Catherine Gallagher and the Intellectual Accessory

Upon reading Gallagher’s Historical Scholarship, my initial inclination was to leave this area of literary scholarship to the research of some other book guru. The idea of categorizing literature into any form of methodological order is a chore that feels far too scientific for a subject that is nearly entirely subjective. And, to be blatantly honest, Historical Scholarship is just the sort of text that spurs questioning towards my own motives of literary study, because this text could very well scare me away. Indeed, Gallagher’s essay is packed with so many different focuses within the field of “historical scholarship,” I struggled to keep up – and in doing this I found myself questioning the point of this essay. Yet Gallagher writes in such a way that oddly urged me to read on, as if the “aha” moment was just at the end of the next paragraph and everything was soon going to make sense. And it didn’t – but that’s perfectly fine because like I stated earlier, this text brought me back to the nature of my interest in literature, which is that I believe it is to connect like minds – to show that although we are diverse, we are not alone.
Gallagher seems to evoke a negative connotation when she writes “Books are certainly not disappearing, but, the argument goes, they are undergoing transformations in their environment of visual and electronic communication that change the nature of authors and readers” (184). I beg to differ with Gallagher. As a product of the electronic age, I value text in the same manner whether it is read from a screen or a book. Because it is the value that I take – the meaning that I extract from the words and apply to my quality of life that is the very essence of literature. Gallagher states “the author subject and the reader subject both seem to have depended on a certain stage of textual production, at which print was the primary medium of public communication and its most prestigious form was the book intended for private consumption” (184). It’s almost as if Gallagher views the book as an intellectual accessory – as if literature is a matter of personal possession rather than an enabler for shared experiences. Literature of the past is popularly viewed as something “intellectual” rather than something “human.” When I study literature, I am looking for that something that speaks of the human heart. And yes, of the mind. It’s a common place to say that literature has the power to say familiar things in new ways – and consequently in ways it may be heard again, as if for the first time.