Mern Þonke

My planned ramblings on PhD reform have been trumped today by my response to an NPR report on the new Miller High Life (that's what loosely passes for beer, if you happen to be reading this from a country with a fine brewing tradition) advertising campaign. For the present, you can see the advert at http://www.millerhighlife.com/. Although The basic thrust of the campaign is that Miller High Life, with its Girl in the Moon emblem, has been around for most of the historical events (major and minor) of the last century. It appeals to nostalgia, not for things remembered, for the past in general--at least the past that overlaps with Miller's history. The obvious message is that by drinking the beer you are somehow connected people and events in, say, 1906. It's a very effective advert, albeit some of its effectiveness comes from its abandonment of the traditional conventions of beer advertising.

The way the Miller High Life advert connects people to the past got me thinking about the way that we in the world of literary criticism, and more specifically those of us who study the Middle Ages, form such connections. To read the publications of the MLA and other professional organisations, there is a crisis in the profession about how we sell ourselves to the public. Our discipline will never survive unless we show how it is relevant, and we've been doing a very bad job of it in recent years. But I wonder. Have we really been doing such a bad job. Yes, the discipline is in trouble, but look at the resources available to us for getting our message across. Almost nothing. We have minimal budgets, a wealth of competition from a myriad other subjects, the general difficulty of the field (ack! all those languages), and the subject doesn't directly generate a lot of money. Nevertheless, we continue to gain new students and there's certainly a fair amount of medievalia (however distorted) in the general pop culture. Given the circumstances, surely we are doing a fabulous job. Perhaps we should be congratulating ourselves rather than agonising over our seeming irrelevance.

But could we do better? Could we be as effective as, say, a Miller High Life advert? What's the difference between those who use the past to deliver their product and those who deliver the past as their product? Well, don't answer that one. I'm sure there are a great many differences between a brewer and a medievalist. My point, though, is that both work with the premise that the past is somehow relevant. Admittedly, Miller has a product, the beer, which serves as the medium for the connection between the consumer and the past. Perhaps that's what medievalists (and literary critics in general) need: a product to help forge that connection. Supposedly we have various such projects: good writing skills, critical analysis, and the like. But these are nothing like as tangible as a bottle of beer. Could we come up with something more tangible?

To approach that problem, I think it is helpful to look at things from Miller's point of view. Their beer is really just a fermented liquid, not a metaphysical medium for connections between the past and the present. The rest is good marketing--devised by a good marketing company. And this is where I think the medievalists really differ from the brewers. The medievalists have to do their marketing on their own. The brewers can call on experienced marketers who (for the right price) will devise a way to sell their product. I wonder whether things would be different if we had the same resource available to us. In fact, I think there are ways that this could be done by clever interdisciplinary work, the use of grant money, and the like. But even if no such solutions are taken on board, it might be a good idea for us all to take a closer look at the techniques used by professional marketers to see what, if anything, we can learn from them.

If this seems like a load of nonsense, wit it the ale of Milwaukee, to misquote another Miller entirely.