The return of the Generalist

As the size of humanities departments diminishes, graduate programs need to reconsider how narrowly new PhDs should specialize. From the Ivy League to state universities to traditional colleges, liberal arts departments have shrunk, even as the discipline continues to find new methods and questions.

To keep up with the expanding subjects, departments need to train students to become more flexible, capable of teaching and writing in more than one field. If a history department has just one French scholar, it is not enough for that professor to focus only on the newest specialty. Somehow it is necessary to teach it all, to cover seventeenth-century Absolutism along with the colonization of Algeria—a tricky move if there is only one French history professor.

Yet increasingly we are confronted with the reality that if we don’t teach a subject, no one else will.

Lots of professors are less than eager to teach beyond their specialty. How is teaching a distant subject matter going to foster your publication record? If the Cold War is your domain, how is teaching the eighteenth century going to help you finish your book on the Berlin Wall?

Ultimately, we have to move in both fields, the ones in which we teach, and the ones in which we publish. The result may be less narrowly defined publications and less historicist courses. Classes may ask bluntly what does the French Revolution have to do with the Cuban missile crisis or the Iraq war? Essays may more inclined to explore the longue durée.

Either way, we will have to think more broadly.

Corporate University?

Now with the news that GM has had too many brands that need to be pared away, one is reminded of all the downsizing that humanities departments have undergone. The Liberal Arts have been subjected to a corporate model of accounting while GM it seems has been following a different pattern, one that preserved old brands --not unlike preserving old languages. Is Pontiac the practical equivalent of Latin? or Old Hittite? Should we applaud GM for its commitment to history?

It's gone. . . .

What to do in the absence of a good bad sci fi television series? How to carry on, now that the tedium of Battlestar Galactica is over? This is the secret burden of those raised on any version of Star Trek, the yearning desire for the comfort of pompous impossibilities. Network executives have surely anticipated this response, and I am merely unaware of the next installation coming my way for me to loath and desire like cheap candy.

Professorial Voice

Went to a lecture given by an old professor of mine, a famous fellow, who has written more books than years I will probably stay above ground. Eighty books to Sander Gilman’s name:

Sitting back to take in his talk, I was immediately struck with how unchanged he looked, and then most remarkably the sound of his voice. If you don’t see someone for a long time, the voice is the feature you most thoroughly forget.

The sound of a human speaking does not linger like an image or a piece of advice once given. If he is real person, we don’t hear the voice over and over again as if he were Robert Plant. Yet when the voice returns, once you hear your old teacher again, the satisfaction and pleasure of recognition is quite remarkable.

I had heard him speak many times, in class and down the hall, yet this intimate apprehension had been replaced after leaving graduate school by reading and professional commentary. “So what do you think of Sander’s latest book?”

But today what really mattered to me sipping coffee in the audience was the childish happiness of hearing an authority who had trained me speaking familiar truths again, and yet not without surprising turns of thought that reminded me of his continued mastery.

French cartoons in America

Why have Asterix and Obelix not found a huge audience in the United States?

Cartoon fans have asked this question for decades. How many conferences have we sat through listening to number crunchers dissect audience surveys?

How many times has it been suggested that deep down inside American kids don’t t trust French cartoons? How many mothers have worried about the exact contents of the magic potion that gives the protagonists the prodigious strength to defeat an endless array of Roman legions? Who has not wished for a little magic potion just to get through a long day? Don’t Americans want the small Gallic village to survive? Are they not impressed with Obelix’ capacity to eat? Who does not want to try the ancient French recipe for wild boar on a spit? All these questions have buzzed around campus seminars and studio lots for decades.

Now a new essay just published in the Annals of Alternative Media History by Buster Hinds, a young assistant professor at the University of California Cooperative Extension, Mendocino County, has put forward a sharply defined historical thesis: Americans have really always sided with the Romans against the hard-to-capture Gallic warriors.

In the Cold War environment that produced Asterix and Obelix, American audiences clearly preferred for the Roman legions to subdue that one last French village holding out against the Empire. Rather than identifying with the plucky Frenchmen who repeatedly foiled the Roman attempts at conquering the last independent village in what was then called Gaul, Americans could not help but side with Caesar in his unrelenting determination to mop-up France.

Who could not see the analogy between the Viet Cong and Asterix, the fiery little warrior who ran circles around the better trained and better armed Romans. Who did not detect the resemblance between Getafix, the village druid, and Ho Chi Min?

Was it not more than a coincidence that the first Asterix and Obelix film was released in 1967, just as the Vietnam offensive was building up to its greatest strength?

Was it no coincidence that the first comic book was released in 1959 the year Charles de Gaulle became President of France?

Yes, the American viewer, even those of the tenderest age, and certainly those discerning parents ever on the look-out for subversive political messages, recognized implicitly that Asterix and Obelix was more than a celebration of Gallic pride, it was a covert jab at Roman, i.e. American hegemony.

Mozart wants you. . .

John Rounder writes:

Help, It’s Bach week here in the thawing hinterlands. A week of snippets and bits, but not a single cantata in its entirety. The public radio station has a new fund raising campaign running, as well, and they are running ads with nasal English conductors foisting their mother country accent us, urging us to send in money because after all Mozart was a genius, whose music never ceases to astonish us. Having an Englishman Peter Cushin or Christopher Lee sell high culture is a lovely American tradition. Check out this classic ad for classical music “So many of the melodies of popular songs were actually written by the great masters.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tBhGjo9TuAc

Why not have someone in a Viennese accent tell us that Mozart wants you to contribute to public radio? Would that leave the wrong impression?

Venice without James Bond

Cultural discussions outside the academy are so polarized, so simplified and reduced, that there is hardly any position to take that does not react to the NY Times. And then once you leave the scholarly world, the pull of Hollywood seems irresistible.

So the laudatory review in the Times of a new exhibit of Venetian art makes the sixteenth-century seem like a gunfight down at the Grand Canal. Admittedly the curators at the Museum of Fine Arts set the tone with their title, "Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese: Rivals in Renaissance Venice," but the Times review lays down the narrative as a set of dueling threesomes.

Art history is once again a struggle of gigantic egos and skillful hands, first Titian masters oil painting, allowing Venice to muscle in on the game that Florence and Rome had mastered, as if painting where a contest between rival football teams. Then Tintoretto arrives, and immediately the two greats maneuver around each other, emulating and mocking each other. The wrestling match gets interesting—where is Roland Barthes when you need him—with the arrival of the new kid in town, Veronese. Rich patrons are put all aflutter by his courtly manners, the saloon girls swoon for the young dandy with the quick draw. Have we not seen this movie before?

The Times and the museum, presumably as well, cannot think outside the splashing narrative forms of big screen movies. The complexity of great painting is reduced to the nuance of a tabloid headline. It really does not have to be this way. Plenty of foreign papers give slow, thoughtful art reviews for readers who have heard of Venice before. American papers give in all too quickly to the demand to excite the undergraduate masses.