
The Books That Wouldn’t Die - jeffreyrogers
https://www.chronicle.com/article/The-Books-That-Wouldn-t-Die-/245879?key=yc0panBLrqCSy_jQRBofjCgEAHJ5yaQsqWLc_SlQbBRY3HYRT5ZklZvC2-IGcR6WYk5GT0VWR3djVk0tRmluUlA3VVBVajV0U2N2ejJOdmpIcnUwb2JlWmgwaw
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Emma_Goldman
One of my favourite books is Marshall Berman's _All that is Solid Melts into
Air_ , an attempt to examine the whirlwind experience of modernity, through a
delirious blend of philosophy, history, literature, architecture and
autobiography. It is a deeply personal and intensely felt book, and completely
unlike anything else I've ever read.

The humanities and social sciences have become leaden under
professionalisation. There is a paucity of vision and imagination, a
reluctance to look beyond the horizon of one's own subdiscipline, and a
failure to ask big and novel questions. Yet those are everyone's favourite
books, that mean most to them, and change not just their arguments but their
worldview.

~~~
jboynyc
Russell Jacoby's _The Last Intellectuals_ (1987) is a book about how the
humanities and social sciences professionalized and lost their grander vision.
Essentially Jacoby claims that gentrification and the expansion of academia
killed the figure of the independent "public" intellectual.

Some of the books he holds up as examples of intellectual (rather than
academic) engagement are Jane Jacob's _Death and Life of Great American
Cities_ , William Whyte's _Organization Man_ , C. Wright Mills' _White Collar_
, Murray Bookchin's _The Limits of the City_ , and Lewis Mumford's _The City
in History_. I think most of these would be good candidates for "undead"
status.

A few years ago there was an interesting symposium revisiting the argument in
light of changes in the public sphere:
[https://www.chronicle.com/specialreport/After-The-
Last/16](https://www.chronicle.com/specialreport/After-The-Last/16)

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jccalhoun
The article starts by mentioning Erving Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in
Everyday Life (1956) and Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities (1983). I
wonder if texts like this are really "undead" in the way that the author
implies. My phd minor was anthropology. I'm pretty familiar with the overall
argument of both and have even used them to frame my thoughts from time to
time. However, even though when I just searched for them and Amazon says I
bought Goffman in 2006 and Anderson in 2003, I have no memory of the specifics
of either book. These ideas have outlived the texts they came from. The
specifics of them may be dated, as the article does mention in passing, but
the ideas are still useful in the abstract.

~~~
barry-cotter
Be grateful you can’t remember Imagined Communities. It conflates nations,
nationalism and the nation state in an attempt to argue that nationalism
postdates the American Revolution. It’s possibly the second worst widely read
book in the humanities. Other scholars wrote more intelligently and with far
greater insight on the nation and its relation to the state, before and after
Anderson. Before, Ernest Gellner, after, Azar Gat.

[https://www.gnxp.com/WordPress/tag/imagined-
communities/](https://www.gnxp.com/WordPress/tag/imagined-communities/)

> Non-Europeans have no agency or originality in creating their own national
> identities. They were blank slates upon which European colonials drew
> something.

> Luckily for me, I don’t come into reading Imagined Communities totally
> ignorant of other viewpoints. I’ve read Victor Lieberman’s Strange
> Parallels, which makes the case that mainland Southeast Asia resembled
> Europe in the coalescence of distinct proto-national identities one to two
> thousand years ago.

> The same is true to the north. China was arguably a nation-empire long
> before Europeans arrived. Though the Chinese peasantry spoke different
> dialects, it was united by a ruling class with a sense of coherency. The
> modern Japanese nation-state state is modeled on Western nation-states, in
> particular, Prussia. It strikes as bizarre to hold that this unique and
> isolated nation didn’t exist in the imagination of Japanese when the
> Europeans first arrived.

[http://bactra.org/reviews/nations-and-
nationalism/](http://bactra.org/reviews/nations-and-nationalism/)

> Because industrial economies continually make and put into practice
> technical and organizational innovations, they continually change how they
> employ resources, especially human resources. Their occupational structures
> change significantly in a generation at most, and often more quickly, so no
> one can expect to follow in the family profession. (A hundred years ago,
> there were no system administrators, but there were carriage-drivers.) In
> Agraria, training could be left to families or guilds, be largely tacit and
> physical and tied up with the rituals and social context of the trade, and
> different parts of the same society could be almost unintelligible to each
> other, provided only they could go through the customary haggling or
> tithing. None of this will do in an industrial, changing society, in which
> training must be much more explicit, be couched in a far more universal
> idiom, and emphasize understanding and manipulating nearly context-free
> symbols (even manual work increasingly becomes controlling a machine, which
> must be, as we say, read); it must in short take on the characteristics
> formerly associated with the literate High Cultures of Agraria, and moreover
> this training must be received by the entire economically effective
> population. (A rough definition of an industrial society might be: one where
> you can learn a trade from books, a society of reference manuals.) So far,
> such training, on such a scale, has always needed at least elementary
> literacy, and it hasn't been reliably provided by any institutions weaker
> and smaller than states. Moreover, the teachers employed by this system must
> themselves be trained in the same High Culture, and so on, quickly
> escalating to the point where the culture needs an entire university system,
> at the least, to be self-sustaining. States become the protectors of High
> Cultures, of "idioms"; nationalism is the demand that each state succor and
> contain one and only one nation, one idiom.

~~~
jeffreyrogers
> It’s possibly the second worst widely read book in the humanities.

Alright, I've got to ask: what's the worst widely read book in the humanities?

~~~
barry-cotter
_Orientalism_ , Edward Saïd, a book riddled with factual errors whose
Eurocentrism is as complete as that he criticises but of the opposite valence.

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vanderZwan
> _The problem is not simply one of obsolete ideas and refuted arguments but
> also of untenable form: No one in the academy seems to be writing books like
> these anymore._

Well, since you cannot determine if it is an Undead Text until it has been
thoroughly rejected by the field after a few decades, the only other thing to
do is to apply the "anti-disciplinary and scholarly"-litmus test to recent
books. There's plenty of those, no? For example, Thomas Piketty's "Capital in
the Twenty-First Century".

~~~
bsder
I think the issue is that refutations now occur closer to real-time.
Consequently, the book doesn't get time to get buried into academic
"consciousness".

I suspect that things like "Freakonomics", for example, would qualify, except
that people have already picked it apart.

~~~
vanderZwan
That sounds like a good hypothesis.

I am absolutely with you that in the academic scene refutations happen more
quickly now; from what I have been told _all_ academic discourse happens
faster, so why would this be an exception. However, I'm not so sure whether
these refutations spread among pop-culture more quickly as well.

Freakonomics has been picked apart, yes, but has it faded out of the public
consciousness yet?

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passthejoe
The author name-checked a lot of books but didn't really go into depth. Two
that I studied in college, Ong's "Orality and Literacy," and Kuhn's "Structure
of Scientific Revolutions" were mentioned by name, but there was no context.

~~~
vanderZwan
I'm curious which field Johan Huizinga’s _Homo Ludens_ is supposed to apply to
and rejected by, because it was part of one art-history class I had in art
school. We didn't have to read the book itself though.

~~~
jboynyc
I think that would be history, Huizinga's "home" discipline.

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jacobolus
Is there a proposed list of “undead texts” someplace?

~~~
cooper12
Other than in the article, the only other instance I found of the term was
from this event at Columbia University, [0] at which the co-authors were both
openers. So the term seems to be specific to them and pretty new. Still, in
the OP article, the sidebar does solicit readers to submit their candidates
and it hints that the list might be published, so something to keep an eye out
for.

[0]: [https://english.columbia.edu/events/undead-texts-grand-
narra...](https://english.columbia.edu/events/undead-texts-grand-narratives-
and-history-human-sciences)

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osullivj
I'd mention Feyerabend's Farewell to Reason and Hofstadter's Godel, Escher,
Bach as my faves in the undead category. Or family if you will!

