人文学科的挑战与机遇——访哈佛大学英文系主任詹姆斯·辛普森教授

罗　媛

(苏州科技大学，苏州，215009)



人文学科的挑战与机遇
——访哈佛大学英文系主任詹姆斯·辛普森教授

罗媛

(苏州科技大学，苏州，215009)

摘要:近年来，人文学科的衰退是海内外学界一直探讨的热门话题。哈佛大学同样面临着人文学科发展的困境。哈佛大学英文系主任詹姆斯·辛普森(James Simpson)教授在2012～2013年间参与起草了《描绘未来：哈佛学院人文学科教学的图景》这一重要文件，以此应对哈佛大学在人文学科方面的衰退局势，并自2012年起在英文系实施教学改革。笔者于2014年8月至2015年8月在哈佛英文系访学期间就“哈佛大学人文学科的发展近况——以英文系为例”这一话题专访了辛普森教授。访谈中，辛普森教授指出哈佛大学既直面人文学科所面临的不利因素，同时又把挑战视为发展的契机。为了吸引更多的学生选择人文学科，哈佛大学在本科阶段倡导宽广的人文教育，在课程设置中彰显文学与当代经验的相关性，同时也倡导具有悠久历时性的人文教学法，鼓励开设探究经典文本的相关课程。英文系的重要举措就是改革课程设置，将重大主题和经典作品研究与小班教学有机地融为一体。成立于19世纪末的哈佛英文系一贯重视文学史的学习，在文学教学和研究中一直倡导跨学科路径。辛普森教授还就中国的英语教学提出了宝贵建议，指出不同文化之间的交流至关重要，但这往往囿于政治方面的阻力，而文学作品却可以超越政治，促成人们对异域文化形成更丰富、更深刻的认知。因此，他希望中国在英语教学中大力倡导文学教学，以此促进文化交流。

关键词:挑战，机遇，人文学科，教学改革

LUO Yuan(LY): Recent years have witnessed heated discussion about the declining situation of Arts and Humanities in the higher education. As Chair of English Department in Harvard University, you have participated in the joints efforts of the composition ofMappingtheFuture:TheTeachingoftheArtsandHumanitiesatHarvardCollege, during 2012-2013. Could you briefly introduce the background of the project and the main idea of this document?

James Simpson(JS): In 2012-13, Dean Diana Sorensen convened a committee to address the issues of declining enrollments in Arts and Humanities at Harvard College. One group devised new courses, and a second (of which I was co-chair) composed the document to which you refer, which can be found at http://artsandhumanities.fas.harvard.edu/files/humanities/files/mapping_the_future_31_may_2013.pdf.

The document recognized the powerful forces militating against study of the Arts and Humanities (especially economic, technological and vocational). Despite those forces, our document saw the current situation as a great opportunity for the teaching and learning of Arts and Humanities. How? Our students report that they choose their concentration/major out of intellectual curiosity, and because they wish to contribute constructively to society. Our committee noted that our students were choosing Social Sciences (particularly Government, Psychology and Economics) in order to satisfy their intellectual curiosity and in order to contribute constructively to their world. So our committee decided to encourage pedagogy in the Humanities that does show how the Humanities always contribute to contemporary understanding and experience. We encouraged a broad Humanities education, designed specifically for undergraduates, who will most probably not go on to post-graduate specialization. We emphasized how our study is always prompted by, and always answers to, contemporary experience (rather than being a study of the past “for its own sake”). We emphasized how study of the Humanities exerts especial pressure on the present because artistic practice always both reflects and challenges norms. We encouraged colleagues explicitly to emphasize courses so as to make it clear that humanities have contemporary relevance. Despite our emphasis on contemporary relevance, we also encouraged Humanities pedagogy with long chronologies. We also encouraged courses that only ever deal with great (not necessarily canonical) texts.

LY: Two years have passed since the composition of the document. I wonder what changes have been made in the undergraduate education of Arts and Humanities in Harvard. Could you take English Department for example to share with us what specific measures have been made to improve the humanities education in Harvard College? Also, given that English is the cross roads of the humanities, compared with other humanities disciplines, what’s the particular challenge and opportunity for English ?

JS: In the Arts and Humanities Division, Dean Sorensen introduced a number of new “gateway” courses for freshmen, since we learned that many freshmen begin their university career by intending to concentrate on the Humanities, but finally choose Social Sciences instead. So we developed courses with big themes, great texts and long chronologies that spoke to freshmen. These courses have been well enrolled.

For the English Department, we focused on recruiting students in a variety of ways. Above all, we changed our curriculum so as to present courses with large themes in small teaching groups (capped at 30 students). The combination of great texts, big themes and small classes has been very successful: our own departmental enrollments have grown, and we remain one of the two departments with 50 or more concentrators in Harvard College most well judged by undergraduates.

Literature can be described as the cross roads of the disciplines, because literature always draws on other disciplines (sociology, history, psychology, economics, theology, etc.) even as it also leads out from those disciplines to take us to forms of imaginative understanding unavailable to the other disciplines.

LY: The English Department at Harvard enjoys a history of over 100 years and many distinguished professors and remarkable administrators have contributed to the development of the Department ever since its founding in 1890. Though there have been great challenges during different stages of its development, I think there is a tradition in the English Department at Harvard that distinguishes the English Department at Harvard from other peer English Departments in this country. Could you elaborate a little more about this tradition? I know you have a very admirable academic background, moving from the University of Melbourne to Oxford and to Cambridge and then to Harvard. What are the similarities and differences between the English faculties and departments of Oxford, Cambridge and Harvard?

JS: A brief history of the Harvard English Department can be found here: http://english.fas.harvard.edu/about/department-history/

There are similarities and differences between the English faculties and departments of Oxford, Cambridge and Harvard. All are committed to transmitting the culture of the humanities through the reading of literature. In practice, many scholars in each of these departments will practice the same kinds of scholarship. That said, there are indeed differences of tradition.

Oxford has a long philological tradition, which continues to lay great emphasis on History of the Language and knowledge of older forms of the language (i.e. Anglo-Saxon, varieties of Middle English) in literature at undergraduate level. Those undergraduate emphases tend to produce a different research culture at faculty level too: Oxford has a great philological tradition of editing texts.

Cambridge’s most pronounced intellectual tradition is that of literary criticism as a culturally significant act at the present. This tradition, most closely associated with the literary critic F. R. Leavis (1895-1978), produced an undergraduate curriculum that emphasizes traditions that lead into the present. By contrast with Oxford’s emphasis on the beginnings of writing in English, then, Cambridge emphasizes the ends (both temporal and functional) of literature.

Like Oxford, Harvard’s English Department dates from the end of the nineteenth century, when the study of vernacular literature (as distinct from the study of the classical languages) gained in intellectual respectability. (The Cambridge English Faculty did not begin until after the First World War.) The strongest and most enduring emphasis at Harvard has been literary history.

LY: As Chair of the nation’s premier academic department at Harvard, perhaps you also face many challenges. What’s the greatest challenge confronting you?

JS: There are many very great departments of English in the United States, in both private and public universities, of which Harvard is but one. Our greatest challenge is attracting undergraduates. Our graduate programs continue to attract very many high quality candidates; our faculty searches continue to attract high quality applicants. But without our undergraduate enrollments, we have no department. Undergraduates can study no richer or more satisfying field than literature. So we must remain alert to changes in the larger culture that offer opportunities for, and threats to, the study of literature.

LY: As an auditor of several courses in the English Department in the past year,I find the faculty here are not only productive scholars but also very devoted to teaching. How do the teachers here cope with the relationship between research and teaching? It’s really not easy to be a qualified teacher of humanities, particularly to be a college teacher. Professor Irving Babbitt once stated “one may shine as a productive scholar and yet have little or nothing of that humane insight and reflection that can alone give meaning to all subjects, and is especially appropriate in a college teacher”. What qualities do you think would be essential as an ideal professor of English at Harvard College?

JS: In the Humanities, we (both professors and students) are all always in a position where discoveries can be made. Every time we read a text, even if we have read it dozens of times before, we stand on the edge of discoveries. So teaching in the Humanities is never merely a matter of transmitting information (as it might be in many other disciplines). Ours is a dialogic subject, where a discovery -of, if you like, a recovery - can be made in every class. This, then, is the subject that should have the most exciting classes. With small classes (either lectures or sections) in which each student can speak, our courses tend to attract very strong approval from our students. Our department lays very great emphasis on our teaching. There is no room for scholars who want only to get out of the classroom into the library.

LY: Besides your administrative work as Chair, you also teach courses for undergraduates and graduates, at the same time you are a productive and distinguished scholar, really admirable. How do you manage to strike a balance in your career?

JS: Time management!

LY: You are an expert onLatemedievalandReformationWesternEuropeanLiterature, 1150-1680, with a master work ofReformandCulturalRevolution, 1350-1547, being volume 2 ofTheOxfordEnglishLiteraryHistory. I remember you have mentioned that your commitment in this masterwork is “to make history whole”.Could you elaborate a little bit more on this?

JS: My commitment is, as you say, to “making history whole.” I resist historiographical projects that would dismiss one period as irrelevant to the present. In the western tradition, there is an especially pronounced hostility to the millennium between the Fall of Rome (410) and the fifteenth-century Renaissance.

So most of my work has been focused on the “medieval” period. That millennium (dismissed as “dark” and “medieval”) is itself vast and complex; in all its forms it is the space in which the following phenomena work themselves out in a myriad of forms: fall of empire; the introduction of a new religion; and the emergence of alternative forms of authority that eventually take shape as nation states. We cannot understand “modernity” without understanding what intervenes between empire and nation.

More recently, in the last ten years, I have moved forward to early “modernity” of the sixteenth century. My interest here is in giving an alternative, less flattering picture of early modernity than the standard cultural histories would supply. Whereas the standard cultural histories represent both the Renaissance and the Reformation as moments of revolutionary liberation, I see them from a different perspective, in which they emerge as absolutist and punishing in both politics and religion.

All my work resists the kinds of broken historiography that revolutions (both political and religious) would impose upon us as scholars. Revolutions desire to start history again, and to escape the past completely. If we accept that historiographical practice, we end up with stunted self understanding (the aim of all study in the Humanities).

LY: When you teach course like Arrivals: 700-1500, do you attempt to relate medieval literature to the contemporary world or to the students’ personal experience, in order to arouse the students’ interest? Could you give an example? If not, in what way do you make your teaching of medieval literature lively and interesting?

JS: Almost always, at the end of this course, students confess that they approached medieval literature (700-1500) with trepidation. And then they declare, with a certain astonishment, that they had never realized how enjoyable and how relevant this literature was to contemporary concerns. Neither did they realize how daring this literature was and remains. Chaucer’sWifeofBath’sPrologueandTale, for example, reveals that women have been represented negatively in Western literature because women have not written the stories. Many modern readers are familiar with this kind of argument, but think that it derives from feminist writers of the 1970s. Chaucer wrote his text in the 1390s.

LY: As to the curriculum of the English Department here, it seems that literary theory does not account for a large part. Yet it is at English Department at Harvard that many literary theories were first proposed by the scholars, then became influential throughout the academic world, like New Historicism by Professor Greenblatt. And some archives indicate that in the 1990s the English Department was more in touch with interdisciplinary approaches to literature. Nowadays in the age of “after theory”,what role do you think the literary theory plays in the academic world of literary studies as well as in the curriculum of English Concentrators at Harvard? Are interdisciplinary approaches to literature still popular at the moment? Could you give an example?

JS: I have a divided view of the place of literary theory in undergraduate pedagogy. On the one hand, positively, our students should certainly understand the intellectual traditions of their own discipline. Students should also see how literary study is inflected by theories from other disciplines. On the other hand, negatively, in the 1990s literary theory distracted students from engagement with the great texts of our tradition. The lure of theory also produced too much impenetrable scholarly prose that damaged and diminished the capacity of our discipline to address large audiences. We also started to “interrogate” texts, in the manner of the secret police.

So what should we do? We should definitely do more to introduce students to the intellectual traditions of the discipline and adjacent disciplines. But we should only apply theory as an act of practical judgment, with readiness to see how works of literature never conform to the consistency promised by theory. Ours is less a theoretical and the hypo-theoretical (i.e. sub-theoretical) discipline. We always deal in hypotheses, but literature itself does not conform to theoretical consistency; if it did, it would not be great literature.

Interdiscplinarity has been promoted for so long now that it needs no further emphasis: we are all interdisciplinary in our scholarship and our teaching.

LY: In the message you write to the prospective concentrators of English, you mention transferable skills students will take away from the English concentration including critical interpretative reading, writing, speaking and ethical understanding. In what way do these fourfold skills help distinguish the students from other concentrators in relation to the curriculum for English concentrators at Harvard?

For English concentrators in China, I think the transferable skills also include cross-cultural awareness and cross-cultural mobility, besides the skills you mention for English majors in U.S. Yet due to the limitations of both the faculty and students as non-native English speakers in China, there is a big gap between transferable skills grasped by English concentrators in China and that of the English concentrators here. What suggestions would you like to make for the education of English majors in China so that we may take some measures in the future to broaden and enrich English studies?

JS: I would happily include cross-cultural awareness and mobility among the transferrable skills derived from an English degree.

I stressed transferrable skills because our discipline has traditionally been reticent to say that the reason for studying literature is to become better writers and speakers. Scholars in English have been wary of that argument, because practical skills of expression, can, of course, be taught more efficiently without studying literature. If we teach students how to write and speak clearly, then, the argument might go, why bother reading Dickens?

I think we should stop being wary of promoting the fact that our discipline inculcates transferrable skills. The study of literature has, since classical antiquity, been turned to public speaking and civic application. In today’s very challenging vocational context, in which students find it difficult to find employment, we simply must advertise this truth: that we do teach students how to interpret complex textual corpora; and that we do teach students how to write and speak lucidly and cogently. We do a lot more than that, but when students come to apply for jobs, they will be advantaged by possession of these essential skills.

I cannot say how literary study should be promoted in China, but I hope it is! Cultural exchange is highly important, but often blocked by political orthodoxies. Exchange through literary study avoids the explicitly political obstacles to cultural exchange, and permits a richer, deeper sense of other cultures.

(责任编辑杨丽)