Personal note: Blogging from me will probably be light for the rest of the month. My publisher’s publicist has booked me for a “virtual book tour,” in which I’ll do guest blog posts and interviews for what looks like a daunting number of web sites.
My plan is to throw myself into this thing and work the (Charles) Dickens out of it. A virtual book tour would appear to be tailor made for my personality, so if I can’t shine at this I’ll be a man pretty much with nothing to say for himself.
While I’m thinking of it, buy my book.
It’s been in the news lately—The University of Baltimore is offering a credit course on zombies in literature.
Blumberg’s course is not without precedent. Brendan Riley, an English professor at Columbia College in Chicago, introduced a course called “Zombies in Popular Media” in 2006, a few years into the nation’s zombie revival. He believes he was the first to offer an entire course on zombies, a perennial entry on lists of oddest college courses.
“It was kind of a fight to get it as a recognized course at the school,” Riley said. “Because, at first, it appears to be kind of a frivolous topic.”
I suppose if I object to this, I’ll be identifying myself as not only a dinosaur, but a fossilized dinosaur.
But I do object, and I’m pretty sure I’d have objected back when I was in college.
The purpose of higher education is not to reassure young people that the stuff they really, really like is just as important as dumb old classic literature, history, and science.
The purpose of higher education is to open their horizons to the accumulated wisdom of their ancestors and the ongoing discovery of knowledge. To give them (as I put it in one of my still-unpublished books) “a rack of pegs on which to hang their experience, once they have some.”
I think that most institutions of higher education in the West have entirely forgotten their purpose. They’ve become factories for the production of certain kinds of documents. Actual students are secondary to the process.
There’s an old story that’s sometimes told in Evangelical circles. It’s about a seaside rescue station, a shack with a boat and an underpaid, overworked, dedicated crew of life savers, who listened to the radio for distress calls, and went out in the storms when ships were in peril along their stretch of coast.
Over the years they saved many lives. Some of the people they rescued had money, and they gratefully donated it to the rescue station. Soon there was a second boat, and a nice break room. Pay was increased. A group of admirers, not themselves life savers, took to gathering at the station, to do support work and socialize.
A large assembly building was built. More social members joined.
In time the social aspect of the organization eclipsed the life saving mission. New leadership was elected, and they resented the incessant demands of the rescue crew, who (for some reason) couldn’t seem to recruit a lot of actual life savers out of the larger organization.
In the end, an overwhelming majority of social members voted to discontinue the rescue boat work altogether, as it interfered with the organization’s primarily social purpose.
So the rescuers found another little hut by the shore, and started saving lives from that location. And in time some of the people they rescued, in their gratitude, started giving them money…
I’ve heard it referred to as “mission drift.”
I think that, to a large extent, higher education has abandoned its legitimate function.
Who needs zombies? We’ve got plenty of college professors who devour brains already.
Good post. I starting to think of a new story: “Zombie Chefs Take Manhattan.” Will the last vegetarian lock up the butcher shop?
About your blog tour, will you let us know where you post, or I shall I hunt you down everyday?
You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them. — Ray Bradbury
And this is one of the ways.
Phil: I’ll try to keep you posted. I’ll probably post about it myself. If I keep on top of things.
As a university student, I can see the value of both things. If a class on Zombies was taught properly, with reference to Zombies throughout history, it could prove an insight on modern culture and how we got where we are today. However, I doubt it would be taught that way. The primary purpose of a university should be to remind people of who we are and how we got here, not to look forward with no regard for the past.
So I agree with you, Lars. A class on Zombies in pop culture is rather flippant, especially in a day and age where UNIVERSITY students usually don’t know Chaucer from Spencer, and have never even heard of the Icelandic Sagas and have trouble even beginning to comprehend the old Irish myths. I could rant about that for days. (I think our standard of University admission is far too low these days, but that’s another topic altogether.)
Well, Spencer had a sit-com in the 80s, so we know him. Who is this Chaucer guy or girl? Was he on cable?
Lars, as a scholar of Popular Culture, I would argue that it’s as important to study the literature of the masses as it is to study the classics. By studying the nuance and meaning of popular entertainment, students learn a lot about how their culture works and become more savvy about the media they consume in great quantities.
@Kelsey — I agree with your first paragraph. And the key here is “if it is taught properly.” I spend a lot of time making sure students know the expectations of my class before they enroll, because they assume it to be as frivolous as Lars seems to.
At the same time, I’m unsure what precise value Chaucer (or insert particular part of the canon) holds in itself. For most of the history of University education, the canon was one of the many ways upper class men were introduced to the values and ideas of the upper class, so they could continue being upper class. Only in the last seventy-five years or so has University become part of a larger project of wide scale education for middle and even working class people. As such, the value of the canon has been re-assessed.
Most educators today are much more concerned with helping students become critical thinking life-long learners who can communicate their ideas effectively. Whether they know the difference between Spencer and Chaucer is less important to us.
Brendan, this is one of the concepts I explicitly reject. It’s not about class. The great art of the past was produced by the upper classes. This is a historical fact. Doesn’t make it less great. Giving the masses access to this great stuff was one of the notable achievements of post-Reformation, pre-French Enlightenment democratization. The idea was to let the common people into the Inner Chamber, to enjoy what the only the rich once enjoyed. Instead, contemporary scholars want to trash and burn the chamber. They’re impoverishing us all.
Who is keeping the masses from that great art? There’s a difference between saying higher education is about opening students to the accumulated wisdom of the past and saying “here are the 100 books everybody should read.” The latter is most certainly about culture and class — hence the canon wars of the 1980s. The very fact that you say “the masses” can now enjoy that “great art” re-draws those lines again.
As for contemporary scholars burning the chamber, I would say it’s matter of practicality and institutional pressure more than anything else. The huge number of college educators under pressure to write to maintain or advance our careers means more and more pressure on the subjects of our writing. There are only so many ways you can write about the same 100 books. If scholars aren’t attending to those books as much any more, it’s more to do with the academic land-rush into new disciplines, I think.
Lastly, for me it’s an ongoing give-and-take with the general population’s idea of Higher Ed. While most educators would agree with your idea about what higher education is about, most students and parents would _strongly_ disagree. For them, higher ed is about career training. Just look at how many jokes there are about career prospects for English majors.
Maintaining that humanities classes are about _what_ we read instead of _how_ we read further solidifies the idea that we’re out of touch and our classes are just a remnant of the ivory tower past.
Two interesting books on the subject are Mark Bauerlein’s THE DUMBEST GENERATION and Zachary Karabell’s WHAT’S COLLEGE FOR. Both highlight this ongoing push-and-pull over what higher education is meant to be.
ps> I see from your website that you’re in Plymouth, MN. I too hail from the nicest of states–Chaska to be precise.
Brendan, your comment sounds like a rejection of the benefits of joining into the great conversation with classic writers of our civilization. Would you say that’s right?
I was referring to comment 6. I just read comment 8, which doesn’t seem as stark a rejection. Still, a class on the undead in a course on modern literature makes sense to me. But I still want to learn the language and ideas of Chaucer and Spencer.
@Phil – not a rejection of the benefits of joining the great conversation, just of the idea that a specific cultural literacy is the precise and necessary background knowledge for doing so.
And I certainly don’t want to toss the classics out the door or burn the Chamber down. I think everybody should have a chance to read the Miller’s tale. 😀
I think too many people attend college. A lot of people are happier, and have more fulfilling lives, in the trades. God bless ’em. But they ought to be introduced to the classics at some point too, to decide for themselves whether they want to read more or not. I believe that we all need some grounding in the common culture, or we’ll be Balkanized. I’m not English by ancestry, but Scandinavian. But I appreciate my education in English literature.
What you say about practicality in academic careers just reinforces my notion that the institutions are experiencing mission drift. It’s all about the process, rather than the material and the student.
I think you’re right about college. Our current mania for four-year degrees (and the widening gap between wealthy and poor which makes it seem like the only path to middle-class comfort is college) certainly does a disservice to many students.
Thanks for a great conversation.
Brendan: As for contemporary scholars burning the chamber, I would say it’s matter of practicality and institutional pressure more than anything else. The huge number of college educators under pressure to write to maintain or advance our careers means more and more pressure on the subjects of our writing.
Ori: This is the critical point. Universities have two separate goals: education and research. Arguably, in the humanities those two goals are very much in conflict.
a) How so?
b) How is that true less in science? (i.e., high end molecular biology researchers have the same difference in what they’re writing and teaching as do humanities scholars doing heavy research in lit while teaching Lit 101.
But I agree it’s a critical point.
When I think of limiting my study to popular material or even modern/contemporary stuff, I worry that I will blind myself to the ideas, history, and imagination that everyone around me is blind to as well. As filmmakers, we will only watch each other’s work and select popular films, and we will create more of the same. We won’t break any cultural boundaries because we will be steeped only in our own present culture. Is that what we’re told is happening in the MFA programs, that we have many skilled stylists but few storytellers now because the writers are reading each other’s work without any respect for wonderful English literature from the past?
“limiting my study to popular material”
Is that what we’re talking about? I feel like most posts along the lines of the one that started this conversation are about limiting study to only classic material.
“@Phil – not a rejection of the benefits of joining the great conversation, just of the idea that a specific cultural literacy is the precise and necessary background knowledge for doing so.”
I’d like to extend Brendan’s point. The idea that zombies are about more than just cheap thrills is surprisingly close to the idea that Shakespeare is about more than weird language or Jane Austen is about more than polite language. All three engage with cultural conditions of their period but also with the experience of being a human being living in society, &c.
I *highly* value the study of literature of the past, which gives us (as C.S. Lewis put it) an image of “history from the inside.” But I can’t differentiate that from study of literature–even popular literature, and especially the sort of oddly philosophical/ethical literature that zombie stories have mutated into–of the present historical moment. If we don’t realize that the present has something to say, then we lack part of the vocabulary that will let us listen most clearly to the past.
Brendan, I think there is a conflict because a lot of the knowledge and skills taught, even at the university level, is not material for current research.
It’s hard for me to judge if that is the case in science too. I took linguistics and history at a normal university, but my professional training (computer science and education) came from correspondence schools. So I didn’t get to know any of the professors.
I suspect science has less of a problem because they have less basics to teach:
1. They had less time to accumulate them. Plato is still relevant. Greek science, mostly, isn’t.
2. They regularly “prune” their knowledge base by removing things that are flat out wrong. Racism in the 1800s is relevant. Phrenology from the same period isn’t.
I guess I would hold that the anchor point for education ought to be the whole tradition of our culture. Popular culture should be examined in its light. Popular culture may have new riches to offer; but it needs to earn its place at the table.
I get the impression that the assumption now is that contemporary culture is the base point, and our cultural heritage is only examined insofar as it relates to that. This casts us adrift in history, and makes our work instantly irrelevant to the next generation, which will have its own contemporary culture to venerate.
I think it depends on ways of reading. Reading the past in comparison to the present can be useful as a corrective to the present–the past offers alternatives to the present. Such comparisons don’t necessarily “venerate” the present, though they do assume limited knowledge of the past.
@Lars “I get the impression that the assumption now is that contemporary culture is the base point,”
I don’t think this is true. If it were, courses in popular culture wouldn’t be newsworthy, nor would my course be featured on all those “wacky courses” lists. Academia still mostly holds that old is better.
If we don’t realize that the present has something to say, then we lack part of the vocabulary that will let us listen most clearly to the past.
I don’t understand this. We live in the present; we apply truth and theory and face their consequences here in the present. What part of the present is saying something we are not?
I know we should think through modern entertainment and modern culture, but focusing on zombies seems frivolous, as we’ve said. I should keep quiet since I can’t talk to the professor or see more details about his class and teaching style. Maybe he has a good thing going, and he’s being a bit provocative with it.
@Phil “I should keep quiet since I can’t talk to the professor”
Oops. I should have been more explicit: I am the instructor of the Columbia College Zombies in Popular Media course. I assumed from my first post and the fact that my name is in the story Lars quoted that this would be clear. My bad.
If you’d like to the the syllabus or more information about the course, you can go to:
http://curragh-labs.org/zombies. This is an information page I created for students considering taking the course.
Sorry again for the confusion!
Oops — I didn’t respond to the interesting part of your post.
“We live in the present; we apply truth and theory and face their consequences here in the present.”
In my experience, most teenagers don’t do that. They don’t look at their everyday media with any critical eye at all.
Hey, you’re Brendan Riley, English professor at Columbia College in Chicago! I’m sorry I didn’t check your website or make the name connection. I’ll be sure to look at that course information so I can criticize you with impunity.
Brendan explained what I meant, but I’ll expand anyway.
I quoted C.S. Lewis’s comment that literature could show you history “from within” to make the point that literature is intimately connected with the culture that creates it–it embeds worldviews. One of the mistakes of studying only old literature is that students often see a disconnect between the past and the present. (One student, for instance, claimed that Capitalism happened in the 19th Century, but seemed oblivious to the fact that it continues to happen.)
If students are introduced to the critical consideration of contemporary literature, they begin to understand how their culture and identity can be formed and transformed by the fictions they consume. One goal of such education, ideally, is to make them more self-directed, independent-thinking citizens. But another side-effect is that a basic understanding of the way art works today gives them a basis for understanding the way art worked in other periods (or works in other cultures).
A student who understands how materialism and commercialism are reflected and challenged in art today might be a more interested reader of William Blake’s poetic critiques of the different forms of materialism and commercialism in 18th-19th Century England, or the way Thoreau sought to escape it in 19th Century America. The point is not that they would see Thoreau or Blake as contemporary Americans, but that they would more clearly see the difference between our thought and that of Thoreau and Blake. Knowing how literature works today should help one to know how literature once worked–and visa versa.
I should say that I appreciate Prof. Riley’s showing up here and engaging in polite, thoughtful discussion. That’s extremely classy.
Are you saying we must continue to be polite in response? I thought this was the point at which our comments dropped into a mindless stupor.
BTW, Brendon’s blog, http://curragh-labs.org/blog/, look pretty good. I’m going to have to add it to the sidebar.
Phil, you’re worse than Hitler.
Oh, now you’ve done it. Once Herr Hitler is brought up, the conversation regardless the topic is over.
I think I’ll start drafting several posts on Calvinism and the righteousness of modern America for next week in retaliation. I may even try to commit a different logical fallacy in every one. Heh, heh. I know how to talk smack.
Thanks for being so welcoming! It’s easy to wander into new places on the internet and find yourself in a flame war, especially when you show up to disagree with the author.
I look forward to your post on Calvinism. 😉
Brendan, do you lead your students through connections to older literature? Do they have the background in that literature that they need to put things in context?
I enjoyed your site, too. I suspect I’d enjoy your class. Who could fail to be enthralled by the Undead? And you know that “zombie institutions” are a favorite whipping boy of us economic conservatives who see the end of the world looming.
Sorry for the slow response — the notice got buried in my inbox.
My approach stems from the media and cultural studies disciplines, so we don’t spend much time on earlier _literature_, per se. We explore the zombie from three perspectives: the historical/voodoo zombie (the word ‘zombie’ entered the popular lexicon in the 1920s because of a popular travel book about Haiti), the cinematic (how the “hollywood” zombie gets used as a metaphor or analogy or allegory for cultural discussions), and philosophical (philosophers use the idea of a zombie as a way to think through the mind/body problem).
Part of the problem is that zombies as we understand them don’t have much appearance in literature before the 1920s. Scholars have certainly pointed to ghouls, revenants, and golems as predecessors, but the zombie became commonly understood only in the modern era.
As for the “zombie institutions,” I’ve just written an essay for an academic collection coming out next year that plays on this question a bit — thinking through the way the word zombie gets used in a variety of circumstances these days. I learned during that research that “zombie bank” is not a new term, but was coined during the S&L bailouts of the 1980s.
Yes, not only the mind/body problem, but the problem of still-ambulatory creatures that nevertheless lack almost all recognizable purpose, other than consumption, like a machine stuck on a single setting. Also, that creepy “undead” theme familiar from vampire and possession stories, of a once-familiar person who’s not decently dead but is no longer on the right team: betrayal.
That’s curious: Zombie is originally a voodoo term.
Sure, Haitian voodoo. Who could forget 1943’s “I Walked with a Zombie“? A favorite of my sister’s and mine from Saturday morning monster TV in the 60s. We had a 45 record with its theme song, “Shame and Sorrow for the Family” — “. . .her eyes are empty and she cannot talk, and the nurse has come to make her walk. . .” I think the flipside was “Never Make a Pretty Woman Your Wife.”
I see there also was a 1932 Bela Lugosi film, “White Zombie,” also set in Haiti.
Or maybe it was a 78.