Fun For Smart People

Harvard has long been known for its cutting-edge scholarship in the humanities. Faculty rosters read like "Who's Who" lists of leading scholars in a variety of disciplines. The recent addition of distinguished new professors in English and Afro-American Studies has further bolstered Harvard's prestige in these areas.

Over the weekend of Oct. 21 and 22, the Center for Literary and Cultural studies (CLCS) at Harvard celebrated its tenth anniversary with a symposium on "Literary and Cultural Studies Today." The innovative scholarship presented at the symposium demonstrated that Harvard's tradition of excellence remains unchanged.

The professors who read their papers at the conference are some of the more powerful (and generally, more liberal) of Harvard's scholars. Academic traditionalists who believe in the strict separation of disciplines might have been skeptical (or even fearful) of the interdisciplinary approach CLCS advocates.

These reactions fail to do justice to the wealth of excellent scholarship showcased at the symposium. Of course there were hits and misses; not all the panels were equally strong While much of the scholarship presented was highly creative, a fair amount of it was offbeat.

But overall, the intellectual discourse at the symposium functioned at a high and eminently satisfying level. The director of the center, Professor of English Marjorie Garber--widely known among undergraduates for her popular core class on Shakespeare--deserves congratulations for her work.

One high point of the weekend was the panel entitled "One Poem, Three Readers," where three professors offered their close readings of the Robert Lowell poem "For the Union Dead."

The presentations--made by Porter University Professor Helen Vendler, Professor of English and Comparative Literature Barbara Johnson and Assistant Professor of English and of History and literature Meredith McGill--demonstrated how literary studies should and must draw on a variety of disciplines which might at first appear to be unrelated to the text being analyzed.

One panel I particularly enjoyed was 'Criticism and the Personal Voice. Even though I can't say I agree with many of the political stances held by the panel participants, I was intrigued by their explanation of how they wave autobiography and criticism together to form polished, elegant pieces of writing.

Other panels which I personally found interesting where 'Law and Literature: Where Do Go From Here," an excellent introduction to how the two disciplines inform each other; "Are We Post-American Studies?" a highly theoretical and also entertaining look at the future of the field: and "What Is Culture? What Are Cultures?" a panel which raised important question about cultural definition.

Not everyone who attended the conference emerged as satisfied as I did. On the second day, one man attacked the CLCS for promoting "the genocide of Western culture." His criticism was not only paranoid but unfair.

But he at least deserves credit for investigating and learning about the object of his criticism before making his attack.

All too often, we immediately dismiss those ideas with which we strongly disagree, without reflecting on them or considering their merits. When we deal with unpopular statements in this manner, when we append the label "offensive" to any argument with which we don't want to grapple, we place free speech and liberal education in grave danger.

David R. Lat's column appears on alternate Tuesdays.