Books for Burning

If the 18,000 members of the Modern Language Association published one book every five years, calculated the association's president, Morris Bishop, they would turn out 3,600 books a year. The thought appalled him. "If publication is a virtue," reasoned Bishop, professor emeritus of romance literature at Cornell and himself a prolific author of witty light verse and biography (Pascal, Petrarch, La Rochefoucauld), "so is refraining from publishing unnecessary words."

Original literary sin. Bishop told the association's convention in New York last week, lies with the intellectually sterile Ph.D. thesis. "Given the task of writing on a subject that interests nobody in a book that nobody will read, the candidate approaches his task with repugnance and he fulfills it often with loathing." But having suffered to earn his doctorate, the aspiring scholar must then publish or perish, thereby swelling the torrent of useless words.

Like Noah, Bishop was optimistic that the flood will recede. "I expect a revolt on the part of overburdened libraries, administrations and scholars. Foundations, discouraged by the outcome, will be more chary of demanding publication. Their subsidies may be rather for crop limitation than for production. Literary research will dwell less on the disinterment of dead facts, more on the communication of live ideas." Among the live ideas proposed by Bishop: the literature of travel, exploration, adventure; a study of "TIME style and its effect on undergraduate themes"; an analysis of "the explosion of pornography in the sexy '60s and its demand for literary sanctification."

Such scholarship, said Bishop, aimed "not toward the fellow specialist but toward the elegant amateur," will rescue research from irrelevance. As an example of serious trivia, Bishop offered his own Ph.D. thesis, a 365-page treatise on the forgotten plays of 19th century French Critic-Playwright-Poet Jules Lemaitre. "I have often thought of extracting it from the library and burning it," he said, "but I renounced that purpose on realizing that no one has looked at it in 38 years."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.