"Dig out the syllabi for your next English courses and add one or (if you want to get really wild) two scholarly monographs. Ditch the course pack youve planned and go for actual, real, whole books produced by the scholar or scholars whose work you respect most. The clearest evidence of the existing structural misalignment in our field is the hyperbolic, ambivalent, and almost schizophrenic role into which we have cast the scholarly monograph. We require the writing of monographs for advancement in our field. We do not require that our students read them and we dont read them very much ourselves."
Scholarship is really the worst kind of writing (well ok that is not true, that would be journalism) but it is certainly very far away from the kind of writing I would imagine most English or Philosophy (under)graduate students hoped to write upon first viewing some lines from Homer, Shakespeare, Plato, or Nietzsche (to name a few.)
Further below, Davidson writes the most interesting paragraph of the piece:
"By not teaching the monograph as a genre, we are depriving ourselves of the opportunity to teach and therefore to study what this genre can do, what it cannot do, what it does well, and what might be done better in other forms."
Most interesting here is the idea of the monograph "as genre" which, ideally, would lead to a sort of parody of scholarly writing (of course, to my mind, this already occurred significantly in Derrida
: copious, overflowing footnotes, endless sentences, tepid word play (at least he was trying) etc;). Implying that scholarship is yet another genre seems to remove epistemic significance that scholarship critically (that is, philosophically) handles the other genres below it, such as Romanticism, Victorian Studies, Early Modernism etc; however in regrafting scholarship as a genre Davidson performs a double move whereby scholarship becomes literature just like Romanticism and Early Modernism, just like Ode to a Grecian Urn, or King Lear, or Pride and Prejudice. --That makes scholarship worth reading.The looming and significant question this article poses is, can scholars become literary, can they become artists, can they enjoy play along with seriousness?
