I could imagine a situation where I might want to say, “I don’t be-
lieve in academic excellence.”... What people usually [respond
to] is that there is an absolute ranking: “I know for certain that
Shakespeare is better than Updike.” And then I think the rest of us
are going to say, “Well, I don’t believe that”... English professors
also hate the form of question, “Is so and so a great writer? Is so
and so greater than so and so?” I’m more drawn to a kind of
worker’s ethic, where it’s impossible for me to imagine a writer
who wouldn’t like to write better than they do. I can’t imagine a
writer thinking, “It’s all okay.”... You might just limit it to a will-
ingness to say some things work and some things don’t work. But
I can’t imagine a world of literature without that.Among academics who hail from other disciplines, there seems to
be a widespread perception that literary scholars are divided, or per-
haps even confused, about issues of quality. For instance, a historian
draws on his experience sitting on grant panels within his university
to describe the situation in English this way:
When you have people from Hispanic languages or English de-
partments, basically they say, “I like this one.” You try to find out
why, and it’s an extremely idiosyncratic thing. They like it because
“I like football, and it’s about football.” People are given a very
wide range of acceptable criteria and the criteria for arguing
about excellence are much looser. There’s not even a lot of experi-
ence in granting in departments. They may have experience in
judging doctoral dissertations, but in granting they tend to not
knowhowtodoitatall...There’sarange of fields, some fields
are in continuous epistemological crisis, others have too much
certainty, and the middle range would be the more fruitful. That
is, people who are willing to have doubts, but at the same time are
not paralyzed, are not arbitrary in their judgment.78 / On Disciplinary Cultures