel, and you want to look at the types of aesthetic philosophies that may have informed the proliferation of the genre. At some point, you are going to have to think about why novels mattered to people, and why your intervention matters, and this will undoubtedly have a historical dimension. You'll also have to address the content of those novels, which will probably be political in some way.

So all of this is to say that you're in good company. You won't be made to apply theory like a lens and go through a text doing a feminist reading. But you won't be able to escape history, either. 

[jrockford27]

I'll start by saying that there is really no lack of current and ongoing humanities scholarship that does not address questions of social-justice, cultural studies, relativism, etc.  With regard to relativism, there is actually a growing sentiment that "postmodernism" is "over," whatever that might mean. What can be said is that projects revolving around the critical theories of the experience of marginalized groups is very "hot" right now because we're in a cultural moment where marginalized groups are increasingly gaining footholds within established structures, giving them a platform to critique those structures in ways that have not traditionally been done (or even allowed).  Those kinds of projects get a lot of attention because they respond to current events and changes in academia and culture at large in very important ways.  However, that does not mean that aesthetes and formalists are unwelcome in English departments, there are tons of them, and they're publishing all the time!  

This board gets a lot of threads that ask questions about programs that emphasize this or that. I think there was a thread last year where the OP asked people to recommend programs that had an "emphasis on psychoanalysis." While there is something really romantic and intriguing about the idea of a  department full of like minded Frankfurt School Marxists, or Lacanians, Deleuzians, or even formalists, regularly gathering in smoke filled chambers to hash out the specifics of their shared discipline, for better or worse the economics of the University prevent this from happening. 

The important thing to remember about academic departments when determining whether one is a good fit for you or not is that most (if not all) English departments strive for broad coverage. That means that you're unlikely to find departments where you have a ton of professors whose interests contain a lot of overlapping concerns. They may have particular areas of strength (for example, the Center for Psychoanalysis at Buffalo, or the Children's Lit concentration at Pitt), but will generally strive to incorporate a broad range of approaches, genres, time periods, etc.  

All of which is to say, you're not going to find departments that are totally eschewing one approach or another, especially, as @Bumblebea says, approaches that are central to the discipline. If you're a strict aesthete or formalist, you'll probably be in a department with Marxists or Lacanians or whatever who will find problems with your methods, and the opposite is true as well.  I'm a cultural studies scholar, and I had a graduate colleague who found the whole backbone of cultural studies based criticism to be of questionable worth.  We still get along, and we both have professors in the department who supported our work. 

Your concerns about the application process are valid, since (this is becoming my catchphrase on this board) the most important aspect of the admissions process is the one over which you have the least control: the composition of the admissions committee. @Bumblebea's advice is sage here, a successful application statement - I think - needs to have at least some theoretical and/or historical undergirding. Striking a balance between a statement that is narrow enough to show strength, and broad enough to show flexibility, is one of the biggest challenges of your application. You will want to show that you can become conversant in relevant issues of critical theory (you will be expected to do this) even if they don't find their way into your dissertation, because a well rounded scholar must be conversant in the major issues of the field. I had to read Kant and Cavell, and my aesthete colleagues had to read Adorno and Althusser!

Edited July 12, 2018 by jrockford27

[Ramus]

Seconding what's been said above. Very few departments can be broadly classified as singularly committed to one methodological or theoretical approach. That's just not how departments work. You may find that certain periods within a department are clustered around certain approaches—the post-45 crowd is more likely to be interested in cultural studies approaches, whereas early modern faculty are more likely to be partial to some form of historicism—but, again, that rarely holds across periods. Very often you'll find that even within a given period of study, the methodological and theoretical commitments of faculty are pretty diverse. And you shouldn't assume that faculty of certain persuasions are necessarily incompatible with you and your interests. 

It's also wrong to assume non-social-justice approaches are somehow uncommon. Students in those camps tend to be a bit more vocal about their theoretical and/or political investments, but you shouldn't take that as an indication of what makes a successful applicant or graduate student. 

Edited July 12, 2018 by Ramus

[Indecisive Poet]

Thank you for your responses, @Bumblebea & @jrockford27! I'll address both of them here:

3 hours ago, Bumblebea said:

First of all, I don't think you're going to find an entire program *without* something pretty central to the discipline, like cultural studies or critical race theory.

I suppose that was poorly worded on my part; I wasn't trying to ask for recommendations for programs that don't do this type of scholarship as much as I was programs that aren't...completely built on it? I'm not sure how to express the feeling I've had when sifting through websites that most of them seem to operate in large part in this language and I keep having the nagging feeling that I won't fit in.

3 hours ago, Bumblebea said:

Second of all, I don't think what you're asking is that unusual. There are a lot of people out there who focus on issues of form and genre. In fact, I think that most programs are recognizing that cultural approaches by themselves (Marxism, gender, queerness, race) are pretty tired, and that English departments shouldn't be history/social science lite--we need to focus on literature as a distinct expression.

2 hours ago, jrockford27 said:

I'll start by saying that there is really no lack of current and ongoing humanities scholarship that does not address questions of social-justice, cultural studies, relativism, etc.  With regard to relativism, there is actually a growing sentiment that "postmodernism" is "over," whatever that might mean.

Just goes to show how little I know right now! I hope to have a better idea when I'm applying a year from now of what current trends are in scholarship. It seems like whenever I learn about a trend in the humanities I learn something new that renders it outdated.

3 hours ago, Bumblebea said:

At some point you have to address history. For example, let's say you want to focus on the rise of the novel, and you want to look at the types of aesthetic philosophies that may have informed the proliferation of the genre. At some point, you are going to have to think about why novels mattered to people, and why your intervention matters, and this will undoubtedly have a historical dimension. You'll also have to address the content of those novels, which will probably be political in some way.

I do consider myself influenced greatly by formalist modes of thought but I also certainly don't think myself in a formalist/new critical bubble. I am excited about history and hope to address it in all the work I do (in particular I'm interested in thinking about Enlightenment ideas and shifts to the industrial, etc). But to me that consideration of history feels a little bit different from coming at things from a primarily critical race/gender theory perspective.

2 hours ago, jrockford27 said:

You will want to show that you can become conversant in relevant issues of critical theory (you will be expected to do this) even if they don't find their way into your dissertation, because a well rounded scholar must be conversant in the major issues of the field. I had to read Kant and Cavell, and my aesthete colleagues had to read Adorno and Althusser!

Maybe this is too specific of a question, but do you have any ideas about how I would show this in a SoP if it isn't my primary area of focus? I am definitely interested in Western Marxist theory but right now it seems more like an undercurrent that might not even be worth mentioning in an SoP (though this could change in a year). Do you think a statement that makes no mention of these "hot" areas specifically could still somehow show that I could become conversant in those areas?

And re: the rest of your post, I really hadn't thought about it like that -- that no department has one emphasis, per se. I guess that's maybe been my impression as I go through websites and it seems like many faculty members are doing the same kinds of things or that the program offers certificates in say ecocrit or critical theory and has a lot of resources in those areas. I suppose just because those areas are strengths for the department doesn't mean they don't have strengths in wildly different areas too.

I see now that my question was probably not a good one... but these answers have been as useful as those I was expecting!

[jrockford27]

1 minute ago, indecisivepoet said:

Thank you for your responses, @Bumblebea & @jrockford27! I'll address both of them here:

I suppose that was poorly worded on my part; I wasn't trying to ask for recommendations for programs that don't do this type of scholarship as much as I was programs that aren't...completely built on it? I'm not sure how to express the feeling I've had when sifting through websites that most of them seem to operate in large part in this language and I keep having the nagging feeling that I won't fit in.

Just goes to show how little I know right now! I hope to have a better idea when I'm applying a year from now of what current trends are in scholarship. It seems like whenever I learn about a trend in the humanities I learn something new that renders it outdated.

I do consider myself influenced greatly by formalist modes of thought but I also certainly don't think myself in a formalist/new critical bubble. I am excited about history and hope to address it in all the work I do (in particular I'm interested in thinking about Enlightenment ideas and shifts to the industrial, etc). But to me that consideration of history feels a little bit different from coming at things from a primarily critical race/gender theory perspective.

Maybe this is too specific of a question, but do you have any ideas about how I would show this in a SoP if it isn't my primary area of focus? I am definitely interested in Western Marxist theory but right now it seems more like an undercurrent that might not even be worth mentioning in an SoP (though this could change in a year). Do you think a statement that makes no mention of these "hot" areas specifically could still somehow show that I could become conversant in those areas?

And re: the rest of your post, I really hadn't thought about it like that -- that no department has one emphasis, per se. I guess that's maybe been my impression as I go through websites and it seems like many faculty members are doing the same kinds of things or that the program offers certificates in say ecocrit or critical theory and has a lot of resources in those areas. I suppose just because those areas are strengths for the department doesn't mean they don't have strengths in wildly different areas too.

I see now that my question was probably not a good one... but these answers have been as useful as those I was expecting!

No need to apologize, and I think my post contains some generalizations (I apologize, I'm flipping between browser windows and my dissertation and that doesn't lend itself well to giving ironclad advice). You should be asking lots of questions, and this is a place to ask them.  Your questions are good and worthwhile. I didn't know any of these things when I was an undergrad.   

Some departments have working groups around things like ecocrit, childrens lit, etc., but within those you're likely to find a lot of diversity in theories and approaches.

My bit about the SoP may be a little over the top.  If you aren't interested in Marxism as a subject, there is absolutely no reason to include Marxism in your SoP. On the other hand, (and I'm being reductive again for the sake of ease and time) it is hard to imagine a strong statement of purpose that does not engage with prevailing discourses in some way.  As bumblebea said, a good scholarly project is going to have at least a little theory behind it. You show that you're potentially conversant in theory/scholarship by identifying what authors/critics/theorists influence your approach to close reading, and why you think that this approach is important.    A statement of purpose, I think, is (among other things) where you propose a starting point for inquiry.  What questions drive you? What contribution do you want to make? Why do you think [school x] is a good place to do it? It's hard to imagine forming a substantial inquiry without placing your work into dialogue with prevailing theories (be they cultural studies, critical theory, or aesthetic theory).  

I apologize to you, actually, because this is probably very confusing. Unfortunately, grad school applications are a very confusing process, and (speaking of relativism) you're going to get a lot of potentially conflicting advice!

 

[Bumblebea]

(Disclaimer: My own scholarly interests lie in the distant past, so my need to historicize the crap out of things is definitely coloring my responses to you here. People working in different eras might have much different advice.)

I think what everyone is recommending is that you need to retreat from the idea of taking one specific approach and instead think about combining different approaches. That is, if you like to come at literature from an aesthetic/formalist approach, that's great, but the literature you study is still going to require close attention not only to form but also to the historical/political issues that inform the backdrop of your chosen literary era. 

Combining approaches isn't going to be like "add a dash of gender criticism and a sprinkling of Marxist theory"--no, these days we think about approaches emerging organically from what the text is telling us about authors and readers of the time. Like, for instance, let's say you're writing about a picaresque novel that involves cross-dressing. You're probably not going to be able to write an article ONLY about the formal properties of the picaresque mode, though you might start there. You instead would do a detailed discussion of the picaresque combined with gender issues, and you'd think about how gender issues might influence the author's use of the mode, or how the mode might push the author to have specific engagements with the theme of cross dressing. And you're going to have to do research into cross-dressing and gender issues of the 18th century (or whatever century you're studying), no way around it. Then let's say the next picaresque novel you study takes place against the backdrop of the Atlantic slave trade. Same issue will apply--you'll have to do research into the Atlantic slave trade and think about the relevant theories as they might help you discuss the novel. And if gender issues also arise there (since race and gender and colonization don't exactly respect boundaries), then you'll also want to address that.

Basically, you have to think about what the literature is telling you and work from there. Like, IME the time has passed when people self-identify as "Marxist" or "feminist" alone and go through novels and poems and stories and apply only one theory. Their work might deal with the same issues time and time again, but that's probably because the approach is useful to the literature they study. Scholars tend to pick approaches that are most helpful to them rather than starting out with "feminism! feminism! I must do feminism!" and then applying feminist theory to everything they read. (In fact, excessive focus on one cultural approach is probably bad because we now recognize the importance of intersectionality. If someone is focusing only on gender, they're going to get called out for ignoring the experiences of non-white people, and if they're focusing on social class issues as they relate to men, they're going to get called out for ignoring women, etc. etc.) I mean, Gilbert and Gubar might have written a landmark text about women and literature ... but their work has (maybe unfairly) served as something of a punching bag ever since and an example of a narrow-minded approach.

So I'm being really long-winded here, but my main tl;dr takeaways are:

• Any program worth its salt is going to have a whole bunch of people on faculty who do all kinds of approaches. You're not going to find a (good) program that is invested in one thing and hostile to all others (and if you do, run). It's true that some programs seem to produce more scholars who work on a variety of aesthetic approaches (Berkeley comes to mind--a lot of their people do novel studies and poetics) ... but people are also always going to market themselves as having a cultural angle, since that's what the job market wants these days, and that's what's going to publish. Look closely at grad student interests and review recent dissertations. 
• Think about what your chosen literature is telling you. It might have formal/aesthetic aspects that you find really cool, but it's also going to be engaging with other cultural issues in some way. Think about how the form might influence the treatment of issues and vice versa. This might be a way to integrate approaches and therefore seem more attractive and identifiable to adcoms. 
• Check out this guy's work: http://mcgarrett.faculty.wesleyan.edu/ I'm not an Americanist, but I love his work and it seems to me that it's very formalist but also attentive to social and political history. 

[Bumblebea]

49 minutes ago, jrockford27 said:

No need to apologize, and I think my post contains some generalizations (I apologize, I'm flipping between browser windows and my dissertation and that doesn't lend itself well to giving ironclad advice). You should be asking lots of questions, and this is a place to ask them.  Your questions are good and worthwhile. I didn't know any of these things when I was an undergrad.   

Yeah, this. I wish I'd thought to ask these questions before I applied to PhD programs. OP, you're ahead of where I was, let me tell you.

(And I'm also flipping between revising an article and writing these posts, oh crap, I mean procrastinating ?)

[Indecisive Poet]

7 minutes ago, Ramus said:

Seconding what's been said above. Very few departments can be broadly classified as singularly committed to one methodological or theoretical approach. That's just not how departments work. You may find that certain periods within a department are clustered around certain approaches—the post-45 crowd is more likely to be interested in cultural studies approaches, whereas early modern faculty are more likely to be partial to some form of historicism—but, again, that rarely holds across periods. Very often you'll find that even within a given period of study, the methodological and theoretical commitments of faculty are pretty diverse. And you shouldn't assume that faculty of certain persuasions are necessarily incompatible with you and your interests. 

It's also wrong to assume non-social-justice approaches are somehow uncommon. Students in those camps tend to be a bit more vocal about their theoretical and/or political investments, but you shouldn't take that as an indication of what makes a successful applicant or graduate student. 

Thanks, @Ramus. Lesson definitely learned about asking this sort of question/thinking this way, and it's actually really reassuring to hear departments don't work like this.

I think I overstated my case in assuming how uncommon those approaches may be; I suppose looking at websites can make certain things that are already worrying to me seem more overwhelming than they are. I admit I've also been influenced by various posts on here that have suggested it's not possible to not incorporate one of those approaches into your major area of interest (though I suppose it may be a matter of, like, of course any given paper I write will probably make mention of gender or race at some point). At any rate, it's definitely also reassuring to hear that's not as uncommon as I'd thought.

[Indecisive Poet]

@Bumblebea This makes a lot of sense and thanks for the recommendation on Garrett! I'll check him out.

Edit: it's also kind of funny that this discussion is being had because I took a novel theory seminar with a professor at my undergrad university who studies precisely the history of literary and cultural forms, looking at form with a Marxist-historicist perspective. The seminar was centered around reading novel theory with a historicist slant. But the pure theory element was also way over my head, so perhaps I didn't absorb as much as would have been helpful...

@jrockford27 - I'll tag you here as well since this is essentially one conversation at this point.

I understand, I think, what you're saying in terms of any given project and the kinds of research it'll entail. I guess I'm thinking right now about marketing myself in an SoP, though. Even though throughout my career and within each project I'll draw on a ton of different theoretical approaches, do I mention those I'm most influenced by in my SoP? Or do I focus more on the content of my research question?

I guess, like, I know I wouldn't say something like "I'd like to study x literature and x questions from a formalist approach" but I would instead expound upon the formal/aesthetic questions that interest me. So there really isn't a need to name-drop particular brands of theory at all, right? Instead I might be name-dropping particular authors/works or contemporary scholars in my period/maybe within aesthetics & such if I learn more about what's going on in the contemporary world there (lol), but largely focusing on the questions I'm trying to work on and how I arrived at my interest there. I suppose the reason I was initially worried is that those questions aren't the kinds of things I'm used to seeing in SoPs ("I'm interested in the autonomous identity of Caribbean peoples in pre-colonial American lit", for example -- cultural problems that are relevant to what's going on with marginalized groups today, as you've both mentioned), but instead they are rather more abstract, airy-fairy, aestheticist questions (though I will certainly narrow them down to something that hopefully doesn't sound abstract or airy-fairy in a year's time).

And certainly when I visit faculty pages they have those handy labels that tell me their research falls into 20th Century American and Gender Studies or whatever their combination is, and then their individual pages tell me their work deals with questions of gender in whatever more specific way. So it's not so much that they only analyze work from a feminist theory standpoint but I suppose, again, the content of what they want to research is pointing them in that direction.

I'm also rambly right now and don't know what I'm saying but I think everyone's responses have given me the answers I needed if not the ones I made the post to receive, haha. Thank you! I'm happy to distract you both from dissertating with my questions at any point desired

Edited July 12, 2018 by indecisivepoet

[Bumblebea]

2 hours ago, indecisivepoet said:

I suppose the reason I was initially worried is that those questions aren't the kinds of things I'm used to seeing in SoPs ("I'm interested in the autonomous identity of Caribbean peoples in pre-colonial American lit", for example -- cultural problems that are relevant to what's going on with marginalized groups today, as you've both mentioned), but instead they are rather more abstract, airy-fairy, aestheticist questions

Yes, I think people often do take one of two approaches when narrowing down their interests--they decide they want to research literature by a particular region or identity (Black Atlantic, Caribbean, queer Southern gothic, post-WWII disability) and look for literature that they can use to explore that specific culture or identity; or they focus on a particular genre, form, aesthetic trend or literary technique and grow their interests from there. Both approaches are completely valid. The former, though, will be more readily identifiable to adcoms; the second has the potential to be extremely rich and fruitful and exciting (IMO), but you need to work to "situate" this approach in your time period, if that makes any sense.

Like (and here's an example I'm just pulling out of my ass so probably not a good one), let's say you're interested in modernist poetry because you love the ways in which authors experimented with form and language. Well, maybe you'll talk a lot about the form but also think about formal experimentation as it might have related to, say, other types of experimentation. Maybe you discover that a certain poet was really interested in social and scientific experimentation (the evidence is in his poetry or other things he wrote), and so you're willing to hypothesize that thinking about poetic forms in connection to social engineering might have been something writers were doing at the time. You're still privileging your interest in form/aesthetics but using it to branch off into other contextual issues. Maybe you're dipping into posthumanism or critical race theory while you do so. You're not pigeonholing yourself as a critical race scholar, but you're using a particular approach to deepen what we know about poetry of the early 20th century. 

So I think that's what some of us are trying to say here. In this day and age it's going to be difficult to "sell" yourself--on either the admissions trail or the job market--as someone who focuses only on aesthetic/formalist issues. But you can certainly privilege your interest in such issues while relating them to other issues. Like, upthread you talked about an interest in the Enlightenment and the industrial revolution. Do you see Enlightenment-era literary forms as providing a particular window into the industrial revolution? Do the literary forms of the era (and some of the aesthetic critics--there are so many of them) give us insight into how people wrestled with massive ideological questions (human rights, women's rights, revolutions, modern capitalism)? So, I would say, don't take the approach that you have to have some kind of cultural studies "angle"--the angle should emerge naturally based on questions that pique you and the surrounding historical contexts. 

And to answer your other question--

3 hours ago, indecisivepoet said:

I guess, like, I know I wouldn't say something like "I'd like to study x literature and x questions from a formalist approach" but I would instead expound upon the formal/aesthetic questions that interest me. So there really isn't a need to name-drop particular brands of theory at all, right? Instead I might be name-dropping particular authors/works or contemporary scholars in my period/maybe within aesthetics & such if I learn more about what's going on in the contemporary world there (lol), but largely focusing on the questions I'm trying to work on and how I arrived at my interest there.

Correct. I don't think you would necessarily have to telegraph that you are combining a formalist approach with Western Marxist theory. Instead, maybe if you're looking at the Enlightenment, you mention X about form and aesthetics and then discuss how you'd bring it to bear on Y aspects of early modern capitalism and industrialization. Or something like that, you get the idea. 

[Indecisive Poet]

@Bumblebea This makes a lot of sense, thank you. My primary period of interest is actually Romanticism, which I think is a period that obviously interacts heavily with its political contexts (French Revolution etc, I'm not so much interested in this) and its position in a dramatically changing modern world (more interested in this, as I've mentioned above). I think once I learn more about the period this kind of dialectic between the formal and the social will be a useful way of figuring my interests because I've always seen my interests in "modernity" and its symptoms -- early capitalism etc -- and in aesthetics/form as two distinct areas. But perhaps I'll find them coalescing as I continue to learn and that will make that angle emerge naturally, as you've suggested.

[Bumblebea]

Yes, Romanticists definitely interact with a lot of social and political theory--you should have no problem finding an angle there! And the French Revolution is pretty well-trodden ground, so if you can push past it and find something new, you'll be golden. 

It occurs to me that you might look at this person's work: https://english.osu.edu/people/risinger.13 I saw him speak at a conference. If I'm recalling correctly, he writes about how we generally don't associate Romantic poets with stoicism--usually we think about the spontaneous overflow of feelings, feelings, feelings--but he finds evidence that they were more concerned with stoicism than we've given them credit for. So, as you can see, there are definitely people out there who are not all about some social justice/identity issue but who stick more with intellectual history, philosophy, and emotion. You're in good company. 

 

[Indecisive Poet]

Thanks for the recommendation, @Bumblebea, I'll check him out.

Funnily enough, I heard a talk from someone at Oxford this morning generally revolving around the poetic "anxiety of influence" but his angle had to do with "injecting" the reasonable, culturally-charged literary studies with mysticism and a sense of the abstract. I'm not sure how he's faring in the academic job market but it was a cool lecture to hear at just the right time; it really resonated with the ways I've been thinking about my own approaches (which are admittedly not "mystical" but still somewhat similar).

[merry night wanderer]

I'm in the same boat (with the same Romanticism focus!) and I just want to say-- I went to NASSR this year, and although there was plenty of cultural theory, there was a strong showing for straight formalist and philosophical papers. I had just the same concern as you, that I was extremely outdated, but people are still doing fresh and interesting work here, even if it often intersects with historicism and critical theory and the like as Bumblebea said.