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  • Incipit:On the Present and Future of the Field
  • David F. Bell and Catherine Witt

For the first installment of this new dialogic series, the journal asked David F. Bell (Duke University) and Catherine Witt (Reed College) to reflect on where the field is now, where it is going, and what is likely to be meaningful in nineteenth-century French studies ten years from now. The authors composed their initial essays without knowing the identity of their interlocutor; the ensuing conversation took place in person. Unless indicated otherwise, all material in footnotes comes from the author of the related passage.

The university context for research in a field like nineteenth-century French studies is rapidly changing. Pressure to engage in interdisciplinary teaching and collaboration as well as to reach out more broadly to the public beyond the university (“public humanities” is a phrase we hear oft en) means that the time available for specialized research is no longer a given. The present situation, however, can be seen as an invitation to re-conceptualize our work in order to articulate more compellingly its place within broader public concerns. The potential off ered by new digital media tools and databases ought to be recognized and developed. Digital archives allow us to explore history in diff erent ways and to collaborate more easily, and digital authoring tools invite us to reflect on other ways of presenting our research results, including other ways of writing. The media environment is always in transition, always a space of remixing. Combining established and experimental perspectives off ers the potential for synergies that will characterize the next phase of work in our field. (dfb)

This essay off ers a brief overview of notable trends that have emerged in nineteenth-century studies in the last ten years and reflects on contemporary researchers’ distinctive commitment to historicity and interdisciplinarity. It considers the impact of recent technological innovations on the re-centering of today’s scholarship on the digital archives of the nineteenth century as well as on the reshaping of communities of researchers across national, disciplinary, and methodological boundaries. A claim is also made that the return to the archive calls for the renewal of both the understanding and practice of philology that would critique rather than serve traditional acceptations of the notion of field. (cw) [End Page 145]

Disciplinary Quandaries
David F. Bell

To be a college or university teacher and researcher in the specialized field of nineteenth-century French studies feels increasingly schizophrenic. On the one hand, a responsible scholar and teacher needs to be an expert in the field who dedicates a sufficient amount of time to the reading, writing, and archival work required to be a credible specialist. On the other hand, universities and colleges now regularly encourage disciplinary scholars to go beyond their fields to engage in collaborative teaching endeavors and in cross-cutting research outside their areas of specialization (often by means of very tangible incentives). This is a classic double bind: damned if you do, damned if you don’t, because one cannot afford not to do both, and one then finds oneself unable to do either as well as one might wish.

The encouragement to undertake cross-disciplinary work of all kinds emerges partially from the broader challenge to the university to prove its mettle in the marketplace and to focus less on pure research and more on research that is tied to tangible outcomes, a.k.a. “deliverables.” (Scare quotes tend to multiply when one tries to characterize the forces at work here.) The mandate for research to contribute to the broader economy in turn prods faculty to go beyond the confines of their discipline and to be more “practical” in their professional activities. One of the after-effects of the push toward interdisciplinarity is the creation of a momentum toward nothing less than an internal reorganization of the university itself—away from traditional departmental structures. Departmental structures encourage corporatist strategies: longstanding administrative units have an institutional weight, which makes them important elements to be reckoned with in a university’s budget and hiring decisions. They have chairs, they have faculty lines, they distribute their faculty appointments within the broadly consensual...

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