kind of principle of selection, has been willing to challenge their
premises, has been willing to consider data even after you’re well
along in a study that completely challenges and overgrows the hy-
pothesis you’ve been making. Those kinds of things I think...are
things that every field can recognize as good...Ifsomebody
doesn’t know the theoretical and critical literature on their sub-
ject, that tells you something right there. It tells you they haven’t
been doing their homework, [haven’t] joined what I would call
the intellectual conversations.Even in the absence of such relativistic views of excellence, the
question of how to evaluate literary studies scholarship would re-
main open. Until the recent past, mastery of close reading, defined as
“making very careful observations about how the language works,
about how meaning is produced by the interactions of individual
words and their allusions to other literary texts,” as one English
professor explained, played an important role in determining the
disciplinary pecking order.^30 Three simultaneous developments have
rendered these skills less central to the practice of the literary craft,
and thus have created a crisis in how literary studies scholarship is to
be evaluated. First, the critique of the canonization process has gone
hand-in-hand with a critique of privileging the written text, which
has fed into a broadening of the disciplinary agenda toward cul-
tural studies, defined as the critical analysis of visual, performative,
and literary texts. This shift has transformed the meaning of close
reading: deciphering popular culture requires less erudite, properly
scholarly (that is, highly legitimate) knowledge than does studying
canonized authors. Second, English scholars have widened their in-
terests to include history and anthropology and have become more
concerned than they were in the 1950s with locating literary texts
within their social and historical contexts. In developing histori-
cal skills, English scholars may have indirectly lowered the value of
purely literary analytical tools within their broader analytical tool-
72 / On Disciplinary Cultures