Shame on Me: Susan Howe, C.S. Peirce, and the Outsider Inside

Academic shame haunts any professorial career, even the most successful.  It cannot but inflect scholarship: often, I would argue, through strict adherence to depersonalizing norms of professional discourse that serve to... [ view full abstract ]

Academic shame haunts any professorial career, even the most successful.  It cannot but inflect scholarship: often, I would argue, through strict adherence to depersonalizing norms of professional discourse that serve to protect authors from vulnerability. As a result, heartfelt familial debts are crammed into foreshortened prefaces; the “why”s of what we choose to write about are never specified; and authors continue to be drawn to research subjects that help them articulate unspoken griefs and grievances. Take, for instance, Bollingen-Prize winning historian poet Susan Howe and late 19^th-century philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce: he for whom, Howe once wrote, "Academia wore Peirce / out long before / the massive literature / of Pierciana." To many of us Howe figures as immortal; and yet she dwells on the fact that, while she lives less than half an hour from New Haven, Yale University neglects to invite her over.

In this talk, I would like to pair a discussion of Howe and Peirce’s written relationship with a self-narrative regarding my own “checkered career,” in the unguarded and strangely sympathetic words of a department chair. The first document will draw from Howe’s book about Peirce (Peirce-Arrow) and my  interview with her. The second will begin with my surprise at finding that a reader of my first book based an entire photo project on the last paragraph of its acknowledgments, which discussed my dying mother. It will then narrate my subsequent denial of tenure at a prestigious university and the successful academic career that followed, concluding with the strange kinship I feel with those who experience themselves as outsiders to the academy despite what to others may seem entire professional self-assurance. My goal here is not to prioritize self-narrative over scholarly inquiry. It is rather to encourage us all – not just academics – to read seemingly cool exegesis for the powerful motives that inform it. Ultimately, I hope to spend the rest of my working years “expanding” what counts as scholarship, in an era when dispassion is no longer a viable approach to our communal life as scholars and citizens.