Customer Reviews

Academic Instincts

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After the grandiose promises made in the dust cover it is hard not to be disappointed by this light volume, weighing in for a few hours read at a mere 150 pages. I bought it, captured by the claim that it would "...open the door to an important nationwide and worldwide conversation about the reorganization of knowledge..."That author of that bit of false advertisement ought to take the study of words as seriously and enteraingly as Garber does.

The book fits the crossover genre that is Garber refers to in the text--designed both the reach a general audience and an audience of academics who might chose to read about themselves. Its entertainment lays in its play with words, many words: dilettante, autodidact, professional amateur and amateur professional, and genius, to name just a few.

As to helping us understand the shift in knowledge and disciplines, this book is not very substantial. Words like interdisciplinary and crossdisciplinary are thrown about casually. The understanding it adds to the idea of interdisciplinarity is slight, but not critical. It allows the academic, generally one who likes to learn, an opportunity to keep learning, Garber notes glibly. An interdisciplinarian, is like an amateur sleuth, an amateur professional, "someone who is learning, or poaching, or practicing without a license" (p. 19), but also someone who might obeserve clues a scholar more entrenched in disciplinary practice might overlook.

A playful read, but hardly one that will launch nationwide and worldwide conversation about the nature of knowledge.

Professor Garber has written a set of three popular, satirical essays to look at how knowledge advances involving literary study. Nicely spanning the gap between the amateurs and professionals who are interested in the subject, she takes a time-independent view to show how the pendulum is always swinging within predictable constraints.

For example, it is always becoming either more or less desirable to be a professional or an amateur pursuing knowledge. "Nowadays amateurism seems to be the goal of the profession." "But it turns out that the professional makes the best amateur." She cites Harold Bloom and his evolution toward the book, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, as an example. Along the way, she also considers Sister Wendy, Oprah Winfrey, Richard Dawkins, and many others who operate near or across these amateur and professional lines.

Her second essay talks about Discipline Envy, and uses Freud's most famous form of envy as the starting point for many witticisms. Basically, the grass is always greener in the adjacent discipline, but those people are to be despised. "Similarity and contiguity, says Freud, breed distrust, rivalry, comparison, even, perhaps, self-hatred and self-doubt projected upon the nearby other."

The final essay considers Terms of Art. " . . . [T]he history of jargon is the history of ideas in the making . . . ." She reminds us that one word in twelve within Shakespeare (and she is a noted Shakespearean authority) was considered novel in its day. She also reminds us that the word, shibboleth, originally served a role as a password in the Book of Judges. Jargon is often similarly used now to help show to which group you belong.

While providing good entertainment value and perspective about the never-ending academic battles over roles, boundaries, and words, the book lacks a helpful center. The book talks a lot about the inevitability of what people will do, and suggests some things to avoid. But the book lacks weight by not proposing much more than taking a broader perspective. How should new attempts to combine "disciplines" be pursued to make the most progress? How can creating new jargon be more helpful? What roles should be expanded between amateurs and professionals that do not exist very often now? The answer always seems to be broad minded.

On the other hand, it's better to read a book that leaves you hungering for more than one that overstuffs you with unpalatable content. The food for thought here can probably add perspective to your own quests for knowledge, whether taken in the role of Don Quixote or as Cervantes.

Be aware of your instincts, so you can direct them in the most useful ways!

With 'Academic Instincts', Marjorie Garber, a professor of English at Harvard, discusses the vagaries of her vocation and reappraises the importance of the Humanities at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Are the concerns of an English professor purely aesthetic, political, or both? Why do academics resort to jargon words, and do these terms really mean anything? What is literary theory? Why do academics such as Harold Bloom demur at the use of theory when he himself has been called a theorist? What is at stake here?

Garber doesn't answer these questions so much as survey how they have been variously answered over the centuries and, more specifically, the past few decades. In a book whose cover features Raphael's 'School Of Athens' (albeit with a photo of the author superimposed on the forefront), whose first chapter begins with "The Election of Jesse ("The Body") Ventura", and whose topics of interest range between American basketballer-turned-politician Bill Bradley, scientist Richard Dawkins, media celebrity Oprah Winfrey and philosopher-cum-literary critic Jacques Derrida, you would suspect, understandably enough, that the author has either developed an extraordinarily complicated argument to encompass all of these types of evidence, or avoided attempting an argument at all. Well, there's a bit of both here. As I say, Garber's work is a survey rather than a critically engaged attempt at disputation. She wants to revise the so-called 'culture wars' (which she never formally defines for her reader), not partake in it.

Pay no attention to the blurb, whose bevy of positive reviews from American-based literary critics, who resort to descriptions like 'bravura', 'brilliant', 'bracing', and 'fireworks' makes the book sound like a ferociously written manifesto seeking unitary Truth. Garber writes lucidly, good-naturedly, and with her customary tactile sense of language play. Her style of writing is egalitarian - she'll accept anything that might add value to her analysis - and, in three relatively short essays, suggests that academics often attract the ire of those outside their profession precisely because their interests, as well as their rhetoric (or 'jargon'), seem exlusive.

I don't want to go into the details of each chapter too much - that's already been done by other reviewers here. I do want to ask, though, about what kind of audience might be intended for a work such as 'Academic Instincts'? Conversely, what kind of author writes about culture wars, yet doesn't elaborate on this admittedly jargon-ridden term? Who orders a book like this, which contains over thirty pages of footnotes and indexes? These research tools form the professional apparatus of a scholar. And this work, for all its avoidance of a formal argument, ultimately constitutes a serenely eloquent defense of the author's profession.

Prof. Garber's book is an insider's look at the foibles of the academic profession. She has three main themes: the dichotomy between professionals and amateurs, discpiline envy (she uses Freud to great effect here!) and academic jargon vs. plain English.

Each theme is buffeted with ample quotes from literature and contemporary cultural critics. Prof. Garber's strength is her ability to weave together disparate realms of academic life to poke fun at (in an admiring way) the academic profession with all of its growing pains and characteristic paradoxes (the dilettante as professional; the professional amateur etc...).

On the whole, an interesting, fast-paced look into the strange world known as academia.

Princeton, you are forgiven for The Terror of History (the terror, the terror!); here we have that miracle, a book about the world of scholarship that is the antithesis of dry; when she talks of the amateur/professional divide that she herself effortlessly, elegantly straddles, it is a wry delight! I think I shall have to get her book on dogs. (I don't even like dogs, but it can sit beside Unleashed and Dearest Pet.) Maverick or sophisticate, I like her style

I read this book in the hopes of including it in a review essay on teaching at the college level but found that it does not fit into this category at all. Instead it is a philosophical or literary critique of the preceived condition of scholars at the college level by laypeople and by other academics. Divided into three sections, only the last two really address the issues that are often said to plague university scholars today -- the first is more of a comment on the conflict between experts and non-experts in all other aspects of society, especially politics and mass media. Garber makes a strong case that all of these "so-called problems" within the academic world are not new and indeed may be necessary for growth and the pursuit of knowledge. However, she ignores some of the very real and serious issues that rip departments apart, isolate graduate and undergraduate students, and threaten funding for education both on the professional and on the consumer level.