Vocation of a Scholar

Vocation of a Scholar

Richard Altick and Frensternmaker write that the literary scholar and the critic are engaged in a comman pursuit, so they both show the differences between Critic and Scholar. 

Some professional students of literature prefer to regard themselves primarily as critics, some as scholars; but the dichotomy between the two is far more apparent than real, and every good student of Literature is constantly combining the two rocks, often without knowing it.

The critics business is primarily with the literary work itself - with its structure, style, and content of ideas, tha means critics studies only text with its structure. Believing that "every work of art must be seen from without as well as from within." Every history minded person knows, the scholar values them in direct porpotion to the help they afford - at once or in a prospect - in illuminating specific pieces of literature and the interaction of many works that constitutes what is called Literary History.

George Whalley said for Critic and Scholar, 

" No true scholar can lack critical acumen; and the scholar's eye is rather live the poet's - not, to be sure, in a fine frenzy rolling, 

but at least looking for something as yet unknown which it knows it will find, with perceptions heightened and modified by the act of looking.

For knowing is qualitative and is profoundly affected by the reason for wanting to know."

Again it is clear that no critic can afford not to be a scholar without scholarship every synoptic view will be cursory. The genuine scholar is impelled by a deeply ingrained curiosity, an undeniable urges to learn as well as to teach. Than the discussion moves towards the dramatic discoveries. Here is a Hamlet, here is a lyric by Shelley, here is a Great Expectations. Each is intelligible in itself, and any attentive reader can derive immense pleasure from it. But almost

"Every Literary work  is attended by a host of outside circumstances that,

once we expose and explore them, suffuse it with additional meaning."

Sainte - Beuve's critical axiom tel arbre, tel fruit ( Like the tree, like the Fruit) it is the product of an individual human being's imagination and intellect, As to be sure, but the fact remains that behind the book is a man or woman whose character and experience can not be overlooked in any effort to established what the book really says. To understand a book, we must also understand the manifold socially derived attitudes - the morality, the myths, the assumptions, the biases, that it reflacts. 

"Literary research, then, is denoted for one thing... to the enlightenment of criticism which may or may not take advantage of the proffered information."

In further discussion is about Personal Satisfaction. Unmeasurable but intensely real personal satisfactions that literary research affords men and women of a certain temperament: the joy of finding out things or finding new way that have previously been unknown and thus of increasing. 

Publish or Perish: This discussion and idea of 'publish and perish' moves to academic writing, for example if you are working in the field of academic writing then you must write such thing which should be Published in the well known book, magazine, or any other sources. But if you would not publish anything then you will be thrown of the academic field. Your identity as an academician will sure Perish. Morris Bishop, the Cornell specialist in French Literature and writer of light verse and detective stories. He said about the literaty research:

".......I am not against research. I practice it, I honor it, I love it. But a taste for literary research is something special. It is not the same thing as delight in reading, or delight in introducing others to the pleasures of reading or the pleasures of writing. We do well to encourage literary research. We do ill."

Then, Dr. Johnson held,

" No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money."

If so, the history of literary scholarship at its best is populated with amiable block - heads. Scholars may value the creature comfort as highly as do people in any other line of work, but it is their itch to know more, not primarily the prospect of enlarged salary checks, that draws them to the library after their classes are met, their papers graded, their committee
  meetings attended. 'Interpret, understand and appreciate' , the scholar must follow these three words. Then, there is discussion on a successful and happy scholar.

What are the chief qualities of mind and temperament that go to make up a successful and happy scholar?

Law and Journalism: The practice of law requires a through command of the principles of evidence, a knowledge of how to make one's efficient way through the accumulated "literature" on a subject, and a denotion both to accuray and to detail. It was perhaps no accident that James Boswell himself, who often would, "run half over London, in order to fix a date correctly", was a lawyer by profession. Journalism, more specifically the work of the investigative reporter, also calls for resourcefulness - knowing where to go for one's information and how to obtain it, the ability to recognize and follow up leads, and tenacity in pursuit of the facts.

     Both professions, moreover require organizational skill, the ability to put facts together in a pattern that is clear and, if controversy is involved, persuasive.

"Idea research must love literature for its own sake,

that is to say, as an art

They must be insatiable readers, and the earlier

they have acquired that passion, the better."   

Intellectual sympathies that only devotion to an art and a desire to share it with others, can provide. Wordsworth has rightly said in 'Perlude':

"What we have Loved, Others will love,

and..., we will teach them how.." 

That same dedication in fuses one's activity as a professional scholar. As Vendler said:

"As scholars, we..... love, beyond philogy, and compositions and literature, the worth of scholarship, by which we mean accurate evidence on literary matters. 

We are engaged in teaching others - our more advanced students - how to love what we love in the discipline of scholarship: how to prize the exact edition over the inadequate one; how to value concision and clarity over obscurity and evasiveness; how to appreciate a new critical vocabulary when it brings energy or insight into our world" 

 

So, scholar should have all this above mentioned abilities to reasearch in the literary study.

    

    Once there was an illusion, nourished by the plodding me thodicalness of German philology that literary research tolerates to a degree the subjective impression, as is inevitable in a discipline that deals with the human consciousness and the art is produce but as assembles and assayers of historical fact, literary scholar need to be as rigorous in their method as scientist. And indeed, a background in science is almost as good preparation for literary research as is one in law or newspaper work, because some of the same qualities are required; intellectual curiosity, shrewdness, precision, imagination - the lively inventiveness that constantly suggests new hypothesis, new strategies, new sources of information, and when all the data are in, makes possible their accurate interpretation and evaluation.

"Scholarship involves a great amount of detail work,

in which no margin of error is allowed and,

over which the analytic intellect must constantly preside."  

It is no occupation for the imapatient or the careless; not is it one for the easily fatigued. Scholars must not only be capable of hard, often totally fruitless work -  they must actually relish it. The taste of a Vocation, the aphorist - essayist Logan Pearshall Smith once wrote, "is the love of the drudgery it involves." 

H.L.Mencken attributes to the Japanese:

 

"Learning without wisdom is a load of books on an ass's back"

One can be researcher, full of knowledge, without also being a scholar. Research is the means scholarship the end; research is an occupation, scholarship is a habit of mind and a way of life. Scholars are more than researchers, for while they may be gifted in the discovery and assessment of facts, they are, besides persons of broad and luminous learning. They are never either engulfed or overawed by mere data, because their minds are able to see them in the long perspective of mankind's artistic ambitions and achievements.

Conclusion:

for although in this book the words research and scholarship are used inter changeably. as is the common practice, a much that has been said so far implies a distinction between the two that certainly exist, if not in the letter or present usage, at least in the spirit. Scholars do their research in the very analytical way. They have both the wisdom and the knowledge that enable them to put facts in their place in two senses.