Where Are the Literary Scholars/Theorists?

What this suggests is that literature scholars look to other humanist fields for a larger framework in which to discuss a particular human behavior: writing high art literature. And your list is a bit misleading. Foucault wrote about literature and art. Derrida wrote as much about poets like Edmund Jabes and James Joyce as he did about philosophy, and his philosophy is itself more a poetics and hermeneutics — a study of language and meaning — than, say, an ontology or epistemology. Bourdieu is a sociologist of, among other things, high/low culture divisions and art. All three, along with many lit scholars, would see themselves as mixing disciplines.

Mark, Derrida has written in several places about the effects of Joyce’s writings on his “philosophical writings,” and two of his earliest works of philosophy concern Bataille (who goes beyond all of these disciplinary divisions) and Jabes (a poet). And Foucault’s issues of concern — prisons, representation, sexuality — were concerns of literature long before they were addressed in this manner by historians. The Annales School of French history has often been described as a sort of literature-inflected history. So when historians begin addressing issues often discussed by novels in a self-consciously literary manner, is it all that surprising that scholars of the novel would look to those historians as well? I’d say that historians and literature scholars since Foucault are more influenced by the nineteenth century novel than by earlier historians or literature scholars.To answer your final question, I think it has to do with the sorts of questions asked by scholars in those fields. For example, philosophers look mainly to other philosophers because, especially in the analytic tradition, the questions are so discipline-specific. They also have ceded a ton of ground to physical sciences, psychology, and cognitive science.But scholars of literature are not restricted by their discipline to any single set of questions. They also do not have to cede ground to other disciplines. Cognitive science might know more about how the brain works than Virginia Woolf, but a scholar of Woolf’s fiction has to explore the history and psychology of her time to understand how *she* thought the brain works. However, some critics might look to cognitive science to explain why certain narrative forms work and others don’t. It makes sense to me that, to understand something created by humans, a scholar would look to the sum total of research about human behavior: history, philosophy, psychology, science, etc. It’s more worrying to me that historians aren’t looking to philosophers or scientists or sociologists, that sociologists aren’t looking to historians, that philosophers ignore historians and sociologists. That suggests to me that those fields are more about the discipline than about human existence.

First off, I’m flipping through some excerpts of Richards’ *Practical Criticism* (Chapters One and Seven), and I’m seeing citations of: Malinowski, an athropologist; Coleridge, a poet-critic who thought himself a philosopher; Lawrence, a novelist-critic and not a literature scholar; Rousseau; Confucious; Pascal; Charles Peirce; and a handful of works of literature. Not a single reference to a self-identified literature scholar. Now I’m flipping through Wimsatt and Beardsley’s “The Intentional Fallacy” and “The Affective Fallacy”, and I see references to: Longinus, a philosopher; Plato, a philosopher; Edward Young, a poet; Thomas Carlyle, a historian; Walter Pater, an art critic; Matthew Arnold, a “cultural critic;” more Coleridge; Curt Ducasse, a philosopher of art; Professor Lowes and Charles Coffin, who so far are the only literature scholars mentioned; William Bartram, a naturalist; F. O. Mattheiessen, whose department was American Studies and who wrote history as well as literary criticism; Hayakawa, a philosopher of language; Charles Morris, a semiotician; C. L. Stevenson, an analytical philosopher; Paulhan, a psychologist; J. S. Mill, a philosopher; Leibnitz, a philosopher; Baumgarten, a philosopher; Santayana, a philosopher; Penjon, a psychologist; Max Eastman, a private scholar with a background in philosophy; Hans Zinsser, a bacteriologist; R. C. Givler, a psychologist; more Malinowski; Kenneth Burke, whose work is usually classified as philosophy or “theory” and who is very similar in scope and interest to Derrida; and Richards himself.So the work of both Richards and Wimsatt is itself overwhelmingly influenced more by philosophy and psychology than by so-called “practical criticism” by scholars of literature or the classics.But Mark, can you really not see the differences in methodology — not “theory” but practical method — in English since, say, 1970?Deconstruction turned the attention of scholars away from literature as formally-unified object to the process by which texts generate and often subvert their own meanings. This hermeneutic turn led critics back to philosophers of meaning, intentionality, language, etc. The shift away from deconstruction was largely in the name of a new historicism (thus the fancy name for the approach — “new historicism”). These writers questioned the validity of work by formalists and deconstructionists alike, and that is why they cite historians and anthropologists and sociologists more than the work of previous lit scholars.Finally, there’s a difference between intellectual healthiness and institutional healthiness. I *do* think that some sort of trans-disciplinary turn is necessary in literary studies, and I think it could bode well. The problem has been the narrow way in which this turn has taken place: the historians, sociologists, philosophers, etc. that are referenced are a small group of “theorists.” This is unlike the truly trans-disciplinary work of a scholar like Norman Brown or Lewis Hyde or Roberto Calasso, who I think suggest a more creative approach to the issue.The lack of institutional health has to do with a lot of factors. English grew too fast, in too many different directions, with no sense of overall mission. It became fragmented — although at some level it always was a fragmented mish-mash of cultural history, elocution, rhetoric, hermeneutics, linguistics, aesthetics, and others subfields. But if popularity is any sense of the relative health of a discipline, undergraduate English departments are still huge, bigger than religious studies, philosophy, classics, and, often, comparative literature departments.

The list of literary scholars of yesteryear indicate why we have no literary scholars today: Those of the list all moved away from humanities methods toward scientistic [sic] methods. Who wants an ersatz scientistic reader when you can have a genuine scientistic reader, which is what we have in the current list of most cited writers. Eco calls what I’m calling scientisitc Ur-Fascism. I wonder how Zizek falls, in the list of cited writers and in one’s feeling of method. I find him to be wonderfully literary, but I see how Marxism and psychology, two profoundly scientistic discourses, obviously animates him.

Have you checked as to what journals this ISI list covers? My understanding is that this is particularly oriented towards the social sciences and is less inclusive of literary journals.

The fact that Richards and Wimsatt filled their works with philosophical and linguistic figures means little here. They and a few others largely invented literary criticism. Note in my post that I singled out the year 1960 for comparison, not 1935.And the point that methodology changed circa 1970 likewise doesn’t change the point. Yes, we had a turn from practical criticism to theory, but why, then, as I noted, do the citations not contain literary theorists? Why theorists and thinkers mainly focused on other things (with implications for literature)? This question applies also to nordicexpat’s sound pint about citation counts. Yes, the most popular ones will not be “field-bound,” so to speak, but why aren’t they general thinkers within the general discipline?Luther’s and nordic’s points about the popularity of the field are relevant, but answerable. In terms of undergraduate enrollments, English and foreign languages have held steady in absolute terms but have fell precipitously in relative terms. That is, the number of attendees in classes have remained about the same, but the percentage of people majoring in them has dropped by 50%. The only reason absolute numbers have held on is that the undergrad population in overall has risen so much.But there is another measure of popularity–unit sales of literary monographs. Those have fallen steeply, from around 1000 copies 30 years ago to around 300 copies today (with 225-50 of those copies going to standing library orders). In other words, literary scholars don’t feel they need to have each others’ books.It’s a sign of the decadence of literary studies, and a further sign is tjfarrel’s cynical comment. It says that ya gotta know your Foucault and Derrida if you want to do well in the field. They are an orthodoxy. Why does a field take its orthodoxy from people in other fields?Finally, good question, willardhall, and I tried to track into the ISI list from the Times and couldn’t get there.

here’s the link you are looking for: http://isihighlycited.com/maybe few literary scholars are cited because they all spend too much time citing Foucault already.

Mark, you’ve brought up the issue of monograph sales before, and I think my response remains the same: the habits of bookbuyers have changed, especially among the academics I know. In my experience, the older professors I knew had much more invested in their private libraries than the younger professors.My own dissertation cited largely only literature scholars, but I didn’t purchase a single one of the books I used for research. With Borrow Direct and other programs, I could get any secondary source I needed overnighted to the Penn library. And no, Wimsatt and Richards did not invent literary criticism. It was alive and well in the 18th and 19th centuries, only it wasn’t necessarily to be found coming out of universities. The New Critics institutionalized a certain type of criticism. But their own work, as my evidence suggests, generally cited a small body of “theorists” coming out of linguistics, anthropology, and philosophy, along with a handful of more specialized works on literature itself. (Exactly as nordicexpat writes above.) The same is true of literary scholarship today. The big methodological questions often require lit scholars to look outside of their specific fields. The local questions they examine always cite lit scholarship, but the pool of scholarship they cite is diffuse, depending on the particular points of investigation. If you’re writing about *Finnegans Wake* and issues of cultural rebirth and colonialism, you’d tend to cite big theorists like Said for the framework and then a bunch of scholars who have addressed that particular issue in that particular text. I think we had better blame the poets and novelists themselves. As look as they are interested in history, psychology, society, the family, religion, politics, sexuality, truth, beauty, the good, and so on, lit scholars will have to turn to thinkers who think about such things in order to discuss the literature. Unlike, say, a chemist who only has to cite studies in chemistry, or a psychologist who only has to cite studies in psychology. If the chemist wanted to write about the human uses or social roles of chemicals, well then it might be different. (I wonder how many historians of science only cite science research and not historians. But we question why lit scholars — most of whom work on what could be called the history or sociology or philosophy of literature — don’t only cite lit scholarship.)

Mark, when you say “Literature departments make up the bulk of the humanities” could you be a tad more specific in terms of defining “the humanities?” Futhermore, at what point did the sheer number of citations determine relevance? As 7738373863 pointed out (#14) those citations don’t necessarily determine positive or negative influence – simply a sitation. And isn’t it interesting that someone who is so committed to literature (and more generally humanties) is concerned about some statistical analysis?p.s. Where’s the data? No link to the source article? No idea where you’re getting this from (and I shouldn’t have to do all the digging, since that’s the whole point of having web-enabled b log posts).

It’d be so awesome if no one on that list had more than two or three citations.

The lists of journals included in ISI’s Web of Knowledge are available at http://wokinfo.com/about/mjl/

happy to say as a young(ISH!) academic who does interdisciplinary humanities work (and reasonably well, thanks), i’ve NEVER cited anyone on that list.what an intense sense of satisfaction I am now experiencing…

Mark, Catherine Gallagher makes the same argument about the rise of structuralism and deconstruction after New Criticism: scholars needed new questions in order to produce new work.However, I’m still not letting Winsatt or Richards off the hook. They had plenty of literature scholars and classics scholars and rhetoric scholars to turn to when they “institutionalized literary scholarship.” Instead, they turned to philosophers, anthropologists, psychologists, linguists, etc. Why? Because philosophers who deal with language and meaning *are* literature scholars. Because anthropologists who study symbolic behavior and ritual *are* literature scholars. Because psychologists who study affect and feeling *are* literature scholars. And so on.

One reason why social science theorists may be cited so often by literature faculty is that literature faculty are reinventing themselves through cultural studies. At my university, which has a strong, highly ranked English department, the current department chair is a specialist on serial killers, and his departmental colleague who runs our humanities institute recently published an ethnography of gay club life.
If an English department is abandoning English and literature, and is turning to social science topics, it’s not surprising that they should use and cite social science theorists.
Our Comp Lit department has similarly abandoned literature. The former chair is now working on genocide in Rwanda, and the latest book by one of his colleagues is a critique of anthropology; that department seems dominated by philosophers, when it’s not doing social science. In such circumstances, citing social science theorists seems quite reasonable. If our English faculty were drifting into doing biochemistry, I’d expect them to be citing chemists; why the mystery?
Cordially,Barbara Piper

Thanks, nordicexpat, and I think you’re probably right about the shift toward “job-centered-ness” having an impact on humanities majors. And that’s too bad, because the rising emphasis in so many professions on reading and writing skills seems well met by a humanities degree.

I also want to put more pressure on the idea that the decline of the English major has to do with the fact that “If you extend ‘literature’ to all meaningful language and all symbolic behavior, the discipline becomes so diffuse as to be indistinc,” as Mark writes.First of all, the ancient discipline of rhetoric was quite successful, and it had no problem including under its tent “all meaningful langauge.” Second, I don’t think you can look at the classes offered by undergraduate English programs and say that the study of literature is overshadowed by the study of other types of writing or symbolic action.Third, I do think there’s a clear mission behind most English scholarship and teaching. It’s just different than the New Critical mission. Most scholars of English-language literature since the 80s have wanted to look at the connections between literature and the larger social world from which it emerges. Race/gender/class studies and the new historicism put the work of art back into dialogue with historical processes and other forms of symbolic action (speeches, pamphlets, newspapers, popular literature, etc.) When Shakespeare scholars look at the relationship between Caliban and New World travel narratives; when Americanists connect *The Scarlet Letter* to popular American novels about the Puritans; when Romanticists connect new poetic forms to new approaches to science; they are all participating in a rather coherent mission.

Could it be because when historians write about literature — such as Michael Kammen’s *Mystic Chords of Memory* — they don’t cite literature scholars, often leading to naive readings of literature?Could it be because when philosophers write about literature — such as Rorty, Cornel West, Martha Nussbaum — they also don’t cite literature scholars, often leading to naive readings of literature?

Wait a moment. It just dawned on me that this is the list of most cited BOOK authors across ALL of the humanities. In what world can this be the basis to determine anything about citation habits in English? A quick look at the PMLA will tell you that most English scholars cite articles, not books. And history isn’t that much smaller than English as a discipline: so where are all the historians? Thomas Kuhn is the only historian in the Times list, although I’d argue that Foucault is a historian, not a sociologist or philosopher. The overwhelming majority of the people in the full published list are philosophers, which makes sense, given that philosophy is the abstract theoretical framework of history, sociology, English, psychology, and so on.