Specialization gets a bad rap. But think of someone whose opinion you really respect on a particular subject. That person is likely to be a specialist. That person's "general" knowledge is also likely to be pretty good, as good as that of the so-caled "generalist," maybe. Let's say the foremost expert on Mahler knows as much about Mozart as the person who knows a little about everything in music but is not the foremost expert on anything in particular. My girlfriend is the foremost tourist guide-book writer on Japan, and she also knows a lot about places that aren't Japan, more than the casual traveller who doesn't even know one place well.
It is normal to start out narrowly. I was a specialist on one genre, in one country and one period of time, and knew about one poet more than any other. That is what I have seen in Assistant Professors in my department over the years too. Then I branched out to other poets, went back in time to the modernist period from the postwar, still doing one genre and one nation. I knew about other things, but I was only authoritative about that. Then I decided to do the 1st Lorca book, and drew on previously untapped parts of the scholarly base. Still highly specialized, but now it doesn't look so bad, does it? A full professor is still a specialist, just broader and deeper. By developing depth on any topic, you also develop breadth, branching out to learn the other things you need in order to understand your topic. Personally, I see the breadth as a normal part of intellectual curiosity about things that aren't your speciality, and the depth as your mastery of your domain.
1 comment:
This is more or less the folk theory of the PhD dissertation I picked up in computer science: that one goes deep in the dissertation to show that one can, even at the price of narrowness. The skills thus demonstrated are expected to carry over into a career of broader work.
Post a Comment