Furthermore, the rise of cultural studies and other interdisciplinary approaches to social and cultural practice caught the eye, and the disapproving glance, of many former, retired, or disgruntled academics, some transformed into journalists or government officials, who unilaterally declared a culture war. Wielding the three most effective weapons for such a battle, intolerant anti-intellectualism, jingoistic super-patriotism, and nostalgia for a past that never was, these self-appointed guardians ridiculed what they did not demonize and demonized what they did not ridicule. Deconstruction, a reading practice developed directly out of the New Criticism, was parodied as a plot of the left. When deconstructive critic Paul de Man was discovered to have had a complicated past involving possible collaboration with the Germans during World War II, deconstruction also became a fascist plot. Race-class-and-gender, or race-class-gender-and-sexuality, were deemed unworthy “political” objects of humanistic attention, and attention to colonialism (even for a discipline like English studies, which emerged as a university subject at the height of the British empire) was likewise dismissed as irrelevant political meddling by scholars who would be better off restricting their activities to the library, the archive, the museum, and the (undergraduate) classroom. What was most disturbing about these attacks was their mean-spiritedness and the shoddiness of the “research” that produced them, often consisting of sitting in on a single class by a given professor, or listing and belittling the titles of courses or conference papers, many never read in their entirety by those who mocked them. But there is no doubt that this strategy was effective, and doubly so, since those targeted began to retaliate, providing precisely the kind of partisan evidence their critics had wished into being.
Few who lived through this period would welcome a resumption of such hostilities, which now seem both fevered and distant. But I mention these developments for a reason: to point out that the scholars singled out for particular opprobrium in these books of the late 1980s and early 1990s were, almost all of them, professors of literary studies. Roger Kimball’s grumpy but highly successful diatribe, Tenured Radicals, begins in the spirit of a manifesto: “It is no secret that the academic study of the humanities in this country is in a state of crisis.”64 He then proceeds, in the second paragraph of his book, to name some of the principal culprits, all of them professors of literature: “Princeton University’s Elaine Showalter” (gender), “University of Pennsylvania’s Houston Baker” (race), and “Duke University’s Fredric Jameson” (Marxist politics). Other humanistic disciplines also sustained periodic swipes, especially those that led to a concern with politics (as in the work of University of Virginia philosopher Richard Rorty) or popular culture (Harvard philosopher Stanley Cavell). But the academics these critics loved to hate were more often than not trained as literary critics.
As I’ve noted, this strategy was successful. Not only did the country take notice that the sky was falling, so, too, did the critics and scholars mentioned, and even those scholars watching the debates from the sidelines (not the margins, which were now at the center) began to feel the pressure. Once a suspicion is planted, it is very difficult to uproot it; tenured radicals, spiffy phrase that it was, had changed the way the academy regarded itself. Like the insinuations of Iago (“It speaks against her with the other proofs” [Othello, 3.3.44]), these proofs of nothing multiplied to produce a firm conviction that something had gone wrong. Partially as a result, the place of literary studies in the pantheon of the humanities came under tacit and explicit critique. Younger—and older—scholars of literature shifted their interests, whether consciously or (more likely) unconsciously, away from the play of language, the ambivalent ambiguities of the signifier, and the modes of counterintuitive argument that had marked the most brilliant literary work of the 1970s and 1980s (and, indeed, the 1940s and the 1950s), toward less controversial terrain and more supposedly objective (and even scientific) methodologies like history, the sociology of knowledge, and cognitive theory. Literary study was in the process of disowning itself.
Genteelly, professionally, persuasively, and without an apparent consciousness of what might be lost in the process, departments of literature and literary study have shifted their emphasis. This return to history is in fact a return, not a leap or an evasion. Trends in intellectual work tend to be cyclical, with attention shifting from text to context, from author or artist to historical-cultural surround, from theory to practice and from micro- to macro-analysis (in literary study, close reading versus meta-narratives). A great deal of the most recent work in literary studies is deeply informative, much of it represents what used to be called “a contribution to knowledge,” and almost all of it is professionally honed if not glossy. If little is provocative, perhaps that is to be expected after a couple of decades of high-profile contestation. There are many ways of doing inventive scholarship. Painstaking literary-historical work (like the kind of literary work that admires and imitates the scientism of cognitive theory) can at its best also be imaginatively interesting.
Nevertheless some literary historians and historicist critics within departments of literary study are in danger of forgetting or devaluing the history of their own craft and practice, which is based not only on the contextual understanding of literary works but also on the words on the page. Counterintuitive interpretation, reading that understands the adjacency of literature, fantasy, and dream, the subliminal association of words through patterns of sound or tics of meaning, the serendipity of images and ideas, the sometimes unintended echoes of other writers, the powerful formal scaffolding of rhetoric or of genre—all these are as richly transgressive as any political interpreter might desire, and as elusively evocative as any archive-trained researcher could wish to unearth or detect.
A passage from T. S. Eliot’s “Burnt Norton” has always seemed to me to describe with particular eloquence what we do as critics when we study how writing works:
Words move, music moves
Only in time; but that which is only living
Can only die. Words, after speech, reach
Into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern,
Can words or music reach
The stillness, as a Chinese jar still
Moves perpetually in its stillness.
Not the stillness of the violin, while the note lasts,
Not that only, but the co-existence,
Or say that the end precedes the beginning,
And the end and the beginning were always there
Before the beginning and after the end.
And all is always now. Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still. (137–153)
The specific contribution of literary studies to intellectual life inheres in the way it differs from other disciplines—in its methodology and in its aim—rather than from the way it resembles them. What literary scholars can offer to the readers of all texts (not just those explicitly certified as literature) is a way of asking literary questions: questions about the way something means, rather than what it means, or even why. It is not that literary studies is uninterested in the what and the why—in recent years, such questions have preoccupied scholars whose models are drawn from adjacent disciplines like history and social science. But literariness, which lies at the heart of literary studies, is a matter of style, form, genre, and verbal interplay, as well as of social and political context—not only the realm of reference and context but also intrinsic structural elements like grammar, rhetoric, and syntax; tropes and figures; assonance and echo. A manifesto for literary studies will claim for it an unapologetic freestanding power to change the world by reading what is manifest, and what is latent, within and through the language of the text.
The best way for literary scholars to reinstate the study of literature, language, and culture as a key player among the a
cademic humanities is to do what we do best, to engage in big public questions of intellectual importance and to address them by using the tools of our trade, which include not only material culture but also theory, interpretation, linguistic analysis, and a close and passionate attention to the rich allusiveness, deep ambivalence, and powerful slipperiness that is language in action. The future importance of literary studies—and, if we care about such things, its intellectual and cultural prestige both among the other disciplines and in the world—will come from taking risks, not from playing it safe.
TWO
The Pleasures of the Canon
The notion of a literary canon, a body of works considered centrally important and worthy of study, is—linguistically, at least—a fairly recent idea. Canon law, canons of saints, and canonical books of the Bible were all familiar concepts from the medieval period on. The word canon itself means rule, and it came to indicate a standard of judgment or authority, a test or criterion. But it’s really only in the twentieth century that the term regularly began to be applied to a list of modern books. (In effect, the literary canon was a secular version of the biblical canon: a system for designating books that were authentic and merited inclusion.) The development of Great Books curricula at places like Columbia University, the University of Chicago, and St. John’s College, and the publication of projects like the fifty-four-volume Great Books of the Western World in 1952, made such lists of major writers and thinkers widely available.
In this connection, it’s of some interest to note that the Chicago Great Books course, devised by university president Robert Hutchins and philosopher Mortimer Adler, was initially aimed at businessmen, and was intended to fill in gaps left in their education. This was not, that is to say, initially a freshman “core” course but a program intended to allow “successful business and professional men” to remedy the omission of literary reading in their earlier years of study by meeting “in a relatively painless fashion in congenial surroundings.” The year was 1943.
The concept met with immediate approval, and within a month the Great Books seminar, nicknamed by participants the “Fat Man’s Great Books Course,” began to meet once a month at the University Club.1 It was one of these businessmen, William Benton, the CEO of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (and later a U.S. senator from Connecticut), who had the idea of marketing a set of Great Books in conjunction with the encyclopedia. It was only when the Great Books of the Western World were sold like encyclopedias—by door-to-door salesmen explicitly recommending them as an instant educational upgrade for middle-class American households—that the set turned the corner from steep deficit to (modest) profit. To save money, the editors had chosen inferior translations in the public domain. Some nineteenth-century translations of the Greek classics were imbued with ejaculations and false archaism—“Ay me!” “Why weepest thou!”—at the same time these plays by Sophocles and Euripides were being translated by a brilliant new generation of scholars and published as The Complete Greek Tragedies by the University of Chicago Press.2
For decades the Great Books movement—which Dwight Macdonald, in a scathing review of the Adler-Hutchins venture, called “the fetish for Great Writers”3—had been tied to a notion of general education that promoted these texts as essential building blocks for college freshmen and sophomores. Today, however, many freshmen and sophomores rush straight ahead to professional training, skipping literature altogether, or taking only one or two literature courses over the four years of their undergraduate education. Some later come to regret the lost opportunity to learn about the humanities and the arts. As a result, the interest in brushing up the classics that animated executives in the 1940s and 1950s is again alive and well: an idea that began as a pick-me-up for businessmen has found a new audience among modern-day professionals. Very often readers who read these authors with pleasure in high school will return to an interest in literary culture only after establishing themselves in positions of professional—and financial—security through college and post-college training. Book clubs, leadership institutes, post-performance audience talk-backs in regional theaters, cruise-ship lectures, and alumni colleges are among the ways adult readers now encounter the literary classics. Business schools teach the plays of Shakespeare to exemplify good (and bad) business practices, management skills, and group motivation, and programs in medical humanities likewise use Shakespeare to illustrate key themes about life, death, and humanity. It is in extension courses and lifelong learning, though, that the appetite for reading great works of literature seems most directly expressed.
But what does it mean to read the classics or to study them? Dwight Macdonald’s review of the Hutchins-Adler Great Books series—a review that must have been real fun for him to write—takes note of the deliberate absence of a “scholarly apparatus” accompanying a set of books that span the disciplines of literature, philosophy, history, and science, and range from ancient Greece and medieval England to Freud and (inadequately selected works of) Marx. “The Advisory Board,” Robert Maynard Hutchins wrote, “recommended that no scholarly apparatus be included in the set. No ‘introductions’ giving the editors’ views of the authors should appear. The books should speak for themselves, and the reader should decide for himself. Great books contain their own aids to reading; that is one reason why they are great. Since we hold that these works are intelligible to the ordinary man, we see no reason to interpose ourselves or anybody else between the author and the reader.”4
Macdonald found this particularly vexing in the case of the six volumes of scientific writing, which posed a problem “so urgent that almost no expository apparatus would suffice. A scientific work differs from a literary, historical, or philosophical work,” in his view, “partly because it is written in a language comprehensible only to the specialist (equations, diagrams, and so on) and partly because its importance is not in itself but in its place in the development of science.” Thus, while Milton “does not supersede Homer,” and the historian Edward Gibbon “represents no advance over Thucydides,” scientific writing is “often revised, edited, or even superseded by the work of later scientists.”5 To underscore this point, Macdonald offered some quotations from Hippocrates that were meant to show how out of date he was as a scientist—for instance, “In women, blood collected in the breasts indicates madness.” But as this example makes clear, such observations are very much of interest today in the history of science and medicine, and as well in the fields of women’s and gender studies. It has become a critical truism that the works of Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche are taught more often in literature courses than in the original disciplines (science, economics, philosophy, or philology) in which those writers began their work. This does not make them failures but, rather, successes—“crossover” successes. Hippocrates, likewise, has found new readers, new contexts, and new relevancies, even if physicians do not consult him on the treatment of ulcers and broken bones. These writers have become literary and historical. That does not mean they are useless but that they have found, or made, new uses. The literary is not the category of last resort (or of lost causes) but the category of textual richness and multiplicity of meanings.
Let’s return, though, to the purist claim made by Hutchins and Adler—that the omission of a scholarly or expository apparatus was a plus, morally, ethically, and literarily, for their Great Books series, removing a barrier between reader and writer. Dwight Macdonald quite sensibly suggests that “surely, without distracting the reader from the text,” a scholarly apparatus could have given the essential information about the historical and cultural context in which each work appeared and have translated terms and concepts whose meaning has changed with time.6 The word apparatus is an unlovely word, conjuring up as it does a kind of mechanical contraption or scaffolding. In fact, apparatus comes from the same root as prepare, and means a way of getting ready. A scholarly apparatus, however, sounds particularly menacing and constraining, like a harness (or a HAZMAT suit).
This id
ea, that scholarship and criticism somehow got in the way of and impeded the direct interaction between reader and work, is an artifact of the times—the late forties and early to mid-fifties. It is related to the romance of the Great Books as part of a theory of general education, a theory that was, in turn, indebted to concepts of American individualism, self-realization, and the spread of democracy in the post–World War II period. It is, in fact, the forerunner of the “culture wars” of the 1980s and the resistance to literary theory, which was widely regarded as a dangerous foreign import.
Specialists and Generalists
One of the recurrent flashpoints in the public discussion of the humanities is whether specialization is ruining literary studies, replacing generalists who know and love the canon and the great (and small) works across periods and genres with specialists, intensely localized and professionalized, who know every inch of a particular piece of literary terrain (the American nineteenth-century novel, or seventeenth-century religious poetry, or medieval drama, or Dickens) but who no longer command—or, it is implied, much care about—the larger picture.
Not long ago, that larger picture would have included the classics of ancient Greece and Rome (preferably read and studied in the original languages), Dante and Petrarch, French literature from (at least) Corneille and Racine through the nineteenth-century novel and the twentieth century, and many other works from what came to be known, too broadly, as the Western tradition. Time moves on, and—happily—writers keep writing, and so we now have not only a more global sense of world literature but also a constant consciousness of new work, poems and plays and novels and essays, that is published, reviewed, and read every day. No one can read all of this; no one can command it. And certainly no scholar can read the preponderance of scholarly work being produced today. A century ago the world of literary scholarship was smaller, more intimate, clubbier—riven by factions and sometimes astonishingly personal and intemperate in its expression, but at the same time rather self-protective, insulated as well as isolated.
The Use and Abuse of Literature Page 7