DRSI, Day 1 Thoughts and Questions

I'm very lucky to be a Fellow in the UW Simpson Center for the Humanities Digital Research Summer Institute, led by my recently graduated colleague from the English Department, Jentery Sayers. The other Fellows are from a range of different fields: genetics, social work, anthropology, comp lit, women's studies, and musicology.

The DRSI is a pilot program, so what each of us will take away from it is uncertain (though I have no doubt that it'll be useful). One of the points that came up in that first meeting is that reflective writing and documenting process is valuable -- not a new insight, but it's good for me to be reminded of it.

There are a few useful questions that I thought were raised just in the first session, and that I want to hang onto.

Neena's Sindhi Voices Project is working to provide an archive for narratives from Sindhi elders (defined as "individuals that, after the 1947 partition of India, left Sindh, stayed in Sindh, migrated from India into Sindh, and those that received emigrant Sindhis"), and a field kit, available in multiple languages, to help people gather those stories. The archive is ubiquitous in literary and historical studies, so I was thinking of the project as an archive, but on reflection, 24 hours later, I think I'm wrong to do that -- the field kit, and other materials like it, that the SVP produces, are central, rather than just being apparatuses that allow the archive to be created. I say this thinking of Neena's comment that one of the responses to the project is excitement from young women who have helped gather stories, because the project is helping them gain primary experience in what journalism is. However, as she herself acknowledged, one of the challenges of the SVP is finding a way to bring the stories to the elders themselves, and that will probably involve something like a traveling exhibit, or other hybrid version.

The question that this raises, for me, is how does the digital facilitate and support the nondigital?

Mary's Georgian in Seattle website is also what I think of as a community cultural site, bringing together stories, and eventually film and music. Its title ties it directly to the population in Seattle, while its eventual goal (if I understand correctly) is to present Georgian culture that informs users both about what Georgia is, and its conflict with Russia. Listening to Mary speak, I was struck by her emphasis on how many people assume that Georgian means "a subset of Russian" (-- in fact I made the same sort of careless mistake in thinking that Velimir Khlebnikov was Georgian because he'd been associated with the Futurist movement in Tbilisi). In one sense, then, the website is meant to be a repository of art that might help outsiders get a clearer sense of what it means to be Georgian. Emphasizing both Seattle and Georgia prompts me to think about the relationship between the local and the global, because the local will never go away, at least; I doubt it will in my lifetime. Can a local area become a satellite of advocacy/culture for a different local area, or for a place to which it's only connected through the technology of globalization? In regards to Mary's website, this is a geopolitical question; however, it has ramifications for the development of digital humanities resources, specifically digital humanities centers, as the landscape of academia shifts towards distance learning.

The other thing I heard, however, was how small the Georgian community in Seattle is: everyone knows everyone. And what I hear in her presentation, and see in her website, is the importance of creating a digital homestead, and I hear in that the echo of the excitement of Geocities neighborhoods, back in the late 90's. Her site, I think, will have a different meaning (and serve a different purpose) for those people who produce it, than for those who read it. When we evaluate the worth of a site, we need to look at its value for both producers and users. Sometimes those will be the same group of people -- but not always.

I'm still thinking about this, because near the end of the day, we were reading Sharon Daniel's narrative of her Public Secrets project in her article "Hybrid Practices," which appeared in Cinema Journal 48.2, as part of a thematic section on digital scholarship and pedagogy. In the article, Daniels writes that "the women who have participated in Public Secrets are highly politicized and are seriously committed to this endeavor. They are quite literally historians and theorists who speak out in an effort of collective resistance" (157). I reacted poorly to that statement, because Daniel was defining historian as someone who had undergone a particular experience, rather than someone who had completed a specific program of formal studies. It's the problem of evaluating the authority of primary vs. secondary sources -- and it's not a new problem to be sure, but it feels perilous when I think about it in terms of digital humanities projects, because the goal of so many technologies is to create the illusion of unmediated, raw, data. The intro to Public Secrets, in which Daniel provides the context for the project, is accompanied by a button in the lower righthand corner of the screen, inviting users to "skip sequence," as though the "real" substance of the project.

And the voices of the women who contributed are the substance of the project -- and they are historians and theorists, and anyone who says otherwise, including me, probably needs to check their privilege. I'm still struck, though, by Daniel's self identification as a "context provider" (her phrase), when the most overtly visible sign of her contextualizing is something that people are invited to skip. Every aspect of the site is part of the context that Daniel is providing, of course -- but it's a graphical context, and easy to dismiss as presentation, rather than as part of the research.

On the one hand, this reminds me of scholarly editions whose editors have attempted to minimize, or erase entirely, their editorial presence, as though they made no decisions, and came as close as possible to traveling back in time to bring you the original texts. I find these efforts disingenuous, even when having a seemingly pristine edition seems useful: the Editor(s) made decisions in producing it; and chances are, the Editor(s) got the privilege of making those decisions by exerting their authority and knowledge in overt ways, i.e., by demonstrating their comprehensive scholarship regarding the author and text.

No one has said, "oh, digital humanities is all about producing primary sources and getting rid of those nasty pedantic scholars," at least, not to my knowledge -- but in thinking about Public Secrets, and how Daniel herself presents it, I realize that it needs to be. (ETA: Or rather, I'm acutely aware that it makes me feel highly vulnerable as a young academic to describe myself as a context provider, in terms of how people might interpret that role, and its connection to the years I've spent in a formal uni program. And I'd like to feel less vulnerable, or figure out why I'm feeling vulnerable and what I can do about it.) Digital humanities methodologies are attractive because they facilitate making primary sources accessible -- but how do these same methodologies affect our standards for good secondary criticism?

This last question is probably the one that has the most relevance for my own project (link coming soon!), which involves specific mentions of prices in a wide range of different types of documents: partially, because my project, like so many, can give the illusion of magically summoning prices together, untouched, from their source texts, for users to compare -- and also, because the project develops directly from an argument that I'm making about the grounds for literary economic criticism. However, I think that needs to be its own post. Suffice it to say, DRSI is going to be a really interesting workshop, and I think I'll get a lot out of it.

what might an interdisciplinary research methodologies course look like?

This morning, I was sorting through readings by E P Thompson, James Chandler, Ian Duncan, Fredric Jameson, and Alex Dick this morning, and juggling various strong opinions on the intersection of literature and economics, literary history, and the relation of history and historicism to the formation of political economy and economics. And I'm getting somewhere good with this, rather than just somewhere horribly muddled. But I felt a bit disheartened, too, because if I think back in my coursework, I can remember a lot of discussions tremendously well, but among them, there's little or nothing about how to develop a research methodology, or choose one (or most likely, a combination of those two) that addresses the challenges of interdisciplinary research.

The closest thing to a discussion like this took place in a Textual Studies course on early printed texts, which in addition to looking at the development of print from Caxton through the 18th century (the professor was a specialist in 18th century novels and dramas), and also covered the history of the emergence of textual studies/bibliography, and its fractious relationship with literary criticism in the 20th century. And that was nice, but it didn't address the issue of textual studies as interdisciplinary, understandably, because the whole point was to valorize it as worthwhile.

What I was wishing for this morning, was the memory of seminar discussions about the challenges of writing literary history, of balancing between close readings of literature and combining them with detailed factual and statistical research, not just on issues like book buying and readership (which I think of as a fairly usual place for lit critics to go to when they want to buff up an argument with historical data), but also poverty, famine, religion, politics, agriculture.* I don't mean that I wish someone had taught me how to do it "right," because it's entirely clear that there's not one single right way -- but I wish I had memories of discussions about the different effects of choosing one approach vs. another.

Part of that is no doubt that I'm working with three fields that really do have a fraught relationship. I can point to booklength discussions about whether literary history is or isn't possible, essays on the same, and quick little daggers flung in reviews about attempts to write literary history, directed, I think, at practitioners from both lit and historical backgrounds. Meanwhile, I'm still talking with several people who work on lit and econ. about the grenade that Mary Poovey lobbed when she published Genres of the Credit Economy in her assertion that literature simply wasn't a good medium for studying economics.

Anyway, assuming that I'm not the only one who wishes that there had been a course to directly address the issues of interdisciplinary research methodologies, here is a rough vision of what a course might look like, and/or might cover.

Disclaimer: I'm in a lit. program, and for the moment, I'm imagining this course based on what I wish had existed. I'd love to hear suggestions that might make it a course that would be useful for students in other disciplines as well. I think it might work best if it were oriented towards interdisciplinary research methods in the humanities, rather than IDRM across the board encompassing everything -- but that's just my temporary, preliminary opinion.

1. I think it would start by looking at disciplines that are so interwoven with literature that we barely even think of them as separate anymore: classics, history, and psychology. It would look at the emergence of literature departments in the 19th century as a separate discipline from classical studies, and probably review the literary/historical biography/New Criticism debates.

I know that these are old chestnuts, but I'd like to think that there are worthwhile and useful questions and points to consider, in terms of the intentions behind these early disciplinary combos, and in terms of the objections that were raised to them. And at the very least, I think that they merit being reviewed as formative influences on the discipline of literature today. The same goes for theory and psychoanalytic criticism.

How much time was spent on any of these would depend on the professor, but I imagine that this would account for between 30 and 50% of the entire course.** Readings, off the top of my head, might include: E.P. Thompson, Terry Eagleton, David Perkins, Rita Felski, Martha Nussbaum, Clifford Siskin, John Guillory, a selection from Theory's Empire...this list is not definitive.

2. From there, the course would shift into a more focused look at specific areas of interdisciplinary research that are currently active. Lit./econ. would be the subject of one week, and it probably wouldn't be a bad idea to spend another week on New Historicism. Other focuses might be anthropology/social sciences, public humanities and/or activism, history of science.

This would be the most challenging part of the course to put together, because the subject material would largely consist of a couple of readings from each of the interdisciplinary areas, in which the authors made direct claims or comments on the nature of the study, or which were otherwise emblematic of the particular area. Alternately, there's no reason that source material couldn't consist of digital archives, tools, etc., where those were available.

3. An exhausted, overcommitted professor could run this course and have it be useful just by using the standard method of having the students sign up to present on the readings and raise discussion questions each week. He or she would provide perhaps the most leadership in the beginning of the course, during those weeks where the focus is on literature and its origins as an interdisciplinary field. (I suppose that if I have an agenda for the course, that's part of it - the idea that literature has always been interdisciplinary).

I don't mean that he/she could tune out for the rest of it, because I would be counting on him/her to provide the sort of guidance and knowledge that only comes with having been a professional academic for longer than grad students have been -- for being familiar with different trends in research that have risen and fallen over time. I strongly suspect, however, that if the students were given some guiding questions to use: what specific goals arise in interdisciplinary research? What types of arguments does IDR lend itself to? What relationships can we see between the disciplines that are joined? -- that they could have lively and useful discussions which might later be useful to them while they were writing dissertation chapters. There's a lot of material that could be covered, but I've had some courses, one in particular, that overwhelmed with reading, and yet the massive avalanche of material, not to mention the syllabus itself, was useful and valuable, and I can still remember it in a fair amount of detail.

4. What would students get out of this? Primarily, an acquaintance with a bunch of readings outside their primary areas, in a context which included focused discussion about methodology -- what the authors were trying to do, and why. Probably, a useful final project/essay for this class would be to undertake an interdisciplinary research project/paper in one's own area. This assumes that the students are interested in IDR, but surely that's a safe assumption. It's an opportunity, then, for the student who's interested in literature and gender, to work on developing an argument that is overtly interdisciplinary, while thinking critically about what it means to be interdisciplinary, in terms of the types of sources used, and the types of questions raised.

Secondly, I hope the class would provide students with a space to think about the politics of interdisciplinary work, and probably the politics of the humanities in general. There's lots of territory there for literature, and surely for history, and library science, and philosophy, too. It's possible that what I really want, and am not fully articulating, is a class on the politics of literary study. (I do want that class.) But what I really wanted this morning, is a class where we might read Stephen Greenblatt one week, and Bruce Robbins Upward Mobility and the Common Good: Towards a Literary History of the Welfare State the next, and later, read Amartya Sen, and ask, in each case, what are they doing, and how, and why? And what does it look like when we discuss them as part of a sustained exploration? Are there techniques that are shared between all three? And assuming that there common techniques, that there are also differences, then what are they?

This is just one way that such a course could be put together. There are tons of others. The brilliant thing is that though such a course couldn't cover everything, that it would prompt insights and questions that would be transferable to other areas of interdisciplinary research, that might provide at the very least, a starting point for thinking about choices that one makes in developing an interdisciplinary research methodology.

But this is only a rough draft. How would you improve it?

ETA: I realized that by some standards, this may not look like an interdisciplinary research methodologies course at all -- surely that would involve techniques like statistics and ethnographic research being taught, right? I heartily agree, and if someone offered that class, I would have camped out all night in front of registration, just to make sure I got in.

One reason I didn't propose that class is that at the moment, my department would say "we don't have anyone who could teach that." I think a lot of departments might be in those straits. But the other reason I didn't propose that class is that there seems to be plenty of interdisciplinary work that shows up in books and essays even without bringing in quantitative research, and yet, is quite central to the author's main argument and/or his or her grounds for raising questions. And maybe that's Cultural Studies 101 stuff, but I sure would love it if we could interrogate it in the process of constructing seminar papers, conference papers, essays, abstracts, and dissertation chapters.




*And I don't just mean how to write Marxist criticism, though that certainly would be an applicable discussion to have.
**I'm thinking in terms of quarters, since that's the only system I've worked in. Semesters might work differently.

interdisciplinary pedagogy for literature and economics: a syllabus

Part one

Part two

Part three

Enough nattering about: here's a syllabus to suggest one way that this course could be taught. It's designed to cover a lot of ground, time-wise, but through a series of careful hops, rather than reading everything, or pieces of everything.

ENGL ###: Where Literature and Economics Meet

We do not think of the disciplines of literature and economics as having much relevance to each other: the former is about stories that are imaginary, and read for pleasure; while the latter is about “real” situations which affect the wellbeing of individuals, cities, and even nations.

This course is about investigating that conflict, and about seeing it not just as a conflict, but as a dynamic relationship between two disciplines that has developed throughout the last three centuries. We’ll be using the techniques of economic analysis to read literature in new ways; as well as exploring how imagination, creativity, and metaphor are vital components in the discipline of economics. Among the questions we will consider are: On what grounds do literature and economics intersect? Can we use math and statistics to study novels and poetry? What happens when we look at literature as a knowledge-producing discipline? What changes when we consider economics as a science of human emotion? How do authors use economic forces to create literary genres? How do economists use storytelling in order to do their jobs?


In the course of the quarter, we will read primary sources in the genres of fiction, poetry, and economic theory; and secondary sources that provide useful contextual information, and help situate both disciplines in their historical context. You’ll learn about how practitioners in each field have critiqued and/or embraced the other, and in studying the way that economic analysis affects the way that literature can be interpreted, you’ll gain greater insight into the reasons for tensions between the two fields today. You will also be able to look at each field separately from very new perspectives: how can literature work as a science? How can economics work as an art?

This course cannot substitute for a traditional economics class, and is not intended to serve as an economics course for non-business majors. Instead, it’s meant to give you the opportunity to explore how the two fields have shaped each other, and to provide you with a foundation for further study involving literature and economics, as well as experience that will be useful in looking at the intersection of other humanities and hard science fields.

By the quarter’s end, you should have developed:

• Familiarity with the common ground between the fields of economics and literature, and the relationship of the two disciplines to each other.

• Knowledge of economic principles and questions that affect literature production.

• The ability to form new critical questions about both literature and economics, and to analyze and discuss the role of each in terms of their categorization as art or science.

• Familiarity with the critical concepts of authority, ideology, and economic behavior, and with the different types of reasoning and literary devices that are common to both literary and economic genres.

• The ability to think critically about how knowledge about economics is distributed through multiple sources.

• Critical thinking skills for searching, gathering, evaluating, and presenting search data.

• Practice writing in different genres, including formal academic essays, and writing for the web.

Reading Schedule

Week 1: Defining economics, defining literature
Reading: various brief excerpts defining economics, and defining literature

Week 2:
Defoe: “An Essay on Publick Credit” (1710)
Maynwaring: “An Excellent New Song, Called Credit Restored” (1711)
Addison: “A Vision of Public Credit” (1711)
Smith: Excerpt, The Wealth of Nations (1776)
Wordsworth: “The Old Cumberland Beggar” (1800)

Week 3:
Malthus: Excerpt, An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798)
Blake: “The Chimney Sweeper” (Songs of Innocence) (1789)

Week 4: “Professional” authors, and publishing in the 18th century
The rivalry of Edmund Curll and Alexander Pope
Pope: “Moral Essays: Epistle IV” (1733)
Pope: Excerpts from “A Further Account of the Most Deplorable Condition of Mr.
Edmund Curll, Bookseller, Since Being Poisoned” (1716)
Curll: Excerpts from “A Compleat Key to the Dunciad” (1728)

Week 5: The emergence of the genre of economics
Ricardo, Excerpt, On the principles of political economy and taxation (1817)
Martineau: Excerpts from Illustrations of political economy (1832-4)
Dickens: “Bill-Sticking,” (1851) and “Shops and their tenants” (1839)

Week 6: The gay science vs. the dismal science
Excerpts from J. S. Mill and Thomas Carlyle
David Levy: Excerpt, How the Dismal Science Got Its Name
Ruskin: “The Veins of Wealth” (1860)

Week 7: Economics in the literary industry today:
Greco, Rodriguez, Wharton: “Changes in the book publishing industry, 1945-2005”
Dustin Kidd: “Harry Potter and the Functions of Popular Culture”
Ted Striphas: “A political economy of commodity codes”
Chris Anderson: Excerpt from Free: the future of a radical price

Week 8: Defining economics, defining literature II: the classification of arts and sciences
Martin Gardner: “Science and the Unknowable”
Karl Popper: “The Problem of Induction”
Paul Kristeller: Excerpt, “The Modern System of the Arts”
George Dickie: Excerpt, Art and Value
Daniel B. Smith: “What is Art for? (NY Times website)

Week 9: The transmission of economic information and authority
Student website presentations

Week 10: The conflict between literature and economics
Review of readings from Week 2 & 3
Focus question: When do literary and economic texts represent the real, and when do they represent the ideal?

interdisciplinary pedagogy for literature and economics, continued

Part one

Part two

The challenge is that there's so much that could be done. As withneedle suggests in comments for part two of this series, you could do econometrics regarding genre creation and production (and Google ngrams makes that possibility all the more fascinating); you could look at character choices through the lens of economic behavior, taking into account that economic behavior encompasses far more than the obvious questions of to buy or not to buy, to invest or not to invest.

In order to make the class most useful, however, I think that it's necessary to find a way of making the integration of lit and economics into a sort of narrative in itself, something that helps avoid the combination simply becoming a gimmick. Narratives aren't an unmitigated good -- the inherited narrative of conflict between literature and economics has done plenty of damage -- and yet I think the best way to counter that damage is to show that different narratives exist as well.

The idea is that literature can help us understand the history of the discipline of economics – how it might have become an art, but instead became a science, and why it has remained a science. This is a slightly different way of looking at Mary Poovey's positioning of imaginative writing as a genre whose original purpose to help mediate value -- if she's correct in doing so (and I think she is), then the implication is that looking at how literary texts confront economic issues differently over time will naturally lead to understanding more about how the discipline of economics, and its cultural context, changed over time. A sustained course of study in lit. and econ. couldn't replace a quarter spent reading David Ricardo, Jeremy Bentham, James Mill, J. S. Mill, William Stanley Jevons, Carl Menger, and Alfred Marshall -- but neither could that course replace one mixing those economists with Ruskin, Dickens, Harriet Martineau, and Charlotte Brontë (or any other combination of literary and hard economic writers).

Today we see imaginative writing as an art, and economics as a science. Whether economics is actually a science, or will remain one, is a question that's been posed implicitly for years in any comment that implies that it takes mysterious talent or arcane knowledge to prosper using economic knowledge. It's posed more directly by David Brooks in a recent NY Times op-ed, which is then dissected by the late Maxine Udall. Notably, Brooks' idea that economics will "blow up" as a field centers around the role of mathematics vs. interpretation (or as Brooks puts it, "a subsection of history and moral philosophy"), and how important each one of these approaches is to producing economic knowledge.*

I think what Brooks is missing, or not addressing, is that the conflict that we're facing now is an echo of debates surrounding the emergence of the discipline of economics originally, both in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. For a long time, depending on the author, a treatise might have an approach that was grounded more in mathematics, or in theory. By the mid-nineteenth century, economics was being discussed and written about as a science (and for that matter, "science" had taken on the meaning that it has in contemporary usage). In 1895, the London School of Economics and Political Science was founded; by 1901 it had been recognized as part of the University of London, and its degrees of BSc and DSc recognized as the first university degrees oriented towards the social sciences. But economics did not become a science, and has not remained one, without conflict.**

One of the costs of remaining a science is that economics has to display a different perspective on data than it would if it were an art. You could do an interesting study on the querelle des anciens et des modernes as it works differently in the arts and sciences, I suspect. But literature’s status as an art, its perspective on looking at information over long periods of time, and from different perspectives than economics, is one of the characteristics that makes it a useful platform for looking at economics. It avoids the tendency to look for norms and averages, and to make assumptions about whether aspects of economic livelihood are endogenous or exogenous (see Udall). It's why the two disciplines need each other.

* David Brooks is not an economist. Udall was, and she defends her discipline against the prediction that it will explode by acknowledging that in order to progress as a science, practitioners of economics need to diversify our methods for "conceptualiz[ing] and relat[ing] our theories to real-world phenomena."

** Just for giggles, check out the Google ngram for "art of economics." It's not as precise as I would like; for one thing, it's hard to tell exactly where single years match up with spikes in the data. But I do think it's interesting how it spikes up and down, and how several of those spikes seem to coincide with memorable financial crashes.

interdisciplinary pedagogy for literature and economics: why it matters

Part one

So, yes, there's a big conflict between economics and the humanities. I think that literature becomes a major face of the humanities in that conflict, and so does art -- there are more stories about flaky artists and poets than there are about flaky historians and philosophers. But that's not really important. What's more important is that the conflict is also between economics and everyone else. That's a grammatically crude way of putting it, I know, but it's also a crude, rough conflict, messy because it can be fought on the grounds of knowledge or on the grounds of wealth. Both knowledge and wealth are forms of power, but they're not quite the same, are they? Or are they? Is one superior to the other, and why? There's no universal answer; and attempting to find one gets into even more unanswerable questions and sensitive subjects, such as the unpleasant question of whether I'm genuinely smart, or just lucky.

One consequence of the baggage surrounding economics is that it ends up buried in layers of mystification, political partisanship, and probably just general caution. Discussing it is like bringing up religion at a dinner party -- a risky idea. But the consequences of our reluctance to attempt to make finance a more public subject* is that financial illiteracy is a huge concern.

My ideas for classes aren't going to solve these problems. It'd be foolish of me to claim anything more definite than that I think they might help, rather than aggravate further. I think my point, my reason for bringing this up, is that it's really difficult to develop an effective interdisciplinary pedagogy for literature and economics without at least some consideration of these issues. What you get, most likely, is the same dull round of literary authors critiquing the market, and an arc that's meant to develop the realization that their thoughts regarding the market were actually more complex.

Let me be perfectly fair and direct: unless you are willing to develop a more interdisciplinary pedagogy, you cannot escape that same dull round. Therefore, it's not the fault of the instructors who teach such classes that they're stuck here; and I do not intend these posts or my ideas as a critique of their work. Institutional support is often low or nonexistent for any interdisciplinary work,** and the combination of literature and economics is not exactly an intuitive combination.

I should also note that the conflict between literature and economics isn't one that's only important to the practitioners and students of literary studies, or to the general population at risk for financial illiteracy. It's also important for economics, as Richard Bronk explains here, in a brief essay about his book, The Romantic Economist:

My starting point for The Romantic Economist was an observation made during seventeen years working in the world of finance. I was struck by an important mismatch between the way economists usually model economies and the way markets often work in practice. Economists normally rely on essentially static equilibrium models to make predictions about markets, and they assume that economic actors optimise their trading possibilities on the basis of rational expectations. Yet, as we are daily reminded, markets are dynamic and creative processes characterized by relentless innovation, self-reinforcing emotional spasms and massive uncertainty. And, in this uncertain world, individuals are driven as much by emotion, sentiment, intuition and imagination as by rational calculation and probability forecasts of future utility.

Bronk, whose book I haven't finished in entirety yet, but which I recommend, is a very rare creature indeed, which is to say, someone approaching the two discourses from a background with more experience in finance than in academic studies of literature. He's not the only one to remark on the importance of emotions and sentiment -- the topic of behavioral finance and its implications for the efficient markets hypothesis (EMH), is being considered by others as well.

And it would be interesting to have a class looking specifically at sentiment in the markets, and sentiment in the novel. But I'm not proposing that, at least, not quite yet.

*And no, I know that this wouldn't be easy, that there are myriad issues of embarrassment and self-consciousness and dangers of ostracization and so forth.

**I am lucky to be at an institution where the support for interdisciplinary pedagogy is pretty damn good.

interdisciplinary pedagogy for literature and economics: some background

I'd like teach classes that integrate literature and economics. Not just classes where the theme is credit satires of the 18th century or Victorian portrayals of the working class, but classes where it's foregrounded that literature and economics are two different knowledge producing disciplines, and that share methods. In both, imagination, metaphor, and logic are vitally important tools.

There's a lot of fractious posturing and well-rehearsed conventional thought about how literature* and economics aren't compatible. Those wacky poets and novelists, they have no head for money; while the cold-blooded economists have no heart, and maybe even no soul.

Among academics, there's also a lot of discussion about how both literature and economics are genres that could be called creative writing -- you write a poem, I write a check, and hey, both of them are creating something that isn't really there!. Money is valuable because we agree that it is, says John Locke; we agree that "a little piece of yellow metal, which would keep without wasting or decay, should be worth a great piece of flesh, or a whole heap of corn" (Sec. 37). It's really no different than the suspension of disbelief that we use when we're reading novels.

It became trendy a while back to suggest that lit. and econ. were rather two halves of one discourse, separated at the fall like the original humans in Aristophanes' account. Mary Poovey goes the farthest in that regard, writing that imaginative writing (as we would define it today) was one of three genres in existence at the end of the seventeenth century, whose main purpose was to mediate value. (The other two were money itself, and writing about money: shipping ledgers, economic theory, etc.) Marc Shell and Kurt Heinzelman, who produced some of the earliest writing on the genre, made similar moves; Heinzelman, if I recall correctly, is the first to wonder whether it would be possible to identify a point at which the discourse of literature and that of money really and truly parted ways for the first time. Money and fiction, like Sophie Zawistowska and Nathan Landau, the original star-crossed lovers. Or maybe more like George and Martha.

This idea of the two as separate halves of the same discipline has been made credible in part by the recognition that the Romantic poets and writers weren't quite so staunchly anti-commercial as previously thought; that their views on the subject were more complex than those of the stock character artists and writers in La Boheme. I'm summarizing here, and compactly, but Philip Connell's Romanticism, Economics, and the Question of 'Culture' provides a lot of historical data on the details.

Truthfully, I'm a little leery of the positioning of lit. and econ. as sundered discourses, because, as Rob Mitchell writes, "while metaphors, tropes, and modes of perception originating in finance may infiltrate literary discourse (and vice versa), if such slippage characterizes every other cultural discourse -- law, politics, medicine, etc. -- then finance and literature begin to seem like arbitrary points of departure and analysis" (8). But it might be right. My problem with it, and this is something I bring up because it's central to the question of a pedagogy uniting the two, is that it ends up being more distracting than useful. It's a move that feels defensive to me, like the lit. side is trying to passively and subtly assert its own importance in relation to finance, by connecting the two.

The conflict between them is huge -- let's acknowledge that. It's not just a catfight -- professional organizations in the humanities are counseling academics to find ways to "emphasize its practical and economic value." It's being called the "Crisis of the Humanities," and looking back over the multitude of articles covering it in the last three years (more than I can list here), there's been little or no development in the argument. It just gets more and more dire as arts and foreign language departments are shuttered.

I don't have an answer to that conflict, or some big insight that solves that problem. But I do think that it, meaning the conflict between the two, needs to be actively considered in the process of developing courses and pedagogy that brings the two subjects together, because otherwise, I don't think those arguments can move forward -- or at least, it's much less likely that they will.

I'll start addressing how we might surmount this problem in my next post in this series.

*(which, for today's purposes, I'm using to mean both the creation of fiction, poetry, and creative non-fiction AND the study of said literature)