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[Worried for the Future]

"Moreover, we do not see a decline in the number of English Lit majors, particularly at the top schools."



Yes, because what the departments have denegerated into does not require intellectual labor and students receive ridiculously inflated grades for that lack of work. No mystery here. If departments give out easy A's, they will continue to get enrollment (over, say, courses in the hard sciences). That has nothing to do with interest in great works and ideas per se.



"Derrida et al. were marvelous readers and critics. They did not try to consign literary works to oblivion."



This is obviously a matter of opinion, and I strongly disagree with you. The damage done by mediocre thinkers attempting to replace the great works with their own personal and political conceits has been massive.   Once you have grad students coming out who have never read Chaucer, Milton, and Twain, there is no room for confusion about the damage done.

[A. Hanson]

As someone who completed a Ph.D. in English in 2001, but who has worked in academic administration since then, I am finding this discussion very intriguing.

I am an Academic Advisor at a large research institution in the Midwest.  I advise students in our College of Liberal Arts, and I must frequently field the question from parents, "What can my daughter do with this" or "What are starting salaries after graduation?"  I try to explain to parents and students what skills they will learn if they choose to study English, history, visual art, etc.  This is a difficult task:  how to make literary or humanistic studies more "relevant" to today's society and young students (and "relevant" is a problematic word in itself).  I can be very cynical about this and blame things on those materialistic baby boomers who want their children to continue their own comfortable lifestyles without having to work the 30+ years that they did in order to achieve such comfort.  It seems that education these days is purely a commodity that enables one to get a job at which one can make the most money.  But I digress . . .

I was fortunate to attend a prestigious women's college in the early 90s which had a fantastic English department.  And, surprise:  I had never heard of "literary theory" until I was a senior and was required to take a course in "Critical Theory."  Of course, thinking back, a variety of theories influenced the way in which professors taught my courses, although I didn't know it at the time.  My master's program in the U.K. was also "theory light" and focused more on cultural studies.  In other words, I was trained to look at the text and to wrestle with it myself.  For my doctoral dissertation, I ended up working with historical documents and archives, within what might be called a "cultural studies" context.  I had a wonderful advisor who pushed me to cement my research and primary idea within one or two popular theoretical perspectives (namely post-colonialism).  I tended to push back with my focus on the historical (in an "old" historical sense and not the "new historicism").  But I always had the overall feeling that, in order for my work to be "serious," it had to invoke the language of the newest literary theory.

So I guess my two paragraphs are connected:
Could the increased focus on theory over the past 30 years have been detrimental to the accessibility of literary/humanistic studies for the average student?  Will the "decline" of theory bring more students back to the field, or make it more "relevant"?  Furthermore, will there be a disconnect between the work that academics do as researchers ("inventing" or "realizing" new theoretical perspectives that see the world in ever more complex ways), and the work that they do as teachers (making literary studies valuable and relevant to a new generation saturated by influences of media, technology, and consumerism)?

Just some thoughts . . .

[ABD, lit]

What bothers me is that those who argue viciously "against" theory do not acknowledge that any framework we adopt IS theory.
But perhaps I think this because I have a sloppy way of assessing what "theory" is... I see theory in the everyday.

Sometimes I am afraid because I was educated at a time when theory was ascendent and I wonder if this will affect my employment opportunities - however, my subfield is entangled with and shaped by "theory."

jargon is a different story, but sometimes we have to use  a special language to gain and communicate insights that are specific to our field.

I admit I like "theory" (whatever that is), but I also like Susan Sontag! And I temper my theory in my work with historical analysis.

[savitri]

I do not see why reading, loving, and thinking deeply about great works of art (Chekhov, a favorite!) and enjoying the art of theory (when done well) are antagonistic, as Luke/Lea seems to imply. They might well be complementary. At absolute worst, perhaps they might sometimes be orthogonal (that is, reading Derrida takes an hour that might be spent on Turgenev). But oppositional? Why?

I cultivated what was an early love for literature by reading secondary texts in college, and loving some of them (I only love some writers too, though - Hawthorne, for instance, struck me as utterly uninteresting and dispiriting, so a partial love for criticism is hardly an indictment). YOU may hate Of Grammatology, say, but countless others find it as worth studying as, say, Finnegan's Wake, or Labyrinths by Borges. Is one more obviously lucid than the other(s)?

Perhaps reading tough criticism takes as much effort as deciphering higher level mathematics, understanding Jung, or reading Gary Becker. So? Why do you insist there's no payoff for anyone, just because you haven't made the effort to find it? Why can't college students find pleasure and relevance (to use an old chesnut of a word) in, say, a Marxist reading of post-Colonial literature? As an Asian American, I actually think that's pretty meaningful! (yeah, I like plain vanilla readings of Shakespeare, too)

As to the accusation of easy A's in English: Look, grade inflation is an affliction across the board these days. To say that it's concentrated in English lit. is just absurd. Even those who see it concentrated in the humanities often overlook the fact that at a weak school, inflation is liable to happen across the board. At a huge school, it may well happen equally in the math/sciences, where exams may be predominantly multiple choice and therefore based on memorization of volumes of material. Even at strong schools like Harvard, grade inflation can be said to exist across disciplines (Summers has even admitted as much). Do you really want to argue that English gives out easier As than any other discipline? That is unsubtantiated. Of course, if you want to talk about grade inflation across the board, that is quite another discussion...

[AJ Tamburri, Florida Atlantic]

Indeed, some might wonder what "observers of [non-]English ... departments say [that] the age of literary theory, which dominated the field for 30 years beginning in the early 1970s, has passed." This might be a curious starting point that deviates from the anlo-centric norm. Equally curious is that the so-called marker seems to be Ferrida's death, a Frenchman. Just some food for thought.

[anon22]

This is laughable.

Theory exists in the physical sciences, math, and engineering.
Theory is based on cogent principles supported by exerimental evidence.

What you people call "theory" is nothing more than opinion.

For educated people I am amazed you don't know the difference...

[anonymous]

Of course there is literary theory.  Aristotle was the founder of the strongest lineage of literary theory as he was the founder of the strongest lineage of scientific theory. Read the Poetics.

[hijk]

Bowing before the obvious superiority of the scientist's argument ("Theory is based on cogent principles supported by exerimental evidence"), the literary scholars slinked off to their cold lonely offices, there to sniffle into used tissues and take what little comfort they could from their books--those lying bastard "theory" books.

[anonymous]

More likely the belligerent imperialism of Mr. Science just turned everyone off.

[Observer]

There were no English professors per se (i.e. on a large scale) until the 19th century.  English studies were created as a form of 'classics' for the working classes.  Theory and literary commentary, however, begin with Aristotle.  In some ways, Aristotle has not been surpassed, in that what he says is still applicable today in many striking ways.  Throughout the millennia since Aristotle there is example after example of stunning, but non-academic theory/commentary: viz. that of Horace, Sidney, Johnson, Coleridge, Arnold, et al.

The bottom line is that the great theorists/commentators were, traditionally, 'amateurs' (or professional writers) and many remain so down to our own time--Edmund Wilson is a prime example.  Literary theory/commentary can be done by anyone, so long as the person is a diligent and experienced reader.

In response to that fact and to both differentiate themselves from 'journalists' and to vie with the (envied) scientists as 'serious' commentators, the recent (highly academic) theorists have wrapped themselves in impenetrable jargon and posed as weighty thinkers, even though most of what they say is reducible to platitude or self-validating pseudotheory.  It is that 'theory' that we are finally ridding ourselves of--not the real thing.

[Composition/Rhetoric Professor]

Now that "belligerent imperialism" has been mentioned, it seems a good time to note that one problem not yet brought up in this discussion is the belligerent imperialism of literary scholars within English departments. In fact, the whole discussion of whether or not "Theory" has destroyed or enlivened literary studies ignores over one hundred years of disciplinary history in which rhetoric, composition, and creative writing have been either expunged from or brushed to the margins of English studies while those individuals professing literary studies (or its not-so-different sibling, cultural studies) continue to approach texts from only one angle: interpretation. "Theory" didn't destroy literary studies. It only helped highlight how narrow and stultifyng the whole enterprise always was.

[%sig%]

[another anon]

I've spent the last half-hour reading several possibilities as to why, how and for whose benefit Literary Theory has taken a primary role over the esthetic study of Literature.  I have to be completely honest when I say that the whole debate grips at a part of my core, the part that has been asking himself "... and just what are we good for as literary critics?"  Here's what I've come up with:

1) The act of creating literature is that of expressing the human condition and our interpretation of it.  Some choose a more (what I like to think of as a) metaphorical approach, while others analyse one work to create another one of their own.  Of course, to some extent all literary criticism falls under the latter.  This, in its jargon and supposed irrationality, really isn't harmful, though, as long as it serves as both a tool for understanding within the field and as a base for our subsequent communication with those from outside of our field.  To those who see the act of literary interpretation as a vacuous excercise in creative narcissism, I only ask that you see how every possible field, including archeology, astronomy, chemistry, biology, etc, utilize imagination when the hard facts begin to break down and the scientific method begins to give (I cite the last several decades of sub-atomic research as a perfect example of this beautiful, creative science).  Those from outside of the Humanities fields often ask me to explain how I could see myself as equal to a scientist in form and content of my work.  I tell them that I don't see that we do the same thing, only that the logical process that leads us to our conclusions should be respected as the beginning of an expression, explanation and living of the human condition in a form which the sciences seems to pretend to have forgotten (even in such cases as the one I've cited above).  

2) I don't see anything wrong with the domination of cultural and literary theory studies, as they allow for a social, historial and political contextualizing of our literary interpretations.  Granted, I enjoy sitting down with a poem and having my own private dialogue with it, figuring out all of its possible messages, finding out about what the poet (perhaps through his or her poetic voice) it trying to tell me whether s/he means to or not.  However, literary studies as they exist today began decades ago as a means of taking our work to a level at which a broader range of people could appreciate it.  In this way I do what I can to take the extra-literary meaning into account, an act which I only hope my collegues would not consider "giving in to the man" of literary theory and cultural studies, but of applying my world-experience to my literary one.  

3) As far as the real-world problem of employment is concerned, I don't espouse an attitude by which (non-)literary-theory PhDs are preferred or not preferred based solely on their (non)-literary-theory academic upbringing.  I believe that departments need to hire from both sides so that OUR STUDENTS may benefit from all the possible sides of the issue, as was done fortunately in my BA/MA institution.  Now, the fact of employment difficulties is not in question here; we all have them, and even in some alternate universe where this debate could never take place the difficulties would still exist.  The notion that this is terrible because it will never change (a feeling I get from reading the comments here), on the other hand, is.  As I commented above, the Humanities as a whole has shifted from isolated criticism to cultural-literary-social-political-etc-theory-driven propositions.  THE PENDULUM WILL SWING AGAIN, and when it does, we'll see who's complaining about a lack of contextualized criticism in academia...  Hopefully at some point the moderation between these supposedly polar opposites will come to be the trend.  

Thank for your patience, and for the lively debate.

[anonymous]

The problem wasn't so much with the generation of theorists so much as it was the generation of activists hired by the theorists to put their theories into praxis.  The newer activist generation can't think for themselves which is precisely why they were hired.  They are quite fundamentalist about the theories they were hired to preach and their lack of flexibility is driving everyone in the academy out of their minds.  Now, however, they are expected to publish but because the activists can't think for themselves (which is why they were hired) they are an embarrassment to the theorists.  So the theorists are busily trying to create the impression that there is a crisis in the publishing industry because the activist gorillas that they hired can scream about their identities all day and night but they can barely sign their names much less write a book.

[Randy Stephens]

Last summer I worked a job which allowed
me to study and learn a good bit about
a famous American writer, Carl Sandburg.
One of my favorite of his quotes pertaining
to literary criticism is, (this might be a bit
paraphrased), "When I wrote only God and
I knew what I really meant.  After a few years,
only God knew."

[%sig%]

[Theo Kipnis (unaffiliated)]

This dialogue and the related articles are interesting to me because they seem to confirm a suspicion I had that literary theory has been a field that talks about the questions it itself raises, more than one that discusses the questions raised by works of literature. I mean no-one disrespect by saying this, and hope the statement to be taken as an inquiry. However, I have noticed that taxonomies of story structures, subjects, characters, and other elements exist, but I have had no luck finding analysis of the most common "points," "meanings," "underlying messages," etc., of literary works. In short, lots of material on how to read a story (and the problems with how other theorists read them), but not much on what the stories actually say.

What I have noticed is that each analyst approaches literature from his or her own level of analysis, such as the facets of a genre, comments on social equity, the relevance of the reader, etc. These are all fine and informative, but even within each of them I have had no luck finding a cohesive message. Namely, what can an overall view of the messages found in literature tell us about what authors are saying about human nature? Further, as there is not, to my observation, a common denominator that underlies the theoretical directions, comparing one interpretation to another is an apples-to-anvils exercise. As such, it is hard to gain intelligence from the rich history of literature about what is meaningful to people, based on durable works.

I would tend toward a psychoanalytic approach as a solution, but those I’ve seen cited so far are totally out of date in terms of contemporary psychology. It may just be time to update that approach’s source material.

If you’ve read this far, thank you. I would appreciate any feedback on this idea, as well as references to relevant books, thinkers, and counter arguments.