The Role of Institutions

One aspect of last week's discussion that I want to say a bit more about is the role that institutions and institutional pressures play in defining the field of study we are investigating. To that end, I thought I should introduce you to a couple of websites hosted by major organizations in the field:

Bibliographic Society of America:
http://www.bibsocamer.org/

Sharp (Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing):
http://www.sharpweb.org/

Media Ecology Assocation:
http://www.media-ecology.org/

As you will see, these sites make some efforts to define the field, and have considerable memberships and resources, with regular conferences, and some with their own journals and fellowships. As we discussed in class, these institutions are in many ways a response to the constant scrutiny and pressure that is brought to bear on teachers and scholars of the humanities in higher education, who are compelled to defend, seemingly on a daily basis, the "relevance" and practical contributions of their discipline. (To that end, two very recent and interesting assessments of this issue are to be found in Marjorie Perloff's 2006 Presidential Address "It Must Change" in the PMLA 122: 3 (May 2007): 652–662 and in Rachel Donadio's article, printed in yesterday's NYT, "Revisiting the Canon Wars." Though not strictly relevant to the role of material approaches to literary study, they offer a broader context for understanding some of the developments within this (and other) fields.)

It would also be interesting to consider the differences between these three organizations. Are they speaking about the same questions, just in different language or levels of abstraction? Or are there real differences between them?