Michael A. Winkelman, grammaticorum equitum doctissimus @TotalGrammarCop
18 November 2019
The New Trans-Mediocrity in Literary Studies;
or, The Sovereignty of Salierization
Part 2
IV. Terms for Our Times
L’hypocrisie est un vice à la mode, et tous les vices à la mode passent pour vertus.
—Molière, Dom Juan, ou le Festin de pierre
What rhetorical devices best delineate the ethos of typical Humanities professors
at this moment? The terms hyperbole and irony would surely have their champions. With
exaggeration running rampant across campus, hyperbole would be an awesomely extra
answer. From the inflated grades handed out like Halloween candy to the ways that
crowing faculty boast about their impotent, inconsequential copycat works, puffery
aboundeth. The kudos drift down like glittering snowflakes in a romanticized snow-globe
college wonderland, but the quality of instruction and research has declined. It is like an
ideal gas law for the liberal arts: as the positive epideixis escalates, the actual value drops
in inverse proportion. Ergo, while students may walk away after graduation with shiny,
gilded transcripts, they remain academically adrift: unlettered, unskilled, clueless. These
infantilized Gen Zers, cocooned in safe spaces, blanketed with trigger warnings, and
taught to privilege feelings over facts, are decidedly unwoke in many ways.27 And as for
the so-called original scholarship of their teachers, what they boldly proffer as new and
true contributions to human knowledge is actually tepid, unadventurous pabulum. Such
publications function primarily as résumé-fillers and loyalty oaths of ideological
soundness—virtue-signalling pointed at PRT committees more than anything anyone will
actually read and learn from. For instance, one frequently encounters Ivory Tower
poseurs marketing their buzz-worthy novelties in Digital Humanities like this: “drawing
on crowd-sourced analytics, my current intervention seeks not only to map out how trend
X has gone viral online, but also to help curate the vital project of a neoteric poetics of X
in the public sphere of cyberspace.” Such extravagant embellishments, however, induce
massive amounts of irony: the hype is increasingly hollow.
While either of those words would fit well enough, I would hereby like to propose
their kissing cousin paradiastole as the trope du jour. Paradiastole is a concept from
classical oratory, revived by rhetoricians in the age of print, that means the redescribing
of vices as virtues. For instance, Greek dudes today might dub their drunken,
homophobic, misogynistically toxic fraternity “a brotherhood of good fellowship,” while
on the distaff side, young women might deem their catty, party-girl frenemies “beloved
sorority sisters.” Early Modernist Quentin Skinner has traced out this figure’s ancient
inception and sixteenth-century reappearance in an erudite article in the essay collection
Renaissance Figures of Speech. He shows that this exculpatory maneuver, even more
than most persuasive tricks, had somewhat sketchy, slimy connotations. It reeked of the
rationalizing of misdeeds, back-scratching, shystering, and the exoneration of faults. In
The Garden of Eloquence (1577), Henry Peacham called it an “instrument of excuse
serving to self-love, partial favor, blind affection, and a shameless person,” used mainly
for “the better maintenance of wickedness” (quoted in Skinner, p. 161). Then as now,
satirists condemned notorious deployers of paradiastole, mocking those sell-outs who
weaponized alternative facts to move ahead in the rat race. Henrician courtier Sir Thomas
Wyatt, for instance, presented a scathing indictment of such fashionable spin-doctoring in
his Horatian satire “Myne Owne John Poyntz.”28 Unlike his dissembling, dishonest peers
at the Henrician court, Sir Thomas cannot “say that Pan / Passeth Apollo in music
manifold; / Praise Sir Thopas for a noble tale, / And scorn the story that the Knight told”
(48-51). He is simply unable to lie—neither about the aesthetic quality of the two
divergent Canterbury Tales to which he alludes, nor about more substantive matters of
state. As he declares: “My Poyntz, I cannot frame my tune to feign, / To cloak the truth
for praise without dessert, / Of them that list all vice for to retain” (19-21). He means he
cannot commend the immoral and iniquitous with false flattery. For this policy of candor,
unsurprisingly, he faced heavy corporal punishment and was rusticated, time-honored
outcomes for speakers of truth to power (see lines 77-103). Paradiastole, though, does not
always have to be so negative: Brutus justifies the assassination of Julius Caesar in
Shakespeare’s tragedy as the purging of a tyrant infecting the body politic, not a straight-
out murder. This remains a debatable issue in those unfortunate places where democratic
processes have broken down and prescribed legal mechanisms for removing entrenched
autocrats are ineffectual—another illustration of the timelessness of our endangered
humanities.
Paradiastole often occurs with its converse meiosis, which means a spiteful attack
or malicious attempt to diminish something or someone that is actually noteworthy.29
Cultural theorists shackled in Plato’s Cave who impugn, belittle, or slam consilient,
biocultural New Humanist interpretations, which are drawing from cognitive
neuroscience and Darwin’s enlightening discoveries to enrich our understanding of the
arts, as “reductive,” “essentialist,” “determinist,” or “imperialist scientism,” exemplify
this related practice.30 This is part of a broader War on Science, an assault on reason in
which postmodernist educators have been complicit, with all that entails.
When a close observer considers the state of the liberal arts at most campuses
right now, the burnished paradiastole seems well-nigh blinding. (And don’t even get me
started on Education programs!) Pedagogical and scholarly shortcomings have become
not embarrassing liabilities to hide, but rather strengths to humblebrag about. The ways
that derivative, trivial publications, embedded with clunky jargon and based on dubious
post-structuralist theories and fatuous identity politics—aka grievance studies—are
extolled as unprecedented, provocative, stylish contributions to knowledge, and therefore
cause for preferment, sound more like something penned by satirists such as David Lodge
or Jonathan Swift than like careful, rational appraisal.
More significantly, teaching has come to epitomize this reversal in meaning.
Humanities classes generally do not challenge pupils to think critically, read closely,
demonstrate mastery of course content, or otherwise foster intellectual growth. Nor are
sharp, logical, in-depth written arguments, nor what was once upon a time referred to as
“the ol’ college try,” expected. Instead, most courses offer feel-good politically-correct
lite edutainment. However, those attributes make them fun, popular, positive learning
experiences as registered in student evaluation surveys, the all-important customer review
of the satisfied consumer. A compelling body of both quantitative and qualitative studies,
however, has proven that such evaluations are fundamentally worse than worthless;
according to education expert Kevin Carey’s summation, they “provide little useful
information other than an inverse correlation to academic rigor.” In short, sophistry,
mediocrity, an absence of standards, and the adoption of faddish techno-gadgetry, rather
than deep learning or contemplation, have become the cardinal virtues of the twenty-firstcentury neoliberal university. Lest we forget, the pitiful thrivers exalting these traits are
the ones serving as advisors, mentors, and role models to undergraduates. But, by
wholeheartedly embracing these new, improved, sparkly values, utterly compromised
teachers signal their “professionalism” and good institutional fit, and thereby keep the
enterprise running smoothly.
The long-gone taxonomists of elocutio were, by and large, committed to
encouraging informed debate in the agora or lecture hall for the benefit of the
commonweal. The Renaissance and Enlightenment philosophers they trained accepted as
axiomatic that reason and logic would lead to truth. Of course, as savvy as they were at
parsing verbal ornaments in Latin or Greek, or mooting utopian ideals, their lives were
spent ages before the development of modern data science or evolutionary biology, and
the concomitant transformation in our understanding of human nature they have led to.
According to the latest work in behavioral science, one take-away of this revolutionary
New Learning is that even very well educated people do not magically favor veracity or
reality or some sort of absolute Goodness; generally even they are happier preferring to
believe what is most comforting or self-serving, howsoever mendacious or casuistical the
underlying reasoning.31 We can now see, then, paradiastole’s deep roots in the psyche. Its
epidemic manifestation amongst the literati should not really surprise those aware that the
default ground state of institutions is one where currying favor, nepotism, dirty tricks,
unprincipled careerism, callous office politics, dishonesty, spineless conformity, and
other habits conducive to a discourse of paradiastole flourish.32
My attempt here has been to explicitly describe academic fashion à la mode—this
season’s unveiling of the Emperor’s New Clothes. Somehow, it seems to me, humanist
higher education has become another bureaucratic entity largely defined by its
deficiencies. If one peers into its very core, one finds corruption and bad faith, worms
consuming the apple.33 Those actually promoting “traditional” humanism, in contrast, are
barely subsisting in the inhospitable hinterlands, fighting a losing, asymmetrical guerrilla
war against the brute imperium of market forces. At this moment, meanwhile, those
calling themselves liberal humanists have come to uncomfortably resemble many of the
tainted apparatchiks within organizations they ostensibly oppose and critique, like the
scandal-plagued, destructive “amateur” college sports industry, or the inherently sinful
Catholic Church, or the post-truth, illiberal conservative political party in America.
Within the hallowed halls of academe, the problems have become structural, ingrained in
the very fabric of the enterprise: not bugs but features. There’s a stiff-necked, neopuritanical eagerness to point fingers while burying all consciousness of one’s own
fallibility or shortcomings. This precarious, uncomfortable situation is not though really
all that unusual: civilizations rise and fall, authority erodes, societies disintegrate
internally, things fall apart, the center does not hold. Why should higher education be
immune to such profligate decadence?
Sir Walter Raleigh, another Renaissance English polymath a bit later than Wyatt,
composed a timeless satirical poem about this state of affairs entitled “The Lie.” (Like
Wyatt, Raleigh was imprisoned in the Tower at His Majesty’s pleasure; unlike Wyatt he
was executed there.) In “The Lie,” the speaker’s soul is sent on a “thankless errand”:
telling the smug and powerful that they are hypocrites. He commences by taking on the
bedrock foundations of early modern society: the royal court, which was the seat of
government and earthly authority, and the Church, responsible for the spiritual welfare of
the realm:34
Go soul, the body’s guest,
Upon a thankless arrant, [errand]
Fear not to touch the best,
The truth shall be thy warrant:
Go, since I needs must die,
And give the world the lie.
Say to the Court it glows,
And shines like rotten wood,
Say to the Church it shows
What’s good, and doth no good.
If Church and Court reply,
Then give them both the lie. (1-12)
The expression “to give the lie (to someone)” means to accuse someone directly and
openly of being untruthful. Raleigh does not exempt educators from his charges: “wit”
excessively “wrangles / In tickle-points of niceness,” while “schools … want
profoundness / And stand too much on seeming” (43-44 and 63-64; “want” means
“lack”). Given both how much more is empirically known and potentially available in our
age, and how essential an informed citizenry be for a healthy democracy to function, this
systemic failure seems, if possible, even more perilous now than four centuries ago.
This status quo can hardly be sustained indefinitely. Perhaps it is not too soon for
aficionados of classical genres to dig out their reed pipes in anticipation of the next big
thing: viz., pastoral elegy. Since like a train-wreck celebrity addicted to adrenaline,
danger, and drugs, the Humanities seem intent on willful self-destruction, it would only
be fitting, in the spirit of paradiastole, to chant a requiem of lamentation recounting how
they passed mildly away at a ripe old age.
V. Qu’ils s’en Aillent! Tout!
PRINCE OF ARRAGON: O that estates, degrees, and offices
Were not deriv’d corruptly, and that clear honor
Were purchas’d by the merit of the wearer!
How many then should cover that stand bare?
How many be commanded that command?
How much low peasantry would then be gleaned
From the true seed of honor? and how much honor
Pick’d from the chaff and ruin of the times
To be new varnish’d?
—William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice (2.9.41-49)
Something fundamentally tragic plagues literary studies right now. It’s not just
that the major is rapidly going down the tubes, it’s also that powerhouse interest groups
are dead set against indispensable improvements or quality control. Instead, stakeholders
with skin in the game are doubling down on a losing bet. As Professor Thomas Benton
points out in his Academic in America column:
Our “failing” system of higher education actually is working the way it is supposed to,
according to the dictates of the market. The patterns of selection and resource
allocation—and the rising costs of college education—are not driven by educational
needs so much as they are the result of competition for the most enjoyable and least
difficult four-year experience, culminating in a credential that is mostly a signifier of
existing class position. (“A Perfect Storm,” CHE, Feb. 25, 2011, A45)
Still, though, if some good soul had the wherewithal to implement a model dream vision,
what might she create? The first step would be to bid adieu to the despotic hegemony of
Theory and the multiculturalist crowd, and to return canonical great literature about
fundamental questions to the syllabus. There would be room for valuable work from
assorted perspectives, but the discredited, counterfactual follies of postmodernism, “one
of the great intellectual frauds of the twentieth century,” would be long gone.35 In turn, a
special warm welcome would be extended to New Humanists, who are doing the most
vibrant, revitalizing research and teaching at present. They’re a tiny minority at present,
but hopefully they’ll turn out to be like the mammals who supplanted the dinosaurs. As
Brian Boyd explains in “Getting It All Wrong: Bioculture Critiques Cultural Critique”:
Until literature departments take into account that humans are not just cultural or textual
phenomena but something more complex, English and related disciplines will continue to
be the laughingstock of the academic world that they have been for years because of their
obscurantist dogmatism and their coddled and preening pseudo-radicalism. Until they
listen to searching criticism of their doctrine, rather than dismissing it as the language of
the devil, literature will continue to be betrayed in academe, and academic literary
departments will continue to lose students and to isolate themselves from the intellectual
advances of our time. (19)
A perfect department would not result from replacing one monolith with another, but it
would have substantial upgrades across the board. For instance, rather than the silly,
shrill, and sour imputations of feminism as practiced of late, investigations into gender
would take into account Homo sapiens’ deep history as ultrasocial, loquacious, dimorphic
primates who are driven by their selfish genes. Students, that is, would learn something
about archetypal conflict and resolution from reading Darwin, not Deleuze. Rather than
yet another tedious intervention condemning non-P.C. storylines, they might ask why
fairy-tales and romantic comedies have such staying power, or what their messages and
purposes regarding the human mating game are.
More generally, standards would be raised significantly across the board. To
ensure this, there would need to be much greater answerability and openness in hiring
and promotion. Many have gotten so used to “rituals of backchanneling, influence
peddling, and whoremongering,” alongside the usual log-rolling, cronyism, embellishing,
mystification, and faddishness currently in effect, that relatively unbiased peer review
may seem impossible, but it really isn’t.36 Rather, it is more a question of political
priorities and willpower.37 Feedback to publications could evaluate the originality (or lack
thereof), the depth or shallowness of the investigation, and the clarity of the writing if so
desired. As a related point, since as everyone recognizes, entirely too much is being
published, especially with online journals of mixed quality proliferating while university
presses and libraries face financial hardships, an emphasis on quality over quantity, and
contractual requirements for ongoing scholarly productivity after tenure would help. A
single great article, a succinct yet masterly treatment of an important issue, or a topnotch
edition would serve the greater good better than the deluge of undistinguishable garbage
we’re now inundated with (clearly many of the details remain to be figured out).
This accountability would carry over to the classroom, which is actually where an
influx of high-quality instructors could end up doing the most good. As the 2012 Chicago
public teachers’ strike and other cases show, how to evaluate teaching fairly isn’t easy.
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? The shortcomings of most proposals have been
enumerated: (1) the numerical measurements of student learning favored by
edumetricians result in teaching to the test. That is, they lead to quickly forgotten rote
memorization and fail to account for extracurricular factors or profound critical learning
take-aways. (2) Observations are somewhat artificial and subject to subjective biases. (3)
Student evaluations of teaching are essentially worthless; according to education expert
Kevin Carey, they “provide little useful information other than an inverse correlation to
academic rigor.”38 Nonetheless, the hurdles here are more a matter of preferences than
methodologies. Maybe it would include a judicious mixture of quantifiable and
qualitative factors—tracking of student scores and long-term outcomes down the line to
look for value added; checking distribution averages to reveal grade inflation; clear
evidence in terms of class materials for synoptic critical thinking about a field; and
maybe even periodic standardized retesting for profs too. What I’m suggesting, then, is
that if sharp, rigorous, clever teachers who truly provided students real opportunities for
developing intellectual competence as readers and writers, along with comprehensive
content mastery, were what parents, citizens, legislators, school boards, and pupils
wanted, we would readily find a way to get and keep such people, as is done in Finland.
Teaching could learn something from sports, where at best there is healthy competition
on a level playing field with safeguards against cheating, and open evaluation and results
are available.39
The elephant in the room here is tenure. Given the lay of the land, we’re faced
with unpalatable options. If the beleaguered tenure system as it presently stands is
basically preserved, and assuming tenured Theorists and other deadweight fakers don’t
miraculously transform, the legacy costs of the status quo would mean writing off a lost
generation in English.40 It’s comparable to professional sports teams that sign over-priced
All-Stars to long-term mega-contracts, leaving depleted, losing rosters when said Stars
are over the hill or succumb to injury while still disproportionately eating up a fixed
budget. And since prominent schools have a higher proportion of tenure-stream faculty,
the effects are exponential, in terms of mis-trained grad students and editors at top
journals and presses, like an uncapped oil spill at a river’s source polluting everything
downstream for a very long time. Should this model predominate, English will be lame
for the foreseeable future.
Plan B would recognize the extraordinarily perilous and precarious circumstances
at present, and would mean implementing a post-tenure review. That is, those who don’t
measure up as effective scholar-teachers would be cashiered. The two-fold justification
would be that tenure had been granted under false pretenses and that the incipient
catastrophe necessitated such draconian measures. It would be a “reason of state”
argument. Both premises seem demonstrably valid, but the blowback would be fierce.
Like radical invasive surgery or chemotherapy, such a fraught last-ditch effort to save a
terminally ill patient is itself traumatic. Moreover, self-interested poseurs would surely
decry it as an attack on their academic freedom or a political witch-hunt, and many would
hold that the principle of tenure should even trump the fate of English as a serious
academic discipline: nicer and easier to watch it collapse gradually than to try to rescue it
by such radical means. And, as Angelo’s actions in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure
reveal, finding impartial judges gets tricky. The rabid reactionary pushback against
would-be Reformers of the decadent late medieval Catholic Church (e.g., the burning of
heretics) provides the paradigmatic case in point.
A more benign middle way would entail that schools with the flexibility and
opportune opening slots begin the process, one appointment at a time, of putting together
a great lineup. Potentially, there are all sorts of exciting, innovative research and teaching
projects worth undertaking once the search for the Truth and appropriate classroom
standards are reprioritized. It’s hard to imagine a more golden opportunity for some
program to improve by breaking rank, by letting elite big-name universities compete for
the authors and editors of On Making Sense: Queer Race Narratives of Intelligibility
[sic!] by Martínez, or Why Internet Porn Matters by Grebowicz, or Hard to Swallow:
Hard-Core Pornography on Screen, edited by Hines and Kerr.41 The study of Psychology
has apparently managed to successfully reverse course in a similar manner. The sheer
validity of findings emanating out of cognitive neuroscience, its underlying experimental
modus operandi, and evolutionary explanations for human behavior were adapted—albeit
belatedly and piecemeal—and twentieth-century follies relegated mostly to historical
footnotes. Similarly, like the Phoenix, the study of literature and language could be
reborn. Again, if serious reform were enacted, there could be drastic changes for the
better.
VI. Conclusion
what a paltry pathetic thing
to honor Mediocrity as your king
and when the king lets out a fart
they love the smell with all their heart.
—Don Burness, “My Enemies,” 9-12
The all-around debility of English literary studies has grave consequences.
Perhaps our current predicament is the inevitable fallout of larger socioeconomic and
cultural forces, as implacable as the gods on Mt. Olympus. Alternately, maybe blame
falls on the shoulders of the many weak-willed individuals who collectively abused their
power and authority rather than doing the right thing. Either way, the situation is bad
news for those bookish folk who believe in the value of an excellent liberal arts
education.
In the meantime though, during this golden age of information and knowledge the
likes of which humankind has never previously experienced, it’s an awesome time for
contemporary English professors to follow their patron St. Salieri, basking in the
applause echoing around their campus caves.
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NOTES
27 See Twenge, iGen.
28 Quotations of Wyatt and Ralegh are from Sylvester, ed., Sixteenth-Century Verse. Wyatt was a courtier
under King Henry VIII, a friend to Anne Boleyn, the first sonneteer in English, and a genuine Renaissance
man.
29 The best example I’ve ever encountered occurs in the black comedy Pretty Persuasion (2005). In one
scene in this darkly satirical film set in Los Angeles, two rich American girls passive-aggressively shame
their new immigrant friend for hoping to become a medical doctor helping patients in the Global South,
rather than doing something worthy, such as becoming a famous actress, model, or celebrity.
30 See Carroll, Reading Human Nature, 2011; Pinker, “Science Is Not Your Enemy,” 2013.
31 See Kahneman, Thinking.
32 For striking anthropological critiques of institutional culture, highly relevant to understanding our
craptastic twenty-first-century corporate university, see Graeber, The Utopia of Rules, 2016; Schmidt,
Disciplined Minds, 2000; Strathern, ed., Audit Cultures, 2000; Veblen, The Higher Learning, 1918. N.b.
Simpkin’s Law states that the key attributes of successful new workers are abject groveling, pandering, and
flattery to veterans; merit per se is relatively insignificant if not detrimental.
33 On institutional corruption, see Thompson, “Theories of Institutional Corruption”; Washburn, University,
Inc.
34 More recently, see the classic Calvin and Hobbes cartoon in which Calvin observes that the utter
breakdown of authority is “like a six-year-old’s dream come true” (Watterson). Cf. Ulysses’ speech on
“degree” in Shakespeare’s problem play Troilus and Cressida (1.3.75-137). He bemoans the topsy-turvy,
dysfunctional situation in which disorder, insubordination, raw power, and appetite have overturned law,
rules, propriety, and civility.
35 Wells, Shakespeare’s Humanism, 240.
36 Berlinerblau, Campus Confidential, 124.
37 See Tumbleson, “A Confluence of Crises”; Kett, Merit.
38 Carey, CHE, Aug. 2, 2013, A26; see also Flinn and Crumbley, Measure Learning; Johnson, Grade
Inflation.
39 Arguments over the notion of pure intellectual merit go back to the medal gradients in Plato’s Republic
and continue unabated. Lord Michael Young, who coined the term “meritocracy,” meant it satirically in his
1958 book on British education and society. For a lucid, logical recent intervention, see Pinker, “The
Trouble with Harvard.”
40 Even these modest proposals for tenure reform by-pass the related issue of adjunct faculty, now teaching
an increasing number of classes at most schools without job security, academic freedom, health insurance,
a living wage, or long-term commitment to the institution. It’s another huge problem, as many
commentators have observed. N.b. public school systems have begun to dismantle tenure, to uncertain
long-term effect.
41 That it’s become difficult to distinguish between reality, satire, and porn within media studies or
mainstream news outlets is itself depressingly suggestive.