The Reading Experience

Selectivity

In a post discussing his list of "Best American Fiction, 1968-1998," D.G. Myers makes this assertion:

Literature just is a selection of masterpieces. There is no getting around this obstacle. The problem is what criteria of selection you are going to use.

I really can't imagine a more reductive and, especially for a literary scholar who professes to love literature, a more implicitly dismissive view of the value of literature and literary study. It's all about choosing up sides and announcing that your "criteria" are better than the other side's?

That "literature" is determined by selection--ideally, in Myers's case, by scholars, but presumably by whomever--would surely come as a surprise to all those writers who thought their own efforts to define and redefine the "literary" through their work had something to do with the way "literature" is received. Apparently literature has nothing to do with reflection on how a work of fiction or poetry might be created, or how it might appropriately be read, nothing with determining how literature differs from other kinds of writing, with the possibilities of language, with human imagination, nothing to do with the evolution of literary forms over time and across cultures. It's a competition to see how many lists onto which the work in question might appear. It's certainly true there's a long-term "selection" of books that make it onto our collective reading list--the test of time--and the judgments of critics play some part in this process, but individual lists of masterpieces are just momentary bursts of opinion.

Putting aside the difficulty of determining which works count as "masterpieces" in the first place, at least once you've gathered the usual suspects, why must we concern ourselves only with masterpieces? Is there no pleasure to be found in a "minor" but still accomplished work, nothing to be learned from the flaws in an unsuccessful one? I admit that I myself am sometimes overly impatient with books that don't engage my interest early enough, but in some cases I probably would have found something of value if I'd stayed with them, even if I'd never put them on a list of Best This or Best That. In other cases I really can't see any contribution to "literature," but such books still raise questions about definition and method that do contribute to the discussion about literature, and for that reason are worth reading.

Later in his post, Myers claims "For literary critics there are, as I see it, only two choices. Either the course of intellectual honesty, where a man admits that there are books that are not worth reading, or the course of literary preening, where he pretends to enjoy books because he thinks he should." I'd suggest a third: admit that there are books not worth reading but in doing so don't conclude you've engaged in an act of criticism or made some contribution to the proper definition of "literature." Making lists does not make literature magically come into existence, although it does make the prospect of teaching literature more manageable and does allow one to make one's points about whatever subjects one's selection has made available. Presumably they will be those points opposed to the points being made by the guy who has selected the books "he thinks he should." In this way, literature surely does become more than "a selection of masterpieces." It becomes the act of overcoming that "obstacle" and casting literature aside in favor of promoting one's own wisdom.

Something New to Do

Britt Peterson's Chronicle of Higher Education article on the champions of "literary Darwinism" portrays these "scientific" literary scholars as threatening to overturn the currently entrenched academic approaches associated with Critical Theory and Cultural Studies. But at the level of its basic assumptions about literature--about why we study literature in the first place--there's absolutely nothing "new" about literary Darwinism, as Peterson makes clear, perhaps unwittingly, in his description of this method:

The most prominent [of the new science-based scholars] are the Literary Darwinists, whose work emphasizes the discovery of the evolutionary patterns of behavior within literary texts — the Iliad in terms of dominance and aggression, or Jane Austen in terms of mating rituals — and sets itself firmly against 30 years of what they see as anti-scientific literary theories like poststructuralism and Marxism.

To emphasize "evolutionary patterns of behavior within literary texts" is not different in kind from an emphasis on cultural patterns or historical patterns or, indeed, the kind of class-centered "patterns of behavior" emphasized by Marxism. What all of these appropriations of literature have in common is that they're really not about literature. Marxists have their political agenda for which literature seems a useful prop, cultural critics have theirs, and the literary Darwinists are now making a play at getting theirs a prominent place within the scholarship factory that academic criticism has become. Readers truly interested in the study of literature--not the study of science or sociology--have no more interest in reading Jane Austen for her representation of "mating rituals" than in reading James Joyce for his putative insights into the nature of Empire. These readers want to "study" both of these writers in order to more fully understand how their texts work, how they expand our ability to experience works of literature, to transform experience into aesthetic "patterns." Literary Darwinism will do nothing to assist such readers in the goal of engaging with literature as a singular form of art.

In this way, it isn't surprising that the Darwinists are encountering resistance from from "those you might think would be allies — other members of the loosely defined group of literary critics breaking new ground with studies that incorporate scientific theory and even, in a few cases, empirical method." The "science" being employed by the Darwinists is not quite compatible with the "science" used by those enamored of "cognitive psychology," and thus the latter consider the former to be rivals in the competition to create the latest academic fad. And it is certainly not surprising that this whole "loosely defined group" would be opposed by the theorists and the sociologists, since they are in danger of being unseated at the academic big table, just as the theorists themselves began unseating the New Critics and the traditional historical scholars thirty-five years ago.

Prominent Darwinian Joseph Carroll gives the game away when he observes that

"The stick is that [mainstream academics are] going to feel more beleaguered and provincial and left out in the cold, and the carrot is that they're going to feel that here's something new to do."

The worst thing that could happen to an ambitious academic critic is to be "left out in the cold," methodologically speaking. One wants to have tenure and as many publications in prestigious places as one can before the next group of promising scholars looking for something "new" comes along.

Carroll's Darwininian colleague Jonathan Gottschall makes it even more explicit:

"I think that ambitious young scholars, graduate students and so forth, will see something of glamour in here, something that can motivate their studies."

I don't know if Gottschall is being unusually honest or if he simply got careless in his word choice, but his invocation of "glamour" as the motivating goal of literary scholars, however dim and degraded such glamour might be--these are professors we're talking about, after all--only underscores how utterly trivial the "discpline" of academic literary study has become. It is about, and only about, itself as a "field" in the academic curriculum. All concern for literature as something that might be valued in its own right dissipated into the ivy-scented air long ago.

Peterson wonders whether literary Darwinism will "save literary criticism," but the only thing that will save literary criticism is, well, a revival of actual literary criticism. What the Darwinists are proposing is certainly not that. It's an effort to dislodge the "literary" from literary study once and for all. It seeks to subdue literature and all the remaining "subjective" responses to it and pin it to the wall of scientific scrutiny (at least to the extent that "literary Darwinisim" is actually science, which is altogether questionable). Gottschall is pretty clearly contemptuous of the established approaches to literary study, which, astonishingly enough, he seems to consider still too literary to be taken seriously. He's apparently an advocate of the notion that literary study has to be destroyed in order to be saved, although what remains as the object of scholarly study will then have no resemblance to literature whatsoever.

Unmoored

I agree with Jonathan Mayhew that for literary study "Mere 'appreciation' seems a little cloying, a little narrow, in prescribing an attitude of silent awe." The experience of literature is grounded in "mere appreciation" (although I would contend that "appreciation" is a much more concentrated and difficult task than its connotation as passive "admiration" usually suggests), but if the study of literature is to go beyond the initial (or even repeated) intensified encounter with the work, it does need to, in a sense, leave the "appreciation" of the work behind. Even a more methodical analysis of the specifically aesthetic elements of a text has to suspend immediate appreciation in order to focus on the particular devices the text incorporates and on the effect these devices create--in other words, on how the text works. "Silent awe" is hardly a useful response when the actual study of literature takes place.

But I can't agree--based on my reading of most scholarly articles published in most "name" academic journals--that for very many academic critics "it is simply taken for granted that there are other questions to be asked aside from 'what makes this poem beautiful?' and that the discipline can't go anywhere being confined to that question. In other words, appreciative admiration is assumed (somewhere in the background) but is not itself the goal." It is true that "there are other questions to be asked" aside from the aesthetic ones, but I don't believe that academic criticism in its current manifestation assumes "appreciative admiration, " foreground or background. Or if it does make such an assumption, it does so only to dismiss aesthetic appreciation as the concern of naive readers who haven't been apprised of the strategies employed by academic critics to transcend the "merely literary" in favor of more "serious" issues of politics and sociology.

And it may be true that the "discipline"--literature as submitted to the protocols and conventions of academic inquiry--can't remain "confined" to the question of aesthetic beauty, but this is a problem not for literature per se but for the subject "literature" as it is defined within the academic curriculum. In a recent profile in The Chronicle of Higher Education of M.H. Abrams, Jeffrey Williams comments in passing that "Today the New Criticism, the dominant approach to close reading from the 1940s until the 1960s, seems narrow and constraining." New Criticism was constraining only to the extent that to use it meant to attend entirely to the literary qualities of literature, to withhold biography, history, and politics as subjects tangential to the focused analysis of literary writing. Presumably those more interested in history or politics than in literature would indeed find New Critical close reading "narrow and constraining," although one could ask why such scholars chose literature as their course of study as opposed to, say, history or politics. As Jonathan himself says, "when literary studies forgets the aesthetic, watch out! The discipline becomes unmoored from its reason for being, confused in its aims."

I'd have to say that the discipline of literary study has become more than unmoored and confused. I'm afraid that "the overt hostility to aesthetic questions in certain quarters," as Jonathan puts it, has become the mainstream attitude among academic literary critics. Some writers might still be valued because they can be used to shore up ideological positions, but "literature" as the record and register of literary art is held in contempt, at best the avocation of amateur readers (including bloggers), at worst a fancy instrument of oppression wielded by hyperliterate elites. If the only way works of literature can usefully be brought into the classroom or the pages of academic journals is to examine them for their "social constructions", or to expressly belittle mere aesthetic questions, in my opinion, as I've said here before, the best thing for literature would be to remove it from academic curricula altogether.

Learning How to Write

William Bradley at the blog Incertus takes issue with the recommended "goals" of creative writing instruction for undergraduates as expressed by AWP. The first two goals listed are "An Overview of Literature" and "Expertise in Critical Analysis", while "Understanding of the Elements of a Writer’s Craft" comes in third. Bradley asks:

Does it seem odd to anyone else that "Understanding of the Elements of a Writer's Craft" is listed as the third goal for creative writing instruction? Doesn't it seem like learning how to write should be priority number one? Yes, getting a strong background in literature and honing critical thinking skills are important, but aren't they important in a creative writing class because they help facilitate the goal of students learning how to write?

I do find it odd, but only because I would have thought that by now the AWP would have given in to complaints about requiring literature courses for creative writing degrees and given its approval to craft-driven approaches. This would only be in keeping with the general drift toward "practical" relevance in most undergraduate degree programs, and it's to the AWP's credit that it hasn't yet gone with the flow.

Learning how to write should indeed be the ultimate goal for students in creative writing, but exactly how one would learn this without the widest possible familiarity with literary history and with the basic principles of literary analysis is not at all apparent to me. Students who take "learning how to write" seriously are not learning a set of rules or some generalized standards that simply need to be applied. They are learning how they might eventually write poems that do not just invoke the name of "poetry" as it has been codified into a set of established precepts or write fiction that does not just perform some known variations on the "well-made" story. They can do these things, in my opinion, only when they are relatively familiar with the "tradition" that gives their own work definition and that in turn they hope to revise or modify. (This can certainly be done by any aspiring writer without the mediation of an academic program, although an academic creative writing program should make this encounter with tradition more focused and more organized, or else it really has no useful reason to exist.) And I really don't understand how a "strong background in literature" can "facilitate the goal of students learning how to write" unless it comes first. Otherwise, works of literature are used only for imitation, to illustrate ""pacing" here or "characterization" there.

To approach creative writing instruction with the assumption that "the elements of craft come first" is to reinforce the idea that "writing" can be reduced to a collection of techniques and devices the student must master in order to become a certified writer. Creative Writing programs probably already do reduce the writing of poetry and fiction to a simple "how-to" process, and perhaps for reasons that at one time, at least, were unavoidable. "An Overview of Literature" and "Critical Analysis" (mostly understood as formal analysis and "close reading") were expected to be at the heart of literary study as offered by most English departments, to which was added "creative writing" as a kind of practicum. Over the past twenty-five years, most English departments have more and more withdrawn from this arrangement, offering less and less of an "overview" in order to concentrate on Theory or Cultural Study, and programs in Creative Writing, both at the undergraduate and the graduate level, are going to have to pick up the slack by providing more critical-literary instruction or else their students will have practically no "background in literature" at all.

One of the first things they should do is to insist that there is no "craft" involved in writing poetry and fiction unless this simply means that both forms have a history that provides us with models of how the form was used at some point in the past. Imitating those models might have some initial pedagogical value, but ulimately the best writers will learn how to discard them. Beyond that, craft becomes only the self-applied anasthetic of literature.

NOTE For a broader discussion of this issue, see my essay, entitled "Not Merely Academic: Creative Writing and Literary Study," here.

Responding to Other Scholars

Rohan Maitzen recently gave her colleagues a kind of primer on "academic blogging," and among the responses she received was this:

Finally, another colleague proposed that, overall, the internet is great for connections, comments, and other 'lighter' forms of scholarly interaction (I'm paraphrasing) but not suited for sustained analysis. I think this is true in a way, but more because of how we use the internet than because of any necessary limits on its forms. . .

I also think it's true that few blogs offer the kind of 20-page "sustained analysis" that still stands as the paradigm for academic publishing, but this is, as Rohan says, more a function of how the internet has been used so far than an inherent limitation of the blog post. Much valuable literary criticism is being offered on many blogs, both "literary" and "academic," but most bloggers and readers of blogs still conceive of a blog post as "essay lite," an attempt to engage in some "sustained analysis" without running on to umpteen screens-ful of text. There's nothing wrong with this, but it does reflect an attitude toward screen-reading that continues to consider it ridden with "screen fatigue" and other ills endemic to the act of reading online text. And it tells us nothing about the long-term potential of blogging and other forms of online publishing, especially when print periodicals start to disappear (as they will) and most reviews, essays, and articles are "printed" online.

I've concluded that folks like Rohan's colleague are never going to be converted to online publishing. Their professional identities are too intertwined with the supposed "prestige" of print and of peer review for them to turn to the internet simply because it provides an opportunity to write about literature in interesting and still-unexplored ways. They are too invested in the notion of the lengthy "sustained analysis" (much of which turns out to be rote citation of sources and mindless repetition of academic conventions, anyway) to see, for example, that a "sustained analysis" might unfold over the course of several blog posts, perhaps winding up even longer than a typical scholarly article but without its filler. Or that critical discussions on blogs can really turn into discussions across and between blogs, discussions that actually advance the consideration of writers and texts rather than personal agendas and careers. As Rohan further puts it, "I don't see why [this kind of discourse] should be taken any less seriously by writers or readers than, say, 'responses' to articles that sometimes appear in journals by invitation--which are not, strictly speaking, peer-reviewed in the same way as anonymous submissions. Participation in book events is a form of on-line academic discourse that seems basically equivalent to publishing a book review, with the extra burden of having to respond to other scholars' queries or dissenting views."

Sometimes I thinks it's really this disinclination to entertain "queries or dissenting views" that accounts for the blogophobia among certain critics and scholars that has seemed to be on the rise lately.

Analytic

In his post on "Everything Studies," Joseph Kugelmass suggests that

If the humanities were to re-shape itself in order to accomodate the changing shape of culture, all of the analytical disciplines would combine—Philosophy, Political Science, English, Comparative Literature, History, Sociology, Anthropology, and the rest—while the creative disciplines would remain separate, including Creative Writing, Dance, Theater, Visual Arts, and Musical Composition. Critics and scholars are not always good artists, and vice versa. The grounds for such a merger would be basically ideological. If we accept the idea that our beliefs about the world are essentially constructions, then it makes sense to give the study of those constructions the widest possible scope . . . .

I would be willing to accept this proposal (with one proviso, discussed below), but there are actually a number of assumptions about both art (the "creative disciplines") and about academic study that need to be unpacked from this passage I've quoted.

That the humanities needs to be re-shaped because of the "changing state of culture" signals the extent to which the "humanities" as a marker of a certain kind of academic study has completely lost its original meaning. The "humanities" disciplines were those that resisted the scientific modes of inquiry in favor of a more impressionistic, a more humane (as in "humane learning") approach to certain kinds of human productions and experiences. That these disciplines now focus almost exclusively on a quasi-scientific study of "culture" suggests that "humanities" as an umbrella term ought to just be dropped in favor of the more descriptive "cultural studies," which might indeed include "everything."

"Analytic" is of course a nice term to be used whenever it's necessary to distinguish between mere emotional and instinctual artists and real thinkers--the intellectually rigorous (and properly credentialed) "scholars" who can cut through all the artsy-fartsy rigamarole favored by the "creative" types and let us know what all cultural activites are finally really about. Thus dividing existing disciplines into the "analytic" and the "creative," while potentially liberating for the "creative" endeavors, is also partly a good way to get the academic dilettantes out of the way of the Serious people.

The notion that "our beliefs about the world are essentially constructions" (revised in the next paragraph to "the world is constructed by human beings"), however much it may ultimately be true, is also a neat way to marginalize the "creative disciplines," which are merely engaged in fashioning aesthetic objects and not "the world" (at least not until such objects are interpreted by the analytic disciplines.) The Everything Studies or Cultural Studies or Symbolic Systems Studies scholars are dedicated to understanding "the world," not just the trinkets or the word-games created by artists. Art and literature are useful tools if they can be enlisted in the larger "ideological" project of establishing social constructionism as the dominant worldview (at least among intellectuals), but they surely don't merit consideration as aesthetic constructions in their own right.

Joseph's distibution of "disciplines" to be included as "creative" is tellingly literal: "creative writing" but not English or Comparative Literature; "Visual Arts" but not art history; "Musical Composition" but not music history or analysis. It is certainly the case that "Critics and scholars are not always good artists, and vice versa," but surely the study of artistic forms is enhanced by some appreciation of artistic practice, just as, more importantly, programs focusing on artistic practice benefit from some attention to "analytic" questions. Partitioning the "creative" subjects so thoroughly from criticism and scholarship may seem to remove a source of contention so that both the creative and the analytic disciplines can get on with their "real" work, but I think it would ultimately only make disciplines such as English or Art (to the extent they don't just collapse into the sociology that "Everything Studies" wants to be) even more unappealing to students (who usually pursue these disciplines out of an initial enthusiasm for reading fiction or poetry or for experiencing works of visual art), and would almost certainly further marginalize creative writing or theater or music as "soft" performance-based programs useful mostly for "nurturing" writers and artists.

Thus I would endorse the Kugelmass Proposal (as if it needed my endorsement or not) only if, say, "creative writing" was understood to include not just a series of writing workshops but also a critical component that offered some exposure to literary history (emphasis on "literary" rather than "history") as well as some focus on literary criticism. This ought not to bother the faculty in Everything Studies, since this criticism would be "analytic" of literature as literature, not as another way of registering "the changing state of culture." It might have the happy consequence of returning the term "literary criticism" to its rightful place as the criticism of literature--especially new works of literature--and of transforming the academic criticism that has so misleadingly appropriated the term into something else--"everything criticism," I guess. But since academic critics have long eschewed examining anything so trifling as the merely literary, and are so eager to move on to Everything, I can't see why they would object.

Note: You can read my lengthier proposal for an expanded Department of Creative Writing here (text here).

Open Paths

King Wenclas is not wrong:

Literature can't be taught. All the instructor can do, at most, is leave the student an open path. Then, through reading, the student finds the meaning, his own meaning, for himself.

Rather than classrooms I would have silent reading rooms with widely spaced armchairs, so the student can read-- whatever he wants, but read. Reading is the only way to learn what literature is about.

On the other hand, he's not completely right.

"Literature" can't be taught, unless it's construed as a unified collection of "great works" embodying "the best that has been said and thought." That is, unless it's viewed as Universal Wisdom or essentially as propaganda, to be used to illustrate cultural or national greatness.

Students can be taught to read more efficaciously, however, thus sending them on their "open path" more prepared to find what they're looking for and better able to determine what's worth reading and taking seriously in the first place.

They can be taught to read for style and form, for subtlety and implication, rather than for just "the meaning," whether such meaning is subjectively held or not. This can be done not to satisfy the fancypants vanity of the overeducated instructor but to enhance every individual reader's ability to have a fully satisfying reading experience, an experience that includes but goes beyond extracting "meaning" and allows the reader to reconstruct the aesthetic strategies the author employed in embodying meaning, and in some cases to perceive effects of both manner and meaning of which the author him/herself was not necessarily aware. That some "plegmatic professors" use critical discussions to reinforce their own authority does not make all methods of critical reading and analysis inherently invalid.

However, by and large I agree with the King. Beyond a certain point what readers "get" from literature comes directly from, well, reading. There were times in my otherwise benighted career as a literature instructor when I did indeed think the best thing I could do for my students was to lead them to "silent reading rooms with widely spaced armchairs" where they could burrow deeply into the text at hand. But this is not an MLA-approved pedagogical procedure, and I can't say I miss the days when I would desperately search for an approach to teaching literature that was pedagogically sound and that would justify my taking up space at the front of the classroom.

This essential incompatiblity between the protocols of the classroom and the imperatives of literature--defined as particular works read for their immediate literary value--is probably what most explains the decades-long move in academe away from an emphasis on "literature itself" to an emphasis on literary theory and cultural studies. At best, the literature classroom can only be talk about literature, not the opportunity to experience literature. Students can share their experiences after the fact, but this has limited value as well; it's not a practice around which an entire curriculum of study can be built. Theory and social analysis lend themselves much more easily to classroom pontification, and more readily provide a patina of coherence and intellectual sophistication that focusing on the "merely literary" cannot so easily provide.

The student who would prefer to study literature for its own sake might indeed have to do that "for himself."

Political Thrusts

At least Mark Bauerlein has the honesty to admit that, as an academic conservative, he's not really interested in de-politicizing literary study:

. . .The problem [with anthologies] lies in the sizable portion of the contributions that bear a polemical or political thrust. These pieces don’t pose a new model of interpretation, redefine terms, outline a theory, or sharpen disciplinary methods. Instead, they incorporate political themes into humanistic study, emphasize race/class/gender/sexuality topics, and challenge customary institutions of scholarly practice. When they do broach analytical methods, they do so with larger social and political goals in mind.

The problem isn’t the inclusion of sociopolitical forensic per se. Rather, it is that the selections fall squarely on the left side of the ideological spectrum. They are all more or less radically progressivist. They trade in group identities and dismantle bourgeois norms. They advocate feminist perspectives and race consciousness. They highlight the marginalized, the repressed, the counter-hegemonic. And they eagerly undo disciplinary structures that formed in the first half of the 20th century.

In order to correct this imbalance, to provide more "sociopolitical forensic" from the right side of "the ideological spectrum," Bauerlein proposes adding to such anthologies selections from the likes of Francis Fukuyama, Irving Kristol, and David Horowitz, noted literary scholars all. This will be done in order to "broaden humanistic training and introduce students to the full range of commentary on cultural values and experience," conservative code words for "introduce right-wing propaganda."

The time has long passed when we should have dismissed "conservative" criticism of literary study as just so much me-tooism. The conservative battle cries in the "canon wars" or the "culture wars" or the "battle of the books" or whatever martial metaphor you want to use for the fake conflict over what to include on literature syllabi have never been about restoring the integrity of literature or literary criticism. These conservatives are just as interested in appropriating literature for their own ideological ends as their proclaimed leftist enemies.

Artistic Disciplines

In a post discussing the teaching of "craft" in creative writing classes, K. Silem Mohammad observes that

Writing as an artistic discipline has a pedagogical advantage over music and, to a lesser but still considerable extent, painting: language, its primary medium, is inherently referential. Because of this, it is only natural that the teaching of creative writing should involve a fair amount of attention to content. Content is important to the visual arts too, of course, but painters don't begin with content in the way that poets do; they begin with paint, whereas poets begin with words. Words mean things. . . .

Of course it is true that the medium in which literature is created, language (which is, as far as I can tell, not just its "primary" but its sole medium), is "inherently referential." In poetry and fiction, language is being abstracted from its usual function--to foster discourses of various kinds, to "communicate"--and instead is used as the material out of which an aesthetic construction might be fashioned. Although it might be said that music also abstracts or brackets sound from the cacophany of sounds that surround us or that painting brackets sight, visual detail, from the equally overwhelming spectacle confronting us, certainly language bears a larger burden of reference, of already-established meaning. This is one reason that so many readers and critics of fiction in particular can so often blithely discuss it as if it were unambiguously an opportunity for the writer to "say something," just another way to offer opinions, propositions, and pronouncements. Poetry probably bears less of the freight loaded on by this kind of approach to the reading experience, since it is somewhat more obviously an attempt to bend language into aesthetic shapes, but even poets are often judged more by their themes and visions than by their ability to show us what new kinds of shapes aestheticized language might take.

Which is one reason why I would conclude that creative writing courses should devote almost no attention to "content." I'm all for poets learning about "ethics and politics and science and philosophy," but they should do so by reading ethical philosophers and scientists, not by piggybacking these subjects onto courses on the writing of poetry and fiction. I rarely agree with Joan Houlihan, but I do concur with these comments on KSM's post: "Of course, a study of poetry, of literature, even of language itself, is part of all other human endeavors in the broadest sense, but we don't use the fields of science, politics, philosophy, etc. to study poetry--why would we? So why do you think that we need to use the study of poetry to include these other fields? Of course, all fields of human endeavor necessarily overlap, and poetry--literature in general--is at the intersection of many other fields, has a much wider scope than say, economics, but it's not as if there isn't enough content in the study of poetry itself that we also need to make it carry the weight of all these other human endeavors." In other words, words do indeed "mean things," but the effort to make them, as it were, mean meaningfully is hopelessly redundant and only encourages beginning writers--all writers--to think of themselves as oracles rather than artists.

On the other hand, I can't accept that writing instruction ought to focus narrowly on "craft," either. "Craft," in the context of a creative writing class, too easily reduces itself to the mastery of predigested forms, formulae, and "techniques" that allow one to write poems that are acceptably "poem-like," stories that are likely to strike agents and publishers as following the established conventions that lead to successful publication, but that certainly doesn't encourage the writer with a more iconoclastic attitude to venture into the unknown. This leaves the latter, should he/she journey forth nevertheless, teetering awkwardly on the border between recognition from his/her peers and mentors as admirably daring and the abyss of unpublished risk-taking. Even if "craft" includes the strategies used by previous innovative risk-takers, incorporating those strategies can amount to another kind of conformity to convention. I agree with KSM that "craft" can also mean allowing students to regard it "as something that develops organically from just fooling around with words," but it's finally hard to see why they need to go through MFA programs in order to engage in such fooling-around.

The best kind of creative writing teacher, in my opinion, would both oblige students to read as widely as possible in the history of the form--including generous samplings of current writers and their practices--and show the students how his or her own study of this history shaped his/her understanding of what "craft" is good for. Such instruction would give students a sense of the possibilities that previous poets and fiction writers have exploited and a glimpse into the way another writer's work has seized upon some of those possibilities rather than others, or even attempted to explore other, untried possibilities. It would allow the instructor to emphasize that "craft" goes only so far. At some point it has to be abandoned so real writing, writing that forces its own recognition and establishes its own criteria of judgment, can begin.

What's Already Been Written

The recent very valuable interview with Stephen Dixon in the Baltimore City Paper contains this exchange:

CP: According to a recent National Endowment for the Arts study, "Reading in Risk," [today's students] are worse at reading. They're writing a lot more and reading a lot less.

SD: They're right. They're actually right. When I give stories to undergrads, I'll ask who's read Tolstoy. Nobody's read Tolstoy. Or I mention James Joyce, when we read a story from Dubliners, maybe one or two have read a story in high school. When I first started out, kids were much more serious as readers, and I could actually have literary discussions with them, which I cannot do now. Even the ones who are the most avid writers are not avid readers. They just want to write.

CP: Everyone has a novel inside them, but no one reads anybody else's, then. Is that a problem?

SD: It's a paradox. It hasn't really stopped undergrads from becoming better writers than the readers who were writing before. You would think just the opposite. But then there's a problem. We grew up on Dostoevsky, Conrad, if there was ever a serious name, we read that writer. It also told us what not to write, because if the thing has been taken up already, and you have a history of having read it, you want to go on to something new. So a lot of students are sort of writing what's already been written.

Dixon seems to be suggesting that writing programs are good for raising writing abilities up to a point--the point at which mere "craft" leaves off--but that great writers are produced only through the inspiration of other great writers, and this as much through learning "what not to write" as through imitation. As Dixon says, "if the thing has been taken up already, and you have a history of having read it, you want to go on to something new."

Too much current literary fiction--which certainly is produced in greater bulk than even twenty or thirty years ago, mostly due to the proliferation of writing programs--too obviously bears the influence of being "workshopped." It's competent, tidy, duly serious, but ultimately just another version of "what's already been written." Workshops instill conformity and a respect for the "mastery" of pre-established skills, but if a truly innovative writer emerges from one or another of the MFA programs, it's usually an accident, something that's happened despite the strictures of the workshop or because the writer was gifted to begin with. Conrad or Faulkner would have been laughed out of most "creative writing" programs.

Dixon's own work is a good example of the kind of fiction that would be smacked down in most writing workshops. All those absurd run-on declarative sentences, those characters who sound alike, those circular, stop-start plots! Yikes. Didn't anyone ever teach him what a well-made story is like? Doesn't he know that Hollywood producers would never even pause over such idiosyncratic stuff when scouting out their next "source material"? What's Barnes and Noble going to do with it?

A good argument could be made that if creative writing programs don't produce better readers , they're not worth much. Certainly conventional literary study is no longer focused on perpetuating a culture of reading, on inculcating the reading habit and cultivating a readerly sensibility. If the remaining area of academic study still ostensibly dedicated to literature as literature and to fostering literary talent is now a place where "literary discussions" can't take place because writing has been severed from its roots in reading, the future of "creative writing" is a bleak one indeed.

Missing Buttons

In her review of Claire Tomalin's new biography of Thomas Hardy, Julia Keller proclaims that

Life, alas, can't hold a candle to art. Life is ordinary. Life is boring. Life is a stack of day-old dirty dishes in a crusty sink. Life is a pile of soiled laundry. Life is pettiness and tedium. Life is a blouse with a button missing.

Art, though, can be colorful and unexpected and dynamic, and never more so than when it's contrasted with the dreary predictability of life. Thus the biographers of artists must confront a special challenge: How to calibrate the life with the art. How to make the business of living--paying bills, trimming toenails--measure up to the splendid bounty of creativity: novels, plays, poems, paintings.

One would think that, given the general accuracy of that first paragraph, the proper conclusion to draw might be that biographies, especially biographies of artists and writers, and especially biographies of the junk heap variety (if a scrap of information exists, throw it on), are by and large a waste of time. No "calibrating" of life and art is necessary. The dreary reckoning of the "business of living" is never going to equal in its interest value the "dynamic" experience of works of art and literature, and I finally just don't understand why anyone finds it helpful to supplement the experience of art with investigations into the lives of artists. Why would I want to read about "pettiness and tedium," no matter how much they've been gussied up by the biographer's "insight"?

My own latest attempt to read a biography of a writer whose work I admire, Robert Poltito's Savage Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson, predictably enough only met with failure (my own failure to complete it). I knew almost immediately that I probably wouldn't make it through the book when I noticed from the table of contents that only a relatively small portion of it was devoted to Thompson's actual writing life. (His most productive period as a writer, the early/mid 1950s, is given about 60 pages in a 508-page book.) Two-thirds of the book is devoted to Thompson's life before he became a writer, and it is packed with the same kind of eye-glazing detail, about the subject's parents and his parents' parents, about the various places in which he lived, about his adventures as a young man, that fills most such door-stopper biographies. Nothing in the book illuminated Thompson's work, the discussions of which amount to plot summaries and tallies of the money Thompson was paid. If anything, I was left with even less understanding of what Thompson was after in his novels, or how his best ones are as good as they are, than before I read Polito's book.

Keller further asks of a "subject" like Thomas Hardy: ". . .what if the artist was a bit on the drab side? What if he wasn't noisy and rude and randy? What if he simply did his job each day, faithfully and well, with little fuss or fanfare?" It seems to me that these questions answer themselves. If we already know such things about a writer, no biography is needed. What else do we need to know? Exactly how he went about being drab? And even if the writer was "noisy and rude and randy," do we need to know the particulars in order to appreciate the work he managed to produce in his quieter moments? Jim Thompson's life was apparently on the noiser side (although Polito recites the facts of his Communist years, of his drinking and his occasional low-living in such a dry and prosaic manner it's hard to hear it), but learning the known facts about how he lived it still falls far short of the uproariousness of The Killer Inside Me or The Getaway or Pop. 1280. Why do we think the proper way to respond to works of poetry and fiction we have enjoyed is to fixate on the "life" of those who created them?

Life indeed can't hold a candle to art.

Close to Heresy

On the heels of the previous post examining the absurd idea that formalism--close reading, paying primary attention to the formal and stylistic properties of works of art and literature--is a "mechanical" approach that turns art into "something less than human" comes this equally silly commentary by Emily Wilson at Slate:

Historicism, in various new and not-so-new guises, dominates most contemporary academic literature departments. It has become something close to heresy to suggest that any literary work could be studied without close reference to the specific place, time, and culture in which it was produced. Literature does not express timeless truths about human nature—or, at least, you would sound like a simpleton if you said so at an academic conference. Rather, literature articulates the ideas and values of its own time, according to older, Hegelian forms of historicism. Or literature "negotiates" the "power dynamics" of its own time, according to the newer, post-Foucaultian versions. These positions each have something to be said for them: Both respond, in different ways, to the obvious fact that literature is not produced independently of its author and his or her society—as radical forms of literary formalism might suggest. . . .

So formalists believe that a work of literature is produced "independently of its author"? Literally by a machine? By some magic process whereby an author discovers his/her new book fully-formed beneath a moss-covered rock?

Similarly, just how would a writer work "indepentently. . .of his or her society"? All writers are literally expatriates? They float above the world on a billowy cloud of inspiration, gazing heedlessly on their fellow humans down below, who don't seem to realize they might also be "independent" of their time and place?

What radical formalist ever believed such patent nonsense? Of course, names are never given in these sophomoric caricatures of formalism because no literary critic has ever held the position that "literature. . .is produced independently of its author and his or her society." Only someone intent on marginalizing formalism--aesthetic appreciation more generally--could even read such a statement without noting how ludicrous it is. Those of us who prefer to focus on the aesthetics of literature (without which there is no literature) are not so stupid as to think poets and fiction writers free themselves of the assumptions of time and place and produce "timeless truths"; we do think that they produce art, and that art bears scrutiny as art at least as much as (in my opinion more than) it does as a specimen of "the ideas and values of its own time."

Wilson goes on to maintain that "the triumph of historicism is a pity, not least because the dominance of any orthodoxy tends to deaden the critical faculties," but she has clearly accepted the underlying demonization of formalism (it's "inhuman," to accept it "heresy") that has made the domination of historicism in academic criticism possible. To deviate it from it might cede the scholarly territory to those radical formalists and pleasure-seeking aesthetes who still lurk outside the campus walls. Such "simpletons" wouldn't understand "power dynamics" if it was right there in front of them.

Boring!

According to BBC News, the Royal Shakespeare Company's Director of Learning, Maria Evans, is worried about reading Shakespeare in school:

"Stop your average young person in the street, ask them what they think about Shakespeare and 'Boring!' will be a fairly common response.

"Shakespeare remains the only writer studied by every young person in Britain, but many leave formal education determined never to come into contact with the Bard again."

Evans wants to supplement the study of Shakespeare with "theatre-based activities" (indeed, she believes, predictably enough, that "all teaching should include some theatre-based activities"), but I doubt this will have much effect on the youthful Shakespeare haters. We always want to believe there's some magic way of making a difficult subject "exciting"--some new "active, engaging way" of making students see the "joy of learning"--but the fact is that almost anything associated with "school" is found "boring" by most students. (See the Monty Python sketch in which schoolmaster John Cleese has sex with his wife in front of his class of indifferent students. How's that for a "theatre-based activity"?)

The more rational action would be to take Shakespeare--indeed, all of capital-L Literature--out of the classroom altogether. If the result of literary study is students who vow "never to come into contact with the Bard again," what earthly good is it doing? It only further solidifies the status of literature as the tiresome pursuit of pedants (or of earnest but equally tiresome popularizers) and, in my view, does little to encourage the small cohort of students who respond positively to works of literature but would have come to reading it on their own, anyway. Take it out of the schools and literature might become an object of intrigue rather than duty, something to be discovered as part of one's growing maturity, not stuffed into the brain because it's "good for you." Some of those students now convinced it's all just too tedious might even stumble upon it as well.

The Ways That Poetry Gets Taught

In a debate about the efficacy of "teaching poetry" as a way of increasing the audience for it (with, among others, Josh Corey), Eric Selinger asserts:

I would say that some poets don't have many readers because of the sorts of poems they write, but that the reason most poets don't have many readers is because of the ways that poetry gets taught in this country--or not taught, as the case may be--from grade school onward. If poetry were taught, for example, as part of the national patrimony, with the assumption that elementary students should know their Whitman and Dickinson, Hayden and Hughes, because these are our great national poets, just as French students and Italian students learn Baudelaire or Petrarch early on, there would probably end up a wider audience for poetry.

I'm continually surprised by how thoroughly the idea that literature is ulimately something to be taught in schools has become unexamined wisdom. At best, works of poetry or fiction might be useful in building vocabulary or learning the role of figurative language, or as supplements to other courses such as history or social studies, but in these instances literature itself is not really the "subject" at hand. (Which itself is problematic. If literature is finally pedagogically helpful only as something that can be added for illustrative purposes to other areas of study, most students are likely to view it in their future lives as nonessential, purely as the means to another, more important, end.) To study poetry as poetry requires a sensitivity to language and to the possibilities and purposes of aesthetic form that, frankly, most teachers lack and most students have no interest in developing. But I'm not sure why either should be expected to possess such sensitivity. A taste for poetry is a minority taste, has always been a minority taste, and, despite all the efforts to make poetry "relevant" to readers who otherwise couldn't care less (perhaps because of them), will always be a minority taste. And I don't understand why this is considered to be a problem. Physics is a minority taste as well, but physicists don't seem to spend much time brooding over the fact that most people don't read physics journals..

Thus the only really feasible argument on behalf of teaching poetry in school is the one Selinger advances here--"as part of the national patrimony, with the assumption that elementary students should know their Whitman and Dickinson, Hayden and Hughes, because these are our great national poets." But this "national greatness" approach is probably the very worst way of convincing young readers to give a poetry a chance. Whitman and Dickinson get elevated (or, more accurately, reduced) to the level of all the other "great" historic figures whose achievements are duly recited but otherwise ignored. To tell these young readers that such poets are part of their "patrimony" is only another way of saying they should read poetry because it's good for them, a strategy that will only make it certain they'll never want to read a line of verse ever again.

I favor the opposite strategy: take literature out of the schools altogther, even out of college (at least as a required course). Those who might realistically develop an interest in poetry or serious fiction will come to it not because it's been forced on them but because it's been freed of all taints of the "academic," of something one learns in school and then forgets. Emphasize the way poetry embodies values and practices that are precisely at odds with the conformist attitudes enforced by "school." Take it out of the classroom and let it breathe.

Demanding Assent

Peter Berkowitz's review of Theory's Empire in the Hoover Institution's Policy Review is mostly the usual sort of argument made against Theory by conservatives (cultural and political): Theory is just a cover for various kinds of leftist political crusades, it represents an attack on the inherited principles of the Enlightenment, etc. If people like Berkowitz really do want to reform academic literary study to make it more literature-friendly, as he insists he does, they're going to have to come up with a new set of arguments about what's gone wrong beyond these overblown denunciations. I am myself sympathetic to the notion that literary study has become literature-unfriendly (as a number of my posts here have illustrated), but if I also find Berkowitz's kind of analysis shrill and reductive, who, exactly, is he hoping to convince? Certainly not literary scholars who might be in a position to alter the discipline's focus from the inside, who understand that blanket condemnation of Theory and the ritual invocation of Derrida as deconstructive demon aren't very helpful since they can't be taken seriously.

Berkowitz's critique of academic literary study cannot stand because it rests on flimsy foundations:

In these circumstances, it would be advantageous if our universities provided a haven from the forces so inimical to the love of literature. To do this, they need only live up to their official mission, which includes safeguarding knowledge of the cultural and intellectual treasures of the past, transmitting an appreciation of them to today’s students, and, at the same time, equipping students to challenge authoritative interpretations and think for themselves. Unfortunately, the teaching of literature at our universities today routinely makes matters worse, burying knowledge of the classics, deadening students’ literary sensibilities, and demanding students’ assent to a partisan, dogmatic, and incoherent system of beliefs.

The "original mission" of literary study, at least in the United States, was not to safeguard literary treasures or to provoke students into an "appreciation" of literature. While a certain kind of traditionalist undoubtedly has often resorted to this kind of talk when defending the existence of a self-contained literary curriculum, as Gerald Graff demonstrates in Professing Literature, the argument that ultimately carried the day in getting "literature" accepted into the broader university curriculum in the first place was made on behalf of "criticism" rather than literature per se. Appealing to the American need to find utility and definable results in all endeavors, this viewpoint stressed (at least nominally) the quantitative possibilities of the sustained study of literature: "Knowledge" could be produced, and our understanding of literature as whole could be suitably "advanced." (In this way the American academy opertates in a manner closer to the German, rather than the English, model of the university.) No appeal to timeless values could have secured literature its place in the university at a time when reading works of literature was considered a fine way to pass one's time but hardly something to do in a college classroom.

"Equipping students to challenge authoritative interpretations and think for themselves" is closer to the actual goal of literary study as it was envisioned by its original advocates, but it's hard to see how this can be accomplished without formulating critical methods--theories about criticism--that can be practiced in the classroom and illustrated in disciplinary journals. New Criticism was such a method, and although it presumably comes closer to satisfying the expectations of bystanders like Berkowitz, given the academic imperative to advance the field, it was well-nigh inevitable that it would eventually be supplanted by other methods that might or might not begin with the assumption that the disciplinary subject--literature--is a timeless canon of great works whose ultimate value must simply go unquestioned. Those who would argue that such an assumption is finally incompatible with academic inquiry, even "distinterested" inquiry of a kind Peter Berkowitz might want to endorse but which "postmodernists" perhaps would not, are probably right.

In his conclusion, Berkowitz claims that "literature taught for its own sake serves a vital public interest in a liberal democracy. In our busy and distracted age, this may be even more true. Literature transports students to other times and places. It acquaints them with people and immerses them in circumstances remote from their own lives. It brings to life the variety of ways of being human. And it exhibits the common humanity in the glorious variety. In short, the study of literature for its own sake helps prepare citizens for the challenges of freedom." Even Berkowitz seems to concede that literary study cannot be designed simply to inculcate "a love of literature." It must be related to "a vital public interest" and help produce good citizens. I don't necessarily dispute that literature can do the things Berkowitz lists here (although I don't know that it is more important to the citizens of liberal democracies than to anyone else), but I don't really see why reading it and thus benefitting from it in these ways has to be done primarily on a university campus. And to teach it in the way Berkowitz prescribes would indeed require a Theory about its nature at least as tendentious as any of those he disdains as "partisan" and "dogmatic."

Creating Meaning

In his final dispatch from this year's MLA conference, Nick Gillespie reports on a panel called "Taking It Digital: Teaching Literature in the 21st Century." His conclusion:

What each of these presentations had in common was an understanding of what University of Tulsa communication professor Joli Jensen has talked about as an "expressive view" of culture. That is, culture broadly defined "is a way that all of us, even those of us who are not in a special guardian class, understand and symbolically engage the world." This understanding puts art, music, literature, and other forms of creative expression, including political expression, at the very center of our individual and collective experience. Which means that lucid interpretation of the same is vital.

And it need not rely on cutting-edge multimedia technologies; in the end, the panel was less about "taking it digital" and more about engaging students in the creation of meaning. To the extent that literature professors can make it clear that what they do is central to what we all do -- engage and interpret the world within ever-changing and ever-evolving traditions and communities -- literary studies may well be poised for a great 21st century.

Except that what Gillespie describes is no longer "literary studies." It's a version of what is now called "cultural studies," in which, as Gillespie notes, literature is just another form of "creative expression" to be interpreted by a cadre of self-designated authorities who generously agree to "interpret the world" for us. This is a useful enough activity, I suppose, as long as one accepts that these authorities do indeed have interpretive skills the rest of us lack. Perhaps they do, but they haven't acquired them from the study of literature, which has mostly devolved into the "creation of meaning" by forcing literary texts through a pre-set ideological meatgrinder. And a truly "engaged" study of literature would, if anything, demonstrate the folly of interpreting "the world" as if it were a literary text.

The 21st century may indeed prove to be a great one for those practicing the kind of interpretation Gillespie celebrates, but whatever it is they will be teaching, it won't be literature. The controversies the MLA annually foments would probably evaporate if it simply stopped calling what its members do "literary" study. But ensuring that such publicity-garnering controversy continues is probably the whole point.

Literary Illiteracy

Reason editor Nick Gillespie reports on a panel entitled "English Studies and Political Literacy":

The University of Chicago's Kenneth Warren emphasized the role of pre-college education, even as he gently chided moderator [Donald] Lazere for subtly equating "political literacy" with agreement on a particular political agenda. Lazere argued that instructors shouldn't shy away from politics in their classroom, because "literature can't be studied independent of political literacy." In fact, he said, they should bring in a wide array of sources, including The Nation and The Weekly Standard, where appropriate or relevant. That's all well and good. . . .

No, that isn't "all well and good." The notion that "literature can't be studied independent of political literacy" is bullshit. It's this idea that's brought ruin upon "English Studies" to begin with. It's just another way of trivializing literature, making it subservient to politics or culture or history or whatever. What other academic discipline has to endure this kind of marginalization, even on the part of those who belong to it? What would political scientists say if it were asserted that in order to understand politics one must first know poetry? Is it the case that, say, microbiology "can't be studied independent of political literacy"? Why is it only literature that can't be allowed its own autonomy, its own integrity as a subject that might be studied for its own sake and might provide its own kind of knowledge?

I am just old enough to have gone through graduate school before "English Studies" became entirely a hostage to political advocacy. I can attest that many of my fellow students were apolitical, at least as far as their approach to literary study was concerned. Some had decided to study literature precisely because it was removed from the hectoring insistence of political debate and required no political "literacy" in the sense this term is being used by Gillespie and the participants in this panel--i.e., they were free to ignore the inanities of politicians and other self-appointed cultural savants. Few of these students had any trouble separating politics from the study of Medieval drama or 18th-century fiction. Now we're being told it's necessary to consult The Weekly Standard in order to appreciate Wordsworth and Coleridge?

That Gillespie would so readily agree that political literacy is a necessary prerequisite to the study of literature only underscores the fact that conservative and libertarian critics of the academy are not opposed in principle to the politicization of academic literary study. They'd just prefer that the propoganda disseminated to college students be of the right-wing rather than the left-wing variety. Gillespie quotes Mark Bauerlein on the "diversification" of literary study: "Bring in a little less Foucault and a little more Hayek. Some Whitaker Chambers to go along with Ralph Ellison." Wrong again. Get rid of both Foucault and Hayek. Neither of them belong in literature courses. Pair Chambes with Ellison if you're interested in postwar intellectual history, but leave out Chambers altogether if you're teaching postwar American literature.

According to Gillespie, "Bauerlein also pushed for instructors to provide students with an American identity that is positive. 'Often the identity students get is too negative,' he said. 'We need not uncritical patriotism, but some line of argument about American history that students can espouse while criticizing other elements.' That sort of positive feeling would, he argued, make it easier for students to want to become engaged politically and civically." This is where the transformation of literary study into another mode of "political literacy" gets us. Left-wing "scholars" want to indoctrinate students with a "negative" view of American history, while their right-wing counterparts want to cultivate "positive feelings." A pox on both.

Dizzy

This post is an addendum of sorts to Mirian Burstein's excellent critique of Lindsay Waters' essay "Literary Aesthetics: The Very Idea." Miriam has insightfully pointed out the essay's conceptual flaws, and I would just like to amplify her suggestion that these flaws ultimately undermine what otherwise might be a valuable argument on behalf of aesthetic analysis in literary study.

"Literary criticism no longer aims to appreciate aesthetics — to study how human beings respond to art," Waters asserts. "Do you get dizzy when you look at a Turner painting of a storm at sea? Do certain buildings make you feel insignificant while others make you feel just the right size? Without understanding that intensely physical reaction, scholarship about the arts can no longer enlarge the soul." As Miriam notes, the ease with which Waters slides between "literary criticism" and "literary scholarship" is quite conspicuous. While I think it is manifestly true that "scholarship" (defined as the disciplinary discourse of literary study) has abandoned aesthetics as a focus of attention, it is harder to maintain that "criticism" has similarly turned its back on aesthetic "appreciation," especially if you are willing to grant that literary criticism might still be produced by critics outside the ivy-covered walls. Waters apparently shares the now reflexive assumption that all seriously intended literary commentary originates from the academy, but a more useful approach to the problem he identifies might be to encourage a renewal of non-academic criticism that does take "literature itself" as its object, rather than the maintenance of specifically academic norms and protocols.

Waters is if anything even more vague and amorphous in his ostensible definition of the aesthetic as the "feeling" one gets when experiencing great art. Nothing in Waters's essay conveys to me a very clear sense of what it is exactly that Waters wants us to return to when we finally do return to aesthetics beyond a rather saccharine idea of "emotion"--our "intensely physical reaction" to art. Waters doesn't seem to realize how close his notion of studying "how human beings respond to art" is to Stanley Fish's version of reader-response criticism--which posits that what counts in the literary experience occurs "in the reader"--while at the same time he identifies Fish as one of those pied pipers leading academic criticism astray. One could argue that both Waters and Fish are too quick to dismiss the formal qualities of literary texts--in my opinion, the elements with which all aesthetic analysis must begin--in favor of the reader's response, but if I had to choose between Fish's overemphasis on interpretation and Waters' overemphasis on psuedo-sensation, I think I'd take the former.

I agree with Miriam that Waters' concern for the reader's soul "treads close to elevating art to a form of religion." In their weakest moments, the New Critics were guilty of this as well, and in my opinion it was a discomfort with this tendency that led to New Critical formalism being supplanted by "harder" kinds of hermeneutics, reader-response theory being among the first. While feeling "dizzy" over a great poem is a perfectly fine response by individual readers, at some point one's light-headedness has to be dispelled for further discussion of the poem to take place. It would be hard to maintain that very much of scholastic value is taking place in a classroom full of vertiginous students.

I find Waters' invocation of Whitman particularly puzzling: "We cannot help feeling when we read Whitman's Leaves of Grass, for example, that we are being inundated by words, as the poet piles clause after clause after clause upon us. We have to grapple with finding order (not to mention a verb) — to assert some kind of control. That kind of experience embodies the experience of the new democratic order that Whitman was celebrating, gives us a sense, not an idea, of that order." The inundation by words in Whitman is real enough, but it seems to me that Waters has skipped over several steps in the reading process in his conclusion that we end up experiencing "the new democratic order that Whitman was celebrating." Isn't the first kind of "order" we struggle to find precisely a formal order, an aesthetic patterning or arrangement of the "clause after clause after clause" that will help us understand the innovations Whitman is introducing to poetry, the "sense" in which we are to appreciate Whitman's overstuffed lines as verse? Miriam contends that Waters "keeps moving back and forth between the critic's aesthetic response to art. . .and claims about what art itself does," but I never get even an "idea" of what Waters thinks "aesthetic" means as applied to Walt Whitman's poetry. It seems to me that he merely ushers meaning as proposition out the front door as he sneaks it back in through the side door.

A coherent account of the aesthetic effects of literature would have to include the reader's experience of works of poetry or fiction, but I don't see how a concept of aesthetics that focuses entirely on that experience could even be called "aesthetics" to begin with. The psychology of reading is a worthy subject of investigation, although surely the aesthetic is not simply a psychological state. Fish began emphasizing the role of the reader in the study of literature because some forms of "appreciation" threatened to devolve into simple veneration of the "verbal icon." Although I agree with Waters that in subsequent years literary scholars too often "continue to shuck text of its form, reducing it to a proposition to be either affirmed or denied," as far as I can tell what he calls "free aesthetic response" is just as oblivious of the effects of form in provoking "aesthetic response." In seeking to be "free" it substitutes emotional immediacy for attentiveness to the designs and devices that determine (and often defer) meaning. As John Dewey maintains in Art as Experience, such attentiveness is itself ultimately liberating, as it expands our apprehension of what "experience" might be like. When Lindsay Waters asserts that Dreiser's portrayal of Carrie Meeber allows us to "experience ourselves as vain and frail and ambitious," he's actually describing a response to the novel that constricts the literary experience, that reduces it to an opportunity for vicarious self-dramatizing.

Not-Knowing

J. Peder Zane thoughtfully considers the "knowledge deficit" among today's college students. Citing a dinner conversation with some University of North Carolina professors, Zane observes:

All of them have noted that such ignorance isn't new -- students have always possessed far less knowledge than they should, or think they have. But in the past, ignorance tended to be a source of shame and motivation. Students were far more likely to be troubled by not-knowing, far more eager to fill such gaps by learning. As one of my reviewers, Stanley Trachtenberg, once said, "It's not that they don't know, it's that they don't care about what they don't know."

I think Trachtenberg is right, but Zane himself is only partially correct in his own explanation of this state of affairs:

In our increasingly complex world, the amount of information required to master any particular discipline -- e.g. computers, life insurance, medicine -- has expanded geometrically. We are forced to become specialists, people who know more and more about less and less.

Add to this two other factors: the mind-set that puts work at the center of American life and the deep fear spawned by the rise of globalization and other free market approaches that have turned job security into an anachronism. In this frightening new world, students do not turn to universities for mind expansion but vocational training. In the parlance of journalism, they want news they can use.

It is indeed "vocational training" that most students expect from college, but it is not "knowledge" they seek in pursuing such training. They want to be given skills, practical advice about how to accomplish specific career-related tasks, not knowledge per se. This wouldn't be so problematic if it weren't likely most people will change careers or find themselves in situations where their lack of real knowledge will only make them seem. . .well, ignorant.

Thus in the creative writing class Zane describes, in which the students reveal they neither know nor care about Jack Kerouac, these students "aspire" only to be told what they need to do to become best-selling novelists (to the extent they aren't there just "to get a requirement out of the way"). This mindset perhaps also explains William Gass's frustration in teaching creative writing even to graduate M.F.A. students in a distinguished university. Where fiction is concerned, they want to know how to do it, not what distinguishes it as literary art in the work of great writers, past or present.

The teaching of literature more generally has mostly succumbed to the demand for "skills" as well. Literary study is now not a matter of familiarizing oneself with literary history or learning how best to engage with "literature itself." Students are provided with the critical thinking skills that can be acquired through reading literature closely, skills that presumably can be transferred to other contexts where "thinking" is required (in today's academy, especially contexts in which we are encourged to think about social codes and political oppression). I believe that studying literature can indeed help develop critical thinking skills, but this secondary benefit has now become the entire raison d'etre of literary study.

Zane is correct to conclude that "In the here and now, get-the-job-done environment of modern America, the knowledge for knowledge's sake ethos that is the foundation of a liberal arts education -- and of a rich and satisfying life -- has been shoved to the margins. Curiously, in a world where everything is worth knowing, nothing is." But we're not likely to recover the circumstances which made the "knowledge for knowledge's sake ethos" seem desirable in the first place. Too many working- and middle-class families now see "college" as the corridor through which students must briefly travel on their way to well-paying, respectable jobs in the office building on the other side. And since one can't blame these families for adopting such an attiitude--we're a culture that esteems acquiring an "occupation," not an education in itself--it's hard to see how the predicament Zane describes won't become only more pronounced.

Complexities and Paradoxes

Arthur I. Blaustein obviously believes in the socially redeeming effects of fiction:

. . .Now more than ever, we need moral fiction as a healthy antidote to the Bush administration, which has elevated lying and deceit to an art form. Novels offer genuine hope for learning how to handle our daily personal problems—and those political issues of our communities and our country—in a moral and humane way. They can help us to understand the relationship between our inner lives and the outer world, and the balance between thinking, feeling, and acting. They awaken us to the complexities and paradoxes of human life, and to the absurd presumptuousness of moral absolutism. They can give us awareness of place, time, and condition—about ourselves and about others. As our great Nobel Prize winner William Faulkner said, the best literature is far more true than any journalism.

I know that Blaustein believes he is valorizing fiction by describing its ethical utility in such terms, but in my opinion he is advocating that we read fiction for all the wrong reasons. Far from elevating fiction to some kind of privileged place as an object of our regard, Blaustein's encomium to "moral fiction" really subsumes it to the prerogatives of good citizenship and reduces it to its potential value as instruction and therapy. When Faulkner said that literature is more "true" than journalism, he certainly did not mean that it was instead a way to deliver "metaphoric news," as Blaustein puts it later in his essay; he meant that it grappled with those "problems of the human heart in conflict with itself" that surely transcend our concern with the lying and deceit of the Bush administration.

Indeed, Blaustein trivializes those problems Faulkner identifies by diminishing them to our "daily personal problems" and by implying that fiction aims to teach us how to resolve "those political issues of our communities and our country." The writer, said Faulkner, must leave "no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed." Otherwise, "His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands."

I really don't know what it means to say that novels "can help us to understand the relationship between our inner lives and the outer world." Are out "inner lives" not part of the "world"? If not, where are they? And if in teaching us about "the balance between thinking, feeling, and acting," Blaustein is suggesting that, used properly, novels will encourage us to do more of the last-named, presumably in the name of the "outer world," I can only say that if you need novels to tell you that living in the world is important, that we must balance "thinking, feeling, and acting," you're not likely to take their lessons to heart, either. Not to mention understand why most writers take up fiction in the first place, which is precisely to avoid delivering lessons.

It is certainly the case that fiction "awaken[s] us to the complexities and paradoxes of human life, and to the absurd presumptuousness of moral absolutism." This is the one point on which I wholeheartedly agree with Arthur Blaustein. But it's hard to accept that he really believes this when most of his essay concentrates on the way in which reading fiction can simplify our current conundrums, can uncover for us the essence of our mass-marketed and politically corrupt social world and perhaps return us to the time when "the imaginations of young people have been fired by characters that function as role models." And it's equally hard to take Blaustein's own lessons to heart when most of his essay is as morally absolutist as this: "How has it come to pass that our founding fathers gave us a land of political and economic opportunity, and we have become a nation of political and economic opportunists? As we have come to worship the idols of power, money, and success, we have neglected the core political principles of justice, equality, community, and democracy." Or this: "This McNews approach has undercut our moral values and civic traditions. We have sought simplistic answers to complex problems without even beginning to comprehend the consequences of our loss."

(I don't necessarily disagree with these statements, but they're not conclusions one reaches from reading novels. They're moral declarations.)

Blaustein would like to see more people forming reading groups in order to share the socially constructive messages of fiction. Here are the questions he thinks such people should ask of the novels they read:

What do you think is the central theme?
What are the underlying themes?
Did the author raise any emotional conflicts you may have had… or resolve any?
Did the author challenge any political, economic, social, or cultural beliefs that you may have held with regard to race, sex, gender, class, or ethnicity?

Conspicuously absent is any question inquiring about those features of a novel that make it a compelling work of art. They're questions about "themes," emotions, and beliefs. Of course, I wouldn't want to prevent anyone from joining a reading group organized around such questions, but finally I can't quite see why in order to discuss them it would be necessary to read novels. Couldn't everyone get together and talk about certain pre-determined themes (perhaps even ones extracted from this or that novel by someone who'd once read it), specified "emotional conflicts," and selected "political, economic, social, or cultural beliefs"? If you're going to target novels because they might be useful as curatives or for raising consciousness, why not just dispense the cure or proceed with enlightening insights and save time?

The time actually spent with a work of fiction is the most valuable part of the reading experience. It is, in fact, everything. The "reading group experience" is something else altogether. Innocuous enough, undoubtedly, and maybe even helpful in the therapeutic sense, but ultimately a poor substitute for sustained engagement with a novel or short story at its deepest formal and linguistic levels or with works of fiction that aren't obviously congenial to "moral" readings. You'd think that Blaustein might at least acknowledge this.

The Work Itself

AM Correa (Out of the Woods Now) on the efficacy of "close reading":

As an undergrad, I was fortunate enough to study abroad for a term at a university in England where I experienced the rigorous tutorial system. What a concept: read a book, write a 10-page paper, then come back and discuss it with the tutor--every week. The assumption that I could read a Great Work of Literature and have worthwhile ideas about it on my own upended my little American brain. I kept trying to bolster my thoughts with the critical writings of others until one of my tutors asked that I stop using secondary sources altogether. She wanted to see what would happen if I was left alone with a text and my own thoughts.

What happened? My marks improved. With no other choice but close reading, I began to discover more about the work from the work itself. It was a revelatory experience.

Apostles for Art

On the one hand, Camille Paglia thinks that "Mainstream America looks at art and the artist as a scam and they don’t want to support government funding of the arts. Who pays the price for this are working-class talented young people who don’t have access to arts programs. Across the country school budgets are shrinking, the arts programs are being dropped right and left. I’m saying to the art world and all these coteries in Cambridge, San Francisco, Manhattan, 'You have not been good stewards of art. You need to get out of this. You need to be apostles for art.'"

On the other, she believes that creative writing programs are "producing a kind of antiseptic writing, a certain kind of polished professional writing" and that "to be a good writer you can’t just study writing. You have to live, OK? That’s the problem. The best writers have drawn from actual experience, have had some experience. What experiences do people have any more?"

The contradiction between these pronouncements seems to me unbridgeably wide. If you believe that academic study almost necessarily produces "antiseptic" art (apparently this is a synonym for "polished, professional" art), why insist so clamorously that artists and writers get with it and help make American education more amenable to arts programs? If the best art comes from "actual experience," what difference does it make that school budgets for art are shrinking? Experience is cheap, college tuition and good public education are not. If art and artists are out of touch with "regular people," as Paglia contends they are, should their apostolic mission be in schools? They would inevitably be ministering to those students who show an interest in or facility with one or another of the arts, who will only go on to belong to one of the "coteries" for which Paglia has such contempt. ("Coterie" is just another way of identifying a group of people with a developed interest in some particular subject or pursuit. Isn't this always the ulimate outcome of education if the process is taken seriously? Does Paglia believe that the "working-class talented young people" to which she refers will know better than to take education that seriously?)

And since Paglia thinks that religion and sex are "the most substantive" subjects of art, does she truly think that "art education" in the United States could ever teach students the real truth about art? I agree with Paglia that great art is inherently provocative and potentially disturbing, but for that very reason it seems unlikely in the extreme that American education will ever do anything with it except distort and defuse it. And that "government funding of the arts" will anytime soon extend beyond the most "antiseptic" of art seems far-fetched indeed. According to Paglia, if artists would "stop the snide references to the rest of the world who didn’t vote with [them] in the last election" and "address America," they might get more support, but what it would really take is for politicians and their constituents to stop being afraid of the very art Paglia herself likes (at least if her analyses in Sexual Personae are to be trusted). Does she think this will happen?

If Camille Paglia wants to take art to the masses, she should probably stop thinking that school--in any form--is an appropriate forum for such an effort. I also believe that the academy has marginalized those who "just want to do literature and art," as Paglia puts it, but I for one never believed in the notion of the artist as shaman. A taste for serious art is a minority taste, and testifying for art's power as something magical or mystical isn't going to enlist many converts.

Allegorizing

Discussing a book on J. M. Coetzee, Matt Cheney extends the discussion of allegory in Coetzee's work to the relevance of allegory more generally:

. . .one of the problems a lot of writers who are not primarily science fiction writers get into when they try to write science fiction [is that] they allegorize too easily. Most SF readers don't read SF books as allegories (or, at least, merely as allegories), but for the literal presentation of impossible worlds and situations. A lot of SF doesn't make sense to readers who have been trained in literary study, and doesn't seem valuable, because one of the first impulses of most such people is to dive beneath the literal as soon as possible.

This seems to me a very astute analysis, although I might take it a little farther. Readers exposed to academic literary study "dive beneath the literal as soon as possible" because they're encouraged to think of literary works as invitations to critical interrogation rather than works of art with a formal integrity of their own. Reading works allegorically is one way of making the text behave, of pinning it down like a captured specimen. If the sample proves too slippery, you can always pronounce it an allegory of late capitalism, or of the cultural representation of this or that group, of the working-out of one or another "hegemony." The manifest literary qualities of literature (especially fiction) aren't worth dwelling on because they don't really exist; at best they're trivial compared to all this other stuff you can find, at worst an "elitist" imposition not worth the time of "engaged" scholars and critics.

For academic literary study today, literary works are not really to be read all, merely interpreted (and in the most unitary way possible.) "Reading" is not something one does in order to perceive "impossible worlds and situations" rendered by a skilled writer of fiction but is a special power to be used by the academic critic in the quest to reduce everything to the level of what the New Critics would have called its "paraphrasable meaning." It's good for providing the critic with the information he/she needs to deliver up a penetrating insight, (thus making it superfluous for anyone else to read the work in question) but is not something to be cultivated for its own sake because it has its own kind of value or because language is the medium in which literary art might be created. Allegory thus serves for the academic reader as a particularly good way to forego the challenges involved in actually reading fiction or poetry and to settle instead for the abridged version available through interpretation.

Matt goes on to suggest that some current writers are "moving more and more away from the metaphorical tendencies that literary criticism has encouraged and fed off of for so long" and are producing works "that shatter any one meaning and can only give pleasure to a reader willing either to suspend the interpretive impulse altogether and take the story literally, or to a reader who is comfortable holding multiple possible interpretations in mind at once." Perhaps this is the case, but as Matt also notes, "Writers have been writing stories that resist [reductive] interpretation for as long as writers have been writing stories." It's just that academic literary study, especially in its current form, has made it almost impossible to take any kind of pleasure from literature, and "to suspend the interpretive impulse altogether" for academic critics would be to deprive themselves of their livelihood. However, if contemporary fiction were to make it harder for these critics to do their jobs, make them truly struggle with the possibility of "holding multiple interpretaions in mind at once," perhaps they would then just leave it alone. This could only be a good thing.

Funeral Rites

Judith Halberstam thinks the Department of English needs to go:

I propose that the discipline is dead, that we willingly killed it and that we now decide as serious scholars and committed intellectuals what should replace it in this new world of anti-intellectual backlash and religious fundamentalism. While we may all continue doing what we do — reading closely, looking for patterns and disturbances of patterns within cultural manifestations, determining the complex and fractal relations between cultural production and hegemonies — once we call it something other than “English,” (like cultural studies, critical theory, theory and culture, etc.) it will neither look the same nor mean the same thing and nor will it occupy the same place in relation to the humanities in general, or within administrative plans for down-sizing; it will also, I propose, be better equipped to meet the inevitable demands (which already began to surface after the last election) for an end to liberal bias on college campuses and so on.

I heartily endorse this idea. By all means, let Halberstam and her confreres establish a new Department of Patterns and Disturbances of Patterns Within Cultural Manifestations. This would allow them to do what they most dearly wish to do--distance themselves from the study of mere literature--and would further allow whatever renegade elements there are within the exisiting English deparment who still find themselves interested in the "merely literary" either to reclaim "English" as the name for what they study or perhaps to join in on the makeover fun and establish a Department of Literary Study, in which what actually goes on is the study of literature. The latter could perhaps be done by incorporating extant creative writing programs, and such a department would probably continue to offer traditional composition and linguistics courses. (Surely administrators would not want to entrust such courses to a department that otherwise focuses on "the complex and fractal relations between cultural production and hegemonies." This very phrasing suggests that professors in the new department would not be the logical choice to teach courses the goal of which is to teach students to write.)

I believe that such a bifurcation of English would turn out to be a swell deal for us renegades. Given a choice between the PDPWCM department and its ersatz sociology and a Literary Study department honestly devoted to studying literature, I predict that many undergraduate students would turn to the latter. After all, most English majors have traditionally been drawn to the discipline simply because they like to read. If departments of English and comparative literature are currently suffering "massive declines in enrollment," as Halberstam herself allows they are, I'd suggest that one of the reasons is that what students find when they get there--and what they would continue to find in the PDPWCM department--is a pedantic, turgid, supercilious, and utterly joyless approach to reading. Should the new department of Literary Study reemphasize some of the pleasures of reading, and some of the delight of discovery in the study of literature, it would do just fine in a competition to avoid "down-sizing."

Michael Berube doesn't much care for Halberstam's proposal, for reasons that aren't very clear. "[No] kind of renaming or reorganizing is going to make English a coherent, tidy discipline," he writes. "It would be hard enough to make it coherent if it were devoted solely to literature. . ." Berube doesn't seem to understand: Halberstam is advocating that those very tendencies in academic criticism that make English as it now stands incoherent be transferred to the PDPWCM department. The English department left behind would be entirely coherent, despite Berube's doubts. Without those scholars more interested in "cultural production" and "hegemonies" than in works of fiction or poetry or drama, other scholars and critics who think studying such works as forms of literary art is a perfectly nice thing to do would be left alone to get on with the task. Berube continues: "literature, as even the most hidebound traditionalists ought to admit one of these days, is a terribly amorphous thing that touches on every conceivable facet of the known world—and, as if this weren’t enough, many facets of worlds yet unknown as well. . . ." I'm not a hidebound traditionalist--in my version of a Department of Literary Study, periodization and other manifestations of curricular slicing would be absent; professors would be free to teach what they want to teach, as long as the ultimate goal was to understand the literary qualities of literature--but in my experience literature is a perfectly morphous subject. Individual works of literature certainly do explore "every conceivable facet of the known world," but the study of literature concentrates on delineating the way they do this, not on using literature as an excuse to pronounce on such "facets" oneself.

What Halberstam and Berube share, ultimately, is a plain impatience with if not disdain for trifling old literature. Halberstam sneers at the notion of "aesthetic complexity," notes approvingly the way "queer theory, visual culture, visual anthropology, feminist theory, literary theory began to nudge the survey courses, the single-author studies and the prosody classes aside," recommends that the study of Victorian literature be replaced with "studies of 'Empire and Culture,' romanticism with “the poetries of industrialization.” Berube wants to preserve close reading as "our distinct product line," as "what we sell people" (so much for resisting the corporatization of academe), but reduces such readings to "skills in advanced literacy," something that promotes students' "own symbolic economy." Besides, "you don’t have to confine yourself to literary works, either. You can go right ahead and do close readings of any kind of 'text' whatsoever, in the most expansive sense of that most expansive word." Berube forgets that "close reading" was developed specifically as a method of reading literary works, which required close reading because they don't give up their intended meanings so easily, are not storage centers of "meaning" at all but occasions for a reading experience of a distinctive kind. His appropriation of "close reading" is really just a theft of the term for purposes to which true close reading is simply not applicable. (But of course the New Critics have become the collective bogeymen of contemporary literary study, returning now and then from their repressed state to scare the children. They and their appalling practices must be warded off.)

Really and truly, the best thing that could happen to literature would be, once the Department of Patterns and Disturbances of Patterns Within Cultural Manifestations (or some equally dreary equivalent) was actually created, for it to disappear from academic curricula altogether. After eighty years of experimenting with the study of literature as an academic subject, those carrying it out (myself included) have made a complete hash of it. Literature itself is held in contempt not just by the majority of ordinary people but by those professing to teach it. "Literature Professor" has become a near-synonym of "lunatic." That literary study would come to such an end was probably inevitable, since the primary imperative of academe--to create "new" knowledge--is finally inimical to something so difficult to dress up in fashionable critical clothes as serious works of fiction or poetry. Once it was perceived that "aesthetic complexity" was a spent force (at least as the means for producing new monographs and journal articles), approaches to literature that essentially abandoned its consideration as an art form were practically certain to follow. If Judith Halberstam is proposing that, in this context, everyone should acknowledge that the experiment failed, she's performing a useful service. Give literature back to the amateurs.

(Thanks to Scott Esposito for providing both of these links.)

Keenly Observed

According to Morris Dickstein,

To understand the changes that shook the modern world, my students and colleagues have returned in recent years to long-neglected writers in the American realist tradition, including William Dean Howells, Theodore Dreiser, Stephen Crane, Sinclair Lewis, Edith Wharton and Willa Cather. For readers like me who grew up in the second half of the 20th century on the unsettling innovations of modernism, and who were attuned to its atmosphere of crisis and disillusionment, the firm social compass of these earlier writers has come as a surprise.

Dreiser, Crane, Wharton, and Cather are "long-neglected"? As far as I can tell, the latter two especially have become increasingly popular, both among academics and ordinary readers, over the past two decades. This must be just another anti-modernist rhetorical gesture--surprisingly, from someone who has in the past written insightfully about both modernism and postmodernism. (See his Gates of Eden, actually one of the very best books about American fiction in the 1960s.)

I can't really see that the "unsettling innovations of modernism" provide a very clear opposition to the "firm social compass" of the writers Dickstein lists. The modernists didn't lack a social compass, did they? Joyce? Faulkner? They simply weren't as interested in "social fiction" as Dreiser or Lewis. Their "innovations" were directed elsewhere--to the depiction of consciousness, the fragmentation of form, etc.

Dickstein continues:

Like Henry James before them, they saw themselves less as lonely romantic outposts of individual sensibility than as keen observers of society. They described the rough transition from the small town to the city, from rural life to industrial society, from a more homogeneous but racially divided population to a nation of immigrants. They recorded dramatic alterations in religious beliefs, moral values, social and sexual mores and class patterns. Novels like Dreiser's "Sister Carrie" and Wharton's "House of Mirth" showed how fiction paradoxically could serve fact and provide a more concrete sense of the real world than any other form of writing.

Were these writers really as immodest as to consider themselves "keen" observers? Isn't it only literary critics who want to confine such writers to their putative powers of observation in the first place? Did Crane or Dreiser or Wharton believe this was their primary talent as writers? Was mere "observation" all they had to offer?

The rest of Dickstein's paragraph actually does no service to any of these writers. It makes them sound like journalists or historians, but not like novelists that anybody would voluntarily read. If you want information about "the rough transition from the small town to the city" and "dramatic alterations in religious beliefs, moral values, social and sexual mores and class patterns," why not go straight to the historians? Why bother with novelists? Just for a little dramatic illustration? Is this any reason why readers interested in literature rather than history or sociology would now turn to these writers? And exactly why do we need a "concrete sense of the real world" from our writers? Don't our own eyes put us in contact with this world every day? Besides, what other world could novelists be writing about? Where else would their subjects come from?

Dickstein concludes:

This is how most readers have always read novels, not simply for escape, and certainly not mainly for art, but to get a better grasp of the world around them and the world inside them. Now that the overload of theory, like a mental fog, has begun to lift, perhaps professional readers will catch up with them.

How does Dickstein know "how most readers have always read novels"? Exactly how would he have gleaned this information? Professor Dickstein wouldn't be generalizing from his own reading habits, would he? Or those of other "professional readers"? I've known many more people who say they indeed read novels for "escape" rather than something as earnest as "a better grasp of the world around them." For that matter, if this latter were indeed the reason why most readers turn to fiction, would Lewis, Howells, et. al. be as "neglected" as Dickstein contends? Wouldn't they be the most beloved writers in the American canon?

How disdainful is that "certainly not mainly for art." Disdainful of those readers who do seek out "art," disdainful of the possibilities of fiction as art, implicitly disdainful of "most readers," who apparently couldn't appreciate it even if it were present. Unfortunately for Dickstein, it's precisely the lack of "art" in the work of writers like Howells and Lewis (and sometimes in Dreiser and Cather) that accounts for whatever "neglect" they have suffered. No matter how thoroughly the postmodern fog lifts, they're not going to be rediscovered as anything other than than the dreary documentarians they were.

Mediocre Novelists

Inside Higher Education reports on the discovery that a 19th century novelist named Emma Dunham Kelley-Hawkins (I confess to not having heard of her before) was not African-American, as previously believed.

In her [Boston] Globe article, [Holly Jackson] recounts how she made the discovery about Kelley-Hawkins, about whom relatively little had been known. In short, a tip led her to records revealing the author's parents, and that in turn led to the discovery that several generations of her family about whom records exist were all white. (Jackson explored, and rejected, the hypothesis that the family was "passing" for white.)

What's most interesting about IHE's report, however is the quoted reponse from Henry Louis Gates, who himself included Kelley-Hawkins in a series of books by African-American Women Writers that he edited:

He said Kelley-Hawkins was a "mediocre novelist" and that he thinks the primary impact of the discovery will be that people won't write about her any more. There are so few black women authors in the 19th century that every single one matters, he says. "Anyone matters," he said.

But Gates said that he doubted that feminist scholars would now start studying Kelley-Hawkins, since there are so many better writers for them to examine in the 19th century. "It's less important to add one more white woman," he said.

I've always admired Gates, but I find his reaction to this controversy rather astonishing in at least two ways.

First, why would he want to include in a high-profile library of African-American literarure a novelist he readily concedes is "mediocre"? Was the purpose of this series merely to have in print a few more books scholars could "write about" (and therefore are really just more cogs in the academic tenure machine), or did Gates believe ordinary readers might want to read these books as well? If the latter, what kind of impression of the quality of 19th century African-American writing does it leave if you implicitly encourage people to read mediocre novels simply because an African-American name is attached? Is it really the case that "anyone matters?" Matters for what? We all know why it would have been difficult for African-American women (and men) to write and publish novels in 19th century America, and we know further that plenty of talented African-American writers emerged in the 20th century. What real purpose--especially what real literary purpose--is served by preserving a "library" of books many of which presumably aren't particularly satisfying to read in the first place?

Second, how does Gates expect his comment that ""It's less important to add one more white woman" to be taken? Since he acknowledges that quality is not a particularly important criterion for "inclusion" on the list of authors academic scholars might "write about," what earthly reason does he have for excluding "one more white woman" from consideration? All those white women are the same, anyway? Same old complaints about patriarchy and the terrors of middle-class existence? And what can it possibly mean to say there are "better" women writers to study? If the purpose of constructing such lists and compiling such libraries is primarily just to identify as many writers of a specified identity as possible, what's the problem with adding "one more"? The more the merrier, at least where course syllabi are concerned.

But this whole affair only illustrates the deep-seated problems with installing identity politics as the basis of literary study in the first place. From the very beginning of this process, the "literary" drops out of consideration altogether, to be replaced by sociology and cultural history and group solidarity. Perhaps these are more worthy endeavors than the merely trifling study of literature for its own sake, but those engaging in them ought to admit they're no longer studying literature. After all, look what this very case says about the current corruption of academic literary criticism and schlolarship. In her Globe article, Jackson writes:

. . .the readings of Kelley-Hawkins's novels that have been offered over the past 20 years--as critics have labored to account for the overwhelming, almost aggressive whiteness of her characters--now seem notably strained.

Many noted black authors. . .have depicted light-skinned ''mulattos'' with blue eyes as a way of pointedly exposing race as a social construction, instead of a biological fact. Kelley-Hawkins's novels, on the other hand, lack any such political thrust. Scholars have explained this away by arguing that the abundance of white signifiers is actually politically radical, with some even going so far as to argue that this extremely white world depicts a kind of post-racial utopia.

In other words: By the current rules of academic commentary, unconstrained by silly questions of form or style or quality of execution, or any of those other outdated "literary" notions, you can take any book and, imputing to it the sociological or biographical characterstics of choice, make it mean anything you want it to mean.

In this case, literally, white is black and black is white.

Critical Methodology

Scott Esposito and Dave Munger have been continuing the conversation about the role of theory in literary study and appreciation. On the latter, Dave writes:

Unfortunately, the professors aren’t teaching literature appreciation, they’re teaching literature, and contemporary literature study demands an understanding of critical theory, not just close reading. You won’t get anywhere in grad school – let alone as a professor – without an ability to apply critical theory. Faced with doing a disservice to English students who are planning to be something else (lawyers, accountants, schoolteachers, or baristas) or to those who are planning to become graduate students and professors, they favor the ones who have a chance to follow in their own footsteps.

Dave is more or less correct that "contemporary literature study demands an understanding of critical theory," but this is not because "they’re teaching literature." It's because literary study has become a self-reflexive discipline, a course of study about literary study, not about literature as such. You could say that this is unsurprising, even inevitable, given the imperatives of disciplinary study and scholarship in American universities, and you would be at least partially correct. But more about this below.

Dave links to a post at the blog Uncertain Principles that asserts the following about "theory-free" literature classes:

You could argue that this would be doing a disservice to students, that it is impossible to claim to have a meaningful understanding of modern literary scholarship without having at least some acquaintance with critical theory. And you'd be right.

Again, what I find most telling about this formulation is that denying students access to theory would impede their ability "to have a meaningful understanding of modern literary scholarship" (emphasis mine). The almost unconscious assumption is that to study literature in modern American universities is perforce to study the scholarship on literature, to become familiar with what others who have devoted themselves to the study of literature have written about the study of literature. (In fairness, it should be said that Dave goes on to question the use of theory in undergraduate literary courses, ultimately to take a position on how literature might be taught to these students with which I am entirely comfortable; it is precisely the unconscious assumptions behind the language employed in talking about theory, however, that I want ultimately to emphasize.) In many ways, what is now called "theory" is just what passes for the established mode of "literary scholarship."

There was a time, of course, when "literary scholarship" meant not theory in particular, but a wide range of approaches to literature, most of which were understood to be useful in helping us to understand literary works, to be ways of enhancing our ability to finally return to "literature itself" and read it with greater comprehension and enjoyment. But before discussing further how the one conception of scholarship mutated into the other, I want to quote Scott Esposito's gloss on this whole debate:

Dave's answer is "literature without theory" but he realizes that this approach is complicated by the fact that all readers are informed by various experiences and historical knowlege of some sort. In other words, none of us can be "tabula rasa" when reading a book. That means that anyone teaching literature will have to deal with a group of conflicting assumptions. If you don't steamroll/mitigate these assumptions with theory then what do you do?. . .

. . .Are we approaching this text as an aesthetic experience, watching how the words link and interact as one would the brushstrokes of a painting? Or are we approaching this more interpretatively, trying to teach tools to get at a meaning? I suppose we can always just answer "both" and say both approaches are worth teaching, but I'd doubt if that would mitigate argumentation.

Although Scott is also agreeable to the notion of "literature without theory" for undergraduates, his words as well bear the impression of some of the current presumptions about the relationship between literature and theory. One is that "none of us can be 'tabula rasa' when reading a book." This is unexceptionable in itself, but as I pointed out in a recent post, very often this otherwise harmless truism is used to assert further that such experiences and knowledge themselves constitute a "theory," that all reading of works of literature is preceded by a preexisting theory of literature and of reading itself. As I said in that post, I think this is a trivial argument mostly undertaken (not by Scott) to squelch all discussion about possible alternatives to theory as a way of orienting oneself to works of literature.

The second is less a presumption about theory than an altogether unexamined assumption about how we become acquainted with literature in the first place: Scott speaks of his two broadly defined approaches to reading literature as "worth teaching." Certainly we can think of the way we come to value reading works of literature as, broadly speaking, something that is learned, but in this context "teaching" means teaching literature as part of an academic curriculum. And, in my opinion, this underlying premise that literature is something to be encountered through the formal study such a curriculum imposes, that "literature" is somehow first and foremost a subject of academic study, needs to be reconsidered.

Perhaps the place to begin such a reconsideration is simply to remind ourselves that "theory" itself is a by-product of the transformation of the English department into the academic department assigned to "study" literature in the first place. And we should also remember that the establishment of literature as a reputable subject of academic study is still a relatively recent phenomenon. Literature courses were not offered on any reliable basis until the 1910s and 1920s, and really they were not consolidated into a coherent course of study widely availabe in American colleges until after World War II. Furthermore, it was under the aegis of "criticism" that literature was finally accepted into the curriculum, not as a self-evidently viable object of study in its own right. (For a further discussion of this history, see Gerald Graff's Professing Literature.) Before the advent of criticism (by which the focus of study was to be the development of critical thinking and its application more broadly), "English" was at best the discipline otherwise occupied with "philology"--literally, the study of the language.

It so happened that the dominant critical approach to literature in the 1940s, 50s and 60s became the New Criticism, a method of "close reading" that had the happy consequence of focusing the student's attention on the formal qualities of "literature itself," but it was surely inevitable that this critical method would come to be supplanted by others, since, again, the goal of studying literature was to develop critical approaches to literature, not to admire it for its intrinsic worth--although, again, New Criticism did seem to encourage this respectful attitude.

It also happens that New Criticism is a critical approach for which I have a great deal of sympathy, although I also have problems with its unstated ambitions--for many of the New Critics literary study was intended to become through its respect for "the text" almost a substitute for religion--and a number of its practices--the general New Critical disdain for writers such as Wordsworth (the Romantics more generally) and Milton, for example. But in my opinion the most destructive legacy of New Criticism has been the process it initiated whereby Critical Methodology became all-important, inevitably leading to the creation of new methodologies deemed superior to the preceding ones, finally leading to the installation of "critical theory" as we now know it as the sine qua non of literary study. As a result, we have been led to forget: Before there were departments of literature and literary study, there was no literary theory as such. Writers and readers got on perfectly well without it.

Certainly there was literary criticism before the English department became first its guardian and then its warden. But to call the critical writing of Samuel Johnson or S. T. Coleridge or Henry James "theory" is merely to engage in denotative game playing. Critics such as these (who for the most part were poets and fiction writers themselves) wanted to explain what was at stake in the reading of poetry and fiction, and they had their opinions about what was good or bad in their fellow writers, but they hardly thought of criticism as largely about itself, as a contribution not to the appreciation of worthy literature but to the perpetual shifting and expanding of critical methodology.

To return (at last) to the posts at Conversational Reading and Word Munger. Theory is important, indeed indispensable, to "those who are planning to become graduate students and professors." And undoubtedly "anyone teaching literature will have to deal with a group of conflicting assumptions." But these things are true because, essentially, becoming a literature professor, not advancing the cause of literature, has become the primary objective of the graduate student, and because teaching literature has come to be much more about teaching--that is, professing a point of view--than about the works of literature being taught. Those works are still around, waiting for such readers as are willing to take them for what they have to offer. But in this regard, curious readers would be much better served by reading, say, literary weblogs than by giving much thought to what literary theory is all about.

General Symbolic Interpretation

An essay in the most recent issue of New Literary History ("The Critic as Ethnographer," by Richard Van Oort) gives the game away:

The discipline of literature is no longer restricted to literature. Literature still forms a large part of what we study in English and Modern Language departments, but our interest in the interpretation of classic works. . .has been extended to embrace all kinds of other texts, including texts that do not appear to be literary at all, for example, oral testimonies, rituals, advertisements, pop music, and clothing.

But in what sense are these nonliterary objects "texts"? They are texts because they invite interpretation. But what is interpretation? Interpretation is the symbolic process whereby we translate the significance of one thing by seeing it in terms of another. For example, to those who worship it, the totem at the center of the rite is not just a piece of wood (that is, an object to be described in terms of its intrinsic physical and chemical structure); it is also a symbol of the deity who inhabits the wood as a living presence. . .

This irreducible anthropological fact explains the current preoccupation in literary studies with culture as an object of general symbolic interpretation. For if humanity is defined as the culture-using animal, and if culture is defined as that object which invites symbolic interpretation, then it follows that literary studies stands at the center of an anthropology founded on these assumptions. For who is better trained than the literary critic in the exercise of searching for symbolic significance, of reading beyond the literary surface to see the deeper, more sacred meaning beneath?

This passage is if nothing else refreshingly honest in admitting that those engaged in academic literary study really aren't much interested in literature anymore. Even if you accept the qualifying statement that literature "still forms a large part of what we study in English," the rest of the passage makes it clear to what use literature is being put by the "ethnographic" approach described by this writer: The study of literature is merely an "anthropology" whereby, along with the other "non literary objects" mentioned, it serves as a case study for interrogation into "culture as an object of general symbolic interpretation."

The view of literature represented by Van Oort differs from that expressed recently by Amardeep Singh in a post on his blog, to which I have responded elsewhere. Amardeep wants to continue to teach and study literature because he finds it valuable in and of itself, but he has discovered that the most effective way to reach his students is through a "utilitarian" approach through which literature can provide "lessons for life." Van Oort advocates reducing the study of literature to a branch of the social sciences, bypassing whatever purely "literary" value a work of literature might have in favor of the social and cultural "information" that might be wrung from it. I would argue that this has become the most prevalent approach to literary study among academic critics, and its hold is only going to get stronger.

I don't particularly have any objection to studying such things as rituals or pop music or clothing, "texts" about which interesting things might be said using a method of analysis that could very loosely be called "literary"--one of my own academic subspecialties was film--but the move toward critically examining such things has a) siphoned off interest in literature itself, the subject that ostensibly forms the core of this discipline, and b) led to a general levelling of evaluation, by which literature is seen as no more interesting, meaningful, or valuable than these other objects of scrutiny. I don't even necessarily have a problem with this, but it does seem to me that those engaged in this sort of "general symbolic interpretation" ought to confess that they don't really care much about literature, and ought as well to be willing to relinquish title to "literature" as the nominal subject of their critical efforts. If "culture" needs to be studied in the way Oort would have it, fine, but why not allow literary crticism per se, which has now been held hostage by academic critics for forty years or more, to be returned to those who want to read and write about literature for its own sake?

In my opinion, many academic scholars want to retain "literature" as the name of what they profess because they perceive it to still have a certain intellectual cachet they couldn't claim if they admitted they'd rather study clothing. They do their best to dress up their real interests by talking about "interpretation" and "symbolic processes," but finally studying advertisements and tv sitcoms just doesn't elevate their sense of worth as highly as the title of "literature professor" in the college catalog. That Van Oort is driven to speak of the "sacred meaning" to be found in the subjects of "ethnographic" crticism to me only suggests that he and his like-minded colleagues are desperate to find profound significance in their study of trivia and detritus.

And not only is Van Oort's definition of interpretation itself--"searching for symbolic significance"--the sort of thing that has always struck fear in the freshman literature student, but it is precisely the orientation to reading and to the formal study of literature that Susan Sontag had in mind when she wrote "against interpretation" and called for a new "erotics" of art, including literature. The description of the "discipline of literature" provided here by Van Oort is one that indeed enforces "discipline" on works of literature, of a sort more reminiscent of the archaeologist than the anthropologist, digging "beyond the literary surface" to the foundational "meaning" to be discovered there. Sontag had this to say about such an endeavor:

Our task is not to find the maximum amount of content in a work of art, much less to squeeze more content out of the work than is already there. Our task is to cut back content so that we can see the thing at all.

The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art--and, by analogy, our own experience--more, rather than less real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.

Of course, I would not claim that something like Sontag's notion of an "erotics" of reading--an unmediated or aesthetically pure experience of a work of literature--could be the basis of academic literary study in any sustained way commensurate with the requirements of disciplinary scholarship, if at all. While I can't finally think of anything more truly useful to students of literature than the attempt to encourage this kind of reading, the difficulties of accomplishing it in a high school or college classroom are probably insurmountable. Finally it can only be left to individuals to learn for themselves how to value literature simply for the pleasure of reading it. But the heavy-handed approach advocated by the likes of Richard Van Oort is not an adequate substitute. If "ethnography" is the only way by which literature and literary criticism can be incorporated into a college curriculum or into academic scholarship, best to leave them be. As Robert Nagle put in a recent post at his blog Idiotprogrammer: "where is the harm of relegating the study of literature and culture to passionate amateurs? I’m not convinced that we need people permanently ensconsed in academia to keep the flame of humanism alive."

Use Values

In a comment on this post, Amardeep Singh writes:

My main question for you so far is why you feel the "literary" value of literary texts is separate from the other values those texts contain. Much of what one finds in really good literature has to do with philosophy, history, and yes, politics.

In a separate post on his own blog, Amardeep explains further:

The reason I feel confident teaching literature for its potential social usefulness (again, broadly conceived) is that I think that an overwhelming number of writers, British, American, and non-Western, themselves write with some idea of usefulness in mind. The value of literature is almost never just "literary," even for writers; one also reads (or writes) literature to engage ideas from philosophy (inclusive of ethics and morality), history, and politics. None of these related regimes of thought are by any means required to be obviously present, and some writers might really not be interested in things like politics or history. There aren't many of them, and most who say they aren't interested are lying. Even the great, "literary literary" T.S. Eliot explicitly coupled his taste in literature ("classicist") with a politics ("royalist") and a religion ("Anglo-Catholicism").

I well understand the point Amardeep is making--literature has potential use value in multiple contexts separate from one's purely "literary" experience of poetry or fiction--but quite frankly I do indeed feel that "the 'literary' value of literary texts is separate from the other values those texts contain" because otherwise the word "literary" simply has no meaning. If the literary value of a work of literature can't be separated from the other values Amardeep, or anyone else, finds there, then in what sense is there any such thing as literary value at all? Otherwise isn't the value philosophical, historical, or political? I suppose one could say that finally "literature" itself doesn't exist except as a vehicle for philosophy or politics, but I can't say that and never will.

Similarly, there certainly are many writers who want to engage with philosophical or cultural issues, but to the extent they become preoccupied with these issues it seems to me they are no longer fiction writers or poets per se. They've become philosophers or cultural critics. This is ok by me, but I don't see why I have to consider them as literary artists when clearly their goal is not to create literary art but to "say something." Just say it.

This problem has only become more acute as the goal of academic literary study has drifted away form the study of literature "in, of, and for itself" and toward adopting the practices of all other discpilines in the pursuit of "knowledge." This was probably inevitable, and I am really only responding to my sense of its inevitabilty by suggesting that perhaps literature and the academy have finally proven to be not such a good "fit." If historians or philosophers or sociologists (or literature professors, for that matter) want to use works of literature to illuminate or illustrate non-literary issues in those disciplines I surely have no objection, but I just can't see how such practices could be called part of "literary study" unless, again, the word "literary" is simply an empty expression having something to do with "writing." I have an especially hard time seeing how adopting such practices in courses nominally devoted to "literature" adds much to either the understanding of literature or any of the other "regimes of thought" Amardeep mentions.

"Are there forms of cultural expression that contain "literary value" that are not themselves literature?" I suppose if "literary value" is reduced to something like "storytelling" or "personal expression," then perhaps other, non-literary forms could be said to have it. Surely, however, this is so reductive that almost everyone would finally agree there isn't much point to hanging on any longer to either the concept of "literary value" or the category of works now called "literature." At what point do we say that, as far as the academy is concerned, both literature and "the literary" have become so thoroughly shorn of any values in particular that it's no longer very useful to claim them as subjects at all?

In, Of, and For Itself

The latest MLA convention has predictably enough sparked another round of discussion about the state of literary study and, more specifically, what the role of literary study ought to be. In my opinion, that this happens almost every year suggests in itself that most academic scholars and critics don't really know what that role should be, and the current drift in literary study simply reflects this underlying reality.

Some would like to persist in their denial of this reality, dismissing the low esteem in which literary scholars are generally held to be essentially a public relations problem. "They" just don't understand how vital the service we perform really is. Others, however, are beginning to acknowledge that the study of literature has lost its way. Amardeep Singh, for example asks:

. . .Do we really know what we're doing when we teach literature? If so, why do I have so many graduate students who -– even after doing classes, exams, and even dissertations with me –- don't quite know what it is they should be doing? Why did I myself feel this way throughout graduate school? Moreover, are we doing the best job we can with our undergraduates? What are we training them for?

These are admirably pragmatic questions, to which, it seems to me, there are really just two answers, although the second one does open up a Pandora's Box of additional questions. 1) We teach literature in order to introduce students to the inherent pleasures and challenges of poetry, fiction, by focusing on the singular qualities of "literature itself." 2) We teach literature in order to get at other issues of educational value, using literature as convenient illustration or as case studies. Amardeep acknowledges that literature does indeed have singular qualities, which in a way leads him to choose answer 2:

The Canon Wars question and the Social Relevance question come together in literary studies around the question of the Usefulness of the text, which can also be called the Educative Value of the text.

I find it increasingly difficult to reject the criticism that the humanities is useless on the basis that works of art are by definition intentionally, Sublimely Useless (that's Kant's idea, isn't it? Also Oscar Wilde's, as I recall). There has to be more to it than simply shrugging our shoulders at the technocrats who run things (including, in most cases our own universities). The dominant principle of utility can be accepted, but reworked so as to better explain (and defend) the value of literature in an era of multiculturalism, pop-culturalism, and instrumental technocracy.

I think that good Art is useful for a particular kind of educative function, which need not mean a crude idea of 'social improvement'. I mean that reading literature (especially in a classroom) is most interesting when readers expect to learn something about themselves or the world along the way. A John Updike story about a man trying to come to terms with the failure of his marriage and the failure of his divorce is educative in the sense that it aims to make a point about the difficulty in finding independent meaning or emotional stability in the contemporary world. George Eliot's novels, and even Joyce's Ulysses in a certain way of reading it, are also educative. Eliot's Middlemarch is an argument about the limits of individualism (especially as it relates to women). And Joyce's novel is perhaps an argument about reconfiguring the idea of family away from blood and legal status (marriage, paternity) and towards a voluntaristic idea of affinity. If presented that way, students might well be able to say, “this relates to me, I can learn something from this that will help me in my life, and make me a smarter person.” If presented as merely a virtuosic display of literary power and imagination, however, it means a little less.

Such an approach has the virtue of being honest in the setting of its goals: to help students "learn something about themselves or the world," something that will "help" the student in coming to terms with "life." There's nothing wrong with such goals in the abstract, although they could as stated be the goals of almost any other subject in the academic curriculum. Which is, I take it, precisely the point. The study of literature does indeed become like any other subject, inlcuded in the curriculum in the first place for its "educative" value: educative in a specifically "scholastic" sense--part of what we learn in school. It does, of course, almost necessarily exclude works of literature that are most intensely literary, most deliberately "useless," as Amardeep admits when he says his approach has trouble with "more esoteric, 'problem' texts," such as those of Gertrude Stein or Salman Rushdie.

Dr. Crazy also admits that literary study is "in the midst of a major identity crisis," but she doesn't think the answer is to halt the movement away from literature and toward cultural studies, a movement that, in my opinion, is the fundamental cause of that very crisis:

And I do think there is value in studying things like the word "dude" or orgasms or representations of defecation or whatever. Just because these things aren't boring doesn't mean they aren't worthy of study. Sometimes I think that's what the populace demands of us - that we study only boring things. . . These [former] things are part of our culture and they are part of the art that we study and that makes them worthy of our inquiry not just because they are racy things to talk about but because they potentially tell us more about who we are and about the cultural moment in which the text was produced.. . . .

Presumably it is literature that is the primary "boring thing" Dr. Crazy has in mind (although her post is ostensibly about "literary study," she doesn't really have anything else to say about literature at all.) I assume that at best it would just be one of those "things [that] are part of our culture" that are "worthy of our inquiry" because "they potentially tell us more about who we are and about the cultural moment in which the text was produced." This approach to literary study, which is probably shared by a large number of literature professors, has implicitly concluded that literature is not really capable even of helping students "learn something about themselves or the world along the way" and has essentially foresworn the study of literature altogether for the kinds of objects Dr. Crazy mentions. And even when a work of literature is the object of study, it is not for its literary value but because of what it reveals about "the cultural moment."

In both of these views of "what we're doing when we teach literature," literature itself, for itself, is omitted almost entirely, in Amardeep's case grudgingly, in Dr. Crazy's quite easily. Literature in this sense just doesn't have much "educative" value, doesn't tell us enough about cultural moments or provide sufficient excitement for the bored scholars and students. It simply doesn't have broad enough appeal.

And finally I myself don't disagree much with that conclusion. That some works of literature are exceptionally good, even great, and might repay the student's time in reading them really isn't enough to justify including them in an academic curriculum. Why do we need classes in literary study simply to say "read this book, you'll like it"? For a while the problem with this kind of simple "appreciation" was solved by making critical approaches to literature the real subject of literary study, but that obviously no longer suffices if it means abandoning the literature part altogetherfor more and more desparate attempts to trump the most recently ascendant critical approach. And this kind of critical one-upsmanship is probably unavoidable in the long run, given the academic imperative that disciplines must "create knowledge" on a continual basis. Even if the academy were to return to a focus on "literature itself," this would inevitably turn out to be only a temporary fashion, to be superseded by the next generation of cutting-edge "knowledge." Under these circumstances, the only real alternatives available are to do something like what Amardeep suggests, using literature for its most palpably utilitarian value as education for life, or to give up literature altogether as subject of academic study and return it to those who find it valuable in, of, and for itself. I have more or less concluded that the second option is the best.