The Review: Vaccines, Veblen, and a Jonathan Kramnick Interview

How competing concerns about the sources of meaning have produced our current cultural impasse. ADVERTISEMENT [Advertisement]( [logo] [Read this newsletter on the web](. Hi! I’m Len Gutkin, an editor at The Chronicle Review. As you’ll notice, today’s newsletter looks a little different. To begin, there’s more to it. This newly redesigned newsletter will offer a weekly dive into the most interesting stories not just in The Review, but across The Chronicle — and outside of it as well. Each week, after an introductory note, you'll see our traditional digest of articles. Read on for supplements to our coverage, too, including interviews and recommended essays. Now, let's get to this week's installment. Vax On, Vax Off Like some of you, I know a fair number of anti-vaxxers. Many of them are highly educated — one has a Ph.D. I've long been fascinated by how this particular kind of stubbornness develops. In The Consequences of Modernity (1990), the sociologist Anthony Giddens described how belief or disbelief in expert claims is in part a function of one's social proximity to expert classes. But vaccine skepticism seems to cut across social divisions. (The literature is large and mixed, but among other things, [higher median income might predict vaccine skepticism]( Paid for and Created by Purchase College [A Bold Plan for the Future of the College]( Fully integrated with the college, Broadview’s senior living and learning community provides opportunities for engagement with the institution while generating funds for student scholarship and faculty support. One way to think about anti-vaxxers is as related to a broader and longstanding phenomenon: animosity toward the cultural power of science. In his new book, [Science Under Fire: Challenges to Scientific Authority in Modern America]( Andrew Jewett offers a history of this extremely consequential culture war. Religious and irreligious, educated and not, left-leaning and hard right: Over the past 100 years, those concerned about what they take to be the pernicious influence of science constitute a large and varied group. Jewett tells the story of how competing concerns about the sources of meaning and authority — including fundamentalist religion and the scientific establishment's own exaggerated claims to value-neutrality — have produced our current cultural impasse. Don't miss the [Chronicle Review]( "What Attacks on Science Get Wrong," adapted from Jewett's book. And as soon as you're able, get vaccinated. ADVERTISEMENT [Advertisement]( Subscribe to The Chronicle The Chronicle’s award-winning journalism challenges conventional wisdom, holds academic leaders accountable, and empowers you to do your job better — and it’s your support that makes our work possible. [Subscribe Today]( The Latest THE REVIEW [Thorstein Veblen and the Myth of the Academic Outsider]( By Len Gutkin [image] The social theorist wasn’t exactly an outsider. But he was fired in sex scandals — twice. ADVERTISEMENT [Advertisement]( THE REVIEW [Are College Students Killing Townies?]( By Benjamin Schmidt [image] Selfish, hard-partying students make an easy villain. Uncovering the truth about Covid-19’s spread, on campus and off, is harder. THE REVIEW [Joseph Epstein Is Not a Fan of the Modern University]( By Tom Bartlett [image] The essayist who mocked Jill Biden’s degree, and was widely derided in return, has been lobbing grenades at colleges for decades. Jonathan Kramnick on 'Criticism and Truth' What does it mean for literary criticism to be true? How do we know when it's false? In the most recent issue of Critical Inquiry, Jonathan Kramnick, a professor of English at Yale University and frequent Chronicle contributor, published an ambitious [essay]( on the nature of truth claims in literary criticism. Kramnick takes as his starting point the practice of "in-sentence quotation," the "procedure of embedding another's words within the fine structure of one's own." For example, here's the critic Mary Favret writing about William Cowper's poem The Task (the words within single quotation marks are Cowper's): "The noisy arrival of the post-boy intrudes upon the 'Winter Evening,' where the poet hopes to cobble out of 'undisturb'd retirement, and the hours/ Of uninterrupted ev'ning' a rural retreat from hostile weather and imperial hostilities." It's the basic element of literary criticism, and most critics probably learned to do it in college. Its very familiarity, Kramnick suggests, can blind us to the sophisticated craft involved. And this craft, Kramnick says, is one of literary criticism's distinctive ways of telling the truth about the things it studies. I spoke with Kramnick about his essay, "Criticism and Truth," and what makes literary criticism "unique among interpretive practices." Here's some of that conversation. “Knowledge,” you write, “resides as much in the fingers doing the writing as in the eyes doing the reading.” I chose my words carefully in that sentence. I meant to emphasize the dimensions of practical skill involved in writing literary criticism and the fact that literary criticism and close reading are written endeavors. I meant to emphasize that close reading is a kind of craft — that it exists in the performance — and that its craft has epistemic significance. The thinking is in the writing. I meant to emphasize finally how that thinking serves as a foundation for making truth claims specific to the discipline. Close reading involves knitting together your own words with what I call the “indissoluble grammatical epoxy" of words that already exist before you encounter them. That’s a particular kind of skill. I’m speaking both literally and metaphorically. When I say that knowledge exists in the fingers, that’s a metaphor for describing craftwork, craft-knowledge, the act of writing. At the same time, I’m speaking literally about the act of writing — a fully embodied act of encountering the written world. For you, a sentence of criticism “remains true or false in virtue of its aptness to compel our assent, our appraisal of it as well formed, perspicuous, or adroit.” Does the centrality of appraisal to the truth claims of literary criticism not make “truth” an aesthetic verdict? Does it not in other words take the foundations away from truth? This is a point I want to clarify and do more thinking about. I have been misunderstood in this essay and in other writing of mine on related topics to be doing a version of Stanley Fish’s “interpretive communities” argument. I’m not. In fact I disagree quite strongly with Fish’s argument in Is There a Text in This Class? and elsewhere about the epistemic role of the so-called interpretive community. For Fish, the interpretive community was really all that mattered. It could do whatever it wanted, saying in effect, “This reading is right; that reading is wrong.” Fish's argument was one made in the service of an anti-foundationalism and a skepticism about the ability for intellectual work to get a proper handle on the world. My argument is not Fishian in that way. It’s not anti-foundationalist, and it’s not skeptical. Rather, I am making a case for, say, peer review, as having a fundamental and epistemically validating function. Peer review in both its narrow sense and its wide sense — its narrow sense of reviewing other people’s work and saying that this stands or this doesn’t stand, but also in the wide sense, of how institutions of knowledge promote and validate and understand work to get a proper handle on the world, to tell a kind of truth or not. Institutions are important. Validation doesn’t just happen in a vacuum: It’s a social practice, an institutional practice, a historical practice. To recognize that doesn't take the foundations away from truth. It supplies an understanding of them. We recognize something when we recognize work to be perspicuous, adroit, and apt. We recognize that some practice has gotten a handle on some part of the world. “Literary criticism is unique among interpretive practices,” you say, in that “it alone shares a medium with its object” — language. Why is this not also true of, for instance, legal theory, intellectual history, philosophy? Let me start with the easiest case, which would be the philosophy of language and linguistics. When our mutual friend Nan Da read this essay in draft, she asked me about linguistics, which, she pointed out, “definitively shares a medium with its object.” I had to pause and think. I intuitively knew that there was a big difference — but how to get clear about what that difference was? That led me to write that footnote where I looked at a work of recent linguistics, in which the author has transformed a very simple sentence of English into what seems to us, from outside of the discipline, like a ridiculous series of formal notations. My point was that if you’re internal to linguistics, that’s what it means to make knowledge out of language. There, the medium coincidence produces almost a backlash formation. The linguist has to distinguish what he or she is up to from what he or she is describing. I think the lesson of this example from linguistics can be brought to bear on other disciplines as well, where the effort to create an object of knowledge out of something with which you share a medium involves, if perhaps not in such an exaggerated form, one or another manner of distancing, rather than coming close. That is what I think distinguishes intellectual history, philosophy of language, legal theory, from work in the literary disciplines. But doesn’t literary criticism have a lot of its own technical shorthand? There is a popular tradition of lambasting literary critics for the unnecessary complexity or strangeness of their language. And there are various technical languages — in prosody, in narratology, and so on — that are part of literary criticism. And when I was in graduate school, those Greimasian squares! But yes, structuralism would occasionally use formal notation. Prosody absolutely does. In the heterogeneous world of literary criticism, there are definitely practices that emphasize estrangement or distancing as a way of creating objects of knowledge. The digital humanities for example have in some ways doubled down on estrangement and turned their objects into something quite alien — that we could literally never read. But those practices have never and probably will never form the baseline of competence in the discipline. Though I don’t want to be too prophetic. Recommended - The Times Literary Supplement’s Footnotes to Plato series rarely disappoints, and Crispin Sartwell’s [recent essay]( on the paradoxes of the Puritan theologian, minister, and, briefly, Princeton University president Jonathan Edwards is no exception. Edwards is best remembered today for his terrifying sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” — the one that compares sinners to spiders suspended over a fire — but he was also one of the most philosophically and scientifically sophisticated men in early and mid-18th-century New England. - At The New Yorker, Merve Emre's [critical appraisal]( of the University of Chicago English professor Sianne Ngai's Theory of the Gimmick does a wonderful job of evoking the excitement of Ngai's work, all of which focuses on ambiguous aesthetic categories (the cute, the zany, the interesting). Ngai's new book, Emre writes, "finds in the pervasiveness of the gimmick the same duelling forces of aesthetic attraction and repulsion that shape all Ngai’s work." (And for more Ngai, revisit [Charlie Tyson's profile in]( Review]( - At The Atlantic, Ian Bogost [analyzes the ironies]( of the pandemic’s effect on higher education. Americans, it turns out, will sacrifice anything for “the college experience,” even as the education colleges are supposed to be about has been neglected. “Quietly," he says, "higher education was always an excuse to justify the college lifestyle." - At The New York Review of Books, [Kwame Anthony Appiah writes about Thorstein Veblen]( by way of Charles Camic's new biography. As ever with Appiah, the essay is lucid, informative, and often quite funny. (Veblen's "antipathy for pecuniary pursuits was matched … by a certain incompetence at them.") And for those who can't get enough Veblen, [I spoke with Camic]( for The Review. - And at n+1, Nan Z. Da's "[Disambiguation, a Tragedy"]( looks at the damaged fortunes of fine-distinction making in two contrasted sites: first, the fall-out from Maoist cultural politics among the Chinese diaspora and, second, American academic and cultural production. Rangy, surprising, and brave — it's an extraordinary essay. We like to say that The Review is where academe comes to argue with itself. And we’re always hoping to hear from you. If you have thoughts about our recent coverage, stories or topics you want us to know about, or feedback on this newsletter, drop us a line at opinion@chronicle.com. Yours, Len Gutkin Paid for and Created by ModernThink [YOUR PEOPLE AR STILL YOUR GREATEST ASSET.]( Responsible for creating and sustaining your institutional culture, understand how issues such as remote work, physical safety and change management are being perceived by your faculty and staff. The Chronicle's Featured Report: The Post-Pandemic College [Leading experts examine how the pandemic will shape higher education]( in the years to come and what the college of the future may look like. To recover well, colleges must develop a more externally-focused business model, direct resources to expand professional development in online teaching, and continue to expand mental-health services. 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