Egregious Leaps of Logic in Scholarship

 Ellard, Donna Beth. Anglo-Saxon(ist) Pasts, postSaxon Futures. punctum books, 2019.

I was reading this book because a blind peer reviewer, who otherwise had offered some very nice suggestions on an article submission, suggested I consult it for the history of Anglo-Saxon/Old English studies. Although I'm not qualified to speak on the ongoing debates about "whiteness" and institutional racism within contemporary medieval studies (a big source of debate in recent Kalamazoo conferences), I can certainly state that this particular book, or at least its first chapter, left me completely under-whelmed.

In one sense, I admire Ellard's writing style .... an auto-ethnographic, personal sort of academic style that is becoming increasingly common. A good recent example is Ebony Thomas's The Dark Fantastic, which won a World Fantasy Award last year. Apparently, too, publishers like it because it makes academic writing more readable -- something that I'll always support. For the most part, Ellard pulls this off.

What really bothers me about Ellard, though, is the rigor of her supposedly analytical claims. Overall, she's arguing for an inherent "white supremacy" behind the term "Anglo-Saxon" and, by inevitable extension, the entire field of medieval studies. This includes even scholars whose politics are nominally progressive or whose scholarship is otherwise affected by critical theory. So, okay ..... I've rarely been impressed by similar claims before, but every argument is a new argument, so I tried to give Ellard's book a chance.

But then I got to her first big critical discussion: Michael D. C. Drout. Now, Drout is one of my favorite Tolkienists, so it's always fun to see him invoked in the context of medievalism (his formal specialty). According to Ellard, Drout says the "field need not disavow postmodern theories but should reconfirm its commitments to philology" (30). As he says on his blog:

Anglo-Saxon studies and philology are a highly irritating rebuke to most of the rest of the sub-disciplines in English because our intellectual practices are a direct refutation of one of the current central dogmas of literary studies: that all 'knowledge is situated and contingent ....'

In other words, the historical aspects of philology give you concrete facts to work with that undercut poststructuralist, Foucauldian, and historicist claims that all knowledge is local, contingent, or situated. That sort of specificity, in fact, is why I so much admire Drout's Tolkien scholarship, but Ellard will have none of it. Because Ellard wants to show that the hidden power structures of academic medievalism are inherently racist and discriminatory, the allegedly positivistic use of "facts" implied by Drout risks enabling arguments such as "X is not racist because it lies on objective claims Y and Z, and these claim purport to be immune to the critical hermeneutics I wish to apply."

So how does Ellard attempt to tackle Drout's argument? Notably, she doesn't attack it head-on -- such an approach might be considered too positivistic. Instead, in a classic deconstructionist move (and you know she's part-deconstructionist from the syntax in her book's title), she starts a rhetorical "subversion" Drout's argument by emphasizing the denotations of several words he uses: "eye," "gaping," "hideous lacunae."

It's a very poetic critique, but not a logical one. ... and I honestly can't see that any logic follows upon her claims. Somehow, from the idea that philology offers some solid basis for argumentation in medieval studies, Ellard comes to the conclusion, "This old guard [of Anglo-Saxon studies and philology] is the racialized corpse of Empire long since buried in the grave." The connection seems to be that, because Drout uses words with bodily connotations, such as "eye," he somehow also invokes the "racialized corpse" of (one assumes) old, white, and male Anglo-Saxon scholars whom Ellard is rebelling against.

Here's the kicker:

While Drout's comments upon the state of Anglo-Saxon studies reveal fantasies of Empire and race buried within the discipline's methods .....

Which is just a ludicrous thing to claim if one knows the general tenor of Drout's published writings. "Fantasies of Empire and race" indeed. There's just nothing about Ellard's claim -- or how Ellard gets there from Drout's blog post -- that makes the slightest bit of sense to me. It's a mass of verbiage and vague rhetorical claims that apparently strikes Ellard as sufficient because they can act as a faux bridge to the larger political claims that she wants to make. 

I tried looking to see how the book was reviewed, but sadly didn't see anything.