have turned more and more to doing historical work or social sci-
ence work and so it’s been a matter of a kind of internal self-critique,
which is good; it’s very healthy. I like it when I and other English
professors turn their attention to non-literary materials because I
think we’re good readers of them...[Buti]tmaybethat the his-
torians know how to do this better than English professors do.A second panelist, also from English, agrees that “the number of
fellowships that go to people in language or literature [has] really
gone down,” and she draws similar connections between this and in-
creasing deprofessionalization:
A lot of work coming out of the English department is less and
less literary and more and more engaged in sort of cultural stud-
ies or what is called cultural material production. A lot of this
material is familiar to people in history and anthropology and
may just provoke them, in a sense that, “I know this material fairly
well and none of this really computes.” Or else “this seems to be
over-arguing the importance of material which in fact doesn’t re-
ally merit this kind of attention,” or “the actual analysis being for-
warded doesn’t really correspond to my sense about what is going
on in the particular film or this particular MTV video”... To go
in that direction, you’re moving into that sort of no-man’s land or
an open field where everybody can be kind of a media expert.She muses that literary proposals may lose out to ones from history
because
There’s something about people doing history...thereisacon-
crete body of information that you can assess. The interpretation
refers to material that is subject to certain kinds of verification.
Whereas with literary interpretation, part of it has to do with sort
of subtlety, has to do with training, has to do with where you74 / On Disciplinary Cultures