Literary study is in terrible shape, as everyone knows. The language and literature majors are down, the job market in English looks terrible this year (see this), and unit sales of a literary monograph are lucky to reach 400 copies. Also, the insularity of the perspectives and approaches, not to mention the boggy prose, makes the reading of them a wearisome exercise.
But there are great exceptions, and here are three.
Morris Dickstein’s Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression is an entertaining and sophisticated ramble through the books, films, music, and ideas of the 1930s. It doesn’t do tight interpretations, and there is no grand thesis or theory in play. Rather, it’s an engaging commentary on Bing Crosby, Tess Slesinger, screwball comedy, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, etc. Here’s a paragraph on Citizen Kane:
“Films like My Man Godfrey, Easy Living, and Bringing Up Baby indict the rich as coldhearted or harebrained but strictly in a farcical vein. The daffy rich are silly but salvageable, even lovable, and they appeal to us — as they did to Depression audiences — as figures of spontaneity and irresponsible freedom. Citizen Kane, on the other hand, is closer to many literary portrayals of the very rich, from muckraking novels like Frank Norris’s The Octopus to social novels etched in acid by Edith Wharton, Sinclair Lewis, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John O’Hara, and J. P. Marquand, which show how the rich, though immensely attractive, exercise power over others by charming them, buying them, or intimidating them.”
Eric J. Sundquist’s King’s Dream works in the opposite way, taking one text, Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech, and working back and forth between the actual words and relevant contexts. Those latter include the Civil Rights Movement, King’s patriotism, Southern governors, Scripture, and the Klan. The book is, in fact, an eminently useful casebook for teachers of the speech in high school as well as college classes. Here’s a paragraph on black civil-rights leaders and black populations at the time:
“According to a Newsweek poll of African-Americans taken in July 1963, King ranked first among 14 top black leaders from various walks of life, with an 88 percent favorable rating among everyday citizens and 95 percent among one hundred other black leaders. At the bottom of the list was Elijah Muhammed, leader of the Nation of Islam, with 15 percent and 17 percent, respectively. . . . Yet the comparative weakness of King’s appeal among blacks in the urban North became evident in November, when Franklin and Cleage had a rancorous split over plans for the Northern Negro Leadership Conference, with Cleage on short notice organizing a competing event, the Grassroots Leadership Conference, for the same weekend. Despite King’s support for Franklin’s conference, Cleage’s drew a larger crowd and a number of more radical activists, who heard Malcolm X deliver his famous ‘Message to the Grass Roots.’”
Finally, the Web site of one of the best literary journalists in the country, John Miller’s www.heymiller.com. Miller is an editor at National Review and frequent contributor to The Wall Street Journal. His literary essays range from Dickens to Poe to Louis L’Amour to Hemingway (“The Young Man and the Lakes,” a play on Old Man and the Sea, a study of “Big Two-Hearted River I and II,” one of the great short stories in American literary history). He also has a historical novel just out that takes place in Washington, DC, 1861. Here’s a paragraph from the Hemingway piece:
“The narrative begins with Nick Adams, Hemingway’s protagonist and alter-ego, having just gotten off the train in Seney, a town in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. He hikes into the wilderness and fishes for trout. The problem is that the Two-Hearted River lies about 20 miles north of Seney and flows into Lake Superior. On foot, it’s virtually impossible to get there with Nick’s apparent speed. The Fox River — a perfectly good stream for brook trout — runs right through the town, on its way to Lake Michigan.”
“Hemingway visited Seney with a couple of friends in 1919. Wouldn’t he have just fished the Fox?”
5 Responses to Cultural Criticism, Textual Criticism, Literary Journalism
luther_blissett - November 12, 2009 at 1:51 pm
I don’t think that enrollments in English departments or academic job openings are decent metrics for determining the health of literary study. Rather, they are clear effects of a concerted know-nothing professionalism at work in many of our best universities.I also don’t think that one can generalize about the quality of academic prose. Werner Sollors and Greil Marcus recently published the magisterial *New Literary History of America*, in which scholars such as Susan Stewart, W. H. Lhamon, and Wai Chi Dimock address 400 years of American cultural history. The prose, with a few exceptions, is exceptional. Cambridge’s series on Americanist criticism and 18th century British studies are uniformly written in readable scholarly prose.Finally, I find it odd to question academic prose and then praise Dickstein for, uh, not having a clear point (i.e., a thesis). His observation that *Kane* is novelistic is pretty old hat too.
markbauerlein - November 12, 2009 at 2:46 pm
As I wrote at the Chronicle last week, Luther, the prose style in the Harvard volume often strives for lyricism and ends up in bathosand sententiousness.As for the health of literary study, one fair measure of the viability of a humanities field is how much scholars buy and read each others’ books. This is why unit sales of literary studies volumes is so distressing. People don’t feel that they have to keep up with the latest in their own fields any more.And you’ll have a hard time convincing any department chair or humanities dean that the way students vote with their feet isn’t a sure measure of disciplinary health. And you might find that pre-law and pre-med folks would consider your “know-nothing” remark condescending.
luther_blissett - November 12, 2009 at 10:47 pm
With hundreds of selections by hundreds of contributors, the Harvard volume is more often successful than not. Would that Shakespeare had blotted a thousand lines and all. Homer, too, nods.On the topic of buying academic books, I will simply note that while I was in the field of American studies, I didn’t buy a single academic book. However, I was as up to date on its developments as anyone else I knew. I used the library. With often over-night interlibrary loans, I never saw the purpose in spending money on a books. Perhaps it’s more a sign that the age of the gentleman’s personal library is over. (I preferred to spend cash on records.)Students vote with their feet exactly as they are advised by their departments and cajoled by requirements. I went to a school with a healthy set of general requirements, and our English classes were consistently full. (Then again, I took so-called pre-law and pre-med classes as an undergraduate creative writing major, so I’ll stick by the know-nothing remark. I also worked with Ivy League undergrads who hated taking any courses — in their majors or not — that weren’t directly convertible into post-graduation salary bonuses.)
markbauerlein - November 13, 2009 at 10:32 am
Gotta agree with you about the rising conversion of college into a four-year employment scheme for many students, Luther. But to what do you attribute the steep drop in unit sales of monographs in literary studies over the years? In other humanities fields, so I’ve been told (including film studies and religion), unit sales are pretty steady.
luther_blissett - November 13, 2009 at 10:51 am
Mark, I’d add that over the past three decades, English has become a hodgepodge of history, cultural criticism, theory, film, rhetoric, and other disciplines. So I wouldn’t be surprised if the drop in sales in flat-out “literary studies monographs” isn’t correlated to the consistent sales of monographs in disciplines such as history and film. Scholars in English draw on the work of historians far more than historians draw on the work of literary scholars; and film studies is a field often contained within English departments.I’d also like to see the sales data for works in rhetoric and composition. As that field has developed, and as English adjuncts are often given freshman comp for teaching, I think we can say that it is drawing sales away from literary studies monographs.English as a discipline has always been a hodgepodge of other fields, from elocution to linguistics. The New Critics did an excellent job of sharply delimiting the discipline, but that circumscription has been exploded since the 1970s. I would agree that the field has been too dissipated, too spread out over too large a terrain. But if we just look at sales stats as evidence of the health of a field, you’d have to include works on American cinema, black British politics, writing pedagogy, and Lacanian psychoanalysis all as part of the sales figures for English professors.