Showing papers by "Wai Chee Dimock published in 2017"

Editor's Column–Experimental Humanities

Abstract: I N A RECENT ESSAY, “FORM AND EXPLANATION,” JONATHAN Kramnick and Anahid Nersessian ask what “interdisciplinarity” means in the university’s division of knowledge. Against the lip service routinely paid to the term and against those who, proceeding on the assumption that there is a common ground among disciplines, “have turned to the sciences to search for a compelling isomorphism,” Kramnick and Nersessian urge us to recognize the fact that each ield of knowledge is vocabularydependent and therefore “inquiry relative.” Quoting the cognitive scientist Zenon Pylyshyn, they argue that literary study is “fundamentally tied to a class of terms which in part deine the phenomena it tries to explain” (651). Instead of struggling to square these terms with those in other disciplines, literary scholars need to be up front about the “ieldspeciic” nature of what we do, embracing a “literary disciplinarity without apology or compromise” (652). Given the crisis facing the humanities and the unprecedented assault on science today, thinking outside the box is indeed key. Without engaging the full range of issues revolving around disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity, I’d like to use one particular term— experimental—to test the extent of isomorphism among diferent ields of knowledge, in the hope that this case study might help clarify the heuristic beneits as well as the limits of this form of inquiry. What does experimental mean when practiced among the sciences? Is there room for analogous practices within literary study? And what is to be gained by bringing these disparate ields into relation? Rudolf Carnap, the eminent philosopher of science, began his 1946 lectures on the “experimental method” with the startling remark that experiments are neither necessary for nor universally meaningful to all sciences.1 “While all sciences rest on observations,” 1 3 2 . 2 ]

Editor’s Column—Infrastructure Art

Abstract: T HREE TIMES A YEAR, FALL, WINTER, AND SPRING, THE PMLA EDItorial Board meets to discuss articles recommended by irstround reviewers. Some come with glowing reports, others have received more mixed reviews, and almost all have been carefully revised. Now here they are—a hety stack, though not so hety if one remembers that these inalround essays are only iteen percent of the hundreds submitted each year. This final review is a big deal for the authors, and a big deal for the Editorial Board. Each new member arrives as a novice, but, mediated by the group as a whole, each is acclimatized on the spot, together turning this venerable procedure into a living, breathing ritual. By nature this is a ritual collectively honed, carrying no one’s signature but making a diference to all concerned: those making decisions and those awaiting the outcomes, including PMLA’s readers. A ritual of this sort says more about the journal than about any individual editor, since all the essays have been submitted anonymously by MLA members and relect the diversity of the work being done by the membership. he peer review of these submissions is undertaken on behalf of a collective endeavor—a service every MLA member is entitled to, and a service every member could be called on to perform. Collegiality and generosity are integral to the process, but the input of reviewers is not highlighted: if the article is rejected, the painstaking work oten results in an improved essay, but one that appears elsewhere; even if the article is accepted, the recognition accrues only to the author. I’d like to think of PMLA, then, as representing two kinds of work, one complementing the other and together ofering two protocols for what counts as scholarship, with two input platforms and two output formats: inscriptional and procedural, solo performance 1 3 2 . 1 ]