What “Moves” Literary Studies?

I just recently participated in William Hart-Davidson’s workshop for teaching rhetorical moves in multimodal composition classrooms as part of the Washington State University series “Composing the New Classroom.” Of course, Hart-Davidson had many useful things to say about teaching both writing and multimodal composition to freshmen. I found his rejection of modalities for rhetorical “moves” the most exciting. From his slides, Hart-Davidson notes that outcome statements should “zero in on what makes a message meaningful, persuasive, compelling, and accurate across media” and that students “improve with guided practice.” As evidence, he cites Kellogg and Whiteford’s 2009 psychological study of advanced writing classrooms in which they analyze the “uniquely intensive demands that advanced written composition place on working memory.” Deliberate practice is important, Hart-Davidson argues, because students need time to practice the appropriate higher level rhetorical moves that make writing successful. He demonstrated in the workshop that multimodal composition is the best form of deliberate practice because students have to translate specific rhetorical demands (audience, purpose, appeals) from one modality to another — forcing them to become more adept at paying attention to those demands.

For me, the moment was particularly compelling because I sense that many of our majors and graduate students in the literary studies track struggle with the purpose of their work. Courtney King, one of our brightest masters students, notes a

cynicism about the future of the humanities that runs rampant in our department. This has not worn well on me, and has caused me to spend many sleepless nights pondering my own worth. In departmental meetings, in the halls, and over coffee, my colleagues and I have engaged in endless conversations about how disposable our field, and by proxy, we are. I have not spoken with one of my cohort members who is completely certain that they made the right decision by getting this degree. Seeds of self-doubt and self-hatred have been planted not by people in the sciences or the media, but by our own mentors and friends.

Courtney’s observation is, perhaps, one of the saddest and most regrettable outcomes of the “just don’t go to graduate school,” meme that’s been circulating in and around humanities departments in the past few years. (As an aside, I’d like to reemphasize Tressie McMillan Cottom’s essential point that “crappy is relative,” especially when it comes to the job opportunities of poor African-American students who need graduate credentials to overcome “…’ghetto’ names [which] get our resumes trashed” or “clean criminal records [that] lose out to whites with felony convictions”). King’s anxiety is also something I predicted when I wrote “A Plea to Graduate Advisors and Programs” in 2011, when I argued that blanket suggestions to not go to graduate school are nihilistic because “they highlight a complete lack of faith in the future of the humanities.”

I believe that the crisis of the humanities is really a symptom of a larger media shift occurring in our culture and an institution that is mistaking a modality for what Hart-Davidson calls a “move.” Yes, literary studies literally studies literature — and that is a modality. But certainly our interests in literature aren’t simply confined to that technology: otherwise we are just nostalgic geeks. I’d venture to say that most of us find the history, sexuality, gender, race, storytelling, science, culture, technology, and other elements that intersect with and infuse literary expression compelling. It would be a mistake to hold tightly onto a modality and cynically proclaim that anything else is worthless or disposable. We’ve become like the student who enters into a multimodal composition classroom having earned A’s on all of their previous writing assignments and freezes when asked to create a podcast. We haven’t yet realized that we already have several tools that we can apply to this new environment (what Hart-Davidson calls “moves”), and these are the parts of our institutional experience that we should focus on.

Matt Jockers’s Macroanalysis points out that the future of literary studies will force scholars to learn computational methods for analyzing texts on a macro-level. Of course, he reassures us, close reading will never go away. But, in much the same way as John Maynard Keynes’s formulation of macroeconomics forever changed how people studied — and reacted to — global economic forces, natural language processing as a technology can’t be completely ignored by literary scholars without forcing them into obsolescence. I largely agree, and I also feel that such a shift will eventually compel future scholars to adopt new practices and new forms of disciplinary organization. If we truly believe — for example — that most literary expression has always been influenced by global currents, it will become increasingly difficult to chart these complex phenomena without computational analysis. Literary scholars may look very different 20 years from now than they do today. We can either be intentional in that transformation (by identifying the moves that are essential to our studies and translating them into a new scholarly environment) or we can clutch desperately onto our modality and limit the ways we can impact the culture around us.