2 - Institutions and performance: professing performance in the early twentieth century

Summary

“Our professional protocols of value [are] being squeezed by a system whose ideal image of itself promotes theoretically sophisticated, interdisciplinary work in extraliterary studies but whose material base is shrinking … it was roughly twenty years ago that Richard Ohmann pointed out, in English in America, that the profession of English studies thought of itself as doing criticism and theory but was in actuality devoting half of its courses to introductory composition.”

Michael Bérubé

“What a deal: by honoring our own history we get to lead the hottest trends.”

Joseph Roach

To profess performance

In 1905, Professor George Lyman Kittredge, Chairman of the English department at Harvard University, dropped a note to his colleague Professor George Pierce Baker. The latter had been concerned that one of Kittredge's new hires might have designs on the teaching of “the drama” and thus designs on Baker's own curricular territory. Kittredge sought to mollify Baker's anxiety. “You may feel quite secure,” he wrote, “as to any cutting into your special field.” The sentence reproduced the content and form of an all-too familiar interaction between empowered chairman and paranoid colleague. And, as is often true of such interactions, it also revealed a hint of intellectual condescension within its gesture of institutional assurance, one that left flexible whether the word “special” had the connotation of the extraordinary, the narrow, or the peripheral.

Similar kinds of anxieties can be found in the archives of other key figures in the early institutionalization of performance in the American academy.