Against Argument

Stephen Burt has a post over at the Columbia University press blog against argument for the sake of argument:

The academy thrives on argument, at least in the traditional
humanities: arguments get us noticed. Travel guides and scientific
discoveries may both sell books, but to get attention within the realms
of the arts and the humanities now, one almost has to make an extended
argument: to take issue with some dominant view, to explain why what we
already knew was wrong, or (especially in literary studies) to
demonstrate some big connection between features within some
literature, and features of history or (more rarely) philosophy or
natural science outside it.

There’s nothing wrong with making extended arguments, of course, and
I spend much of my time (at least during the school year) teaching our
students how to do just that. Yet our sustained interest in arguments
might be making us keep at arm’s length, or under a cloud, the reasons
why we care for the arts at all, the smaller-scale features that
distinguish works of art from one another, the features which help us
explain (if it can be explained—can it?) why we care for this one, not
that one.

There’s a lot that makes sense in ths post. Argument for the sake of argument has always struck me as being a tacit acknowledgement that whatever you’re saying isn’t interesting enough to grab someone on its own merits, so thus you have to jimmy up some kind of striking argument to get people’s attention. And so, you get stuff like that weird Slate piece where it was argued
that now that Robbe-Grillet died all the experimental writers won’t be
afraid to experiment any more.

The problem with this is that it sells a lot of the arts short; that is, it implies that people won’t be interested in just reading an interesting article about a worthwhile artist. (Lost in that Robbe-Grillet piece, for instance, was some explanation of what exactly he stood for or what his movement consisted of.)

That’s not to say that an essay shouldn’t make an argument (and certainly arguments aren’t mutually exclusive with the idea of describing an artist’s work), but just that this whole thing about getting farther and farther out on a limb to grab readers’ attention is rather silly.

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