Who Abandoned the Monograph?
Scholars at other times and in other places have approached the problem most frequently by blaming the presses for abandoning the monograph to play to more commercial interests. Virtually all of the presses present admitted to significant shifts in the composition of their lists, relying more on “midlist” books that will sell in the superstores and supplementary texts for the classroom, forms of scholarship more likely to sell sufficient copies to cover their costs. At this conference, however, those voicing scholars’ interests sought the sources of the monograph’s problems in the conjunction of scholarly practices and the new economic realities. Both Humphreys and Chodorow, for instance, commented on the scholarly shift toward more theory and less emphasis on building up a body of knowledge. Chodorow attributed this to the diversity of American society and student bodies: “‘knowledge’ based on a canon is indefensible now, and so scholars reach for universals through applications of th
