Published Fall/Winter 2007
 
The Scholarly Monograph as Event
by Scott Eric Kaufman | ns 69
In July, John Franklin Jameson, editor of The American Historical Review, complained that "bad work in books of any magnitude is seldom properly scored in our pages" and that "the average tone of our reviews is considerably laudatory, so that a sharply critical review stands out in the minds of readers." That Jameson penned his complaint in 1909 underscores its severity. Unirritating content cloaked in flat prose, the academic book review is a victim of generic and professional demands. It must be short. It must present a thumbnail sketch of the book's argument. While it may contain genteel praise ("insightful," "profound," "provocative") or traffic in tempered opprobrium ("infelicitous," "insufficient," "of limited interest"), it may not do so to excess, as earnest enthusiasm and impassioned criticism are unscholarly. Such reviews suggest that the years invested in producing a scholarly monograph yield only professional returns: no one engages your ideas, but now they belong to a tenured professor. But even tenured professors desire some engagement, and a single 500- or 1,000-word review buried in the back pages of American Literature hardly qualifies.
Until recently, the obstacles to creating a forum in which peers gather to discuss a work were many and onerous. A suitable conference must be found, a compelling CFP drafted, schedules coordinated, plane tickets purchased, all so that four strangers can sit in a nearly empty room, tired, far from home, for an hour and a half. More often than not, even the best panel at the most prestigious conferences is fiscally inefficient and intellectually unsatisfying. Enter the internet. Mind you, I am no John Perry Barlow, who Yahoo dubbed "the Thomas Jefferson of Cyberspace" for this declaration:
Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone.
I do not ask you of the conference culture, of the David Lodge novel, to leave us online natives alone. Far from it. The literary theory blog to which I contribute, The Valve, invites you to participate in our less expensive, more satisfying solution: the online book event. By virtue of being online, our book events avoid the material hassles of the formal conference panel. No need to worry about seating, managing the clock, or deciding which panelist answers the Hegelian who has found a common strand in the first, third, and fourth presentations. All the virtual panelists can answer, in their own time, in their own way. By "all" I mean "all four," "all fourteen," or even "all forty," as one significant advantage of conducting virtual panels is the ability to dispense with the format of the traditional talk. If twenty people express interest in participating, twenty responses can be posted over the course of twenty days; or two can be posted twice a day for ten days; or three can be posted for six, the remainder on the seventh. The management of a book event is dictated by the enthusiasm of the participants and the patience of the audience. Participants often want to post multiple responses. Comment counts often whip into the hundreds. There is no panel to follow, no reason to vacate the room so long as people linger in the aisles.
In his introduction to Country of the Blind, H. G. Wells wrote, "Things written either live or die; unless it be a place of judgment for academic impostors, there is no apologetic intermediate state." Wells invokes imposture as an insult, but to whom? Who are these impostors judging the literary living dead, and who are they impersonating? Wells' intended target eludes me, but this image of a place of judgment—an apologetic intermediate state in which things written are appraised by countless academic impostors—strikes me as an apt description of the room in whose aisles the participants and audience of our book events linger. They, and we, are academic impostors all. When credentials cannot demand the floor, those who provide the most incisive analysis will have the spotlight turned on them. The wandering political scientist who finds the familiar literary application of political theory to his liking may linger in the room longer than the English professor who finds a return to a tired paradigm tedious. The former graduate student who abandoned the profession years earlier may find her enthusiasm rekindled by a conversation with no professional stakes. A room full of academic impostors with no hizzoner in sight is almost enough to believe that what John Holbo, founder of The Valve, calls the "Taskforce for Evaluating Scholarship Not for Promotion and Tenure" has been established. When the crowd peppering the aisles discusses your book, cynical careerism can be set aside. The impostors are here to hear you out. They care about the living dead.
For Wells, books are remembered or forgotten; academic hoodoo, performed by trained impostors, can sap the living texts of life and raise the dead from their slumber. In their Obeah hands, Homer nods and Shakespeare, desiccate, lies silently beside. Outside, lesser talents, long forgotten, walk again. Silas Weir Mitchell, worn, torn, but in hale spirit, greets James Branch Cabell. That inadvertent unremembered live again in this scholarship of imposture is cause for celebration, for if the vital fiction of generations past requires resuscitation, what chance do its glosses have? Every work of scholarship today deserves its own event. The end result of nearly every grant, every leave, and every summer sacrificed should have intellectual heft enough to warrant the undivided attention a book event provides, lest it become a secondary elaboration of a fiction lost to memory. With Google, this problem disappears. A search for "James Branch Cabell" returns over 128,000 returns, "Silas Weir Mitchell," over 63,000. Not only are they not forgotten, they are vital and alive for anyone who might want information about monstrous clever men or one of the most popular novelists of the early twentieth century (who, I admit, is better remembered for the novelists he treated than the novels that he wrote). A monograph feted is a monograph more likely to be remembered, both by the participants and audience of an event and by Google.
Picture a young scholar—a graduate student, in a seminar on nineteenth-century fiction—preparing to write an essay on The Blithedale Romance. Like many her age (and many much older), her first stop is Google. A search for "reform novel" brings up four entries from databases to which she may or may not have access: FindArticles, PubMed, Project Muse, and JSTOR. After the inevitable noise—some, like Project Gutenberg's Reform Cookery Book, are understandable; others, like a comprehensive history of alphabetization, less so—she finds a link to a post entitled "Origins of the Novel of Reform," which Carrie Shanafelt, a doctoral candidate at the CUNY Graduate Center, contributed to The Valve's book event on Amanda Claybaugh's The Novel of Purpose. She learns that, according to Shanafelt, Claybaugh argues, "The reformist narrative of conversion often appears as an interpolated tale, as in The Pickwick Papers, framed within a narrative that renders the purpose of that conversion story ironic, or at least ineffective in its putative aims." Remembering Zenobia's "The Silvery Veil" and "Fauntleroy," she wonders whether Hawthorne fiddled with this logic. She returns to Google, only to notice that the next post on The Valve also concerns The Novel of Purpose, and that it is written by Paul Giles, with whose work she is already familiar. As she roots around The Valve, she discovers she has stumbled into a conversation about novels of reform, their efficacy, and their scope. The conversation may be over, but the comment box is open. If she wishes to restart it, all she need do is respond—to the original poster, to any of the commenters, to no one in particular, and an email will be sent to all involved. A conversation, months cold, breathes again.
For Claybaugh, the advantages are obvious: a ranging engagement otherwise impossible and recognition of her contribution to the field, with the Google rank to prove it. But the discipline itself is enriched by the record of the event. Discovering a book event is like stepping into a parlor and immersing yourself in an ongoing discussion, one in which the principles define their objectives, their objections, always careful to contextualize their words. Often enough, the experience of reading an article is like slipping in the fifth lecture of a series ignorant of the previous four; the desperate scribbling—half of this claim bleeding into that, this from an unfamiliar tradition, that from a forgotten one—revelatory in the thinness of the finished product. Ever after it concludes, a book event remains a ghostly record of a seminar, but one which can, at any time, be revivified through the magic of email. All involved can return, be they the director of a prestigious institute, like Paul Giles; associate professors like Claybaugh, Miriam Burstein, Gregory Garvey, and Caroline Levine; or graduate students like Shanafelt, Joseph Kugelmass, and myself.
Under normal circumstances, the piety required of those on the lower rungs of the departmental hierarchy would dictate that it is inadvisable for Kugelmass, a graduate student, to criticize Claybaugh, an associate professor, in a public forum. Had Kugelmass' post been a review for publication, it would have replaced the sting of critique with the droning buzz of platitude. (He could, perhaps, have shoehorned in true criticism with a "for all its strengths.") Only because he participated in a book event instead of having written a book review, the situation Jameson described in 1909—in which "the average tone of our reviews is considerably laudatory, so that a sharply critical review stands out in the minds of readers"—never obtained.
Not that it would have mattered. Even the occasional hostile post or comment cannot dampen the mood of someone receiving feedback on a project she anticipated would make as little an impression on the discipline as the average academic book. Perhaps two or three years later, as one half of a dual review, or two sentences in a yearly roundup of scholarship, her ideas would meet with an audience; but a book event offers her an opportunity for immediate feedback, from an eager audience of thousands. Over 5,000 people read The Valve daily, and many of them are not English professors—nor is its founder, John Holbo, a philosophy professor—and therefore are not attuned to the narrow channels through which the profession pushes its wares. Very few English professors write work to be read by an interdisciplinary audience. Fewer still intend it to be read by a general audience. A book event offers both, and in numbers unobtainable under any other conditions.
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