The Use and Abuse of Literature (9 page)

The return of the empirical after the heady attractions of the ungrounded “theoretical” had its effects upon literary scholars as well as upon historians, anthropologists, and sociologists.
⁶²
Inevitably, perhaps, chroniclers began to contemplate “the historic turn.” The editor of the volume
The Historic Turn in the Human Sciences
noted that there had been a proliferation of historical emphases across the disciplines: “the ‘new historicism’ in literary and legal theory, a revived interest in ‘history in philosophy,’ a historically oriented ‘new institutionalism’ and other historical approaches in political science and economics, ‘ethno-history’ in anthropology.”
⁶³

As the century drew to a close, the question of literary study’s place in the intellectual and academic hierarchy was an unsettled matter. Suddenly, the word
material
was everywhere (to be contrasted, presumably, with its antonym
formal
, but also with the complicatedly intellectual and highly verbal playing fields of theory).
Material culture
and
the material book
were phrases to conjure with, as book series on “art and material culture,” “design and material culture,” “American material culture and folklore,” “gender and material culture” proliferated.
The Body as Material Culture, Children on Material Culture, Chimpanzee Material Culture
, and
Cognition and Material Culture
crowded the bookshops—and these titles are only the briefest of selections from the B’s and C’s. Literary critics, once to be styled by preference literary theorists, were now increasingly scholars of material culture.

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:

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 academic 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.

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.