The previous post on literature and the curriculum hailed the MLA/Teagle white paper as an exemplary statement of literary education. (Go here and scroll to bottom to get the pdf.) Against the old pressures to embed literature in a full range of cultural productions and the new pressures to embed literature in a full range of media genres, the report insists that literature has a special value for advanced literacy instruction. It assumes, too, I think, that if language and literature professors don’t speak out and design curricula explicitly on that special value, literary study will decline as a meaningful part of higher education. (See the Appendix and the phrase citing the “increasingly marginal status [of literary studies] in the massive expansion of population receiving bachelor’s degrees over the past forty years.”)

The report goes further, too. It doesn’t just maintain the centrality of literature. It makes a value judgment about qualities of literature and advises a particular approach to it. Those two elements are signalled by two terms. The first one relates to the recommendation that departments “acquaint students with representative cultural examples through a designated body of works,” and it appears in the sentence,

“During their years of study, students should confront texts from popular culture to literary masterpieces . . .”

That may sound open and uncontroversial to people outside literary studies, but in fact the very mention of “masterpieces” is extraordinary. How many times in mainstream literary studies has the term appeared in recent times without scare quotes? Anybody who says the word without a note of sarcasm risks being judged either reactionary or benighted. Leftist critics have always judged the category “masterpiece” to be a reification of class interests, and when they ascended in the profession in the 1960s and 70s, they didn’t just ask that the syllabus be opened up to works of popular and mass culture. They attacked the very distinction between high culture and the rest. Believe in masterpieces, they snorted, and you’re a snob, a highfalutin elitist. (In adminmistrative meetings when people have reacted to the citation of masterpieces and canons, I’ve had the sneaking suspicion that the real objection isn’t ideological — it’s personal. They’re embarrassed to admit that they haven’t read very many of the classics.)

Perhaps the institutions of literary study have come to recognize that without the category of literary masterpieces, there is no reason for literary study to exist as an independent field. If it doesn’t, then there is no reason literature departments shouldn’t be folded into the social sciences, or converted into rhetoric and culture departments. That prospect, I think, has made leaders in literary studies realize what might be lost, namely, a literary tradition that has a claim of, precisely, independence in the full array of traditions that make up civilization.

If you keep masterpieces, though, you need to keep one specific kind of instruction, which brings us to the other term: “slow reading.” That’s what the document wants to preserve. It recommends that every major contain at least one course specifically devoted to “slow reading and in-depth study of an artistically great work or works.” Indeed, slow reading is cast as a discrete capacity, one altogether crucial in a world careening toward ever-faster communications. Masterpieces slow reading down, and so the justification isn’t just a tradition-based one (you need to know your literary heritage) but a skill-based one as well. The report: “Those who learn to read slowly and carefully and to write clearly and precisely will also acquire the nimbleness and visual perceptions associated with working in an electronic environment.”

Here we have the primary organization of language and literary studies drawing a line around literature, literary greatness, and slow reading, sheltering them from the floodwaters of the digital present and the cultural studies past.