Is Monographic Tyranny the Problem?

Extract

Lindsay waters's “rescue tenure from the tyranny of the monograph“ in the 20 april 2001 chronicle of higher Education complements his “Modest Proposal […]” in PMLA. The longer Chronicle piece insistently deploys the concept of crisis that presided over a 1997 conference of humanities scholars, librarians, and editors, The Specialized Scholarly Monograph in Crisis (Case). According to Waters, the overproduction of monographs required of tenure candidates “conceals an identity crisis in the humanities that has been developing for the past thirty years […]” (B7). “Above all,” he avers, “the crisis of the monograph is a crisis in leadership” that implicates the university: “the problem of the humanities monograph is, mutatis mutandis, the problem of the university […],” an institution “increasingly committed to business values” (B8). In this university in which “the humanities have grown to be beside the point,” Waters submits, the increased stress on the tenure monograph during the eighties and nineties is the most evident symptom of an ill-conceived professionalization of the humanities.