Research Methodology (E-C-302)

Name: kalani jalpa h.

Paper: Research Methodology (E-C-302)

Year: 2010-11

Semester: 3

Topic: Scholar’s Life

The Scholar’s Life

v Literary Scholar never ceases being scholars. Today the great majority of them earn their living as members of teaching faculties in colleges and universities throughout the world. As such, they have responsibilities quite remote from the pursuit of knowledge. But in the midst of alien affairs that necessarily command their talents and energies as teachers, administrators, and academic committee members, and in their private roles spouses, parents, and participants in community activities and other good works, scholars cannot suppress, even if they wished to do so, that portion of their consciousness that insists on asking questions about literary matters and seeking answers. Their literary awareness keeps twenty-four-hour days: the bookish excitement that has attracted them to the profession in the first place permeates their lives.

v For example: As a student in school or college he was very poor, dull but as a teacher he was very good teacher.

v It is now almost a century since literary studies began from to be professionalized- that is, transformed from an avocation pursued by persons who made their living as cultural journalists, British civil servants, or in other occupations, into what has become a highly organized and sophisticated intellectual discipline centering in the academy professionalized literary scholarship is now old enough to possess its own teachers in American institutions of higher learning or were their counterparts in British universities: Douglas Bush, E. K. Chambers, R. W. Chapman, Helen Gardner, W. W. Greg, Howard Mumford Jones, George Lyman Kittredge, Roger Sherman Loomis, A.O. Lovejoy, John Livingston Lowes, Kemp Malone, F. O. Matthiessen, Marjorie Hope Nicolson, Perry Miller, Frederick Pottle, F. N. Robinson, Hyder Rollins, Robert  K. Root, George Sherburn, Henry Nash Smith, Rosamond Tuve, Helen White, Karl Young. Those groundbreakers in the profession, the commanding figures during the “golden age” when research dominated English studies from the 1920s through the 1960s. Some historians and critics of our profession claim for the early formative decades a now lost breadth of learning and intellectual rigor. The scope of English studies now also includes writing theory and pedagogy. At the same time, the meanings of that eternally slippery word “meaning” have been drastically redefined. It is quite likely that some of the “immortals” mentioned above would today scarcely recognize the profession of English studies they helped found and develop. These figures, impressive in themselves, do not reflect another form of communal scholarly activity, the scores of conferences of special-interest groups that are held each year, with their own array of prepared papers and discussions.

v Yet, despite all this elaborate programming and, in the case of the MLA, bureaucratic infrastructure, the study of literature remains at base an intensely private pursuit. They may not earn as much or enjoy as much social status as do their contemporaries in other lines of work, but they have the sharper satisfaction of having a vocation that enables them to do what they most want to do in life. Love of books and a consuming interest in the intellectual and esthetic questions they pose unite persons with amazingly different backgrounds and tastes.

v In research, then there are numerous perquisites: the constant company of books, the pleasures of travel, the unlooked-for adventure, the frequent encounter with delightful and helpful people. Although no professional statute governs the matter, it is generally agreed that the possessors are entitled to exclusive rights to the use of their material only so long as they are actively working toward publication. But if they simply sit on their claim indefinitely, meanwhile refusing to let any other, more energetic, scholar mine it, such action contravenes the very spirit of scholarship. This plea is not as altruistic as it might seem. Thus two principles emerge. First, let others know what you are working on. Second, corollary to the first: keep up with what other people are doing, not only in your own field but in others as well. Maintain the same interest in their research that you hope they have in yours. Our profession has no room for intemperate criticism of any kind, least of all in print. Differences, lapses of judgment and tribute equally among all practitioners, lapses of judgment and imperfections of knowledge will sometimes call for comment. But the necessary process of debate and correction can, and should, be conducted with dignity and courtesy.

v Thus our profession has ethical standards that, white unwritten, are as binding as the Hippocratic Oath and the Bar Association’s canons. They are sustained by the desirability of fair play, self-respect, and professional morale. We sometimes are discouraged and may share the belief, so prevalent in the world outside, that our achievements have an unreal quality, or, if they are real, at least they are futile: that they add nothing to the sum of human wisdom or happiness. We gladly learn, but outside the classroom many of us are curiously uninterested in teaching. They are physically here but mentally they are not in the classroom and in teaching. If the humanities, including the study of literature, are in perennial crisis- more so at the present moment, perhaps, than ever before- and the outlook for their survival grim, blame must lie as heavily on us, their appointed agents, for our lack of enterprise, as on the supposed un receptiveness of the prospective consumers.

v Our contribution as scholars in this regard is only a slight modification of our essentially two-fold task in the classroom: to educate students at all levels to read, write, and think, developing in them the intellectually curious habit of mind that casts a disinterested eye over all important issues, appreciating their complexities: and to lead students by extensive reading and critical analysis of recognized writers and thinkers, ancient and contemporary, inside and outside the mainstream, to seek, in Mathew Arnold’s words, “the best that is known and thought in the world” for the purpose of creating in their own lives a ”Current of new and fresh ideas” appropriate in this, our time.