Languages and Literatures by Kyle Hall

May 3, 2012

A twentieth century poet once said: "You see the old way wasn't working / so it's on us to do what we gotta do / to survive." A similar tack, which reevaluates the humanities' arguments for their very existence, seems necessary in today's university.

 

The town hall meeting that was held on May 1st in Boylston left me with a few things to say that I hope could help our thinking about the debates that surround our department. While we had an agenda that listed diverse topics such as the name of the department, future retirements/hires, the more extended academic world that we inhabit and so on, these all seem to me as parts of a whole that should be addressed.

Several faculty members, fresh off of the meetings regarding the future of the Harvard Library System, expressed consternation with that meeting in particular and more generally the way in which the changes to the libraries have been presented (or, oftentimes, not presented). There was a lack of communication, which was framed as being a problem of language, in which the thought process and language of the technocrats/consultants/auditors were entirely foreign to us, resulting in a total lack of communication.

Leaving aside the likely deliberate nature of this incomprehensibility on the part of those tasked with "enhancing" the libraries (as it was so delicately termed), as a general statement the idea that there is a problem of language strikes me as a significant one. Not that the auditors speak a different language – but that we cannot overcome that barrier. While I typically stay out of the debate over the name of our department, here I believe it is important – we are a department of languages and literatures. Yet we are consistently finding ourselves up against a language barrier when trying to explain our position to others who do not have the same “language” or, perhaps better, the same “cultural environment” – be it this particular situation or more generally to those who would ask, “of what use are the humanities?”

But the idea of saying that we cannot understand one another should be the most antithetical position available to us. On the first day of Italian, we speak Italian to our students. It is the same, I know, in Spanish, French and Portuguese. It is a foreign language. Our students don’t understand us. And they must force themselves to understand what they can, improve day by day, and constantly seek instruments that can aid in understanding. Culturally, we present them with materials that are completely foreign to them, which they must learn to accept – not because we ask them to, but because this is how groups come to understand each other and coexist.

The second part of our name speaks to this same necessity. Literature exists as a way for us to poke and prod at possible universes that are not our own; it is a method, not an end in and of itself. There is no book in the world so important that it cannot be left behind, no painting so beautiful that it should not be forgotten. We read these texts because there is a value to the methodology that allows us to envision worlds which are not our own and thus have a better understanding of and control over our own lives. Yet when it comes to our present situation, we seem to apply little of what we would ask students to do when analyzing a novel or even a given cultural context. Somewhere we have abandoned the idea of being able to tell a story, whether it be the story of the library and the uses of its particular parts, or the story of our lives as professional humanists.

If we, within a department and discipline such as the one(s) we inhabit, whatever it may be called, cannot apply those linguistic and literary skills when confronted with those who do not believe the same as we do, who do not speak the same language as we do, who do not come to the same conclusions as we do – well, then, I would also have to ask, what purpose do we serve?

A technocrat may well only speak a language expressed in spreadsheets (ugh). Our job is to help people to speak a new language. We may not speak the language of budget cuts (bleh). Our job is to learn new languages. Others may not understand our story, but our job is to be storytellers. As distasteful and even unfair as it may seem, the onus has been placed on the humanities. Shying away from the burden, particularly for younger members of the department such as the graduate students, is unlikely to produce any favorable results.

As anyone who has made it this far can clearly see, I do not have any silver bullet. I am not offering any concrete solutions to current problems. But moving forward, and certainly before any retreat, I think that it could be helpful to reconsider our stance toward the foreign languages that we are coming up against, time and again, in meetings with administrators and technocrats. Perhaps we can do a better job of understanding them, and then we could also have more effective ways of telling our story. And if there can be no coexistence among us (and certainly on many topics, such as the library, this is likely the case), then this too should be told in a straightforward and effective manner, so that hopefully the groundwork is laid for better days ahead.

See also: Blog