Global capitalism doesn’t necessarily entail a global citizenry dedicated to relentless, free-ranging inquiry; sometimes the two can be positively an… - Michael Bérubé

I also tell students that an essay of two thousand words doesn’t give them all that much space to get going. “You’ve only got a few pages to make that argument of yours. You don’t need a grand introductory paragraph that begins, ‘Mark Twain is one of Earth’s greatest writers.’ It’s far better to start by giving us some idea of what you’ll be arguing and why. If you like, you can even begin by pointing us to a particularly important passage that will serve as the springboard for your larger discussion: ‘Not long after the second scaffold scene in The Scarlet Letter, when Arthur Dimmesdale joins hands with Hester Prynne and her daughter, Pearl, Nathaniel Hawthorne asks us to reconsider the meaning of the scarlet A on Hester’s breast.’”

We sometimes play the blues, too, but we don’t talk about which blues club or which blues tradition we’re “affiliated with.” Who knows? Maybe if there were fewer academic workers caught up in the mechanisms of disciplinary and institutional snobbery, we could start thinking about what it means to be a member of a musicians’ union or a players’ union. And then maybe, when we got the workplace blues, we could get together and work it on out.

I suggest, therefore, that we try to see the intellectual challenges of contemporary literary study as enriched by rather than in competition with knowledge of the history of literary theory. In the same spirit, I suggest that we cultivate a determined antagonism to disciplinary territorialism, whether in faculty hiring, curricular design, or graduate admissions. While I have numerous complaints about the profession and various critiques of its mode of conducting business, I have not forgotten that literary study truly is a remarkable field whose appeal lies in its ceaseless intellectual delights and debates.