Maria Siciliano is a PhD student in English and a Harvey Fellow in the Program in American Culture Studies. Her research interests include transnational American literature and trauma and memory studies.
Eric Hayot, Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature and Asian Studies at Penn State, is a remarkable scholar whose research spans vast temporalities, geographies and modes of humanist research and thought. His monographs position thought-provoking arguments about literary history, and he employs a range of scholarly methods to elucidate these claims. Much of his scholarship focuses on the profession, considering the humanities, our modes of research and the processes of academic writing.
On his recent visit to WashU, Hayot met with English PhD student Maria Siciliano about his most recent monographs, On Literary Worlds (2012) and Humanist Reason (2021), as well as his essential guide to academic writing in the humanities, The Elements of Academic Style (2014). They discussed a process-oriented vision of writing, considered new questions for teaching across the humanities and outlined methods that are key to humanist research.
The Elements of Academic Style provides an indispensable guide to the psychology, practice, and processes of academic writing for graduate students and faculty across the humanities. How has your view of academic writing and style changed since this book’s publication, and what has remained the same?
I don’t think my top-level beliefs about academic writing have changed much in the last decade. I’ve learned some things, and I have some new advice. I think that the conditions that I describe at the beginning of the book — the failure of the PhD programs to teach writing — have actually changed pretty substantially.
We have responded to these issues by building infrastructure to meet the needs and the demands that the book articulated. In that sense, things are clearly better — the level of graduate writing, the amount of graduate writing instruction, the support and recognition all have changed. Yet, the basic writing advice still feels valuable. What has really surprised me is that a few of the main concepts, primarily on paragraph structure, are now being taught in high schools and appear in YouTube videos. The book has had a scope of effect that I’ve been completely stunned by.
In The Elements of Academic Style, you maintain that “[w]riting is not a memorialization of ideas. Writing distills, crafts, and pressures — tests ideas — it creates ideas.” Can you expand upon this process-oriented vision of writing?
I was trying to write against the idea that in “difficult” writing, you have the ideas first, and then write them down. But rather, the process of writing itself will not only articulate your ideas, but also improve your ideas and change your ideas. That’s because writing is a “thinking technology,” as well as an expressive technology.
Your most recent monograph, Humanist Reason lays out a new vision for what the humanities can offer, repositioning our intellectual work as a form of reason, and demonstrating how humanist thought tells us about our world. What is one piece of advice you would recommend for implementing this line of thought into our scholarship and our classrooms?
If I could wave a wand, I would eliminate all of the departments and the curriculum in an existing college of the humanities or the liberal arts. I would invite faculty to think creatively about what they would do if nothing was there. The other thing included in that spell would be to eliminate the profound resistance among faculty towards thinking about large-scale change. Or thinking about large-scale change as only involving loss and not potentially involving gains.
I don’t necessarily know what the humanities ought to look like. I have some ideas — not just ideas I’ve thought of, but ones I’ve picked up in conversation with other people. What are the best ideas that 40 or 50 faculty at WashU can come up with, and how would those ideas be different from ideas at other universities? I wish that we would respond to this difficult historical situation — which is largely not of our making — with a burst of creative energy. I think that we would also have to begin by doing away with a couple major resistances. One is the resistance towards teaching skills and connecting humanities work with professional life, which is a language our students need to hear from us. And two is the resistance towards disciplinary training and formation.
I wish that we would respond to this difficult historical situation — which is largely not of our making — with a burst of creative energy.
In your third book, On Literary Worlds, you center the “worldedness” of literary objects to rethink intellectual influence and to retheorize the past 400 years of literary history. Bearing this in mind, how might think about this “worldedness” when reading?
The fundamental problem I was trying to solve in that book was that I knew that works by two authors could feel very different, and that the feeling was not necessarily happening in the words or even in the plots. For example, if Marcel Proust had written a detective novel, something in it would still feel like Proust. I started by thinking about what that “thing” was, and where it was in the work. You couldn’t just pull out one sentence, it had to be happening over time, in paragraphs, and throughout the pages. What is the “world” that is constructed by a work, such that you can recognize it, and you acquire its taste or its feel? That’s the “worldedness” I was after.
We tend to think of literary works as primarily composed of specific words. What I’d suggest is that I could change a lot of the words in Proust to other words, and it would still feel like Proust. That’s the kind of weird mystery I was trying to solve: Why is this the case, and how does it work?
I was trying to historicize how literature conceptualizes wholeness. Is there a history of these shapes or these feelings? What are the categories — mentally or heuristically — that we could use to describe these differences across examples? Now that we have these categories, can we describe their patterns and development over time? I think of this as a kind of literary history or history of the aesthetic.
In thinking about “comparative methods,” what are the top 5 texts that you would recommend reading?
[Pause] Ok. So instead of naming my top 5 texts, I’m going to name my top 5 methods. I think that in order to learn about comparative methods, we ought to learn a few methods very well and think about what methods are.
- Historicism — or to learn how to grasp the relationship between human practices and their historical context.
- Relativism and anti-relativism — and understanding where and how it makes sense to deploy those two forms, and why you’d want to do that.
- Close reading
- Jamesonian analysis
- Quantitative political science or sociology — it’s useful for breaking us out of a humanities-centered methodological bubble. To think like a humanist really well, you should learn what non-humanists do, because it will genuinely be comparative.
