An Audacious Argument for Modesty

It is notable that Pardis Dabashi's paper at the 2019 MLA convention, “the pressure to intervene: A case for the modest (Young) Critic,” caused such a stir—insofar as it mounted a gentle argument against ritual stir-causing, and the gentleness of the argument was central to its point. As Dabashi wrote, “the language of the scholarly intervention—that is, the articulation of the stakes of one's argument—has a way of ossifying hunches into convictions” (4). The idea, clearly, was to ratchet down the level of agon and hubris in scholarly debate and to foreground the perspectives of younger scholars making their first forays into the fray: “since thus far the post-critical debates held in widely circulated and visible academic forums have mostly been conducted among professionally secure, mid-late career scholars, we've not yet had the chance to discuss the kind of epistemic modesty that matters very deeply to early-career-stage scholars now, that is, scholars entering graduate programs in or around 2008” (2). Dabashi suspects, at least as this professionally secure, mid-to-late-career scholar hears her, that the cohort entering the desiccated post-2008 (and especially post-2015) job market does not see the profession in the terms that have dominated debate about the purpose of criticism over the past ten or twelve years: The field of critical production for us is deeply heterogenous, syncretic: the mixing of critical and (at least some) postcritical methods has become something we take for granted. And early-career scholars of this generation—who don't really have a horse in the race of re-orientating ourselves vis-à-vis the text—would advocate instead, it seems to me, for re-orienting ourselves vis-à-vis each other—that is, laterally, scholar to scholar. (3)