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Whatever we may think of the Romantic vocabulary, which Nietzsche employs here with mischie-
If Nietzsche wants to praise scholars, he also invokes the familiar, risible image of the scholar as
a creature of the inkwell, with pinched belly, his
head bowed low over the paperin which case we
are quickly finished with his book, too! . . . This was
what I felt just now, Nietzsche writes, as I closed a
very decent scholarly bookgratefully, very gratefully, but also with a sense of relief (322).
I offer Nietzsches words as the best testament
to the ideal of scholarship, as well as the best testimony to the existence of an enduring problem
for the readers of scholarly writing, the problem
indicated by Nietzsches confession that he feels
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justified in reading some scholarly booksperhaps most scholarly booksas quickly as possible.
I dont imagine that any of us would dispute this
testimony; we all know how much scholarship
there is to read and how little time we have for
any one specimen of the genre. I suspect that most
scholarship is read gratefully, but quickly. The
stubbornly empirical question of how fast scholars
read is at the center of my concern here; from this
question a host of other questions radiate outward,
questions about the mutually determining relation
between how scholars write and how scholars read.
The mutual determination of writing and reading
also bears directly on the history of academic publication, which is formed and deformed by the demand on scholars to publish their research.
For the moment, I defer the question of publication, in order to situate my inquiry in relation to the long history of scholarly reading and
writing. I hope to return by way of this detour to
the problem of how scholars read today and why
the question of how slowly or quickly they read
is material to the shape and future of academic
publication. But first, I beg my readers patience
and ask them to accompany me on this detour.
Scholarly reading and writing belong to a history
of diverse reading practices, constituting the history of literacy as such, which predates by many
centuries the emergence of print culture, including the rise of university presses. In the premodern
world, the possession of letters was rare enough to
entitle its possessor also to the name of scholar. In
some societiesancient China, for examplethe
literate and the scholars were one and the same.
In ancient Rome, there was a more varied reading
public, though it would be difficult to guess at its
size and even more difficult to locate the scholarly
function in a subgroup of the literati. The social
function of the literati varied thereafter with time
and place, but my story really begins with Western
societies after the fall of the Roman Empire, when
the identity of the scholar turned on the possession
of Latin literacy. Later, to a somewhat lesser extent,
Greek literacy became a requisite for scholarship,
but it is mainly Latin literacy that formed the basis
of scholarly identity during the medieval era, usually fused with the function of the cleric.
The emergence of a new, vernacular literacy in
the later Middle Ages was the crucial condition for
the specialization of a scholarly fraction within the
generality of those who could read (whether Latin
Our understanding of how scholars read, then, depends on acknowledging the divergence between
scholarly and lay modes of reading. This divergence
was correlated with a diversification in genres of
writing, but it would be a mistake to identify
scholarly modes of reading as simply the effect of
new genres of scholarly writing. In fact, scholarship
was of great interest to lay readers for much of the
period between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries and was produced in styles of writing that
solicited lay reading. This condition still obtains to
some small extent, but paradoxically more in the
sciences than in the humanities. Because the language of the sciences is innately inaccessible, the
discoveries of science lend themselves to a thorough
translation into the popular idiom for the purpose
of dissemination. By contrast the language of humanities scholarship is innately closer to vernacular
usage, but over time has acquired a lexicon of technical terms and a repertoire of syntactical features
that strike the lay reader as rebarbative.
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Notes
1. In an important address to the Association of American
University Presses, Publication and the Future of Knowledge, Andrew Abbott suggests that this demand may not in
fact have been met by the professoriat in the aggregate. He
cites several studies, concluding that from the 1920s to the
1970s the number of journals and books as a ratio of professors has remained nearly constant. Or, to put this point
another way, the amount of publication in the average scholarly career is about the same for the period under study. The
research cited, however, leaves many questions unanswered,
beginning with the rate of publication for the period after
1975. In order to square this research with Lewontons observations, we would have to hypothesize that the demand
for increased publication did not have a powerful effect on
humanities scholars until the later 1970s. That decade also
marks the decline of the job market, which suggests that the
buyers market enforced a demand that was much harder
to enforce previously. The evidence of increased scholarly
productivity since the 1970s seems to me undeniable but
most crucially in connection with tenure and promotion.
It might well be the case that productivity tends to fall off
after tenure. If so, lifetime productivity is less the issue here
than the linking of demand for publication with the earliest
moments in a scholarly career, when a scholars knowledge
base is smaller and the conditions of writing more hurried.
2. Abbott remarks that many citations in scholarly works
these days give no page references, even in sources hundreds
of pages long. Such casual citation, if it does not betray the
work cited as unread, suggests that there has been over the
last fifty years a substantial decline in the seriousness with
which scholars are reading each others work. This practice
also tends to restrict the horizon of scholarship to the recent
past and to reinforce the tendency of intellectual fashion to
dominate citation. In an interesting study of citation patterns
in literary scholarship, Jennifer Wolfe Thompson concludes
that citation falls off rapidly for scholarly works older than
ten years, and nearly to zero for works fifty years old (135).
Works Cited
Abbott, Andrew. Publication and the Future of Knowledge. 27 June 2008. Papers [of] Andrew Abbott. U of
Chicago, n.d. Web. 26 Jan. 2009.
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Austen, Jane. Persuasion. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008. Print.
Bacon, Francis. Of Studies. Essays. New York: Penguin,
1985. 20910. Print.
Bowker, Geoffrey C. Memory Practices in the Sciences. Cambridge: MIT P, 2005. Print.
Cavallo, Guglielmo, and Roger Chartier, eds. A History of
3FBEJOHJOUIF8FTU. Trans. Lydia G. Cochrane. Cambridge: Polity, 1999. Print. Studies in Print Culture and
the History of the Book.
Engelsing, Rolf. Der Brger als Leser: Lesergeschichte in
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o. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1974. Print.
Grafton, Anthony. Studied for Action: How Gabriel Harvey
Read His Livy. Past and Present 129 (1990): 3078. Print.
Keats, John.4FMFDUFE-FUUFSTPG+PIO,FBUT3FWJTFE&EJUJPO
#BTFEPOUIF5FYUTPG)ZEFS&EXBSE3PMMJOT. Cambridge:
Harvard UP, 1986. Print.
Lewontin, R. C. The Cold War and the Transformation of
the Academy. The Cold War and the University: Toward