|
But does Modern Thought and Literature, born in the '60s, remain relevant today? BY JOHN SANFORD Marty Kaplan, a 1975 graduate of the interdisciplinary Program in Modern Thought and Literature, has led an interdisciplinary career. He has served as executive assistant to U.S. Commissioner of Education Ernest L. Boyer; chief speechwriter for Vice President Walter Mondale; deputy opinion-page editor and columnist for the Washington Star; and a Disney studio executive. Today he is associate dean of the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication and director of the school's Norman Lear Center, a multidisciplinary research and public policy center that explores the convergence of entertainment, commerce and society. "I have a hunch that had I not had the sense here at Stanford that it's fine to do everything, I wouldn't have imagined that a life could be built that way," Kaplan said during his keynote speech last quarter at the "30-plus" anniversary celebration of the Modern Thought and Literature (MTL) program. The celebration, which drew a few dozen MTL faculty, alumni and students to the Humanities Center, seemed timed as much to reflect on the program's past as to help assure its future through a galvanizing show of support. Some faculty have suggested that MTL no longer possesses the interdisciplinary cachet it once did; they point out that many other departments and programs now offer opportunities to engage in work that cuts across academic fields in the humanities. MTL supporters maintain that the program continues to offer a unique and vital course of study. In any case, this issue and others are likely to emerge when the Faculty Senate decides in the fall whether to renew the program's authority to grant master's and doctoral degrees, which expires Aug. 31, 2005. Early years MTL was founded by Albert Guerard, the late novelist, literary critic and professor of English. Approved by the senate in 1969, it was at the time one of only a handful of programs nationwide where students could engage in serious interdisciplinary work in the humanities. Guerard probably intended to model MTL somewhat on the History and Literature Concentration at Harvard, said Ellen Hawkes, a freelance writer and author of Feminism on Trial: The Ginny Foat Case and the Future of the Women's Movement (1986), who was one of the program's earliest graduates. But his students had other ideas. "Quite frankly, I don't think Albert realized what he had wrought," she said, adding that her peers in the program were bent on exploring what were then largely uncharted territories of academic scholarship. Hawkes was interested in feminist studies; another student at the time was into Marxist criticism; and another was interested in Latin American studies. "The students were a restless lot," recalled David Halliburton, professor emeritus of English who chaired the program for a short while in 1973 and then again from 1980 through 1985. Indeed, MTL was born at a time of great social and intellectual upheaval in the United States. Protests against the U.S. war in Vietnam had grown massive; subversion was in the air. Social movements, such as feminism and civil rights, were increasingly influencing critical approaches to literature, and new theories, such as structuralism and deconstruction, were trickling over from France. Kaplan recalled that the atmosphere on campus was politically charged. "I wanted to be in an environment where the distinction between scholarship and engagement -- advocacy, being in the world -- was not a hard and fast distinction," he said. "And God knows I encountered it here." He said that, in retrospect, he could distinguish the "tectonic plate shifts of the creation of postmodernism." "Look at the ideas that bit the dust when I was in college for graduate school: in aesthetics, the notion that there are objective standards of good and bad; in literary criticism, the notion that there are right and wrong ways to interpret a text; in law, that justice is beyond politics; in psychiatry, that there are impartial distinctions between normalcy and madness. ... "The project of modern thinking was to dismantle its own foundation. Nothing was saved from rationalism's razor, and I was giddy to watch the masters wield it." But it was probably The Rise of the Novel, by Stanford English Professor Ian Watt, that left the most lasting impression on the program, according to comparative literature Professor David Palumbo-Liu, current director of MTL. Watt, who died in 1999, "was really a fascinating intellectual who saw then the ways in which something like the emergence of the novel as a form could be looked at both aesthetically but also in a social context," Palumbo-Liu said. When The Rise of the Novel was published in 1957, the New Criticism, which was predicated on the idea that literature should be examined without regard for biographical, historical or sociological data, was flourishing. And while Watt did not reject the practice of "close reading" espoused by the New Critics, he was instrumental in pushing literary scholarship beyond self-contained textual analysis; he played a key role in introducing sociology and philosophy, as well as issues of class and economics, to the study of literature. Over the years the character of MTL has changed depending on the philosophy of the chair and intellectual currents of the time, but the essential goal -- to examine the way in which literature and society interface -- has remained largely unchanged, according to Palumbo-Liu. The program encourages a holistic approach to scholarly research. For students of MTL, "interdisciplinary" does not simply mean appending a second discipline to a central one, for example, English and philosophy, French and history, he said. "We don't really put literature at the center but rather as part of a larger scheme of things," he continued. "And the way we approach literary texts is not so much for their literary historical value or as an aesthetic object, but rather as a piece of evidence from which we can get at certain kinds of social and philosophical problems." 2000 review The Committee on Graduate Studies and the Humanities and Sciences Curriculum Committee agreed in a 2000 review of MTL that descriptions of the program's intellectual goals were too vague. But a report issued Feb. 16 of that year by the Committee on Graduate Studies stated that "the founding rationale of MTL ... still seems to have merit." A report issued roughly a month earlier by the Curriculum Committee was more critical: "[The program] places considerable weight on interdisciplinarity, flexibility and an unspecified notion of culture, without however defining the particular field of scholarship in which it trains expertise." Palumbo-Liu asserted that the Curriculum Committee's review process was flawed, pointing out that, except for one person in the humanities, members of the committee were drawn from disparate fields and, he contended, lacked familiarity with interdisciplinary studies in the humanities. "An analogy might be having a physics department reviewed by a committee comprised of a chemist, an economist, a historian and a literary scholar," Palumbo-Liu said in a written report presented to the Committee on Graduate Studies on Jan. 18, 2000. He noted that, in contrast, the committee that reviewed the program in 1995 was composed entirely of humanists. "[MTL] is noted for its flexibility and its openness to innovation, features that are universally regarded as strengths in interdisciplinary work, as they allow MTL to conceive of and capture new phenomena and knowledge that fall outside traditional departmental boundaries," Palumbo-Liu told the senate on March 2, 2000. "One of our concerns about the review process is that it is exactly these interdisciplinary strengths that are being put forward as weaknesses by the Curriculum Committee." The senate voted that day to renew the program for four years -- more than the two-year renewal recommended by the Curriculum Committee but less than the five-year renewal generally granted to interdisciplinary programs that are re-approved. But Palumbo-Liu said he is optimistic about the future of the program, which continues to enjoy a lot of support from distinguished humanists at Stanford and other top universities. "Every serious university needs entities that cut across departmental lines," said history Professor Keith Baker, the J. E. Wallace Sterling Professor in Humanities and cognizant dean for the humanities, addressing the crowd at the celebration. "And I think MTL is exemplary in that regard. And I'm constantly reminded of that, particularly when I meet many or hear of many students and graduates of the program over those 30-plus years. ... Even mavericks need to reinvent themselves, and I think David has done a marvelous job in taking the lead -- in helping to answer some of the questions that are conveyed about MTL and giving very interesting formulations of what MTL might be in the next stage of its existence."
|
Marty Kaplan
Ellen Hawkes
David Palumbo-Liu
Keith Baker
|
Stanford Report, April 9, 2003
