My reading has been pretty eclectic this summer, but one common thread has been the work of Fredric Jameson. Oddly enough, and perhaps to my detriment, Jameson did not feature much in my graduate education, but I’ve been trying to rectify that now.
Anyway, I just finished his The Years of Theory: Postwar French Thought to the Present (Verso, 2024), which is an edited version of a seminar that he delivered in the winter/spring of 2021 on postwar French theory and philosophy. As a survey, it felt uneven: some chapters contain lucid and engaging accounts of a particular theorist’s work while others read more like a disconnected listing of important concepts. However, I wonder how much I can fault it for that since it wasn’t conceived as a book in the first place. First, it’s missing a lot of the elements that go into make up what a seminar is: reading assignments, conversations in and out of class, etc. Second, everybody has off teaching days, even leading lights like Jameson, who must’ve been in his late 80s at the time. Besides, guy has read everything and retains an incredible command over the material. It’s stunning to experience, even through the mediation of the book form.
The parts that I found most useful were the early sections on Sartre and the structuralists, but what’s stuck with me more than anything is a brief digression that Jameson’s makes on the subject of the intellectual. In fact, the figure of the intellectual comprises a minor theme throughout the seminar, earning multiple asides and comments, but in this specific instance Jameson is trying to explain to his students the cultural and political status that theorists in France enjoyed relative to those in the United States:
I’ve pointed out several times that, in America, we have to contend as intellectuals with an anti-intellectual climate, a tradition. No one wants to be called an intellectual, and all intellectuals are accusing each other of being nothing but intellectuals. I think it goes back to something which is related to our topic today, which is puritanism and its various traces. At any rate, nobody thinks that being a teacher or being an intellectual is really much of an achievement in the United States. (282, my italics)
What caught my attention is Jameson’s equation of teachers with intellectuals, a connection that many self-styled intellectuals in the U.S. probably would not make. I think one place where we can see that disconnect is in the structural division within the U.S. higher education system that not only separates research from teaching, but also values research over teaching.
Obviously, it’s more complicated than how I’ve just framed it, but the split is real enough that it inspired Rachel Sagner Buurma and Laura Heffernan’s The Teaching Archive: A New History for Literary Study (U Chicago Press, 2021). Those scholars critique disciplinary histories of literary studies that privilege elite universities while ignoring the classroom as an important site for its practice. The way the story has gone: literary scholars at elite universities, freed from the burden of teaching, have made major discoveries that then trickle down into the classrooms of lesser institutions. Buurma and Heffernan persuasively demonstrate how that story gets it wrong: in fact, major contributions to the discipline originated not just in the classroom, but also classrooms situated elsewhere than in elite universities. The authors’ conclude with a sketch of how structural transformations in the post-war research university promoted the research/teaching split, and they end with an impassioned call to rethink the relation between these two supposedly different parts of the discipline.
I’ve been very interested in the potential of that project, not least of which because my university boasts a “teacher-scholar” model that often feels like an excuse to under-fund both practices, a kind of 2-for-1 deal. I’m not attached to the language of “teacher-scholar” at all, but even if we jettisoned that framework we shouldn’t retreat back into an equally false vision that imagines a divide between teaching and research, teaching institutions and research institutions, etc. I strongly suspect that such a vision also contributes to an understanding of teaching as a kind high-level job training (career readiness seems to be this year’s buzzword at my institution). In other words, what would be possible if we not only insisted that teachers are intellectuals, but also embraced the stigmatized position of the intellectual? Maybe that’s strategically a dumb move, but, hey, in his seminar Jameson identified himself as an intellectual. If it’s good enough for Fred…
And so, what I’ve found most interesting about The Years of Theory is its status as a document of Jameson’s pedagogy, not only his methods but also his tics and idiosyncrasies, even his occasional light reprimands. Throughout, Jameson is not only teaching his students about postwar French thought, but also is teaching them how to teach it. It’s an example of what it might mean for a teacher to be an intellectual, and an intellectual to be a teacher.
Steven A. Ruszczycky, PhD 