As Brianna has suggested, I'd also like to think through what may (or may not) make what we do a practice. The first question that came to my mind as I was reading was, do excellence and virtue matter to us as literary scholars? If so, what form would that excellence take, and what virtues would be cultivated by its attainment? It is easy to understand excellence in chess or football: you win the game, or at least play very well. In the case of football, you might have collective excellence (winning the Grey Cup) and individual excellence (running x yards in a season). How do we define excellence in literary studies? Is it the amount of articles we publish? Is it how many times we're quoted by other scholars? Is it the sales record of our books? Teaching-wise, is it positive student evaluations, or a class with a high average? How do we know we've "arrived" as English professors? Is it with tenure?
In our case, the criteria for evaluation are so muddy and multiple that I find it difficult to arrive at a measurement of excellence that would work for all of us. Personally I feel like my teaching record will mean more to me than my publication record, and it will be different for each of us. Does that mean that I am more excellent in the practice of English professorship than the person with a high publication turnover but a bad teaching dossier? Should I even make these comparisons at all, and just be happy with what I've achieved for myself? But that would evacuate the collective character of MacIntyre's argument. Sure, the institution of the university recognizes tenure and publication numbers as markers of excellence, but I do think we are all aware of the often arbitrary nature of tenure, and even publication (who has not read bad, uninteresting, commonplace articles that bring nothing at all to the practice of literary scholarship?) Do we need to find alternative ways to measure excellence?
Which brings us to a question we've already touched in class: the lack of a common canon. Who am I, as a Victorianist, to evaluate the work of a post-modernist scholar? I know nothing of their language, field, texts. It seems impossible for us to evaluate each other outside of our own fields. And yet, we are expected to have interdisciplinary (and inter-field) projects. Should we then divide the measurement for excellence within sub-fields? Medievalists with medievalists, Shakespeareans with Shakespeareans, and so on. But this has the consequence of turning our discipline into little bubbles that would be even harder to burst than they are now, even with all the push towards multiple specializations. I do admit I am a believer in the concept of a common canon, and I don't think that the common canon is as exclusive and elitist as its opponents make it look, but I have not thought this through yet and I don't have anything coherent to present as support for my claim. However, in my personal experience my knowledge of a certain canon has made it easier for me to relate to work outside my preferred field.
I have now digressed a little bit. My other question, which I suppose I will leave open for the sake of brevity, is something that came out when I read MacIntyre say: "the good of a certain kind of life" (190). Is academic identity a certain kind of life? What kind of life is the academic life, as opposed to the office drone who works, as the song says, for the weekend? Is there one more virtuous than the other, or are they both equally so, but with different virtues, different goods? Should it even matter to us what people outside of our chosen life and institution do?
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