Scott Esposito and Dave Munger have been continuing the conversation about the role of theory in literary study and appreciation. On the latter, Dave writes:
Unfortunately, the professors aren’t teaching literature appreciation, they’re teaching literature, and contemporary literature study demands an understanding of critical theory, not just close reading. You won’t get anywhere in grad school – let alone as a professor – without an ability to apply critical theory. Faced with doing a disservice to English students who are planning to be something else (lawyers, accountants, schoolteachers, or baristas) or to those who are planning to become graduate students and professors, they favor the ones who have a chance to follow in their own footsteps.
Dave is more or less correct that "contemporary literature study demands an understanding of critical theory," but this is not because "they’re teaching literature." It's because literary study has become a self-reflexive discipline, a course of study about literary study, not about literature as such. You could say that this is unsurprising, even inevitable, given the imperatives of disciplinary study and scholarship in American universities, and you would be at least partially correct. But more about this below.
Dave links to a post at the blog Uncertain Principles that asserts the following about "theory-free" literature classes:
You could argue that this would be doing a disservice to students, that it is impossible to claim to have a meaningful understanding of modern literary scholarship without having at least some acquaintance with critical theory. And you'd be right.
Again, what I find most telling about this formulation is that denying students access to theory would impede their ability "to have a meaningful understanding of modern literary scholarship" (emphasis mine). The almost unconscious assumption is that to study literature in modern American universities is perforce to study the scholarship on literature, to become familiar with what others who have devoted themselves to the study of literature have written about the study of literature. (In fairness, it should be said that Dave goes on to question the use of theory in undergraduate literary courses, ultimately to take a position on how literature might be taught to these students with which I am entirely comfortable; it is precisely the unconscious assumptions behind the language employed in talking about theory, however, that I want ultimately to emphasize.) In many ways, what is now called "theory" is just what passes for the established mode of "literary scholarship."
There was a time, of course, when "literary scholarship" meant not theory in particular, but a wide range of approaches to literature, most of which were understood to be useful in helping us to understand literary works, to be ways of enhancing our ability to finally return to "literature itself" and read it with greater comprehension and enjoyment. But before discussing further how the one conception of scholarship mutated into the other, I want to quote Scott Esposito's gloss on this whole debate:
Dave's answer is "literature without theory" but he realizes that this approach is complicated by the fact that all readers are informed by various experiences and historical knowlege of some sort. In other words, none of us can be "tabula rasa" when reading a book. That means that anyone teaching literature will have to deal with a group of conflicting assumptions. If you don't steamroll/mitigate these assumptions with theory then what do you do?. . .
. . .Are we approaching this text as an aesthetic experience, watching how the words link and interact as one would the brushstrokes of a painting? Or are we approaching this more interpretatively, trying to teach tools to get at a meaning? I suppose we can always just answer "both" and say both approaches are worth teaching, but I'd doubt if that would mitigate argumentation.
Although Scott is also agreeable to the notion of "literature without theory" for undergraduates, his words as well bear the impression of some of the current presumptions about the relationship between literature and theory. One is that "none of us can be 'tabula rasa' when reading a book." This is unexceptionable in itself, but as I pointed out in a recent post, very often this otherwise harmless truism is used to assert further that such experiences and knowledge themselves constitute a "theory," that all reading of works of literature is preceded by a preexisting theory of literature and of reading itself. As I said in that post, I think this is a trivial argument mostly undertaken (not by Scott) to squelch all discussion about possible alternatives to theory as a way of orienting oneself to works of literature.
The second is less a presumption about theory than an altogether unexamined assumption about how we become acquainted with literature in the first place: Scott speaks of his two broadly defined approaches to reading literature as "worth teaching." Certainly we can think of the way we come to value reading works of literature as, broadly speaking, something that is learned, but in this context "teaching" means teaching literature as part of an academic curriculum. And, in my opinion, this underlying premise that literature is something to be encountered through the formal study such a curriculum imposes, that "literature" is somehow first and foremost a subject of academic study, needs to be reconsidered.
Perhaps the place to begin such a reconsideration is simply to remind ourselves that "theory" itself is a by-product of the transformation of the English department into the academic department assigned to "study" literature in the first place. And we should also remember that the establishment of literature as a reputable subject of academic study is still a relatively recent phenomenon. Literature courses were not offered on any reliable basis until the 1910s and 1920s, and really they were not consolidated into a coherent course of study widely availabe in American colleges until after World War II. Furthermore, it was under the aegis of "criticism" that literature was finally accepted into the curriculum, not as a self-evidently viable object of study in its own right. (For a further discussion of this history, see Gerald Graff's Professing Literature.) Before the advent of criticism (by which the focus of study was to be the development of critical thinking and its application more broadly), "English" was at best the discipline otherwise occupied with "philology"--literally, the study of the language.
It so happened that the dominant critical approach to literature in the 1940s, 50s and 60s became the New Criticism, a method of "close reading" that had the happy consequence of focusing the student's attention on the formal qualities of "literature itself," but it was surely inevitable that this critical method would come to be supplanted by others, since, again, the goal of studying literature was to develop critical approaches to literature, not to admire it for its intrinsic worth--although, again, New Criticism did seem to encourage this respectful attitude.
It also happens that New Criticism is a critical approach for which I have a great deal of sympathy, although I also have problems with its unstated ambitions--for many of the New Critics literary study was intended to become through its respect for "the text" almost a substitute for religion--and a number of its practices--the general New Critical disdain for writers such as Wordsworth (the Romantics more generally) and Milton, for example. But in my opinion the most destructive legacy of New Criticism has been the process it initiated whereby Critical Methodology became all-important, inevitably leading to the creation of new methodologies deemed superior to the preceding ones, finally leading to the installation of "critical theory" as we now know it as the sine qua non of literary study. As a result, we have been led to forget: Before there were departments of literature and literary study, there was no literary theory as such. Writers and readers got on perfectly well without it.
Certainly there was literary criticism before the English department became first its guardian and then its warden. But to call the critical writing of Samuel Johnson or S. T. Coleridge or Henry James "theory" is merely to engage in denotative game playing. Critics such as these (who for the most part were poets and fiction writers themselves) wanted to explain what was at stake in the reading of poetry and fiction, and they had their opinions about what was good or bad in their fellow writers, but they hardly thought of criticism as largely about itself, as a contribution not to the appreciation of worthy literature but to the perpetual shifting and expanding of critical methodology.
To return (at last) to the posts at Conversational Reading and Word Munger. Theory is important, indeed indispensable, to "those who are planning to become graduate students and professors." And undoubtedly "anyone teaching literature will have to deal with a group of conflicting assumptions." But these things are true because, essentially, becoming a literature professor, not advancing the cause of literature, has become the primary objective of the graduate student, and because teaching literature has come to be much more about teaching--that is, professing a point of view--than about the works of literature being taught. Those works are still around, waiting for such readers as are willing to take them for what they have to offer. But in this regard, curious readers would be much better served by reading, say, literary weblogs than by giving much thought to what literary theory is all about.
I don't know that it's impossible to succeed in grad school without an understanding of theory. I'm halfway through a PhD and I'll jump through the critical hoops when I have to, but I don't really have an understanding of, nor an appreciation for, criticism. In studying for a comprehensive on the novel, I'll trot through the major theories of the novel and play matching games for the exam, but in doing so I'm only proving I can complete an exercize. Maybe I've just been lucky so far. Professors have been rather open to my approach.
Posted by: throatwobbler | 02/14/2005 at 10:11 AM
For whatever it's worth, in my experience as a student the best professors are those who are able to "bring theory to life." And to do so without sacrificing attention to the text, or merely imposing some dogmatic or prescriptive agenda. On the contrary. They are the ones who truly understand, who GET theory, while unfortunately most are content to fake it. Granted the system seems more than amply set up to encourage such posturing. But the answer is not to flee from critical theory, especially when it seems that all that is required today to be a "theorist" is a quick skim of say, Eagleton, Christopher Norris or Mark Taylor. One might justifiably wish like hell that more professors had half a clue about Critical Theory--a rigorous appreciation for its history, from Adorno to Derrida--rather than a mere fetish for something now so mantrically, self-evidently invoked as "theory."
Very bluntly, and too quickly: I'm not convinced that such a rigorous thinking--call it "theorizing" if you must--inherently precludes an appreciation for what you call, "intrinsic worth." Although it would seem that the burden of articulating such a thing remains hanging somewhere, overhead. Which is not--this burden--necessarily a bad thing, maybe.
Posted by: Matt | 02/14/2005 at 11:10 AM
"Again, what I find most telling about this formulation is that denying students access to theory would impede their ability "to have a meaningful understanding of modern literary scholarship" (emphasis mine). The almost unconscious assumption is that to study literature in modern American universities is perforce to study the scholarship on literature, to become familiar with what others who have devoted themselves to the study of literature have written about the study of literature."
That formulation was quite deliberate, for more or less the reasons you cite. It's also important to the analogy I was making between literature classes and science classes: In the same way that you can enjoy science without doing any math, but can never hope to be a scientist without math, it seems like you can enjoy literature without theory (I do it all the time), but can't become a literary scholar without knowing something about theory.
Of course, this is all from my perspective as a professor in the sciences, talking to colleagues in the humanities. I'm probably wrong about some aspects of this, and I'd be happy to hear the perspective of someone with a more direct knowledge of the humanities side of academia.
Posted by: Chad Orzel | 02/16/2005 at 12:51 PM
Perhaps you can no longer become a literary "scholar" without knowing theory--although this was not always the case: even twenty-five years ago you could become a scholar just by knowing more about a particular period of literature than most people--but you can certainly become a literary critic or just learn to love literature without it. In fact, those now called "literary scholars" increasingly know less and less about literature themselves. Only theory. Or how literature is really politics.
Posted by: Dan Green | 02/16/2005 at 01:00 PM
Nice, thoughtful post. Very interesting. I'm not sure I buy your argument that there was no "theory" before there were English departments. There was, but it wasn't taught in English departments, it was taught in philosophy departments. Nietszche, Augustine, Origen, Plato, and many others had an awful lot to say about literary theory.
Posted by: dave munger | 02/16/2005 at 02:05 PM
I said there was no "literary theory." No "theory" developed by literary critics or others primarily interested in literature rather than philosophy. Nietszche et. al. were only made into literary theorists by literature professors once they inhabited the English department.
Posted by: Dan Green | 02/16/2005 at 02:24 PM
I suppose it's really a semantic point. Your right in the sense that if there were no literature departments, then it's pretty hard to say there was such a thing as "literary theory." There was theory about literature, but there weren't jobs for "literature professors" because there were no literature departments.
But 20th century literary scholars didn't invent the concept of theory about literature, and they didn't impose some alternate interpretation of Nietzsche, or or Longinus, or Plato. These philosophers were making theory about literature. They didn't think they were making theory about science, or economics, or politics, or anything else. Nothing was imposed on them by 20th century scholars.
Posted by: dave munger | 02/16/2005 at 03:11 PM
I don't think it is a semantic point. The very concept of "literature" as we think about it now is more or less an invention of the literary academy. Before the 20th century, certainly before the 19th century, there was "poetry," but I don't think the "literary theorists" you mention would really understand our talk these days about "literature." Nietzsche mostly thought he was still talking about philosophy when he wrote about Greek drama (a "world view" more broadly) and Plato wrote about poetry, but, again, I'm not sure he would have known what it means to speak of "literature" in our sense of the word.
Posted by: Dan Green | 02/16/2005 at 03:32 PM
I suppose that's true, but again I believe that's simply a semantic point. There wasn't the category "literature," but there were other categories which have now been partially or completely subsumed by the larger category, "literature," such as "drama," "poetry," and even "rhetoric." We don't say these genres have disappeared, now that they have been lumped together into a larger category, and we don't say that theory about a single genre isn't also "literary theory."
Posted by: dave munger | 02/16/2005 at 03:45 PM
Precisely. There are various forms of writing that "have now been partially or completely subsumed" to the idea of "literature." But this was done by the literary academy. The first thing that had to be "theorized" once "literature" became an academic subject was exactly what that thing was. All of our talk about "literary theory" is an artifact of that process, not of the literary history that came before. Literary scholars did indeed "invent the concept of theory about literature."
Posted by: Dan Green | 02/16/2005 at 04:08 PM
But isn't it this way with all disciplines? Yes, the "liberal arts" have existed for quite some time, but some of them didn't evolve into their current form until very recently. "Chemistry," for example, is barely two centuries old. Does this mean the alchemists that preceded them didn't practice "chemistry?" Psychology emerged as a discipline at roughly the same time as literary study. Yet we can trace the basis of psychology all the way back to Hippocrates. We don't say that 20th century psychologists invented the idea of studying human behavior.
It's disingenious to suggest that a discipline that synthesizes thought which has occurred over centuries is somehow now just foisting itself upon academe. "Rhetoric," now a discipline generally centered in English departments, has been a part of the academy since its very inception, and many of the more "radical" aspects of rhetoric were being debated by Plato and the sophists the 5th century B.C.
Posted by: dave munger | 02/16/2005 at 05:00 PM
You speak of literature as a "discipline." The point of my post is precisely that we ought to stop thinking of it that way. Works of literature don't amount to a "discipline." They're discreet works meant to be read by individual readers. For these readers to enjoy and appreciate such works, they don't need "theory." Unless, indeed, their commitment is finally more to the "discipline" than it is to fiction or poetry or drama.
A discipline can't "foist" itself upon academe. Academe created it.
Posted by: Dan Green | 02/16/2005 at 05:33 PM
Chemicals don't amount to a discipline. Human behavior doesn't amount to a discipline. The study of these things does.
"Academe" created all these things, as it created literary studies.
Posted by: dave munger | 02/16/2005 at 08:06 PM
Academe did indeed create literary studies. And it would be in the best interest of the very subject that was to be studied--literature--that academe confess it's not any longer much interested in that subject--at least not those "discreet works" I mentioned earlier.
Posted by: Dan Green | 02/16/2005 at 08:30 PM