Other than in the article, the only other instance I found of the term was from this event at Columbia University, [0] at which the co-authors were both openers. So the term seems to be specific to them and pretty new. Still, in the OP article, the sidebar does solicit readers to submit their candidates and it hints that the list might be published, so something to keep an eye out for.
One of my favourite books is Marshall Berman's All that is Solid Melts into Air, an attempt to examine the whirlwind experience of modernity, through a delirious blend of philosophy, history, literature, architecture and autobiography. It is a deeply personal and intensely felt book, and completely unlike anything else I've ever read.
The humanities and social sciences have become leaden under professionalisation. There is a paucity of vision and imagination, a reluctance to look beyond the horizon of one's own subdiscipline, and a failure to ask big and novel questions. Yet those are everyone's favourite books, that mean most to them, and change not just their arguments but their worldview.
Russell Jacoby's The Last Intellectuals (1987) is a book about how the humanities and social sciences professionalized and lost their grander vision. Essentially Jacoby claims that gentrification and the expansion of academia killed the figure of the independent "public" intellectual.
Some of the books he holds up as examples of intellectual (rather than academic) engagement are Jane Jacob's Death and Life of Great American Cities, William Whyte's Organization Man, C. Wright Mills' White Collar, Murray Bookchin's The Limits of the City, and Lewis Mumford's The City in History. I think most of these would be good candidates for "undead" status.
I suspect the only purpose of mentioning these "undead texts" is signaling. "See how much of an intellectual I am, I have even read these books which you probably couldn't even stomach".
The article starts by mentioning Erving Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1956) and Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities (1983). I wonder if texts like this are really "undead" in the way that the author implies. My phd minor was anthropology. I'm pretty familiar with the overall argument of both and have even used them to frame my thoughts from time to time. However, even though when I just searched for them and Amazon says I bought Goffman in 2006 and Anderson in 2003, I have no memory of the specifics of either book. These ideas have outlived the texts they came from. The specifics of them may be dated, as the article does mention in passing, but the ideas are still useful in the abstract.
Be grateful you can’t remember Imagined Communities. It conflates nations, nationalism and the nation state in an attempt to argue that nationalism postdates the American Revolution. It’s possibly the second worst widely read book in the humanities. Other scholars wrote more intelligently and with far greater insight on the nation and its relation to the state, before and after Anderson. Before, Ernest Gellner, after, Azar Gat.
> Non-Europeans have no agency or originality in creating their own national identities. They were blank slates upon which European colonials drew something.
> Luckily for me, I don’t come into reading Imagined Communities totally ignorant of other viewpoints. I’ve read Victor Lieberman’s Strange Parallels, which makes the case that mainland Southeast Asia resembled Europe in the coalescence of distinct proto-national identities one to two thousand years ago.
> The same is true to the north. China was arguably a nation-empire long before Europeans arrived. Though the Chinese peasantry spoke different dialects, it was united by a ruling class with a sense of coherency. The modern Japanese nation-state state is modeled on Western nation-states, in particular, Prussia. It strikes as bizarre to hold that this unique and isolated nation didn’t exist in the imagination of Japanese when the Europeans first arrived.
> Because industrial economies continually make and put into practice technical and organizational innovations, they continually change how they employ resources, especially human resources. Their occupational structures change significantly in a generation at most, and often more quickly, so no one can expect to follow in the family profession. (A hundred years ago, there were no system administrators, but there were carriage-drivers.) In Agraria, training could be left to families or guilds, be largely tacit and physical and tied up with the rituals and social context of the trade, and different parts of the same society could be almost unintelligible to each other, provided only they could go through the customary haggling or tithing. None of this will do in an industrial, changing society, in which training must be much more explicit, be couched in a far more universal idiom, and emphasize understanding and manipulating nearly context-free symbols (even manual work increasingly becomes controlling a machine, which must be, as we say, read); it must in short take on the characteristics formerly associated with the literate High Cultures of Agraria, and moreover this training must be received by the entire economically effective population. (A rough definition of an industrial society might be: one where you can learn a trade from books, a society of reference manuals.) So far, such training, on such a scale, has always needed at least elementary literacy, and it hasn't been reliably provided by any institutions weaker and smaller than states. Moreover, the teachers employed by this system must themselves be trained in the same High Culture, and so on, quickly escalating to the point where the culture needs an entire university system, at the least, to be self-sustaining. States become the protectors of High Cultures, of "idioms"; nationalism is the demand that each state succor and contain one and only one nation, one idiom.
> The problem is not simply one of obsolete ideas and refuted arguments but also of untenable form: No one in the academy seems to be writing books like these anymore.
Well, since you cannot determine if it is an Undead Text until it has been thoroughly rejected by the field after a few decades, the only other thing to do is to apply the "anti-disciplinary and scholarly"-litmus test to recent books. There's plenty of those, no? For example, Thomas Piketty's "Capital in the Twenty-First Century".
I think the issue is that refutations now occur closer to real-time. Consequently, the book doesn't get time to get buried into academic "consciousness".
I suspect that things like "Freakonomics", for example, would qualify, except that people have already picked it apart.
I am absolutely with you that in the academic scene refutations happen more quickly now; from what I have been told all academic discourse happens faster, so why would this be an exception. However, I'm not so sure whether these refutations spread among pop-culture more quickly as well.
Freakonomics has been picked apart, yes, but has it faded out of the public consciousness yet?
The author name-checked a lot of books but didn't really go into depth. Two that I studied in college, Ong's "Orality and Literacy," and Kuhn's "Structure of Scientific Revolutions" were mentioned by name, but there was no context.
I'm curious which field Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens is supposed to apply to and rejected by, because it was part of one art-history class I had in art school. We didn't have to read the book itself though.
17 comments
[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 49.1 ms ] thread[0]: https://english.columbia.edu/events/undead-texts-grand-narra...
The humanities and social sciences have become leaden under professionalisation. There is a paucity of vision and imagination, a reluctance to look beyond the horizon of one's own subdiscipline, and a failure to ask big and novel questions. Yet those are everyone's favourite books, that mean most to them, and change not just their arguments but their worldview.
Some of the books he holds up as examples of intellectual (rather than academic) engagement are Jane Jacob's Death and Life of Great American Cities, William Whyte's Organization Man, C. Wright Mills' White Collar, Murray Bookchin's The Limits of the City, and Lewis Mumford's The City in History. I think most of these would be good candidates for "undead" status.
A few years ago there was an interesting symposium revisiting the argument in light of changes in the public sphere: https://www.chronicle.com/specialreport/After-The-Last/16
https://www.gnxp.com/WordPress/tag/imagined-communities/
> Non-Europeans have no agency or originality in creating their own national identities. They were blank slates upon which European colonials drew something.
> Luckily for me, I don’t come into reading Imagined Communities totally ignorant of other viewpoints. I’ve read Victor Lieberman’s Strange Parallels, which makes the case that mainland Southeast Asia resembled Europe in the coalescence of distinct proto-national identities one to two thousand years ago.
> The same is true to the north. China was arguably a nation-empire long before Europeans arrived. Though the Chinese peasantry spoke different dialects, it was united by a ruling class with a sense of coherency. The modern Japanese nation-state state is modeled on Western nation-states, in particular, Prussia. It strikes as bizarre to hold that this unique and isolated nation didn’t exist in the imagination of Japanese when the Europeans first arrived.
http://bactra.org/reviews/nations-and-nationalism/
> Because industrial economies continually make and put into practice technical and organizational innovations, they continually change how they employ resources, especially human resources. Their occupational structures change significantly in a generation at most, and often more quickly, so no one can expect to follow in the family profession. (A hundred years ago, there were no system administrators, but there were carriage-drivers.) In Agraria, training could be left to families or guilds, be largely tacit and physical and tied up with the rituals and social context of the trade, and different parts of the same society could be almost unintelligible to each other, provided only they could go through the customary haggling or tithing. None of this will do in an industrial, changing society, in which training must be much more explicit, be couched in a far more universal idiom, and emphasize understanding and manipulating nearly context-free symbols (even manual work increasingly becomes controlling a machine, which must be, as we say, read); it must in short take on the characteristics formerly associated with the literate High Cultures of Agraria, and moreover this training must be received by the entire economically effective population. (A rough definition of an industrial society might be: one where you can learn a trade from books, a society of reference manuals.) So far, such training, on such a scale, has always needed at least elementary literacy, and it hasn't been reliably provided by any institutions weaker and smaller than states. Moreover, the teachers employed by this system must themselves be trained in the same High Culture, and so on, quickly escalating to the point where the culture needs an entire university system, at the least, to be self-sustaining. States become the protectors of High Cultures, of "idioms"; nationalism is the demand that each state succor and contain one and only one nation, one idiom.
Alright, I've got to ask: what's the worst widely read book in the humanities?
Well, since you cannot determine if it is an Undead Text until it has been thoroughly rejected by the field after a few decades, the only other thing to do is to apply the "anti-disciplinary and scholarly"-litmus test to recent books. There's plenty of those, no? For example, Thomas Piketty's "Capital in the Twenty-First Century".
I suspect that things like "Freakonomics", for example, would qualify, except that people have already picked it apart.
I am absolutely with you that in the academic scene refutations happen more quickly now; from what I have been told all academic discourse happens faster, so why would this be an exception. However, I'm not so sure whether these refutations spread among pop-culture more quickly as well.
Freakonomics has been picked apart, yes, but has it faded out of the public consciousness yet?