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Some observers of English and comparative-literature departments say the age of literary theory, which dominated the field for 30 years beginning in the early 1970s, has passed. Others say theory still holds sway in the classroom. A Chronicle report finds that, while theory is still omnipresent, it looks nothing like it used to. And in an essay in the Chronicle Review, Harvard University Press's Lindsay Waters argues that literary critics are no longer concerned with aesthetics -- and he lays the blame not on theory but on its decline. Are literary studies still dominated by theory? Whether yes or no, is that good or bad?
Read more:
• The Fragmentation of Literary Theory
• Literary Aesthetics: the Very Idea

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[Luke Lea/retired gardener]

I don't expect this comment to be published, though it is fine if it is.  Mr. Lindsay Water's essay, to me, is just one more piece of evidence in favor of a proposition far broader and more radical than he suspects: the need to abolish literary studies altogether as an autonomous academic discipline.  Irvine Howe had it right when he said the field rewards those with a talent for bulls***.  Good criticism is rare; writers like Matthew Arnold, Edmund Wilson, or George Orwell come along even less frequently than good novelists, playwrites, and poets.  And when they do come along it is almost invariably outside the academy.

A good undergraduate education should include exposure to the best creative writers of the past.  But this is best done in a broader cultural context, in surveys of the history, literature, and philosophy of the past.  Such courses should be taught by people with Master's degrees, not Ph.D's.

But of course that will be the day.  We need a new Robert Hutchins in this country, someone who can convince us that the very concept of a research university in the humanities is a mistake.  Too bad people like him are even rarer than critics.

[Frank Gado, Retired Bloviator]

"We need a new Robert Hutchins in this country, someone who can convince us that the very concept of a research university in the humanities is a mistake. Too bad people like him are even rarer than critics."

Amen, but there is faint possibility of descrying a star in the east. Our literature departments are in the hands of an inflexible Cosa Nostra that, unlike its predecessor potentates, fosters no illlusions about true academic freedom.

"Research" has been defined by the paradigm provided by the physical sciences. Dartmouth's president, Jim Wright, for example, speaks of the obligation to make "new knowledge"--as though the proper model for an educational institution were a factory. (Can it be sheer coincidence that Robert Venturi, the architect for the new Dartmouth library freighted against the bow of Baker, wanted "his" building to allude to "the mill"?)  The teacher in the humanities should be no mere pedagogue but should reflect the fruiting of an inquiring intellect--which should not be confused with the fruits of the MLA. Were I, for example, to publish an essay refuting the centuries-old interpretation of the opening lines of Dante's Commedia, I would not be creating new knowledge but seeking a better understanding of the poem's meaning (as well of its aesthetics).

My disagreement with Waters lies in his division of literary commentary into two camps. I eschew both Michaels and Fish as frauds.

[savitri]

I think one pertinent question is: which institution, or tiers of institutions, are we discussing?

It seems to me that literary theory is still pretty prevalent at the elite Engl. Lit. programs, including Berkeley, Duke, Yale, and Harvard. But that probably changes significantly as we change schools - it would be interesting to be told otherwise, though, and I am open to hearing so.

The normative question depends, perhaps, on what one thinks literary studies "are good for" - that is, what does one hope to achieve in studying literature? I happen to love close textual readings, but I think that can be accomplished via a number of approaches. Barthes did a wonderful reading in his seminal S/Z (way back in the dark ages of lit crit!); but even Bloom has been a close reader in his time (less so, I would argue, today). Perhaps it's not the approach, but how well one succeeds at the approach, that matters...

Luke Lea/RG,

Why is this article "evidence" supporting your proposition (that literary studies is a waste of time, I suppose)? Why aren't wonderful writers like Helen Vendler, Stephen Greenblatt, Harold Bloom (sometimes!), and many, many other academic writers counter-evidence, if you will? And why don't you vouchsafe a single example from contemporary criticism? The only one I can think of who is "outside" the academy is James Wood (and he writes for the NY Review of Books, right?). Who else today is able to perform the kind of outstanding criticism that emanates from the academy? (Isn't any kind of outstanding production - literary, scientific, artistic, you name it - rare indeed? So why single out literary criticism on this ground?)

You haven't done anything except dismiss the humanities in a sweeping and arrogant fashion, as far as I can see. (And I'm not at all an English major, so it isn't defensiveness speaking!)

[Kirby Olson, Assoc., SUNY-Delh]

Once a pipeline is established in which political readings of literature are what is valued one can no longer blame younger scholars for producing what is expected of them.  The fault lies just as much with every part of the pipeline including editors, bookstore managers, readers, as it does with those who must produce such bilge or else perish.  One would like a list of editors that are friendly to aesthetically-driven criticism.

In my efforts to work with university presses it was my experience at many that unless one was pro-Marx and used that approach toward literature (reminiscent of Zhdanov) that one was no longer welcome.  If one can't find a publisher then one can't find a job or keep the one that one has. Once older scholars get further down the pipeline using such politically correct measures of what counts as good criticism they then kill off anyone who embodies another approach.

Still, I've managed to publish three books of aesthetically-driven criticism and to find editors.  McFarland Press published my book on Codrescu, Texas Tech published my book on aesthetics of comedy, and Southern Illinois published my book on Gregory Corso -- all within the last five years.  

I sent a lengthy query letter for one of those books to Lindsay Waters but never received anything in return.

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[Setare]

"In different ways, all those scholars resist reducing art to ideas; all reveal anew the complex ways in which art holds us in its grasp."

I find it irritating that Waters sees ideas as reductions, stuff to which other, more "complex", entities and processes have been simplified.  Ideas are rather complicated things and studying the relationship between them and literature is never a mere matter of painting by numbers or connecting the dots.

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[Observer]

I find it fascinating that individuals who write about literary studies today often say that the real problem is not postmodernism, multiculturalism, etc. but the general decline in funding for the humanities, the reduction in enrollments, the indifference of university presses, etc.  Why is it that the two sets of phenomena are never connected?  University presses do not wish to publish much of this material because it does not sell.  People do not buy it because they are not interested in endless streams of jargon and leftist politics.  Students have gone elsewhere because they do not want to listen to screeds and because many prefer reading great literature to hearing about French theory (or French theory filtered through imitators).

[The Emperor's Clothes]

>
> "'I find it irritating that Waters sees ideas as reductions,
> stuff to which other, more "complex", entities and processes
> have been simplified.'"

You may find it irritating, but it is nonetheless true. When you make great literary texts into nothing more than a means for advancing your various political causes, then you are a reductionist. You are reducing those texts in scope and value, limiting them to mere projections of your own ideological likes and dislikes. Your classes become about you and your causes, rather than about those books, and you are simply not as important as those great books that constitute our cultural heritage. Derrida, Foucalt, Said, Miller, and all the others were never as important as the works they tried to reduce to lingusitic and political oblivion, and they never will be.

[The Emperor's tailor]

Long live the reductionists!

[savitri]

Observer,

There's a huge decline in reading overall. Have you looked at publishers' sales figures lately? Other than Grisham, King, etc., there's not a lot of literature being read. Where have the readers gone?

If people are reading less overall, then of course there will be a decline in the sales of books published by university presses. That is quite likely true across disciplines, too.

Moreover, we do not see a decline in the number of English Lit majors, particularly at the top schools. At my fancy liberal arts college, English was the biggest major (right up there with Economics), accounting for over 100 students in a graduating class of 500. They certainly are not "fleeing" literary studies - or at least, not yet!

Emperor,

Derrida et al. were marvelous readers and critics. They did not try to consign literary works to oblivion. To the contrary, they paid them the ultimate compliment of scrupulous and insightful criticism. Have you read Derrida on Paul Celan? It's moving to read. Really. (But I agree that some of the French "imitators" are a whole lot less satisfying, emotionally, intellectually, or otherwise.)

In any case, I  think there is a trend away from humanities that is much, much more disturbing than a mass exodus away from the French school of literary criticism. (But I don't think the relationship betweent the phenomena is causal.) And I think we should be concerned much more with the former than with the latter concern. Literary studies will find its way to new theories, approaches, and textual insights. But what happens when liberal arts itself comes under attack?

[Charles Donelan]

I enjoyed reading Lindsay Waters' recent piece on the ongoing plight of "big English," that odd, isolated world occupied by fading names and their bland, derivative junior colleagues. As a veteran of the Yale English major (BA 1982) and the Columbia PhD program (PhD 1992), I knew and studied directly with DeMan, Bloom, Hartman, Said, and many other of the most recognizable names in the recent history of literary theory. The missing piece in Waters' analysis from my perspective is the hiring process, or what has come to be known as the "national search." In my experience and that of many of my generation of humanities PhDs, this was a brutally reductive game involving the tyranny of mediocrity. It left very few of those I know who studied with the above-mentioned big names with tenure-track jobs, tending to reward instead people whose careers would be unthreatening to the vast middle range of mediocre tenured faculty members who served on hiring committees throughout the 1990s. Time and again, exciting people with degrees from top programs like Yale, Berkeley, and Columbia, were driven from the profession by hiring committees afraid to acknowledge the best work being done in the profession. Instead, the youngest, least threatening, most docile-seeming candidates were hired, guaranteeing their mid-career colleagues another decade of protection from significant competition.
Obviously, this scenario would be difficult to prove conclusively, yet it remains the only convincing account of what has happened, not only to me, but to many of the PhDs I know. Perhaps this discussion is a good place to present this particular account of the state of English and literary studies, and to see if others recognize themselves or their colleagues in the description offered above.

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[Observer]

Thanks for your response, Savitri.  Here are some stats on the humanities from John D'Arms, late of the ACLS.  The dates don't line up as neatly as we'd like, but the overall trends are clear.

In 1973 14.8% of the nation's Ph.D.'s were awarded in the humanities; by 1992 only 9.2% were.  If you allow for a time lag of 8-10 years, the average time for completing a Ph.D. in English, the 1973 grads started their programs several years before Derrida appeared on the scene.

In the late 60's 20% of the Bachelor's degrees were in the humanities; by the mid 80's only 10% were; by the early 90's there was a little recovery--they rose to 12%.

Fellowships awarded in the humanities by ACLS, the NHC, and Guggenheim foundation, etc.: 250 in the early 80's; approximately 150 in 1994.

The dominance of theory may not have directly caused the erosion of interest in and support for the humanities, but the dates certainly suggest a connection.

D'Arms (a very moderate and decent man and certainly no ideologue) suggested, very gently, that postmodernism etc. had distanced the academy from the broader society (and its support).  The present debates, he wrote, "appear offputting, highly esoteric, or both."

It's easy to claim that the reason for the downturn is related to general cultural patterns, but the actual conflicts must be confronted.  For example, postmodernism, multiculturalism, etc. has involved a critique of formerly canonical texts, attacking their frequent lack of (contemporary) political correctness.  The notion that it is the humanities' job to 'preserve our cultural heritage'--a common notion among the general public and still a category for NEH funding--runs directly counter to the notion that the job of the humanities is to challenge, undercut, or even efface our cultural heritage.  Similarly, the far-left politicization of literary study generally runs counter to the more moderate political stance of most people.  The fascination, nearly obsession with 'queer studies' is far more characteristic of members of the academy than the general public.  The continued belief on the part of many members of the academy in Marxism as a viable political posture runs counter to human experience across the globe.  Etc. etc.  The nuances of all of these issues can be debated and qualified, but the bottom line is that the concerns of the academy have not been of comparable interest to students and tax payers.  The fact that they have come into fashion and then gone out, suggests that they have not so much 'advanced knowledge' as caught the fancy of academics (temporarily).

Prior to theory's empire, literary departments were very welcoming with regard to a host of approaches.  Some students wanted to do literary history, some biography, some individual authors, some genre study, some the history of ideas, some bibliography, and so forth.  Theory was one of those options, but only one, not the only one.  It is true that some departments have struggled to preserve that posture, but many have not, in part because the politicization has a messianic dimension.  This is cognate with the education schools' desire to test their students 'attitudes' as well as their knowledge.  Despite their protestations that this is not part of a political litmus test, their behavior suggests otherwise.  All formal studies of the political makeup of the academy confirm its narrow tilt, a tilt that is out of synch with the larger society.  When the curriculum is not politicized the voting patterns of the professors are largely irrelevant, but when the curriculum is politicized by individuals whose views represent a small subset of general attitudes it is fair to conclude that some people are simply saying, "Thanks but no thanks."

[Luke Lea/gardener]

"Derrida et al. were marvelous readers and critics."

And Andrew Wiles is a marvelous mathematician -- even if fewer than a dozen people at Princeton, Berkeley, and a few other universities around the world, are capable of appreciating his work.

Do you think I jest?  Please quote me three consecutive sentences from Grammatology that even make sense to an intelligent reader of good literature -- whether Tolstoy or W.H. Auden, Lincoln or Emily Dickinson -- and I will start to take you seriously.  

At least Wiles's work will stand the test of time.

[anonymous literary scholar]

The main problem I've noticed is that the amount of time one has for reading is relatively fixed. If that time is devoted, as it is by many people in English, to contemporary theory, then it is not being devoted to primary sources of other periods. As a search committee member and reader for journals, what I have noticed is that younger scholars seem trained to quote huge amounts of secondary sources but don't really seem to have done much reading of primary  works. Specialists in the 18th century, e.g., haven't really spent the time to read broadly in the literature, history, philosophy, theology, etc. of the 18th century (and the earlier works it references), because they are scrambling to read every ephemeral secondary article on the period and all the major contemporary tertiary (i.e. theory) work.

When Donelan talks about the 'best' people from big programmes not being hired, he may well be encountering people like myself on search committees who are not interested in having those who have studied with "big names" as such but want to hire people who have actually read deeply and broadly in the periods they claim to be expert in -- often I 've found the best candidates are from second tier schools which are less caught up in trends and insist more on a solid historical curriculum.

[Luke Lea, retired gardener]

Mr.  Waters writes: "Literary criticism no longer aims to appreciate aesthetics — to study how human beings respond to art. 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."

I thought it was the experience of art itself that enlarges the soul?  Why do we need to understand "how human beings respond to art," assuming such understanding is even possible.  

As an analogy, when a man who is dying of thirst is given a drink of water, it is the drinking itself that satisfies his soul, not his grasp of the principles of physiology behind "that intensely physical reaction."

And so it is when, after a boring month or three or ten, I come out of a play by Chekhov with the feeling that life does have meaning and is worth living, it is that feeling I treasure, not my understanding of how it was produced. The latter may be an interesting topic of conversation with my wife afterwards, but it is hardly the main thing and rarely leads to any firm conclusion -- except, perhaps, that Chekhov was a genius of rare human sympathy.

College students do need to study great works of literature, partly to understand the times in which they were written, but mostly to cultivate their ability to appreciate great literature later on in their lives, when they will be a lot thirstier than they are now.

As for trying to appreciate the the aesthetics or erotics of art, that strikes me as a vague and misguided -- unless you happen to be a really good bulls***ter that is.


--
Luke Lea