history, and certain forms of maybe philosophy. But when it
comes to literature, there is absolutely no [a priori prestige]...
[T]he sense in which projects [in English literature] are dismissed
or rejected or questioned tend[s] to be more confident than the
way other projects are evaluated...[O]ne of the real question
marks is: Are these literary projects really calling upon informa-
tion the way history does, or [on] a body of knowledge or a back-
ground that we can really trust to be scholarly in any even sort of
commonsensical sense of that word?Other panelists are more optimistic concerning the evaluation of
excellence, disciplinary consensus, and the fate of the field. Pointing
to the evaluation of student papers, rather than evaluation of jour-
nal submissions or book manuscripts, another English professor
explains that English scholars frequently agree. By supplying exam-
ples of areas where judgments of quality are routinely made, he adds
considerable nuance to how the question of excellence is conceptual-
ized in the field:
I mean, people don’t have the same views or the same preferences
or the same tendencies or allegiances, but they usually have the
same views about what constitutes excellence. So you could, say,
grade a student paper with someone who is totally ideologically
opposed to you, and you would recognize marshalling of evi-
dence, strength of argument, persuasiveness, an element of flair,
originality of argument. You could recognize those whether you
happen to like that kind of thing or not. I don’t know if this is
true in other fields, but there is something slightly schizophrenic
here that English professors like to claim they can’t do, but they
do it every day when they’re grading papers.He believes that “the left wing of literary studies” reproduces the
notion that there is no agreement.
On Disciplinary Cultures / 77