I just want to briefly respond to one aspect of Tom Haigh's recent and very thorough reply, without intending any special reference to the McPherson essay in particular. Tom writes:

. . . I’m trained in history, rather than English or media studies. There’s a difference between the kind of arguments that are allowed in the two fields, specifically with respect to evidence and claims about causation. Scholarship in English tends to be more self-consciously performative, and more concerned with joining up apparently unconnected things in a provocative or original way. I’m reminded of a workshop at Penn where Rob Kohler asked a visiting English professor “How would you know if an argument of this kind had gone off the rails and fallen off the cliff?” His suggestion was that you couldn’t, that the aesthetic standards at work meant that almost any connection of conclusion to evidence would be equally valid.

I don't this is an especially helpful anecdote, other than perhaps a very low-resolution snapshot of the general embrace of indeterminacy that characterizes much of the academic humanities. By contrast, and given that my scholarly training is in English literature and that my professional activities take the form of "media studies" (including what we term book history, itself a form of media studies in my view), I feel very comfortable in asserting the following:

English professors (and media studies scholars) are interested in being right in so far as what reasonable people would understand getting their facts straight to mean.

English professors and media studies scholars are interested in primary sources and the archival record.

English professors and media studies scholars do not think anything goes, that one point of view is just as good as any other, or that it's all just, like, your opinion anyway, man.

I do think, as Tom, notes, that we are generally *more* interested in close reading and the ambiguities and sensitivities of language as evidence of historical phenomena, and more willing to place pressure on seeming contradictions or ambiguities which manifest at a linguistic level as evidence of same; and that we are generally more sympathetic to social constructivist (as opposed to techno determinist) arguments. These are huge sweeping statements of course, and my own intent is less to throw down the gauntlet with any single one of them than to offer a general corrective to the notion that the difference between media or cultural or literary studies on the one hand, and the work of an historian on the other is that the one is concerned with getting it right and the others just want to put on a good show.

I don't think Tom really thinks that either, btw, but I have been a little concerned to see it taken up as an acceptable explanation for whatever shortcomings people perceive to be at work in the essay that kicked off the discussion. Disciplinary differences are very real to be sure, but they can't be reduced to anecdote and caricature.

Best, Matt

Matthew Kirschenbaum
Associate Professor of English
Associate Director, Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH)
University of Maryland
http://mkirschenbaum.net or @mkirschenbaum on Twitter