The End of Literary Studies?
According to the Latin Vulgate, the authoritative version of the Bible for more than a thousand years, academic departments of literature might as well close up shop. Psalm 70:15 praises the righteousness of the Lord, "quia non cognovi litteraturas" — because I have not known literatures. According to the 14th-century Wycliffe translation, the Psalmist can proclaim God's glory because "I knew not by literature, by man's teaching, but by God's revelation." Thus, an education in secular literature distracts us from important matters.
Though the word in the Hebrew original is sifrut, most commonly translated as literature, its root, sfr, also generates the verb for counting. Most modern translations render the line not as an attack on literature but as proclaiming that God's greatness exceeds man's ability to measure it. The King James Version, for example, reads: "My mouth shall shew forth thy righteousness and thy salvation all the day; for I know not the numbers thereof." In the most popular translations, literature is no longer impugned.
However, whether or not reading John Donne and Franz Kafka constitutes an obstacle to communion with the Deity, the study of literature in American colleges and universities has been suffering sustained, perhaps fatal, assault from other sources. When Calvin Coolidge, who spent part of his honeymoon translating Dante, was a student at Amherst, a college graduate was expected to be familiar with Homer, Virgil, and Shakespeare. Later in the 20th century, Lyndon Johnson was exclaiming: "I don't want anything to do with poets," and George H.W. Bush was insisting: "I can't do poetry."
Today, the president of the United States does not read books, and even many English majors do not know the difference between Keats and Yeats. Though books abound, a cynic might conclude that writers outnumber readers. The academic study of literature is in crisis.
Departments of literature in American universities are often underfunded, understaffed, and demoralized. Concentrations in French, German, Russian, and other languages have been terminated, and many of those that remain have trimmed their offerings in literature. In a recent article in The Chronicle ("Facing My Own Extinction"), Nina Handler reports that her institution, Holy Names University, is even eliminating the English major.
"Why should I be forced to read Ralph Ellison or Margaret Atwood?" asks the student who went to college to train to be a radiologist, tax accountant, or volleyball coach. "You shouldn't," colleges reply, anxious about applications, enrollments, and their bottom lines. Neglected in favor of STEM specialists, tenure-track scholars of literature — and their attendant horde of poorly paid, insecure adjuncts — must contend not only with diminished resources and resentful students but also with a failure of nerve within their own discipline. Frustrated by their institutional impotence, they turn their hostility against one another.Literature has been displaced by movies, TV, comics, pop music, and social media as the focus of "literary studies." Mesmerized by the perplexities of the present, scholars have abrogated their role as custodians of the literary heritage. An undergraduate syllabus is as likely to include Fifty Shades of Grey as the poetry of Thomas Gray. As Yeats (not Keats) would put it, "Caught in that sensual moment all neglect/ Monuments of unageing intellect." But there is something less sensual than consensual about this melancholy moment. Our collective decisions have brought it on.
In The Hatred of Literature (Harvard University Press, 2018, trans. Nicholas Elliott), William Marx, a professor of comparative literature at the University of Paris Nanterre, surveys the long history of antipathy toward literature, from Plato to the present. Assessing what Socrates, in The Republic, calls "the ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry," Marx finds that it is not just philosophy that has been hostile toward imaginative writing. Alongside the history of literature, he outlines a parallel and parasitic tradition of anti-literature, statements and actions that would deny authors their authority.
Among the overlapping bases for anti-literature that he traces, Marx finds that, in its earliest stages: "It is a question of power." Plato felt compelled to banish poets from his ideal Republic because he wanted to free its citizens from the pernicious influence that the Homeric epics were continuing to exert over the lives of Athenians. If, as Percy Bysshe Shelley proclaimed, "Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world," there are many who would deny them the right to legislate.
Anti-literature has also been proposed as a matter of truth. Plato dismissed poetry as a mere imitation of an imitation of eternal Forms. A poem about a bed merely represents a physical bed, which itself is but an imperfect version of the ideal, paradigmatic Bed. In the 16th century, in An Apology for Poetry, Sir Philip Sidney summarized this enduring Platonic rejection of literature as rooted in the belief that it is "the mother of lies," as if fiction is synonymous with falsehood. In the modern university, the paragon of truth-seeker is housed and generously funded in the College of Sciences, not within the threadbare outposts of literary dilettantes.In 1959, C.P. Snow delivered his infamous "Two Cultures" lecture that claimed epistemological priority for the scientific mind over the humanistic imagination. Despite the glaring defects in Snow's argument that Marx points out — its "approximations, oversimplifications, absurdities, and untruths" — it still holds sway among trustees, who shrink the budgets for literary studies, and politicians, who disdain literary studies as, in contemporary parlance, "fake news."
In fact, poets themselves have often denied any truth claims for their art; if poetry no longer professes veracity, it cannot be reviled for mendacity. Sidney's own defensive strategy was to contend that the poet — a synecdoche for all creative writers — "nothing affirms, and therefore never lieth." Nevertheless, maintaining that literature says nothing is hardly likely to assuage critics who would banish it from the university. If, according to Archibald MacLeish's famous formula, "A poem should not mean / But be," it becomes natural to dismiss the poem as meaningless.
Morality is another of Marx's historical bases for anti-literature. Because he mistrusted the passions, Plato denounced the literary fantasies that arouse them. Not only have the ranks of poets been filled by boozers, junkies, traitors, thieves, murderers, and other assorted malefactors, but, warn the champions of anti-literature, their poetry infects readers with their vices. Puritans of various eras define vice differently, but what the fiery tomecides of Savonarola and Hitler have in common is a fear that books can induce abnormality. In contemporary classrooms, fears that books may be too disturbing have led to trigger warnings and outright prohibitions: Purge Ovid's Metamorphoses from the curriculum because it seems to condone rape, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn because it uses the N-word, The Divine Comedy because it consigns Muhammad to the eighth circle of Hell.
The avant-garde is, by etymology and definition, a frontal attack on conventional values. And, if much of modern literature is designed to shock, provoke, and destabilize, it seems hard to justify its study in an institution supported by the state or high-powered donors interested in maintaining the status quo. It may be that the greatest literature is profoundly moral, that the overt eroticism of the Song of Songs is really an allegory for the love of God, and that Jonathan Swift's suggestion that eating Irish babies solves the famine problem is really a satirical broadside against English Hibernophobia. Still, it would be difficult to recuperate the works of the Marquis de Sade, William S. Burroughs, and Kathy Acker for use in courses filtered for morality.
A final case against literary studies is on the grounds of social utility. For whose benefit other than the insular industry of pedants is a monograph on Edmund Spenser? How does a seminar on Emily Dickinson prepare its participants to be productive citizens? The Battle of Waterloo might have been won on the playing fields of Eton, but certainly not in its Latin classes, and it is Mandarin snobbery to think that an elite education in classical texts prepares one for leadership.
Marx quotes a striking simile coined by the 17th-century French poet François de Malherbe to deny social responsibility: "Un bon poète n'est pas plus utile à l'Etat qu'un bon joueur de quilles." ("A good poet is no more useful to the State than a good skittles player.") If skittles had been an Olympic sport, its best practitioners might at least have brought glory to their nation, whereas anti-literature denies that poets even do that.
To make matters worse for defenders of literature, many modernists abjured any claim to social utility. "All art is quite useless," insisted Oscar Wilde. After Wilde, there might seem to be no use in defending the academic study of an otiose subject.
Anti-literature, however, is the tribute that detractors pay to literature. The premise sustaining anti-literature is a belief that literature possesses power and is therefore worth attacking. Poetry ceases to be hated when it ceases to seem threatening, but, according to Ben Lerner's 2016 book The Hatred of Poetry (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), the aversion remains alive and well. However, worse than antipathy, for the defenders of literature, is indifference. Marx concludes his book with the disturbing possibility that one day literature might merely be ignored and with the fervent wish that "the gods prevent that day from ever arriving."
Perhaps that day has arrived. In 1870, when Charles Dickens's last (and unfinished) novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, was published, 20 percent of Americans could not read it, on account of illiteracy. In 2016, with literacy widespread in the United States, 26 percent of Americans reported not having read even part of a book — print, electronic, or audio — during the past year, according to the Pew Research Center.
Though fiction still outsells other literary genres, even the "literary novel" — the kind that is studied in colleges — is becoming, like ikebana, the exquisite art of floral arrangement, the rarefied specialty of a happy few connoisseurs. Before he ceased writing literary novels, at 79, Philip Roth offered this prediction about the future of the genre: "I think it's going to be cultic. I think always people will be reading them but it will be a small group of people. Maybe more people than now read Latin poetry, but somewhere in that range."
And yet Americans still read tax forms, cereal boxes, and Twitter messages. Some even read Danielle Steel, though almost never Richard Steele. Merve Emre calls this material "paraliterature," and reading specialists contend it can be an effective gateway drug for developing the reading habit. Start with a take-out menu, and it is on to Proust. In Paraliterary: The Making of Bad Readers in Postwar America (University of Chicago Press, 2017), Emre is interested not only in the consumption of noncanonical texts but also in alternative methods of consumption.
Seizing on Vladimir Nabokov's magisterial distinction between "good readers" (those who apply the techniques of close reading championed by New Criticism) and "bad readers" (for Emre's purposes, "individuals socialized into the practices of readerly identification, emotion, action, and interaction that Nabokov decried"), Emre examines bad reading in the middle of the 20th century. At the same time that universities were enforcing techniques of studying texts as richly nuanced, autonomous verbal units, "bad readers" were perusing memoirs, diaries, committee reports, and other paraliterature. They were also using their textual skills to master crossword puzzles and decipher recipes, and in other ways not sanctioned by the academy.Emre is particularly interested in how extramural reading positioned the United States as a world power during the Cold War. She examines the internationalization of American Studies through the creation of a literary canon that, through academic programs, publishing practices, and diplomatic initiatives, enshrined Melville, Whitman, and James and was exported by passionate travelers. At home, such scholars as Alfred Kazin, F.O. Matthiessen, and Robert Spiller adhered to the academic orthodoxy of close, dispassionate reading, but, through study-abroad programs, Fulbright grants, and the Peace Corps, the same scholars encouraged emotional responses to texts chosen not for their autonomous stylistic graces but to spread American ideals and influence.
Emre studies the "paranoid reading" performed by black nationalists such as John A. Williams, Richard Wright, and James Baldwin who sought to mobilize action against racism. She also examines a fascinating case of failed bad reading — a presidential commission that Dwight Eisenhower created in order to present an inspiring portrait of leading American authors to readers throughout the world. Called the People-to-People Initiative, it disintegrated amid bickering among participants including Saul Bellow, Edna Ferber, Donald Hall, John Steinbeck, and William Carlos Williams and the debilitating tippling of its chairman, William Faulkner.
To avoid extinction, disciplines must adapt and evolve. The department of astrology that Pope Leo X founded at the University of Rome in the early 16th century has long since disappeared, but astronomy has thrived by moving beyond geocentric and then heliocentric models. Feminism, critical race theory, ecocriticism, reader-response theory, New Historicism, queer theory, and other approaches have made the 21st-century English department quite distinct from the one that formalists dominated in mid-century. The demographics of instructors and students has also changed dramatically. Courses in travel writing, science fiction, cookbooks, and other paraliterary genres are common. Topics such as Bollywood, Black Lives Matter, and Food as Cultural Capital would have made the fastidious Yale formalist William K. Wimsatt shudder.
Necrophilia, mermaids, and Australian cinema are no doubt worthy topics in themselves, but since life is short and academic years are not long enough, should they be supplanting Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton? It is hard to believe that Game of Thrones, or even the George R.R. Martin fantasy novels on which the TV series is based, might serve as a gateway drug to a lifelong addiction to Virginia Woolf. Since its origins in Aristotle's accounts of Greek drama, literary studies has proved remarkably resilient, but how far can it stretch before it ceases to be literary studies?
Steven G. Kellman is the author of The Translingual Imagination (U. of Nebraska Press) and Redemption: The Life of Henry Roth (Norton) and a professor of comparative literature at the University of Texas at San Antonio.
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