If literary critics insist on writing books no one cares about, does literary criticism have a future?
The past few years have seen a surge of conversation about the place of literature in the academy. With colleagues and students, I have found myself asking: do we need a reinvigorated argument for literary studies? Most of us remain convinced that in a culture besieged by signs, tropes, and fictions, what we do is as important as ever, if not more so.
But it's hard to look past an increasing insularity in our discipline. And I believe that even as we need to rethink our rationales for the purpose of literary studies, much of our discipline has retreated behind customs and conventions that make sense to us, and to no one else. In a series of brief notes, I will reflect here not on how the culture has changed around us—this is a fact that everyone recognizes, and others are discussing on Arcade—but on how we vitiate our own work with self-imposed limits. These are informal thoughts, and I welcome your comments.
What are the horizons of literary studies?
When we describe how and why literature matters, we often rely on a sense of its horizons, which locate literary works in relation to something else. On the one hand, there is the horizon found in literature itself—where the careful description and theorization of literary process is an end in itself, an approach that renews the imperishable discipline of poetics and thus never goes out of fashion. On the other, there are the horizons found in other disciplines, in intellectual history, and in the real world, which respond in some measure to the state of knowledge in those places. One of the most basic things we can say about any work of literary scholarship is this: where does it draw its horizon?
Every critical work has one ultimate horizon—which enables us to say "this is about Paul Celan's figurative language" or "this is about literary responses to absolutism" or "this is about the avant-gardes of the 1920s." But the most compelling criticism involves an artful drawing of contributing perspectives in relation to that horizon, which can produce the effect of plural horizons, one within another. Is this book about A la recherche du temps perdu or about the provision of knowledge and the hazards of self-deception? Is that one about Dostoevsky's ideas of democracy or about democracy itself? If you can ask such a question, the answer often points to the larger, riskier topic. Deftly drawn perspectives in relation to a horizon show literature in a context, and mark how literary knowledge is like and unlike other sorts of knowledge.
If it is to move anyone to read and think, the interpretation of literature should see the drawing of horizons as a provocation, a manifesto, a statement of values. Putting one sort of thing in relation to another—or inside another—is not a merely rhetorical choice, but an act of interpretation that is charged with meaning. And where we locate literature in relation to other kinds of knowledge is especially urgent now, when its status is often questioned or misunderstood.
I want to advance a proposition: that some of the natural, unquestioned literary horizons of the past are no longer so. In fact, they never were. We—scholars, students, and educated readers—saw them as viable for reasons of custom and convention, but they were trivial at best, fatuous at worst.
By way of example, consider what it means to examine social, historical, and intellectual issues entirely within literature, as though the empirical world has been reduced to a perspective within a literary horizon.
I pose the problem this way because in my main field, which is early modern English, Romance, and transatlantic literatures, it's not uncommon to find projects that treat some hyper-canonical author, such as Shakespeare or Cervantes, not as a participant in the wide-ranging discourses of the period but as a horizon itself.
When I was talking to a friend about this a few days ago, I called it the "in Shakespeare" problem. Suppose I'm conceiving a new book on sixteenth-century aesthetics, or political or scientific thought, or knowledge of the Americas. I can treat Shakespeare as one voice among many, including non-literary writers as well as people who not only write but do things; this way, I can attend to what literature makes possible that other discourses and enterprises cannot. Or I can install my hyper-canonical figure as the project's horizon: political thought in Shakespeare.
Somehow we've made an industry in which literary critics are rewarded for conceiving their work in this latter way. No one objects to the foreshortening of ambitions, or to the cynicism involved in pretending to consider real-world issues within the safety zone of a canonical figure. Many presses prefer to publish books that are explicitly grounded in (especially) Shakespeare. Inserting the authorial label in this fashion adds a few tiny degrees of commercial viability to a book, but at the cost of something dangerous, namely the misplacement of a horizon. (I use Shakespeare only as an example, of course: it could be Rabelais, Goethe, or Joyce—except I'm not certain there's an American or British press that still publishes books on Rabelais or Goethe.)
Beyond literary studies, who cares about a real-world issue that is portrayed as finding its beginning and end in literature? What historian of philosophy or art accepts Cervantes as not only a thinker but a context for thought? As the literary disciplines continue to give out rewards for meeting one set of insular customs, the entire intellectual enterprise of literary studies drifts ever further from the rest of the humanities, let alone the larger academy. If the issues—out of economics or religion or the history of ideas—are important enough, they deserve to be followed wherever they lead, not only to the edges of the most canonical works. The two examples I used above, Joshua Landy's Philosophy as Fiction and Nancy Ruttenburg's Dostoevsky's Democracy, show how canonical figures can be addressed without becoming horizons themselves. And as a result, philosophers and democratic theorists must read these two books.
To follow the "in Shakespeare" model of criticism is to make two kinds of mistake: a methodological one, in which the critic attempts by sleight of hand to seem to be addressing topics of wide interest without leaving the zone of canonical literary works—and ends up creating a project that doesn't matter to anyone except a dwindling population of professional readers; and an ethical one, in which he or she evades the responsibility to take literature seriously, which means (against some people's expectations) not treating it as the scene of everything important.
To draw horizons around literature that refashion its place in the world: this is a challenge that should engage us as readers and critics.
Next: whom are we writing for?
I think this post gets to the heart of what -- perhaps necessarily -- ails the literary humanities. The problem can be put in the form of a question: As academics who live in literature departments, what are we writing about? After reading Roland's post, four answers come to mind.
1. We're writing about writers and texts. I.e., we're "in Shakespeare" or "in Dickens" or "in Morrison" or in wherever. But why do we care to be "in" any of these textual worlds in the first place? We like these textual worlds, sure, but isn't our pleasure dependent on the text's parasitical relationship to something outside itself (even if that outside is itself textual)?
2. Perhaps we're actually writing about democracy, self-deception, economics, the law, etc. In this case, though, why include any literary texts at all, apart from the desire to give fun examples? If this is our answer, we seem to have lost sight of why we decided to study literature in the first place (rather than sociology, economics, whatever).
3. In a desperate compromise, we begin alternating rapidly between (1) and (2), attempting to achieve a sort of superposition among these positions. This is a "both/and" solution that often leads to a heavy reliance on allegorical reading and a deficient impersonation of whatever adjacent discourse/disciipline we're drawing from.
4. We might imagine a different version of (3) that is less of an attempt to achieve superposition and more like a search for an interesting Venn diagram intersection, where we find some larger issue or problem that literary, narrative, and semiotic analysis is uniquely suited to shed light on, where text and context almost magically come together. In this case, our work is "about" that area of intersection. This is what I think Josh's project and Dostoevsky's Democracy are aiming at. The problem with this approach is that it's hard to find productive areas of intersection and harder still to write well about those areas. Even when we succeed, we risk attracting the attention of a very narrow segment of readers, readers who already share our peculiar interest in this or that intersectional zone.
What about the possibility of allowing perspectives to emerge out of reading literature, ones that aren't so easily consigned to existing bodies of knowledge, since literature explores the limits of imagination? What about finding and creating readers instead of writing for ones that already exist? What about acknowledging that literature and literary understanding can emerge out of many cultural artifacts that are not commonly considered literature, thereby questioning the categories of "literature" and "things that are not literature but that literary critics write about" altogether? What about studying what we're interested in rather than what we think would most advantage our status? What about setting aside the forces of capital that ask us to make our work readable according to already existing, marketable models, and venturing into the possibility of a materially impoverished but nonetheless rich unknown?
I think reading what we like and writing what we like sounds good to me. It's certainly what I'd prefer to do with my time. I also agree that one of the great values of literature is its imaginative recombination of language, people, ideas, events; one of the reasons I love science fiction is for the way it can at its best push us beyond the limits of what we know and believe and can imagine is even possible. But as humanities academics we generally live in departments and are asked to sit in judgment of each other's work. What norms should guide our writing, teaching, and judgments? If we want to connect to a larger reading public, we should question our norms, practices, and institutional structures. This is what I take Roland to be doing. One risk we face in reformulating our fields is, as you write, an overdependence on "already existing, marketable models"; another risk is producing work for so narrow a readership that the "rich unknown" we have ventured into remains, well, unknown. I'm not sure how to strike the right balance.
One thing I find fascinating as I learn more about literary study as a profession is how poststructuralism has been so good at questioning normative structures at a theoretical level, which has had effects on various social formations, but that we continue to uphold rigid normative constructs within our own institutions. I think part of that definitely comes from the fear of the unknown, which brings with it the risk of irrelevance. I guess I might be unusual in that I'd rather risk irrelevance and do work I find interesting than appeal to an existing readership but feel like I'm compromising my work. It's of course quite reductive to name just those two positions, but when I hear friends say that they can't write something they feel passionate about because it isn't recognizable within the disciplinary framework they've set up for themselves, I feel really sad for them and for the discipline as a whole, because it will end up incorporating dutiful scholarship from that person instead of the risky, committed work that to me makes literary study exciting and vital.
I also prefer risky, committed work to dutifully dull scholarship. That said, I think preferring risky to dutiful is just another norm. The theoretical critique of normativity is built on the insight that norms necessarily exclude. Norms always produce some "Other." This is true. What is also true is that there is no way to live without norms. Even anti-disciplinary, anti-methodological, and anti-normative theory is suffused with disciplinary, methodological, and normative content. Amanda Anderson's The Way We Argue Now makes a persuasive case for this claim.
That's why I think the theoretical critique of norms won't help us too much in building the Humanities departments of the future. Better to get our normative presuppositions and preferences out into the light of day, and decide: which norms? why? who decides? I would love to be employed (and have tenure!) in a department that encouraged a diverse array of literary, cultural, and intellectual projects from a variety of angles, a department which allowed graduate students and faculty to pursue allegedly strange, imaginative, and esoteric projects, alongside work addressed to a broad reading public. But someone would necessarily be excluded even from this sort of department. When 500 grad student applications come in for 10 available slots, we will have to make decisions...
I have more to write on these important questions, so I'll probably write up a new post to address them more fully rather than let this comment get much longer.
I think it's possible to not have norms, if only to have the general norm that there are no norms. This would mean that a department's concept of normativity isn't predetermined, so that questions like, "Does this person fit into our preconceived notions of what our department does?" receive less emphasis than questions like, "Is this person's work interesting?" Of course the category of "interesting" itself is subject to continual questioning, but it would mean that a department's assumptions about what constitutes worthwhile scholarship wouldn't ossify, which would leave more room for unexplored methods.
A practical example of this from my experience is how at Cornell, there are fellowships to support students working on feminist studies, sexuality studies, German studies, and Southeast Asian studies, among others. These fellowships give students monetary incentive to tailor their scholarship to existing disciplinary norms, which means that students who want to frame their work in ways that diverge from these normative categories have to do so knowing that they're giving up the possibility of more money and more freedom. This serves as a microcosm for the even bigger challenge of doing such work knowing about the clear possibility that it doesn't "fit" into currently understood frameworks of worthwhile scholarship.
I know that "anything goes" has its drawbacks, having gone to an MFA program for visual art where novelty was prioritized over other potentially interesting features such as historical awareness and complexity. But I definitely think that literature departments can have a bit more of the experimental environment of art schools. That said, Cornell is definitely more experimental than most departments, so I'm quite happy here.
Thank you for pointing me to Anderson's book (which I hope to read) and I look forward to your post.
I got my degree in the English Department at SUNY Buffalo during the mid 1970s. The department was built by the late Al Cook and, as far as I can tell, his basic strategy was to hire the brightest and most interesting people he could find and let the program be whatever those people came up with.* It was a superb place, one where you could actually believe that ideas were important, No, really. Ideas really mattered then and there. It wasn't just justificatory rhetoric.
I did a dissertation on "Cognitive Science and Literary Theory" (back in 1978). No one in the English Department knew much about the cognitive sciences and so my outside reader, David Hays a computational linguist & polymath in the Linguistics department, was the one who supervised my dissertation work. The department trusted Hays' judgment, and they trusted me, and so I got my degree for a dissertation that was mighty obscure to anyone in the department. I have a hard time imagining that any other English department in the nation would have allowed me to do that kind of work. & I have a hard time believing that there is any department today that is as open to innovation as that department was then. We've lost faith in the life of the mind.
*Bruce Jackson has written a nice account of the department during those years:
http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~bjackson/englishdept.htm
I quite like this approach, Lee. In my own work I've sometimes felt constrained by the kinds of conventions Meredith mentions, but I tend to think that to argue for no norms whatever either serves to occlude the norms that are in fact tacitly being enforced or abdicates a discipline's responsibility to its objects of study. We do not only care about what is interesting, but also about what is true.
I agree with all of Meredith's imaginings here. Some of what you're envisioning is what the most provocative criticism does, and more criticism should do. Unfortunately many professional scholars have lost the sense of "what we're interested in" as opposed to "what we think would most advantage our status," and they are abetted by institutional forces. One of the things that makes your work valuable is that you are rethinking all of the questions you ask here.
Lee has very usefully reformulated my argument in terms that I hadn't thought of. I consider his (3) the most impoverished position of all, for the reasons he mentions, and it's the one I was arguing against; his (1) is not much better, but it can be made feasible when the value of being "in" a writer is confronted directly and not mystified (see my reply to Bill Benzon's original comment). Lee's (2) and (4) seem to me the most salutary approaches for the times we live in -- especially (4). Yes, it's hard, but what we do should not depend on rote relations between literature and the world of ideas. I don't accept the risk of attracting only a specialized readership. Literature is a catalyst: it makes me interested in ideas and problems I wouldn't be invested in apart from it. Achieving that synergy between art and ideas seems to be one of the purposes of a certain segment of literary criticism.
When we are "in Shakespeare," or any other writer, are we not also very much in a/the human mind? Can we not write about that? The trick, it seems to me, is to somehow arrive at a new conception of the mind, not simply as an individual entity enacted in an individual brain, but as also a collective entity.
I don't accept Bill's proposal at all. I think the truism that we read to enter authorial minds is a mystification that has expired in recent years, and that the notion of a "collective mind" doesn't stand up to basic terminological scrutiny, let alone the attention of other humanistic disciplines. I wouldn't be averse to a critic's redefining what it means to be "in Shakespeare," but part of my point is that this is rarely done, and dead rationales are invoked again and again.
It seems to me that the most serious rejection of the possibility of being "In" Shakespeare's mind comes from an understanding of, well, call it semiotics, which informs us that the "text" is but splotches of ink on the page and that, as such, Shakespeare's "mind" is not deposited in those splotches later to be retrieved by readers. Nor can we possibly find society in those splotches, for society is people in interaction, not ink splotches. So what is there? A system of signs? Well, strictly speaking, only a bunch of signifiers, the signifieds aren't there in the splotches. Where and what are those signifieds? We don't very much know. This would seem to pretty much eliminate the possibility of doing anything with those splotches other than reproduce them and/or frame them and admire them. That is, the same move that removes the authorial mind from our grasp pretty much removes everything else as well.
If we're going to do anything more than, e.g. aesthetisize those splotches, we're got two choices:
1) Throw our lot in with the cognitive scientists (linguists, philosophers, psychologists, computer scientists) who study such things and who now know more than we did 25, even 50, much less 100, years ago.
2) Make some assumptions of some kind and forge ahead. These assumptions can either ignore what's been done by the folks in 1 (call this 2a), or they can be used alongside some congenial set of their ideas (2b).
I am somewhat skeptical of notions of collective mind -- and related ideas of memetics, cultural selection theory, etc. -- but I think the problem of being "in Shakespeare" would remain tricky even if such theories turned out to be true. Why write about Shakespeare's contribution to the collective mind rather than Milton's? Or Spenser's? Why write about individuals at all? That is, criticism of Type 1 often wants to study literary texts and the lives of writers "in themselves": at the level of motive, event, biography, relationship, not to mention specific aesthetic effects in particular texts. I'm sure one could dismiss such criticism as theoretically unsound and philosophically unsophisticated ("Don't you understand your common sense vocabulary already presupposes the Theory of X!"), but I think it's harder to dismiss than that. After all, if we're interested in the civil war, we don't think we need a full biochemical map of Abraham Lincoln's brain before we can proceed with historical inquiry; what does our proposed new conception of mind let us say about Shakespeare we couldn't already say?
Why write about individuals at all? That is, criticism of Type 1 often wants to study literary texts and the lives of writers "in themselves": at the level of motive, event, biography, relationship, not to mention specific aesthetic effects in particular texts.
Sure we can do this. But it need not be the only thing we do. Still, it's not clear to me what knowing about the particularities of individual authors tells us about the cultural currency of the texts they write, and its that currency that makes us curious about those biographical particulars.
I see reference to a collective mind as an alternative to your Types 3 and 4. Beyond that I'm attracted to oral story-telling in traditional cultures as a model for this collective mind. The stories themselves are passed down from generation to generation and, presumably, reflect the collective approval of the local population over generations. They are, of course, told by individuals, who tell them in their own individual style, but the telling is necessarily sensitive to the immediate response of the audience. This is, obviously, rather different from the situation in our own culture where we have written texts created by specific authors. But it is not at all obvious to me that the ultimate cultural dynamics are deeply different. After all, one can still ask what a given myth of folktale is about and how it relates to other discourses about the same thing. And if, as a thought experiment, one imagines that the current teller is the unique author of the tale, then the only difference between that situation and that of written texts is that one story disappears when the talking stops while the other remains on the page whether or not anyone is reading.
I've blogged an open letter to Steven Pinker that takes this line.
I'll check out the open letter, but on first blush I don't see much to object to in your proposal that literary scholars might investigate how stories "are passed down from generation to generation and... reflect the collective approval of the local population over generations," and how such stories "relate[] to other discourse about the same thing." A couple questions: how does this approach relate to a version of semiotics that emphasizes intertextuality, to discourse analysis, and to New Historicism? How is the "collective approval" discussed here different from a version of cultural capital? Why is this object of scrutiny called "mind" and not "social dynamics" or "process"?
It seems to me you're asking me for a handful of essays, not a blog comment. And essays of the trickiest kind, where one is attempting to distinguish between mere semantics and substantive issues. But let me offer some comments.
First, I've never been able to get past the word "intertextuality." The "text" is not the physical object, or not merely the physical object. It is mostly something else, and the nature of that something else is rather obscure. I've never found it terribly useful to designate one aspect of that something else with "intertextuality."
Second, I hardly know what I'm talking about. It took me three chapters in Beethoven's Anvil to come up with a way that begins to "theorize" musical performance as a collective enterprise at the neural level. It's not at all clear to me how to extend that construction to story-telling, but I think the job has to be done.
Third, consider language. It's easy enough to abstract grammar from the whole system and think of it as something existing "outside" and "above," almost as something in a Platonic world of ideal forms. The early Chomsky's notion of linguistic competence was much like that and I think the more or less common notion of grammar (especially in its prescriptivist form) is more or less like that. But language (and grammar) isn't like that. It exists only in the minds-and-brains of individual humans in interaction with one another. It maintains its coherence and integrity through that interaction, and it also changes.
But then, isn't all of culture like that? We abstract various systems out of this and talk of them as "outside" and "above," and we even to deny that that's what we are doing. How are we ever going to do better?
"Beyond literary studies, who cares about a real-world issue that is portrayed as finding its beginning and end in literature?" This is absolutely dead on, as is the whole post. Brilliant, provocative, and extremely timely.
With literature rapidly disappearing from the radar screen of the reading public, we are in more danger than ever before of becoming people who do Bad Sociology, Bad History, Bad Psychology, or Bad Philosophy. (Or at best, as Lee says, people who do good work within a tiny intersection.) I certainly worry about this all the time with regard to my own work.
I'm interested to hear what others think about the kind of pressure coming down from publishers that Roland describes in his post. My feeling is that they like what Lee calls the "both-and" approach, as materialized in high-selling books like "The Matrix and Philosophy": perhaps they hope that readers will feel they can use such books as a relatively painless introduction to certain topics. Publishers also seem these days to like books that mention 100 authors for about a page each. This works really well in user-friendly works of literary theory and history (Kundera, Pavel, Prose) but in more topic-oriented works risks making literature, as Roland rightly says, an arbitrary and irrelevant starting point.
I wouldn't normally do this, but there was a crankiness to my earlier post's tone that I've returned now to revise more plainly with the following questions:
1. To what degree does the humanities' current sense of crisis--declaring Theory dead, the desire for a bigger or different reading public--converge with an economic crisis that has highlighted the changing institutional place of the humanities, especially literary studies? Put differently, how is our sense of what ails us symptomatic of a moment of economic upheaval?
2. What would be the advantages of reflecting not only on what ails us as a means of overcoming reified ways of knowing in the humanities and literary studies, but also on what we already are and have been doing well? What would our horizons look like then, both within and without the university?
At any rate, I've found myself fascinated by the posts--Lee's and Roland's especially--revolving around where literary studies in particular currently is and where it should be going. And these are the two questions that have emerged for me as central. I'd be interested in any thoughts interlocutors might have.
One way of approaching your second question would be to list some works and consider their virtues. Alas, my own interests are rather idiosyncratic, so I'm not terribly sure how useful I can be, but I'll make two suggestions, both of which suffer by being a bit old and neither being about literature.
Ernst Gombrich, Art and Illusion. The most obvious virtue is that it rests on an encyclopedic knowledge of (mostly Western) visual art, from ancient times up through the early 20th century. It's a simple kind of virtue, but one not to be ignored. (It is also worth noting that there are things that can happen in one well-stocked mind that cannot happen in a committee of minds.) What Gombrich does with that knowledge is more difficult to characterize, but his topic is the construction of conventions for giving visual representation of the world.
Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked. I'm at a loss for a quick characterization of this work, & that difficulty may be indicative of why this line of investigation never really made it beyond Lévi-Strauss. Lévi-Strauss was attempting to understand the logic inherent in a large body of texts, and was able to do so only indirectly. I do believe we still have things to learn from him.
Let me offer an indirect response to your first question, Joel. A couple of years ago Brian Boyd opened a piece in The American Scholar by referencing a 2005 article that Louis Menand had published on this crisis. In it asserts that "Menand claims that he wants someone to say “You are wrong,” but he rules out anyone challenging the position in which he and his generation have entrenched themselves." While I'm skeptical about Boyd's own prescription for intellectual change (see this, or this, or even my review of his recent book), the charge he levels at Menand is interesting an interesting one. How many of the complainers have any intention of: 1) actually changing their own critical practice, or 2) urging (and allowing) their students to do something new, or 3) working for substantial institutional change within the profession?
see above
I'm a bit late to this discussion, but I wanted to add to the voices praising you, Roland, for this compelling way of thinking of the problem of literary studies. I like "horizon" much better than "relevance" as a name for this problem, since it leaves room for both literary and extra-literary concerns to figure in the solution. And it is striking how persistent the in-Shakespeare syndrome remains even after the canon was supposedly opened up; as all of the commenters here recognize, the tendency to suppose that some Big Question can find its answer within a series of readings of a few literary texts has done a lot of damage to the intellectual credibility of the field. Even if some of those few texts are now chosen from some new, alternate canons--rather more common in my subfield of 20th century than in Early Modern, I think--the fundamental problem of narrow horizons remains the same. Lee and Josh articulate well the difficulties of expanding those horizons, as well as the importance of intellectually honest attempts to do so.
Among your remarks I notice an implicit potential solution, but I wonder whether you would endorse it. You open by suggesting that the relevance of literary studies rests on the fact that we inhabit "a culture besieged by signs, tropes, and fictions" (as presumably all cultures are). This is one of the recurrent defenses of literary study. But then it forces us to ask why the center of gravity of the discipline remains a canon of literary prose and poetry and not some more representative sample of cultural signs, tropes, and fictions. I do not think a good case can be made that the literary canon is sufficiently representative or typical or even some kind of useful sandbox for the study of tropes and fictions. Indeed one of the most embarrassing aspects of high theory was its claim that literature offered the privileged site for the analysis of "tropes" in general. But I can imagine the discipline taking up the project of analyzing writing tout court, with literature making up some fraction of the larger spectrum of written cultural production (and one whose boundaries are by no means historically or geographically constant). And why not? We'd have to retrain ourselves to take on all the non-literary genres out there, from journalism to advertising copy to romance novels to, yes, blogs, but there would be no doubt that our scholarship had a legitimately, valuably wide horizon. In fact Early Modern studies has been pushing this way for a while--or that's how it looks to me from a distance--as it has become more and more interested in textual culture in its broadest sense (pamphlets, sermons, maps, etc). I keep waiting for the canonical, literary "hook" (Shakespeare and cookbooks) to drop away, leaving the genuinely new historical knowledge to stand on its own (cookbooks!). And history remains something with a wider readership and a relatively secure academic legitimacy—one which literary studies could itself contribute to and expand. What would happen if we just dropped the pretense that the real purpose of the literary scholarship is to produce another interpretation of Shakespeare? Would we see that the confining, close horizon is actually just a fog that's waiting to lift?
Well, it seems to me that what you're proposing is pretty much what the proverbial Martian anthropologist would do. These texts, all of them, belong to earthlings cultural production and therefore merit investigation. These anthropologists would quickly discover that some very few of these texts are accorded special privilege, the canon, and would free to investigate the institutions which protect that privilege, etc.
I agree, and would add (some of) Roland Barthes to your (Bill's) list. The term "cultural studies" has recently been given a somewhat narrow definition, but in its broader sense it could very nicely describe a kind of work we can usefully continue to do. (I developed a bit of a passion for 19th-century magic shows at one point, and ended up thinking -- hopefully not deludedly -- that their mechanisms and even aims had a lot in common with those of contemporaneous poetic works.) Sepp Gumbrecht's work on sporting events could I think also fall under this category: viz., attention to a generalized cultural trend manifested as much in X as in Y. I realise I'm getting now a little afield from Andrew's "signs" idea, so I'll leave it there.
Let me add a minor qualification. I don't think the canon, any one of them, is a body of texts informed only by the need to assert power. There is something to the notion that these texts are the "best." Perhaps the move to explicitly consider any and all texts will force us to look at these texts more deeply. Here's an interesting discussion that cognitive anthropologist Pascal Boyer initiated on "high" and "low" in art.
I think Andrew is right that we should imagine a different relation between literature and written cultural products in general. I tend to believe that it's our own unexamined superstitions as scholars--and certain industrial imperatives, such as the conventional views of university presses--that keep the canonical "hook" in place where it doesn't belong. There's a false security in writing about Shakespeare that we have to overcome. The field of cultural studies was supposed to have accomplished this change of climate, but it didn't for reasons that are beyond my ability to explain. No matter how one challenges the Machine of Literary Studies, it seems to deflect change and reconstitute itself.
I like that Machine of Lit Studies, Roland. To me the "failure" of cultural studies to do as you say seems linked to the issue of comp lit. Both can point to tremendous success, at their early phases, in unsettling literary studies, but MLS came roaring back. I think there is a threshhold (not completely unrelated to your earlier posts on "horizons") of tolerance. Of what? I think of lack of "mastery," a word almost as commonplace as Reading's "excellence." How can someone who is not saturated in a discipline's A to Z make statements that bridge fields that link relatively discrete points in two? And after all, it is precisely the canon that is the object of mastery, even over and above the canonical ways of doing criticism and theory. This extends too to language skills--I never get people who claim "fluency" in a language when it's clear they haven't really lived in it. I am barely fluent in my native language. So, we take refuge in the false security you mention to avoid the unpleasant business of being amateurs? Thoughts on a chilly Easter Sunday.
I am very impressed by Roland's crucial provocation, which sets up a nice and invigorating flow of ideas:
"it's hard to look past an increasing insularity in our discipline. And I believe that even as we need to rethink our rationales for the purpose of literary studies, much of our discipline has retreated behind customs and conventions that make sense to us, and to no one else. In a series of brief notes, I will reflect here not on how the culture has changed around us—this is a fact that everyone recognizes, and others are discussing on Arcade—but on how we vitiate our own work with self-imposed limits... What are the horizons of literary studies?" My contribution is very basic, less sophisticated for sure than what others have written. It notes an interesting equation that starts the stream flowing in one direction. After outlining it, I suggest another.
"Our discipline=literary studies" is fine for us. "Literary studies=literary criticism" starts the slide into one area pretty clearly. "Literary criticism=published materials" finishes the trajectory, and asks the question, "Who would read this stuff?" "Are we insular?" And then one stream starts to flow.
But what if we first of all do not equate literary studies with literary criticism? And what if we bring it into an immediately interactive situation, that is, the classroom? And what if, instead of assuming the classroom contains university students, we imagine more open set of participants, who are not going to all write papers and get grades (and thus blessedly do not care about what grade they get!)? I'm getting close to the "in Shakespeare question" in a second, as well as the insular question, so please be patient.
What if we meet, in that classroom, a retired neurosurgeon, an officer from our development office, a staff member from one of the residential facilities, a journalist who writes for slate, a practicing attorney from San Francisco, a retired naval officer who commutes up from Monterey, a middle school teacher from Fremont? Those are the students I have in my evening classes. I have been advised that people enrolling in Continuing Studies want precisely to read single authors. The Dickens course Linda Paulson gives is always filled. So here I am, offering a course on Edgar Allan Poe. I present Poe as an American author, but also one quite different from Hawthorne, though they shared certain issues. I teach him as he is presented to Europe by Baudelaire, and then warped through in various ways Borges and Calvino. Of course I mention issues of class, psychology, historical, massification, urbanization. They enjoy that, but they want to "know" Poe. They want to get inside his head and his style at once, and they want, as an outcome, a sense that they have communed with "him." They want to add that person and that knowledge to their lives, and it is not necessarily "as literature," but as another human's voice. For their purposes, which are not always ours, I think we need to have answers and questions. They will never read a book of literary criticism. They have full time jobs, or are retired and have many other things they wish to explore as well. I think they would like to "deploy" Poe as part of their knowledge base alongside all sorts of non-literary, and perhaps cultural topics.
So, if I could use this series of posts as a kind of launching pad for another way of thinking outside our customary ways of doing literary studies, it would be to ask us to consider bringing literature into other peoples' lives with an understanding of what they wish to get out of it. If we add some of our own insights as to how to expand its benefits, all the better. Teaching theses courses keeps me humble in an important way, and offers a set of rewards that is not altogether different, but different nonetheless.
Here's a passage from Kenneth Burke I've been thinking about: (from “Literature as Equipment for Living” in The Philosophy of Literary Form). Using words and phrases from several definitions of the term “strategy” (in quotes in the following passage), he asserts that: " . . . surely, the most highly alembicated and sophisticated work of art, arising in complex civilizations, could be considered as designed to organize and command the army of one’s thoughts and images, and to so organize them that one “imposes upon the enemy the time and place and conditions for fighting preferred by oneself.” One seeks to “direct the larger movements and operations” in one’s campaign of living. One “maneuvers,” and the maneuvering is an “art.”"
David draws attention to something that has been preoccupying me, how to speak to audiences (not only readerships) that care passionately about literature in ways that professional scholars sometimes don't. How will our discipline survive if it loses touch with what people find most valuable in literature? And how can we recuperate a literary criticism that is aware of these values--a literary criticism that David's students would actually want to read?
The one point on which David and I part company, I think, is that I believe "literary criticism" is still a viable term for what we do; but I think we have defined it too narrowly and abstrusely (and in some cases abandoned it altogether in favor of other labels) when it could be the vehicle for an engagement with non-professional readers.
David, you might want to look at this thoughtful post by Rohan Maitzen at The Valve: Literary Criticism in/and the Public Sphere. She addresses Brian McRae’s Addison and Steele Are Dead: The English Department, Its Canon, and the Professionalization of Literary Criticism. She observes, for example:
That's early in the essay. After discussing this and that and other thinkers on the issue, Rohan concludes:
Roland--I agree that maybe we should redefine, through various kinds of practices on a wide array of fronts, what we mean by literary criticism, but I am not sure how that would work. My sense is that "the profession" and what we do in the academy, and in main stream journal book reviews, dominates the genre, and that there is a strong divide between those discourses, practices, institutions, and other ways people read the same texts and bring them into their lives. I'm not saying it's a bad thing necessarily, but it is there nonetheless. There could certainly be ways to cross that divide, if more criticism follows your and others lead, and we bring those texts into the kinds of settings I mention in my post. I would think students would be interested, as indeed they were when in lecture I did same. But when I asked them on the last day to reflect back and discuss the things that stuck with them, those issues, perspectives, were not the main ones at all. They had to do exactly with what Bill, and what Maitzen, bring up (and thanks for the excellent ref, Bill).
As Roland knows, because he heard my paper on the topic, I have used the Eliot "nearest thing to life" as a touchstone in the monograph I am trying to finish. Eliot's phrase is very shrewd--I interpret it to both name a kind of "realism" but, as you see in her essay, also a realism that delivers what is not "real" to us because it presents to us the lives of others whose experiences and conditions are very different (if not radically different) from ours. Students in the Poe course wanted to know about his life, but also how his work "reflected" his life and his mind, and how literary history placed him. Those were the key questions. Very "traditional," what they had themselves been taught to wonder about. But also, I believe, something heartfelt, and the way they took literature into their lives.
My modest point is that we should not forget that, and that we don't need to apologize for it or for doing the kinds of criticism we do in different arenas. I like the refernece to Kenneth Burke, who I think remains someone that we learn from in important and sometimes unexpected ways. I'll never forget an MLA panel I saw that included him and Joel Fineman. One of the best I ever saw.
Thanks for both your replies.
I wanted to thank Bill for linking to my Valve post and making it part of this very interesting unfolding discussion. I just wanted to emphasize a few points that strike me now even more than they did when I wrote that piece a couple of years ago. First, the issue of readership: more and more, it feels important to me that it isn't just that we have lost (or lost touch with, or never had in the first place) an audience for our professionalized criticism outside the academy, or even outside the discipline of literary studies, but that we aren't really writing for each other any more either. At The Valve this week I mentioned a statistic I had come across, that only 2% of published scholarship in the humanities is ever cited by other scholarship. I haven't been able to track down a good source for this, but anecdotally we are all aware that one of the costs of specialization is fragmentation and (at one extreme, at least) boredom: it simply isn't realistic for us to be interested in everything, or to keep up with everything, and very few pieces of criticism offer us something "portable"--that is, something we can take away and use for our own equally specialized work. Frankly, I'm even tired of work in what is ostensibly "my" special field. There's simply no urgency to it--either the reading of it, or the writing of it. I find that every bit as depressing as our difficulties reaching wider audiences. At The Valve I linked to an interview with Frank Donoghue, author of The Last Professors, who makes the same point that I've heard many, many people make unofficially but which nobody seems willing or able to confront institutionally: we churn out research to satisfy expectations from bureaucracies and administrators, that fit specific models of what research looks like, or what research productivity looks like. Increasingly, in Canada anyway, those models come from science (get big grants! publish articles! collaborate! hire graduate students!). If we don't read the work we publish, it's hard to see that we need to do it, except for professional advancement, but surely that's a perverse incentive. I'm sure there are people who find this work intrinsically interesting, and more power to them--but it seems very narrow and ultimately counterproductive to assume that this is the only way to advance knowledge in the humanities.
Second, about reaching those elusive "broader" audiences: it has never been easier to reach towards them, anyway, simply by writing as well as we can about what we think is interesting and important and then self-publishing, on blogs, on websites, in the comments sections and threads of magazines and newspapers and so on. There's a huge appetite for book-writing (let's avoid "literary criticism" as the term, for now) in this age of book blogs and e-readers and on-line literary magazines. If it weren't for the perverse incentives already mentioned, many of us would far rather be doing that kind of criticism than the kind for which we get promoted in the university. I don't see why that should be discussed as kind of a shameful secret ambition, as Donoghue rather hints in his interview. True, we can't all write for the New Yorker, but why shouldn't we aspire to write for other readers? Those of us in a position to do so should be insisting to department chairs and deans and skeptics among our colleagues that this is a really valuable use of the rigor and attention we have learned to bring to our reading, that it contributes substantially to the public good that universities are supposed to serve, and yes, that it should 'count' professionally.
Sorry if this sounds a bit rant-ish. I had a lot more enthusiasm for specialized academic scholarship at earlier stages of my career, when it all seemed new and exciting to me. And I do acknowledge that we have made gains in our understanding as a result of such persistent inquiry. Still, after a while, I realized just how much of it there is and how little I really cared about most of it, and that became very disheartening. But the whole "crisis of the humanities" starts to seem like the weather, with everyone talking about it but nobody (nobody with influence) doing anything differently. I just listened to yet another earnest discussion in my own department about reducing teaching loads because the expectations for research keep going up--and of course, nobody asked if that was the right expectation, the right balance, the right model. It's true enough that junior scholars face unprecedented pressure (and challenges), but as Dorothea says of Mr Casaubon, "What could be sadder than so much ardent labour all in vain?"
But the whole "crisis of the humanities" starts to seem like the weather, with everyone talking about it but nobody (nobody with influence) doing anything differently.
YES.
I believe there's a problem. But I don't believe that the most prominent doomsayers have any intention of doing anything about it at any level. They're just surfin' the zeitgeist.
Sorry, Bill - I agree with you on everything else! But I for one feel as though everything I am doing currently is an attempt to change things. (I say only "attempt": I have no idea whether any of us can reverse the crisis, and I certainly doubt whether I am the right person to do it, but I feel anyway a responsibility to try.)
There are a number of prongs to this effort. One is the effort to describe the crisis (I think in some cases those who are complaining about the crisis are not just complaining, like one does about the weather, but hoping to make solutions possible thanks to more accurate portrayal).
Another is the effort to convince people to abandon certain habits that have contributed to bringing on the crisis. It's true, of course, that we've been affected by economic and technological trends, but we have also been affected by our failure to make a compelling case for what we do. (Indeed at times a disdain for the very notion of case-making.)
A third is the effort to make a case for what we do, both by rearticulating old ideas and by articulating new ones. (This also involves sidelining approaches that never held water and which merely weaken our position.)
I rather think that Roland's original post was in fact itself a gesture in this constructive direction. Either way, these are all things I myself have been up to in recent years. They do give me qualms, since, as I say, I'm not at all sure I'm qualified to tackle prong three (or indeed prongs one and two), and since prong two requires ruffling any number of feathers; but they're what we all need to be doing.
Maybe Bill is right, though, about the most prominent doomsayers (as he says). I'm not sure. Definitely does not apply to Roland, for example. But I could see it applying to others. After all, we do rather have a tradition in literary studies of striking the melancholy pose in our theorizing.
thinking of you or Roland, Josh. It's the traditional comfort of "the melancholy pose" that I distrust. And "prominent" was a carefully chosen word.
But seriously, what are comparable figures of how much work in any other set of disciplines is cited outside their special audiences? And doesn't thinking this way just show how used we are to the value/credit system of publishing, citing, etc etc.? I am happier to think that, as you do Rohan, we can imagine ourselves conversing, blogging, teaching, even publishing in various registers, voices, rhetorics (getting back to Burke, and his ratios and scenes and such), wanting to achieve different sorts of effects. Also, "urgency" might be over-rated. Energetic, vital, provocative, amusing, thoughtful are ok with me, too. And yes, when has there *not* been a crisis in the humanities, in one way or the other? Defenses of Poetry, Two Cultures, etc etc etc.? Part of being in the world? But I fully recognize that the *institution* of the humanities is under significant change. Just coincidentally, today I was asked by Henry Giroux to write up an essay review of the Donoghue book, alongside Chris Newfield's latest, so maybe I will enlist all your help for it.
I join this conversation belatedly, and perhaps for reasons that speak to Roland's wonderful original post. This winter, I contributed little to Arcade, due partly to teaching demands and partly to time spent revising a book manuscript. Reflecting on both of these work arenas in the context of this thread, I am first struck with how they compete with another commitment: namely, to write more often in this public, collaborative and occasional forum.
Although I aspire to Roland's model of expansive and richly-contextualized scholarship, I often observe my tendency to pull back from arguments that situate the literary as one among several cultural texts or acts. In such moments, I tend also to favor close reading over other analytical modes. Close reading persists in our discipline(s), I would hazard, because it can certainly produce new knowledge and because it offers a kind of shared lexicon across literature classrooms. However, Roland's, Franco Moretti's and others' calls for distant reading invite us to develop other pedagogical and research methods, methods that would also demand more sustained collaboration with others. I belabor this point because I recognize a gap in my own work between how I frame an argument––in a prospectus, an introduction, the first pages of a chapter or a speculative conference paper––and how I pursue that argument to its conclusion. And as I expand out from the literary in a new project, which is considering green architecture, urban design blogs and BioArt practitioners, I hear a cranky voice in my head asking, "But where is the literature in this project"? "How will you research and write about these disparate primary materials"? "What will your methods of inquiry be?" And, to Roland's and others' posts, "For whom are you writing and why?"
Yet these questions seem worth engaging rather than cowing to; for to me, the most risky and exciting work within our discipline(s) occurs when a scholar acknowledges that a literary text, in the context of other media/texts/acts, is not the only or even the most imaginative interpretation of a particular, pressing question––whether historical, political, scientific, philosophical, etc.
At the same time, I find David's reflections on the impassioned interest many readers of literature have "in" particular writers profoundly important for this discussion. Among my most inspiring students this year was a young woman from Eastern Oregon, a first-generation college student for whom the opportunity to travel to London and read Shakespeare "in" England was nothing short of life-changing. In reflecting on both her experience and this provocative conversation, I find myself asking whether expanding our discipline's horizons––with a public more thoughtfully in view––might prompt other readers of literature to expand, in turn, their own visions of what counts as literature, why literature matters and what the act of reading can––and can't––teach us.
Thanks, Allison, for your comment. It props me to recall another instance (and maybe we could all collect similar ones and share). I was asked to do an alumni event in New York recently. I gave a talk on world lit, international relations, etc.. During the Q&A I got a lot of questions from alums who had gone on to become middle school and high school teachers. As a parent, I have been struck by how much of what shapes us--our tastes, prejudices, inclinations--happens during those years. I would love to know how we in the university could connect more with teachers of younger students. At the same time, I remember my son's high school lit teacher asking me for titles, and then shaking her head when the school said there were too many titles that did not feed into the AP.
Allison -- I'd love to see you return to posting when time permits! I've much enjoyed your previous posts.
i must admit that I entirely agree with you on this: where is the urgency of what we are doing? Why do the blogs on Arcade feel so much more alive (both the writing and the reading of them) than any "specialized" work we're writing or reading (with, of course, a few exceptions)? We perpetuate a style and model of work that is conditioned by (mostly) economic pressure (get tenure, get promoted), institutional inertia, and the conventions of scholarly publications, but it often feels like we have ceased to be real writers to become cogwheels in the machine. If there is an audience "out there" (and there is) passionate about literature and reading, why don't we, finally, really, take the business (and pleasure) of writing seriously? Readers need writers, and maybe also dedicated readers (that we all are) to ask writers good questions. (another question that would amount to the same: why don't we write the way we teach?, or why do we not write only when it can truly be an advancement of knowledge or thought? the economic model we are forced to follow--productivity at the cost of relevance and brand placement in specific advertising venues called professional journals--) is hard to escape individually, but lethal collectively. (sorry for the ranting too). C.A.
Thank you, Cecile and Zach, for the provocative question of how to write scholarship the way we teach or, alternatively, the way we are writing here. Natalie is spot on in her comments about the institutional de-valuing of research and over-loading of teaching that besiege the humanities, and especially adjunct faculty in literature and composition programs. Yet, I am repeatedly blow away by my colleagues––across different institutions and ranks––at the capacity of humanities scholars to teach creatively and research rigorously. That said, I agree with Cecile that we need to collectively and collaboratively take some risks with our scholarly research and writing, perhaps risks that begin simultaneously at the level of the sentence and the level of our larger research practices. In my view, continuing the work of expanding our objects of study while also advocating for collaboration (whether within or across disciplines) as valuable to humanistic research is one key piece of this puzzle.
I am in most ways an outsider to this discussion, as I neither write nor teach literary criticism, but I've been listening. It occurs to me that this discussion has revolved around the practice of writing literary criticism, and misses a key element: students. Most everyone in this discussion teaches, and I think that in making a case for literary studies,
there is no better ground on which to do so than teaching.
From your vantage points you see "... a culture besieged by signs, tropes, and fictions, what we do is as important as ever, if not more so." Josh Landy warns that as a culture we are losing the ability to read poetry. There's an imperative here that is very compelling, and I think this problem may reveal how to turn the tide. It's a crisis of education. Perhaps you have the greatest impact by what you already do: teaching humanities in the undergraduate classroom.
Joel asks "What do we do well?" and Cécile asks "why don't we write the way we teach?" Well, I've seen Cécile teach and she is amazing at it. That is what you do well. If it were permissible to write the way you teach, maybe we wouldn't have to make a case for literary studies at all.
I don't entirely disagree with this, Zach, and some of David's smart comments above speak to your point. I value teaching and I think it makes me a better researcher.
But Allison's passing comment, about the time demands of teaching, is also important, and I want to point out where this suggestion about the virtues of pedagogy is headed.
Most people in the humanities do substantial teaching, usually to the point that creative teaching is virtually disallowed (mustgradefaster) and research time is minimal. I'm not talking about Stanford professors; I'm talking about the vast majority of people who have trained to do research in the humanities and who don't especially feel guilty about how insular their research is because they teach a 3-4 load and don't have the time or resources to do any. And by the way, I'm talking about the ever-shrinking tenure track, saying nothing about the vast limbo below.
The idea that the humanities can matter by, in essence, being given over entirely to pedagogy is a popular one with, well, people who aren't in the humanities. The notion that the sciences are where research happens and the humanities are where teaching happens is such a commonplace it scarcely needs to be articulated. I feel pretty confident that every literary scholar on this thread has received the "oh, you teach English? Ho ho, I'd better watch my grammar!" comment, not to mention the ashamed "I wish I had time to do more reading," as if literary critics were nuns with rulers who exist to Pass On The Great Tradition and to shame strangers for not reading The Golden Bowl on their commutes.
A corollary of this belief is that research in the humanities is by definition illegitimate, indulgent, insular, a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing. Its horizons are always by definition misplaced, because it shouldn't have any. By this logic it would make perfect sense to argue that the only humanities research of worth is research that looks exactly like undergraduate teaching. I don't accept that.
I share others' sense that the publish-or-perish system isn't calculated to further the cause of knowledge. But the problem isn't, for Pete's sake, that research is being done.
I did mention the outsider part, right? I certainly did not intend to put forward any position that undermines the validity of humanities research, but looking over my comment I can see how it can be read that way. Since the bulk of my energy is spent on fostering, promoting, and exploring new methods for research in the humanities, mine would appear to be an extremely perverse position then. I guess I was trying to get at the problem Josh describes, and my comment doesn't really apply to the Horizons question at all. Thanks for pointing out how my (well meaning) comment is actually situated in the larger discourse.
I got that you weren't directly arguing against humanities research per se, and I don't think anyone is likely to misconstrue you on that score. My point is that the notion that all humanities research aspires to the condition of undergraduate pedagogy feeds into some very damaging institutional tendencies wherein the humanities and research are understood as mutually exclusive. (Pedagogy and research are likewise understood as mutually exclusive in that model, which I also think is a problem.)
Along these lines, we should note that much of the teaching being done by literary scholars isn't about literature at all, it's about how to write, and a good bit of that teaching is remedial in character. This teaching must be done; it's vitally important work; but it's pretty low on the greasy pole of professional prestige. Everyone in all the other departments wants the literature folks to teach their students how to write; that way they don't have to do it themselves. As long as someone teaches their students how to write, who cares about research about literature?
Enormously important, and a critical moment when we can "intervene" in the relentless processing of students through the pipeline. Teaching to write is teaching to think, and think critically and creatively and maybe urgently.
I'm just curious. Could those on this thread who are currently teaching composition please raise their hands?
(*raises hand*)
I agree, David. And, although I am not teaching composition at present, I continue to see the teaching of writing as central ... critical. How can this pedagogical practice change our own writing and research, I also wonder often. Another pressing question for me is how to teach writing expansively –– writing within and across particular media, writing about or in the context of other modes (performance, presentation, collaboration, etc.).