Against Specialization, A Case For The Literary Generalist

Despite holding a Bachelor’s degree and an MFA, as well as teaching in a university setting, I am not, nor do I ever intend to be, an academic within the currently accepted constructs of that career.

I do not wish to speak ill of academics, for they perform a vital function in society and the specialized knowledge they bring to their fields aid in both the preservation of knowledge and the continuation and cross-pollination of new inquiries. However, it is also this specialization with which I wish to argue.

The primary reason that I have never pursued a tenured career in academia is that my interests resist the type of specialization required of a seasoned academic.

Recently, some of the authors I have read include: Milan Kundera, Virginia Woolf, Jose Saramango, Georges Bataille, Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Allan Watts, Henry David Thoreau, Phillip Roth, Phillip K. Dick, Audrey Niffenegger, Gustave Flaubert, Richard Wright, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, James Baker Hall, Donald Hall, Ranier Maria Rilke, Rachel Carson, Annie Dillard, Robert Grudin, Andrew Meir, etc. This is not a braggart’s list, rather it is a condensed list meant to illuminate the diversity of my reading.

And why shouldn’t a reader develop tastes as broad and contradictory as life itself? Isn’t Alan Watts an appropriate author to read on the heels of Sam Harris? Doesn’t D.H. Lawrence have some insight into life in rural America, even though on the surface his work never touches this terrain? By designating authors to ghettoized sub-sections and evaluating their work only in the context of these ghettos, we effectuate a serious disservice to education.

To read only within a given specialization is to limit the mind and to deny its natural variances. With the rise of the internet, the academic world has seen a collision of influence unparalleled since the invention of the printing press. Never before has so much information been accessible to so many people with so few barriers between reader and source.

The educated mind needs freedom in which to wonder if it is to continue a fertile path of development. Validated Literary Generalists in a university setting would cultivate a broader field of learning. Rather than pursue a field of research that requires being abundantly versed in a given period, critical school of thought, or identity theory, the Literary Generalist as I envision it would be well versed in a few key pieces from many divergent areas. A Literary Generalist would focus on themes or ideas across culture, producing work such as Milan Kundera’s recent book-length essay on the novel The Curtain. Rather than be “experts” in a narrowly circumscribed field of study, the Generalist would paint broad strokes that span space, culture, and time, making seemingly divergent connections to the grand history of literature in ways that speak to a 21st century audience.

As students, we are taught to distrust the generalist. “Scholars” such as Phillip Lopate, Harold Bloom, Garrison Keeler, and Carl Sagan are scoffed in academia. Their work is viewed as pedestrian and damaging to serious academic inquiry.

But is this really the case? What do the works of these “populizers” sacrifice in speaking to a broader audience? Two neglects come to mind: 1) the popularizer often strips their work of academic jargon, and 2) the popularizer is quick to make broad stroke generalizations that can diminish academic nuance within a field of study. Even if these criticisms are true, one must ask—is this really such a bad thing? Can the consciousness raising of a Carl Sagan or a Joseph Campbell really be held negative simply because they avoid the jargon of their fields, electing instead to speak in broad, readily comprehensible language that fosters a greater interest in a particular field of study.

The typical academic’s trepidation of the generalist smacks of an almost delusional paranoia, but it is a paranoia that is easily understood. In a market-driven world, such as our Universities have become, the need to “carve out a niche” is critical to the apprentice academian. Each young Ph.D. candidate seeks to break new ground with their dissertation, to establish a mode of academic inquiry where none has existed before. But how often, at the end of such work, does a new field of inquiry emerge? Too often the Ph.D. dissertation is read only by the panel whose job it is to “critique” the young student and once this sadomasochistic process is complete the dissertation is relegated to a dusty University bookshelf where few will ever crack its spine again.

I imagine that Milan Kundera’s “The Curtain” would be laughed out of these dissertation panels. What could such wide-stroke statements as “[t]he novelist is not a valet to historians; History may fascinate him, but because it is a kind of searchlight circling around human existence and throwing light onto it, onto its unexpected possibilities, which, in peaceable times, when History stands still, do not come to the fore but remain unseen and unknown” possibly mean to a panel consumed by specifics and context. And yet, who has the right to speak for the Novelist?—an academic who merely studies the craft or a writer who devotes his life to creating and understanding that craft.

Inside the capitalist university, surely there must be a place for the Generalist. The educated mind should not be confined to a field of study chosen, often arbitrarily, when the academic is a young Ph.D. candidate. Surely there is place for the generalist, one whom can speak to a “body of knowledge” rather than “a school of thought”, inside the fetid, calcified walls of academia.

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