Robert Scholes draws a distinction between research and scholarship. Research," he writes, "is progressive; it involves invention or discovery of something new. And it often leads to new techniques or products, for which it is highly rewarded. Scholarship, by contrast, is more about recovery than discovery. It is about understanding more clearly or more richly the meaning of texts or events from the past, including how we got to our present cultural situation. And this is true whether the past is ancient, as in Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy, or early modern, as in Michael McKeon's Origins of the English Novel, or quite recent, as in Jane Gallop's Around 1981. The end product of this scholarship is not new commercial processes or products; it is a pedagogy enhanced by the best knowledge available. Scholarship is learning in the service of teaching.
I think this is a perfect synthesis of what I've been trying to express.
It also will give me a way to counter a professor I've been having a friendly argument with about the "proper" result of grad school and post-grad studies, because I now realize I was expressing a desire to be a researcher whereas he gets his satisfaction from being a scholar.
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