(This essay was published a long time ago--as most of the references attest--in a now defunct online journal. Since as far as I can tell its archives no longer exist, I am re-posting the essay here. I mostly still agree with it.)
Much has been written about the purported dominance of American universities-particularly in the humanities and the social sciences-by the so-called "academic left." And indeed acceptable scholarship in many disciplines is undeniably influenced in a virtually uncontested way by left-wing and progressive ideas. In the field in which I was trained, English (more specifically, literary study), the current scholarly paradigm is almost exclusively determined by a left-wing critique of culture and the role of literature, as well as other forms of representation and discourse, in shaping and reflecting culture. Certainly few would deny that campus initiatives, student/faculty activism, and the collective weight of political opinion in general all help push the political balance on most college campuses decidedly to the left.
But the most noteworthy consequence of the ascendancy of the academic left is not, from my perspective, that academe is now permeated with leftist politics. Considering a whole constellation of facts about contemporary America-among them its now unchallenged position as supreme economic, cultural, and military power, its exaltation of business and commerce as indicators of status and accomplishment, its thoroughgoing utilitarian approach to education and manifest impatience with the cultivation of intellect and sensibility for their own sakes-it is not at all surprising that those who choose what was once called the "life of the mind" at its universities would feel estranged from the official values that seem to animate the political and commercial life of American society. Whether such people would identify themselves as "liberals," "radicals," "progressives," or just as independent thinkers, surely it is at the least unlikely that as a whole they would incline much toward the established conservative view of the way things ought to be.
As a liberal myself, I find the idea of a university overrun with left-wingers to be a prospect exceeded in its horror and repugnancy only by the idea of its being overrun by right-wingers. (Actually this latter prospect I find more dreadful by a magnitude approaching infinity.) However, the real damage that has been inflicted by the academic left-and I do believe it has inflicted damage-lies in the extent to which it has managed to simplistically politicize academic scholarship, especially scholarship in the humanities. This reductive approach, whereby all subjects are political, either inherently so or made to be so, is detrimental to real politics, which can be safely disregarded in favor of the more tidy rhetorical kind; even more debilitating, however, is the harm done to the ideal of dispassionate, intellectually serious scholarship and criticism.
The discipline of literary study has arguably been the most devastated and disfigured by this kind of politicized scholarship. It is not going too far to say the study of literature as it was envisioned by those who helped bring it into the university curriculum in the first place has been replaced by the inspection of literature for its ideological credentials, by the expropriation of works of literature for political purposes completely dissociated from the qualities that mark them as literary, that distinguish them from other modes of discourse. To deplore this myopic view of the usefulness of literature is not to deny that some poetry and fiction is motivated in part by a desire to represent political ideas or enlivened by a writer's sensitivity to the political forces at work in the world to which he/she must necessarily turn for inspiration. "Political literature" is not in itself a specious category. Nor is it always invalid to subject a literary work to a political reading, especially if the critic acknowledges the motive to do so and, most importantly, does not claim that such a reading cancels out all other critical values a different kind of reading might disclose.
But unfortunately academic critics now all too often do make this claim, at least implicitly. The increasingly uniform acceptance of the new orthodoxy-the cultural studies approach I have described-has in effect discredited criticism that does not set out to interrogate texts for their deep-seated assumptions about gender, race, sexual orientation, or other sources of culturally constructed "difference," their allegiance to the proper progressive attitudes toward these and other issues of concern to the politically enlightened. Adherence to this orthodoxy is to some extent the product of academic careerism, the homogenization of criticism that was almost certainly an inevitable result of the triumph of academic criticism to begin with. In some cases those conforming to the established method do so for entirely cynical reasons, advancing their own interests within the academy while suppressing whatever misgivings they may actually have about the simplistic formula they are obliged to apply, but for others this politicized criticism is undertaken in all sincerity, from a belief in the underlying political ideals they understand it to be expressing. This is the group on the academic left for whom the political imperative is most urgent, a cause so absolute in its demands as to make any other kind of critical work seem a dereliction of duty.
It is this group, as well, whose very presence in the discipline of literary study stands most in need of explanation. In a field dominated for most of the twentieth century by scholars and critics, whether philologists or acolytes of the New Criticism, who were considered advocates of a detached and disinterested approach to the study of literature, how has it happened that at the beginning of the twenty-first it has come to be dominated by such a radically disparate approach, one that encourages those who adopt it to simply become advocates in the most blatantly tendentious sense of the term? Partly it can be explained as a reaction against the disingenuousness of the claims to objectivity and impartiality made by the earlier cohort of historical scholars and New Critics, almost all of whom sought to promote some writers over others, some beliefs about the nature of literature over others, and in many cases to advance agendas separate from the declared goal of encouraging a dispassionate "appreciation" of literature as a whole. It is an overreaction to be sure, and furthermore derives more than a little from the intellectual inconstancy and susceptibility to critical fashion of which literary scholarship has increasingly (and correctly) been accused. But in its very excess, the turn to cultural studies betrays a more significant lack of confidence in the role of the literature professor, as well as, ultimately, in the relevance of literature in a globalized media age that would seem to have little use for its inherent equivocations.
The rise of the academic left during the 1980s and 90s provoked its share of contentious sound and fury-in literary study, the most discordant notes accompanied the so-called "canon war," a momentarily intense conflict that quickly enough turned into a rout-but in retrospect it was accomplished without much serious opposition, aside from those who could easily if often unjustly be caricatured as hidebound reactionaries. In some ways, in fact, the victory of the cultural studies left has about it a certain air of inevitability. The image of the genteel English professor fostering among his students an appreciation of Literature was always only accurate in the blurring: having created Literature as a proper "subject" of academic study, the older generation or two of professors on whom this image was projected were nevertheless unavoidably in the business of using works of literature in a more ambitious enterprise in which poems, novels, and plays themselves served only an intermediary function. One could less charitably describe it as indoctrination, as promoting an underlying and unarticulated agenda, although unlike the current dispensation, under which the indoctrination is blatant and the agenda all but advertised, the earlier paradigm did begin with the assumption that literature has an autonomy and integrity of its own. However, if the present generation of "literary scholars" has effectively abandoned the study of literature in favor of a more expansively conceived program of their own devising, they are in this sense only emulating their predecessors.
But where in the past literature in the academy was most likely to be seen as adjunct to or allied with religion, history, ethical inquiry, or simply a particular scholar/teacher's idiosyncratic brew of such secondary ingredients, today it is almost uniformly politics and political analysis to which the study of literature has become subordinate. Although the various accounts of the radicalizing of the academy in the United States that have been advanced over the last decade and a half are, however implicated in their own ideological bias, mostly accurate to the extent they identify a set of circumstances that further explain the generally leftish tilt of university faculty, in what remains of literary study the subordination of literature to politics is at least as much the consequence of the absence of a true disciplinary identity centered around literature as the exclusive subject of attention. While the prevailing wisdom of the academy clearly privileges the political as the most "serious" focus of one's scholarly attention, in departments of English and Comparative Literature especially the effect has seemed particularly acute because the politicization of criticism and scholarship has completed a process of virtually emptying out these disciplines of the subject with which they were originally invested.
I would like to challenge the apparently widespread assumption that spending one's time contemplating the literary qualities of literature is not only frivolous but that it also disqualifies one from maintaining a parallel if separate interest in politics and political commentary or, more importantly, that an interest in works of literature, and the development of the requisite facility in reading them, add nothing to an analysis of the social conditions that abide in or the political forces that affect the "real world" outside the library carrel or one's attic garret. I would not claim that the particular insights I believe I have gained from the cultivation of such reading habits are necessarily those everyone who takes literature seriously would reach, but neither are they simply the fortuitous results of an otherwise private enthusiasm. If anything, looking at politics from the perspective provided by literature is a more natural and ultimately more fruitful exercise than attempting to impose on literature a constricted and sadly uncongenial vision of politics.
The actual politics of the academic left strike me as a desperate and ineffectual politics: our views have no salience in mainstream American political discourse, no appeal to ordinary citizens, so we will instead expend our time and labor in an artificial environment where what we believe can be articulated but finally dismissed as inherently unworldly, on creating a simulated, ersatz, merely textual politics. My own literary education, on the other hand, has encouraged me to favor a less impatient, more terrestrial liberal politics, a political outlook that welcomes progressive change but recognizes the manifest obstacles to achieving it, that prefers tangible results to free-floating attitude, that refuses to render "politics" itself a meaningless term by finding it everywhere, to reduce all human endeavor and expression to a conception of the political that is impoverished and unavailing. A true literary education (whether acquired through a formally established curriculum or through self-organized effort) is able to do this because learning to read works of literature unencumbered by anxieties about their secondary rhetorical uses can only over time lead one to share the perspective on human affairs that serious literature itself cumulatively provides.
This cumulative perspective emphasizes contingency, mutability, what in the title of Samuel Johnson's famous poem is identified as "the vanity of human wishes." The academic left is frequently attacked for its "relativism," but in this regard they would actually be well situated to appreciate the worldview expressed collectively by serious works of literature. Although conservatives and traditionalists have always liked to speak of the literary canon as a kind of repository of wisdom and eternal verities, no one who really loves literature would make such a claim for it, or would have developed a love for it in the first place, except to say that the greatest works of literature portray the universal uncertainty of human life and the agelessly unresolved conflicts stirred up by human aspirations. The Iliad and The Odyssey may be stories about courage, fortitude, overcoming destructive emotions, but they are even more about the fluidity and inadvertence of experience, our sense of it as random and unstable, ultimately beyond our control and its meaning beyond our reach. Academic leftists with the courage of their allegedly relativist convictions would see such works as the strongest confirmation of their beliefs rather the primary exhibits in their actually quite categorical critical briefs.
By "relativist" in this context I mean something closer to a tragic view, although this way of putting it perhaps seems more appropriate to the fatalism of conservatives than the cautious optimism of liberals. However, a recognition of limits, an acknowledgment of the imperfections inherent in the circumstances of human life-although not necessarily an insistence on equating these imperfections with "sin" or "fate" or "evil"-are the almost unavoidable, if mostly inferred, precepts offered up by literature as a whole, as they also ought to be, I would argue, by liberalism as well. The philosopher of liberalism who presented a vision of it often associated with such a view as this is Isaiah Berlin, and it is notable that in advancing a version of liberalism that takes account of limits and alternative perspectives Berlin frequently examined the work of writers belonging more to the history of literature than philosophy, primarily figures prominent in the Russian and German branches of the Romantic movement. Although many of these writers gave expression to impulses Berlin considered illiberal, he nevertheless read their work with a respect that seemed to come from an underlying appreciation of the complexities and the outright paradoxes that literature especially is apt to expose and to which it is often the most useful guide.
Among current proponents of the liberal tradition, the philosopher Richard Rorty and the literary critic Stanley Fish have also, it seems to me, attempted to remind liberals of the dangers of self-certainty and an inflexible adherence to "principle." Both Rorty and Fish are often counted as belonging in their own ways to the academic left, both loosely classed as postmodernists in their defense of what is finally a genuine epistemological and critical relativism. But here again the "postmodernist" label proves less appropriate as a characterization of the academic left than its common usage would suggest, as both Rorty and Fish are each more thoroughgoing in their relativism, not to mention more intellectually rigorous, than the partisans of cultural studies could ever allow themselves to be. Rorty wants the political left to give up on the idea of the all-encompassing narrative, the final explanation, including the belief that history itself unfolds coherently enough to justify claims of acting in its name. Fish reminds liberals of the hollowness of declarations of value-neutral principles that supposedly can be shared by everyone regardless of their prejudices or their deeply ingrained beliefs.
Neither Rorty nor Fish have been universally rewarded with the good favor of liberals for their efforts, much less the approval of the more radical left, for whom such pragmatism would require reconciling themselves to the inconclusiveness and outright muddle of practical politics, as well as a willingness to consider the consequences of political choices and actions in the broadest possible context. For the literary or academic left in particular it would require taking note of the role literature has played in the formation of the political analyses offered by these two writers. Fish, of course, is a highly regarded literary critic and theorist, perhaps the most distinguished Milton scholar of the second half of the twentieth century, whose ability to "read" the larger cultural text composed so prominently by the ongoing legal and political discourse examined in The Trouble With Principle is clearly derived from his undeniable mastery as a reader of literary texts. Rorty has long given respectful attention to poets and novelists, has even suggested that works of philosophy ought now themselves be read essentially as works of literature, and evokes as the presiding spirits of perhaps his most direct and sustained statement of his political philosophy the American writers Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman. Far from imposing on literature external political or philosophical conceptions, each of these important American thinkers has in part allowed their understanding of literature to inform and enrich their perception of the ambiguities inherent to politics and philosophy.
One could perhaps say that the political orientation of the academic left also is informed by their understanding of literature, except that unfortunately their understanding of it is hopelessly restrictive. A simplistic and misinformed view of poetry and fiction as instruments for invoking an expressive order-even when (sometimes especially when) ostensibly presenting an appearance of disorder-and a moral clarity most often missing in the ordinary experiences of real life characterizes academic literary study over the past twenty years or so. This is a curious vestige of the era of New Criticism-and a misreading of it-that accepts a caricatured version of the idea of the autonomy of the literary text but only to assist in isolating and emphasizing the political content to which the poem, story, or novel can more usefully be reduced. But this one-dimensional, circumscribed vision of the nature of literature has another, even more telling consequence when considering the recent wholesale politicization of literary study.
From my perspective, the most noteworthy quality of the political ideals motivating both the theory and the practice of the academic left is the apparent transposition of the orderliness assumed to be constitutive of literature to the frustrating irresolution of the conflicts and controversies of actually existing political life. These ideals substitute well-made fictions for the stubbornly open-ended realities of life as it is lived. It might be argued that it is in the nature of ideals to seem beyond what has so far been achievable, or even ever likely to be achieved, and I would largely accept such an argument. But it has been among the least admirable characteristics of the academic/cultural studies left to have converted what might be perfectly admirable as aspirations, as cultural abstractions useful in forwarding one possible kind of analysis, into ideological certainties that discount and disparage any other form of analysis. As we will see, this propensity is not peculiar to the academic left-or even to the "left" or to political ideology in general-but for scholars whose nominal subject is literature, it is a particularly dismaying if not wholly antithetical habit of mind.
For these literary leftists, this habit of mind can be seen at work both in their specific scholarly writings about literature and in the larger political program-sometimes merely tacit, sometimes quite straightforwardly announced-of which such writing are clearly a part. The former generally take two forms: either writers whose perceived political attitudes are deemed acceptable are celebrated for expressing them, or writers with dubious political credentials are subjected to a remorseless kind of scrutiny designed to uncover their political defects. The first enlists the writers in question in a critique to which they may or may not actually be sympathetic; the second manages as well to advance the same critique and to enlist the writers concerned, despite their manifest lack of sympathy, as a result ultimately diminishing all works and writers to the same uniform level of value as tools in a political analysis that often has precious little to do with the values a less dogmatic reader might take from such works-much less the values even the most critically favored of these writers would be willing to endorse.
But it is in the political program that politicized cultural studies scholars believe themselves to be promoting that the most blatant transfiguration of the real into the fictional can be seen. It is not so much that so many of them persist in sustaining the Marxist vision that the 20th century surely proved, at the very least, illusory, but that they thus persist in the full knowledge that their political desires will never be fulfilled in political reality, giving some poignancy, perhaps, to their continued devotion to the fiction that left-wing radicalism has become, but otherwise only reinforcing the sense they inhabit a world of literal make-believe. Or at least one would think so. I am not entirely certain, finally, exactly how to explain the psychological appeal of acceding to this kind of make-believe, nor do I want to engage in a parallel kind of intellectual fabrication by resorting to the explanation provided by the Freudian psychoanalytic story or any other convenient psychologizing fiction. It could be, however, that immersion in the radical worldview provides, like certain kind of popular escapist fiction, an opportunity to leave behind the muddle of ordinary life in exchange for the narrative clarity and enhanced drama stories make available.
Of course, readers of genre fiction or viewers of Hollywood movies know that these fictions have been created for their entertainment and that their pleasures are momentary, time-limited. Belief in the radical fiction, unfortunately, doesn't often show much awareness of its artificial status and far too many of its enthusiasts choose to pretend that keeping up the faith is a sign of their superior principles. Luckily, most settle for the superiority of their beliefs in the abstract-are satisfied with fiction, in other words-and act on them only in the most cursory and ineffective ways. The academic left is an enclave dedicated almost entirely to theory, for most part disdaining genuine political activity, especially if it might only result in the political empowerment of mere liberals. (Although sometimes maintenance of the fiction does exact its price. The 2000 election is an especially consequential example: better to support Nader and help elect Bush than to sully the dream with the likes of Gore.) Furthermore, the excesses of the academic left have been blatant and well publicized enough that any kind of effective political agitation that might conceivably emanate from this quarter would almost certainly be discounted right from the start-unfortunately even if such agitation happened adventitiously to be in behalf of an otherwise worthy liberal cause (such as, for example, adequate funding of higher education, or environmental protection, or universal health care.)
But the predisposition to live within one's own fiction is by no means restricted to cloistered and starry-eyed academics. And while first-hand observation of this tendency in academe has made me particularly aware of it characteristics and its most common effects, I would again maintain that my primary interest in literature-my belief in its capacity to sharpen the mind's apprehension of the shaping patterns at work both in the imaginative creations of poets and novelists and in the imaginary creations many of us attempt to make of the social, political, and cultural arrangements we must unfortunately settle for in lieu of the more vivid if less tangible worlds evoked by the poets-has made me more alert to the many different forms the aestheticizing of mundane reality can take. If academics are not exclusively susceptible to this confusion, certainly neither are those whose political sympathies lie to the left. Conservatives-especially contemporary American conservatives-are if anything even more eager to impose on a recalcitrant and distasteful reality their favored and well-wrought fictions, despite their professed belief in original sin and the imperfectability of human nature.
Early modern conservatism, exemplified by such figures as Edmund Burke and Henry Adams, was indeed skeptical of utopian and radical thinking, preferring the relative security of the already known to the grand designs for the future of the reformers and revolutionaries. This is not an outlook to be lightly dismissed, although it can easily enough harden into a churlish refusal to countenance the possibility of beneficial change. The subsequent history of conservatism, however, has not so much displayed this particular failing as it has seen the conservative frame of mind evolve into a rigid ideology, a "movement" as ready to impose its own version of the way things should be as any left-wing visionary. It is impossible any longer to think of the "conservative"-at least in the United States-as one who simply resists impulsive change; instead, the postwar American conservative comes fully possessed of a complete collection of well-made fictions, chief among them the unequivocal faith in the "free market" (taken over, to be sure, from 19th century liberals), a fiction so powerful in its influence that conservatives have almost managed to conflate it with democracy itself.
Clearly the free market is a notion of potential utility in a number of contexts, but contemporary conservatives have long since abandoned any concern for utility or consequences in favor of an all-encompassing belief system of which the free market has become the central tenet. So all-encompassing has it become that few conservatives bother to notice the way in which it clearly conflicts with, in some cases even undermines, other equally firm beliefs and ideals to which conservatives claim to be committed. The free market necessarily encourages innovation over stasis, relentlessly overturns established methods, practices, and assumptions, ensuring that change becomes the rule, and not even in the more deliberate, managed way-applying what John Dewey referred to as "intelligence"-that liberals prefer. In its cultural effects the free market inherently suggests that all values are ultimately up for grabs, that the most praiseworthy artistic endeavors are those that sell, that those ideas able to attract the greatest number of devotees are the ones best qualified to be regarded as embodying "truth." The free market would seem to be the most immediate agency of "relativism" itself, for many conservatives the central error and besetting curse of our time.
Yet an affirmation of free market doctrine continues to be the sine qua non of conservative politics, uniting all the "wings" of the late 20th century Republican party, which claims conservatism as its political philosophy. One suspects that this valorization of the free market by conservatives can partially be interpreted as a function of post-World War II conservative anti-Communism, in the expression of which free markets became one of those features of American life that clearly distinguished it from life under communism, that made America America, even though previous conservative thinkers-the Southern agrarians, for example-considered capitalism an element of modern culture disruptive of tradition and traditional values. In the effort to counteract the influence of one monstrous fiction, communism, conservatives resorted to the promulgation of another, less monstrous, fiction, and the intensity of their commitment to it has clearly not abated since the demise of the communist threat. If anything, that commitment has seemed to become more inflexible and grandiose, extending to a vision of the whole world subject to the free market dogma (although a sound liberal argument can be made for what is loosely called "globalization," absent the doctrinaire insistence on upholding free market fantasies.)
While the conservatives' desire to hang on to what has become a crucial article of the faith is testimony to their determination that it continue to shape the course of future economic and social arrangements, their embrace of the doctrine in the first place might be further related to the conservative proclivity to idealize the American past, and to measure the present according to a romanticized, fictionalized version of an American that more directly reflects current conservative presumptions. Thus the NRA image of gun-toting colonials and self-reliant frontiersmen; the family values image of the dutiful wife, the bread-earning husband, of America as a sex-free zone, aside from the respectable bearing of children; the strict constructionist image of a Constitution fixed into place once and for all by a group of white founding fathers whose supreme wisdom literally cannot be challenged. Together the various conservative constituencies create a fictionalized story of America and American customs and institutions that guides political consideration rather than the actual appraisal of present conditions that exist, as they say, on the ground. Such an idealization of one's country is no doubt a precondition for the development of nationalism, and the all too frequent conservative assault on the "patriotism" of their political opponents seems to me more a product of their phantasmal nationalism than anything resembling true patriotism.
Nationalism has arguably been the most destructive force in world affairs over the past century, and at the beginning of the twenty-first its baneful influence is only becoming more apparent. As I write, the G.W. Bush administration is being driven by it toward a potentially catastrophic war on Iraq (catastrophic not so much, perhaps, in its immediate prosecution as in its long-term aftermath), ostensibly to build democracy but just as plausibly to enhance the authority of "America" in a new unipolar world. Of course, this action would likely not be taking place except as part of the response to the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. And these attacks, in turn, were prompted by the one force manifestly even more powerful in its capacity to motivate believers than nationalism: religion. Although much effort has been expended in defending "mainstream" Islam from charges that it is an inherently intolerant and fanatical religion, the rise of fundamentalist Islam to a point of unprecedented popularity and prestige in much of the Muslim world nevertheless exemplifies the way in which theistic religion can so easily become radicalized, can become a fiction so compelling to human credulity that any action undertaken to maintain it becomes justified.
The origin of the current variety of unrestrained terrorism in the wellspring of religion is well captured in the title of Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon's The Age of Sacred Terror. As Benjamin and Simon persuasively demonstrate, this terrorism is not primarily a reaction of the poverty-stricken or even an expression of the grievances of those oppressed by their own governments and who hold the U.S. responsible for propping up those governments, although these are contributing factors. Instead, it is an act of religious observance, of obedience to the demands the al-Queda and other Islamist terrorists believe their religion necessarily makes on them as believers. And they believe because belief in fundamentalist Islam and its dictates best explains to them the dilemma they face as inhabitants of a seemingly hostile and alien modern world. But when Benjamin and Simon quote bid Laden's assertions that "there is no choice but return to the original spring, to this religion, to God's book. Praise and Glory be to him" or Mohammed Atta's final testimony that "it is Satan who causes fear in his followers. These are the admirers of Western Civilization, who have drunk their love for it and their hallowing of it with the cool water, and were afraid for their weak feeble stomachs," it is very difficult not to think of America's own fundamentalists, the Christian zealots of the "Moral Majority" and "Christian Coalition" who have for at least twenty-five years waged their own version of jihad-mostly political and symbolic, but sometimes literal, as in the terrorist attacks on women's health clinics-against a "Western Civilization" that all but follows Satan.
Both the Islamists and the Christian right derive their inflexible and self-certain doctrines from a blinkered and unimaginative reading of their respective holy books, a phenomenon that from a literary point of view reveals equally the most egregiously mistaken of reading strategies and the inevitable havoc to be wreaked by all designated holy books. Those of us drawn to the literary point of view would like to think that acquiring it would ultimately cure both of these ills, but this very source of perspective also leads to the recognition that they are unlikely to be eliminated quite so easily. An approach to both literature and to life allegedly more open to ambiguity and complexity that allowed itself its own kind of self-certainty would hardly deserve to be called liberal.
It is not unusual to find offered by many colleges and universities courses in the Bible or the Koran "as literature." Such courses seek to help students to read these texts for the literary qualities that might not otherwise be perceptible through the more common historical or devotional readings of them. While I would not deny that such qualities can be found in both holy books, we are, in my view, well beyond the point where either of them could be rehabilitated as works of literature ("mere" literature, some would no doubt say). Such literary features as they may have-their poetry, their arresting images, their narrative force-can never be seen as more than adornments, must always be subservient to the message for which they have been supremely valued by the devout. It is unfortunate, to say the least, that so many of these must compensate for their inability to settle for the potential literary power of such books by invoking it in their fearful struggles against the innocently prosaic, ordinary confusions of real life.
Ultimately the cultural studies/academic left exhibits a similar intolerance of the literary representations of these confusions, preferring to cast literary works that reveal them to be synonymous with human reality itself as politically deficient, to valorize instead the evasion of this reality by what are interpreted at least as strategies better suited to reconstructing the world according to more enlightened precepts. The fundamentalist commitment to illusion of the academic left does not, needless to say, pose the same kind of threat that the zealotry of the religionists represents. The academics threaten only to trivialize and undermine the study of literature, and the humanities more broadly. This is a serious enough danger in the long run, although literature will most likely survive its injuries, nevertheless. Still, among those questioning the removal of literature from literary study, if not actively resisting it, ought to be anyone who believes (as I do) that with its loss liberalism would lose an important potential source of strength.
Suffice it to say that such strength does not come directly from literary works that themselves convey an obviously liberal "message." To insist that liberalism be served by incorporating it in this way into the thematics of literature would be as doctrinaire as the ideologies I have here criticized. Instead the strength of literature, and its potential to strengthen liberalism, lies elsewhere. In "The Poet," Emerson writes that "The poets are thus liberating gods. . .They are free, and they make free. An imaginative book renders us much more service at first, by stimulating us through its tropes, than afterward when we arrive at the precise sense of its author." In "stimulating us through its tropes," a great work of literature frees us from previous conceptions and preconceptions that ought always to be challenged. Indeed, it takes away from us our most comforting fictions. Liberals would do well to consider the value of this work.