(no subject)

Last thing that would ever happen but: how about a movement of minimalism in literary studies? Seems like, for many texts, there's a finite number of helpful things you can say about them, and an infinite number of distractingly irrelevant or destructively off-base or reductive ones, and it's these that carry the day. How about a new kind of explication journal, jury reviewed, where people make their submissions in the form of individual sentences, paragraphs at most, little key things to bear in mind or zero in on when reading a particular text, passed or rejected from the journal by a vote of "likely" or "not convincingly likely as phrased"? There's, like, four people in history I read expecting regular, expansive accuracy on these matters. Everyone else gets lucky hits, sure, but generally buried in the implausible or predictable (or, increasingly, both at once). I accept that "Andrea del Sarto" will strike each passing generation as a little more mysterious, but the drift involves specifics. The drift to date has also involved specifics. What is it about teachers that hates handling the obvious? It's the best gift you can give most of your students, and the remainder might be best left alone with books of fiction and fact.

I guess the idea is to yoke everything together, thus demonstrating what these texts are supposed to help us do anyway, to model some useful or happy totality of thought: for professors to prove how, for students to see the yoking as well as the specific insights, and try to follow suit with the hows of both without, ideally, repeating the whats without citation. Which notion has some honor to it; so I must actually mean, fire the 40 to 90 percent of professors who yoke badly (and get the facts wrong). Fire 90 percent of everybody is my becoming my default opinion, actually; the remaining 10%, I'm convinced, will be able to handle the consequent unemployment/retraining/low self-esteem crisis.