I Am the Subject of My Own Book: A Case for Scholarship in the First Person

Abstract: Ten years ago, I gave a keynote address at SAMLA (the Southern version of the MLA) in which I located the project of reading—in particular, the kind of reading, especially close reading, that we do as literary professionals—as between two poles, which I identified as Narcissism and Wissenschaft ; I was understanding Wissenschaft as something like an organized principle of study, a science (without the necessary connotation of being limited to chemistry, biology, etc.). As with most opposing poles, they were both meant to be extremes. The axis on which they found themselves in opposition had to do with the question of whether literary reading ought to be understood as a scientific, truth-seeking enterprise, on the one hand, or an expression of the unique sensibility, the “self” of the reader. I meant both extremes to be undesirable, excessive (which seems to be obvious), but I wanted the identification of this grid to suggest two closely related things: first, that we must recognize ourselves as always operating somewhere between these extremes, and second, that we tended, whether we admitted it or not, to think of our professional reading activity as belonging closer to Wissenschaft than to Narcissism. Then and now, of course, “Wissenschaft” sounds like a good word and “Narcissism” sounds like a bad word, so my hope was to cast a little blame on the good word and offer a little boost to the bad word.