Academic Performances
Session Coordinator: Peter Rawlings
Univ. of the West of England, Bristol

Academic Feeling

“the learned class . . . are great sticklers for form, precedent, gradations of rank, ritual, ceremonial vestments, and learned paraphernalia generally”—Thorstein Veblen, Theory of the Leisure Class

“Academic Feeling” looks at one formative but barely analyzed dimension of academic life: the inculcation of affect. Most work on professionalism deals with the structural protocols and criteria through which one attains professional standing. Accordingly, many of the keywords of academic life, such as “the life of the mind,” “tenure,” “national recognition,” and “merit,” are usually seen as designating objective criteria. I argue instead that they often designate affective criteria. This affective realm informally but tangibly constructs us as professionals and governs what we do.

In an article on “The Other Politics of Tenure” I have examined how tenure, despite its official rationale, most often signifies an unwieldy cluster of affects that indeed inflects what we do. In another article, on “Name Recognition,” I examined how a central code of our humanistic profession is citation, and that it in fact offers one of the primary affective rewards of academic life. In this talk, I look at the nettlesome concept of merit and the criteria by which we assess the quality of academic work (and hence deservedness of rank and status).

In the early part of the century, as David Shumway notes, “soundness” was the primary term of approbation in the humanities. In the mid-century, in Lionel Trilling’s era, it was “intelligence.” I believe that the current term of approbation is “smart.” The attribution of smartness purports to be a judgment of merit, but therein lies a contradiction. Merit implies a formal code that one can objectively measure: one attains it through the level playing field of equal opportunity, and earns it through hard work. (Thus the university is not a democracy but a meritocracy.) However, smartness is precisely unearned; it is an ineluctable quality that one is either deemed to have, or not have. It is an aristocratic rather than meritocratic criterion, that projects a natural quality or bearing that is manifested.

In my view, smartness registers modes of academic performance, mannerisms, style, and ethos. It designates status, often self-confirming elite group status; it justifies status not earned through work but through the mutual recognition of ineluctable personal qualities. It is a heightened term because it assures the class position of academics, distinguishing them from those outside professional quadrants, particularly from the working class (they do higher order “brain work” rather than lower order working with one’s hands); from other professionals, who have a less pure relation to intellect; and within academe, from lesser professionals.

Jeffrey Williams
University of Missouri

The Campus Novel in Drag: 20 th Century British Women Writers Performing Academia

Since Vera Brittain’s codification of the 1929 class as the ‘Somerville novelists’ and Susan Leonardi’s continuing study of this group of writers, no one has really pursued the problematic that both of these critics raise: that of the women academic in twentieth-century Britain. The main issue underlying the works of writers such as Muriel Jaeger, Doreen Wallace, Dorothy Sayers, and Brittain herself is the historical, cultural, and ideological position of the woman intellectual in twentieth-century British society. These novelists explored issues such as the intersectionality of class and gender in academia, fears that true intellectual pursuit is dangerous to women’s lives, their health, and their happiness, and the difficulties women academics have in reconciling (or choosing between) their professional and domestic roles.

The lack of criticism and research on this problematic suggests that this thematic was an isolated incident, one that arose only out of this particular group of women writers. However, what these women have, in fact, achieved is to create a micro-tradition within twentieth-century literary studies. When one analyzes contemporary texts such as Margaret Drabble’s The Millstone (1962), Anita Brookner’s The Debut (1981), and even Jeanette Winterson’s Gut Symmetries (1997) it is clear that performing gender and intellect is a fascination for educated women writers. These women are writing within and supporting a literary genre that explores the systems that contribute to—and connect—women’s oppression and women intellectuals’ dissatisfaction. While recent interest in feminist epistemologies and interdisciplinary studies are evidence of women’s influence on scholarship and teaching, researching the problematic of the woman intellectual is key in understanding the past and future of academia as well as the ways in which we create knowledge. The fact that this tradition, unlike the classic male campus novel, has been virtually ignored until now only further emphasizes the need to reclaim these women and their experiences in order to better understand their conflicted relationships with gender roles, education, culture, and writing.

Understanding women’s conflicted relationship with “performing” scholarship in literature as socially and historically constructed provides a contextual as well as a theoretical basis to these concerns in higher education. I propose to present a paper which explores this persistent anxiety with women’s intellectualism as represented in the works of the Somerville novelists and current writers such as Drabble, Brookner, and Winterson in order to analyze the implications not only for our understanding of the relationship between gendered identity and women’s writing, but also for feminism, literature studies, and the future of the academy as well.

Ann McClellan
Eureka College

What does an Academic Perform?

Academics perform in many settings but the most important are, I suppose, the classroom, where the principal audience is students, and the printed page, where the principal audience is one’s peers. To the extent that performance for one’s peers powers a career, the most important setting in which we perform is the printed page. Related to performances in both of these settings, however, are performances—or at least some performances—in settings like this one, a gathering of like-minded people who test out ideas upon one another through informal socializing and, more importantly, the formal presentation of papers. Talking and writing are linked.

As Randall Collins, Pierre Bourdieu, and (closer to home) Gerald Graff have each pointed out—and as we all know—argument is the way of our world, making it competitive and rivalrous. Attention is absolutely necessary for success, and yet, as the academic world expands, more difficult to obtain and preserve. No doubt partly as a result of this, academics sometimes turn theatrical in their performances, indulging in a costume or prop either to underscore an argument or simply to stand out—withness Michael Berube’s electric blue suit, Jane Gallop’s skirt of men’s ties, or Richard Burt’s “loser” combo of sunglasses, gray hoodie, Doc Martins, and shorts.

But whatever strategies an academic uses to garner attention, to get us to listen to him or her, academic performance is not even modestly about blue suits, gray hoodies, or skirts of ties. Academic performance is about coming out on top in argument, the contours of which (intellectual, affective, performative) are shaped by the institutions in which we work and in which we have worked since we were young children. And this returns us to the classroom, which, as it turns out, is the most important setting in which we work, for without early and continued success there, a child would indeed be left behind, unable to find herself in the position to wear a skirt of ties, a gray hoodie, or an electric blue suit while delivering a paper at an academic conference. Which is to say: whenever we begin our academic performances, we begin in medias res.

Sharon O’Dair
University of Alabama