I apologize in advance for giving a pedestrian, boring answer but true scholars are people who publish the kind of research that makes an impact in their field. They introduce new concepts, find new directions of research, and define the conversation in some way.
Back in 2015, I came up with the name “literature of crisis” and explained that the crisis it described wasn’t going to end. It was, I said, a much, much larger phenomenon than the Great Recession.
Just recently, I finished reading a book that’s being prepared for publication where the author discusses my “pioneering, groundbreaking study” and argues that instead of “literature of crisis” we should say “crisis literature.” Which to me is “potato-potahto” but whatever. Ten years later, everybody agrees I was right and literature of crisis still very much exists.
My other big idea was that women grow down instead of growing up and it’s directly connected with women’s liberation.
And now I’m working on my biggest one yet with the new book that’s 55% done. I’m really excited about that one.
Articles and books come out debating my ideas. People send me their articles and say I inspired them. I’ve got a small crowd of scholars reading Bauman and Byung-Chul Han because I like them. All this is how I know I’m a scholar.
It’s all about results. If you can create ideas that are relevant and get other people thinking and creating, you are a scholar. If you can’t, then no matter how much you want to be one, and how much you identify as, and how much you feel like one, it’s all haloymes, which is how Soviet Jews referred to empty fantasies.
Clarissa's Blog 
That sounds very interesting! Could you elaborate?
LikeLike
I did. I wrote my doctoral dissertation about it. 😊
In short, if you take 19th-century literature, you see all sorts of obstacles to women’s growth. But they persevere, work hard, defend their right to be their own persons.
Then, we finally get women’s liberation, yippee. But what is the late twentieth-century literature about women increasingly about? Women self-infantilizing like it’s nobody’s business. Forty-year-old female professors fantasizing that they are princesses, looking for a savior to treat them like babies. We have works of literature where grown women actually dress like babies. There’s a complete collapse of women’s adulthood observed in literature.
Finally, there are no obstacles to growth. You can be whatever you want! But there are no female characters who want to be doctors or astronauts. They all want to be babies or princesses. They can be pushing retirement and still fantasize about being babies and princesses.
Art is how a culture manifests its unconscious. This is what’s in our unconscious.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Thank you! That makes sense. 🙂
LikeLike
My dad would agree with you about women, but disagree about why. He worked census and took all the ghetto neighborhoods nobody wanted, knocking on doors, talking to people, filling out forms. He claims, even in the most chaotic, uncooperative household full of strung-out losers, you could get the whole census form filled out if you could find the 9-year-old girl in the household. She knows everything about everybody: names, ages, occupations, and she can fill in for the neighbors who aren’t home, too.
But then, something happens to them by age 12: they go from being sharp, shrewd, creatures to braindead louts who can’t tie their own shoes or string a coherent sentence together, and care about nothing. And as these are ghetto families, they never recover. How are they so smart and interested in everything at 9, and all that just shuts down by 12? He blames hormones, but admits that it’s not universal and the social environment is at least part of the equation.
LikeLiked by 2 people