Who Reads Academic Research?

The Chronicle of High Ed has an interesting piece on the fact that no one really reads most that scholarly research done by literature academics:

However much they certify their authors as professionals and win them jobs and tenure, essays and books of high scholarly merit in literary studies suffer the same inattention all the time. Why? Because after four decades of mountainous publication, literary studies has reached a saturation point, the cascade of research having exhausted most of the subfields and overwhelmed the capacity of individuals to absorb the annual output. Who can read all of the 80 items of scholarship that are published on George Eliot each year? After 5,000 studies of Melville since 1960, what can the 5,001st say that will have anything but a microscopic audience of interested readers? . . .

The research identity is a powerful allure, flattering people that they have cutting-edge brilliance. Few of them readily trade the graduate seminar for the composition classroom. But we have reached the point at which the commitment to research at the current level actually damages the humanities, turning the human capital of the discipline toward ineffectual toil. More books and articles don’t expand the audience for literary studies. A spurt of publications in a department does not attract more sophomores to the major, nor does it make the dean add another tenure-track line, nor does it urge a curriculum committee to add another English course to the general requirements. All it does is “author-ize” the producers.

This is one of the reasons—among many, I want to stress—that I decided not to pursue graduate-level studies in literature. Once I’d figured out that literature was what I wanted to do with my life, I had to weigh options for maximizing my enjoyment of this career/passion. And, of course, the possibility of actually having what I did vis a vis literature be meaningful to other human beings was a major consideration in that calculus.

While it’s true that academics have a variety of ways to reach an audience, the fact is that publishing stuff that probably no one will ever read is a big, big part of their professional lives. (And just to be clear—I know academics for which this is not the case, but they’re the exceptions.) I wanted whatever I did with books to be something where I’d be interacting with readers of all kinds on a regular basis and actually getting people excited about books I loved. If that’s what you’re interested in, blogging and reviewing isn’t a bad way to go. It won’t give you the societal prestige of being an academic, and you’ll probably have to figure out something else to make up part of your income, but you will have the pleasure of knowing that your work is actually being read by more than 9 people.

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