I was delighted by a small detail in Tim Parks' review of the second volume of Samuel Beckett's letters. Famously (and as this current crop of letters confirm), Beckett refused to participate in the afterlife of his works: he would not attend award ceremonies, he deflected interviews. Beckett thought of his works as "excretions," not creations, something given out from deep within the writer and then, having once been passed out into the world, becoming untouchable. Unselfconsciously fulfilling the myth of the ascetic writer, Beckett was concerned purely with his art, not with the dirtier self-representation of the artist. This rejection, or abjection, of responsibility for a work extended to his plays. According to the letters, Beckett used to send his partner, Suzanne Déchevaux-Dumesnil, to check up on the standard of performances.

And in a letter to Roger Brin, the first director of Waiting for Godot, Beckett enquired about a detail which had clearly concerned him such that he had asked Suzanne specifically about it:

There is one thing that bothers me: Estragon’s trousers. Naturally I asked Suzanne if they fall down properly. She tells me that he holds on to them halfway down. This he must not do – it’s utterly inappropriate.

Beckett does go on to add that one reason why it is inappropriate is that Estragon would hardly be worrying about his trousers at the moment when he is preparing to hang himself. This comment belies the perception that his works are utterly unrealistic, or unstructured. Whilst their symbolism and referentiality might be ambiguous to the point of absurd, the works do possess their own internal coherence and logic. But, like Godot itself, as soon as we have one explanation another opens. Beckett continues:

I have lots of other reasons for wanting this business not to be underplayed, but I’ll spare you them. But please … let the trousers fall right down, round the ankles. It must seem silly to you, but to me it’s vital.

Why that "lots of other reasons"? How many reasons can one possibly find for having a character's trousers fall all the way down, as opposed to half way? What is the "proper" way for trousers to fall down? Isn't the mere fact of them falling at least some of the way down sufficient to convey embarrassment and farce?

Yet comical as it is, the letter points sharply towards the demands that Beckett makes of us. It is precisely because Beckett asks us to search for "reasons" in a work from which rationality seems absent that they are so long-lived. Why do the tramps attach so much significance to the potential arrival of Godot who might, or might not, translate as the God whose existence the audience might speculate on? Does it matter that in a play in which, as Vivien Mercer famously alleged, "nothing happens, twice," the tree of the first act is bare whilst the tree of the second has leaves? The anecdote from Beckett above reminds that although there may be some reasons, some of them even necessary ones (the realism of a suicide allowing his trousers to fall) none are ultimately sufficient to contain the play's meaning.

Which feeds neatly into Beckett's wonderful response to a journalist who had written asking for elucidation about the play. Beckett was not, of course, going to provide an answer about this particular excretion (here diminished as a mere "show"); the author gives everything to his work, and nothing more, certainly not cheap reasons:

As for wanting to find in all this a wider and loftier meaning to take away after the show, along with the programme and the choc-ice, I am unable to see the point of it. But it must be possible.

Whisper it quietly, especially if the universities minister David Willets might overhear, but Mark Bauerlein may have a point. In an article for the US Chronicle of Higher Education, Bauerlein, a literary scholar, argues that most literary research is by and large useless.

Using Google Scholar to track citations, Bauerlein points out that most research has only a minimal impact within the academic community, let alone outside of it. Of course, citation indices alone are not a guide to the value of research (something that those designing the Research Excellence Framework for the humanities need to bear in mind, as they strive for a simple mathematical way of assessing the impact of research). After all, it might be that lots of innocuous and largely unnoticed articles feed in to the one rare work which is genuinely groundbreaking and impactful. Below the surface research is essential to build the tip of the iceberg that people (perhaps even the public) take note of. Bauerlein recognises this, but notes that:

If a professor who makes $75,000 a year spends five years on a book on Charles Dickens (which sold 43 copies to individuals and 250 copies to libraries, the library copies averaging only two checkouts in the six years after its publication), the university paid $125,000 for its production. Certainly that money could have gone toward a more effective appreciation of that professor's expertise and talent. We can no longer pretend, too, that studies of Emily Dickinson are as needed today, after three decades have produced 2,007 items on the poet, as they were in 1965, when the previous three decades had produced only 233.

Academic research is notoriously inefficient or unproductive, by any standard economic model. That does not of course invalidate the case for funding it from the public purse. In fact, given that there would be few private sources of funding for free thinking - not only in the humanities but also in the theoretical sciences - this is actually a very strong case for offering public support for research that does not seem, on the face of it, to do much. Nevertheless, especially in the present socio-economic morass, it seems better to admit this head on, rather than pretend that, say, that one's two thousand and first monograph on Emily Dickinson is suddenly going to change everything.

Having said that, the root of the problem is precisely the longstanding imposition of an economic model of value upon disciplines and research activity that simply cannot sustain it. In the US, the sheer quantitative volume of publications is what will guarantee tenure. In the UK, the REF and its predecessor the RAE require an academic to publish a certain number of articles or books in order for them to be judged research-active. Universities, like mass-production lines, are judged to be working well when they are churning out widgets, no matter whether anyone is actually "buying" its widgets, or whether ten low-quality widgets are preferable to one high-quality one.

This is why I largely agree with Bauerlein. On the face of it, his blunt but true statement of the value of the discipline seems to bow to those in government who would have universities focus only on those practical disciplines (such as engineering or medicine) that have an immediate "impact." But thinking more deeply about it, his call for quality over quantity is actually in defiance of the ways in which economic judgements of value have been imposed on the sector for many years, long before the current economic crisis sharpened minds about the degree to which the public should subsidise universities.

I have spent much of the weekend peer reviewing an article for one of the leading journals in my research field. This post reflects on how difficult I found it to act as a peer reviewer at the highest academic level.

I have peer reviewed many times in the past, and even used to edit a journal - but only (and I use that word respectfully) at the postgraduate level. Reviewing at and for the postgraduate level whilst doing a PhD oneself is peer reviewing in the most precise sense of the term, "peer." My inclination as a postgraduate peer reviewer was to be sensitive to the author, knowing how I would want to be treated were I in their shoes. That is not to say that I was anything less than rigorous. However, the value of a postgraduate journal lies more in giving the submitter valuable career experience, than in contributing to the general field of knowledge. After all, work which is genuinely groundbreaking probably ought to be pitched at a professional-level journal, not a postgraduate one. Thus, to my mind, a peer reviewer for a postgraduate journal ought to be prepared to pass submissions that may not be the most groundbreaking or innovative work. Tacitly, then, I would approach a postgraduate review with a friendly, open-mind, as opposed to a critical, rejecting one.

But reviewing at a higher level for a top journal was a somewhat less amenable experience. I felt that it was my duty, in order to uphold the prestige of this particular journal, not simply to recommend the article on its face value. Yet at the same time, to suggest changes to the article meant myself, as an early-career academic, commenting and critiquing the work of an author who was, in all likelihood, not a peer but a superior, someone considerably more established and experienced in the field.

Peer reviewing requires one to have a total confidence in one's abilities and insights. I am not wholly sure I possess this. If I struggled to understand something, was this due to the author's phrasing, which I should therefore recommend for correction? Or was it simply due to my own ignorance? Where the author had missed out a potentially relevant citation or piece of literature, were they doing so because the connections would simply be - to a more established reader - self-evident? Where I was unsure about the author's use of particular terms and their conceptual overview, was this just me nit-picking for the sake of looking like I had commented carefully on the article?

I ended up making three substantive recommendations. Articulating these was itself quite a fraught process. I wanted to make it clear that I had on the whole found the article well worth publication. On the other hand, I wanted to reassure the editor that I had looked at it with sufficiently informed perception so as to request some well thought-out changes. Surely no article ever passes straight away, and surely most can be strengthened in some way through a second opinion (part of the value of the peer-review process). So I made my opinions felt in 1500 words of commentary, way more than I have ever received on my work, and more than I ever gave in a postgraduate review.

When I have been on the receiving end of peer review, there has been nothing worse than a vague or ill-formed suggestion from a reviewer, which complains about a problem but offers little in the way of possible solutions. But maybe I went too far the other way in my own delivery of a 1500 word review. As I was writing my mini-essay, I felt myself adopting the mentality of a teacher, not only diagnosing errors but also recommending cures. Maybe I ended up patronising the author with clear cut suggestions and solutions, rather than leaving it up to the author as to what to do to resolve the problems. Just a brief comment on a problem might have been self-evident for an established academic.

I am aware that I am being very vague in the above comments; so as to protect the blind peer-review process I cannot quote any specific examples of the article's problems or my solutions. It will be interesting to revisit this post once the article is published, to see if any of my comments have been taken on by author or editor. For now, I'd like to ask the academic community. Do you act in a deliberately sceptical way, knowing that a journal's value depends on its accepting only high-quality papers and not publishing dross because peer reviewers are too scared to condemn it? Or do you try to act like a friendly teacher towards a star pupil, noting errors and nudging them towards solutions which, you suspect, they already know?