The Dustbin of Literary History

The proposition that academic literary criticism has by now become a discipline that is no longer much interested in the literary seems to me indisputable. If "theory" initially  diverted the critic's attention away from literature as a subject sufficient to itself as a "field" of inquiry,  the modes of critical discourse that have followed up on theory's demotion of literature to a supporting role in their pursuit of more ambitious goals-e.g., the "new" historicism, cultural studies, ecocriticsm--have further reconfigured academic criticism into an endeavor that, while applying ostensibly separate methods, has converged around a broadly political project--a project that is pretty conspicuously "progressive" in its presumptions.

Concerns about this trajectory in literary study have been expressed since at least the 1980s, but resistance has been largely symbolic and carried out mostly in alarmist books and mass media reports and perhaps reached a crescendo in the early 1990s. Since then, the movement toward politically-motivated criticism and scholarship has only accelerated, and at present there is decidedly little opposition to it from within academic criticism, aside from someone like Rita Felski and the "post-critique movement--and Felski mostly objects to the methodological dominance of political critique, not to the underlying politics. There has been more abundant criticism of the direction literary studies has taken--or at least of the supposed baneful influence of an over-politicized English department--in the popular media, but probably the most palpable sign that something like a reckoning with the consequences of the political transformation of literary study (at least in the United States) is the increasing willingness of legislatures, governing boards, and University Presidents to withdraw support from departments engaged in literary studies (from humanities programs in general), resulting in the closure of such programs in some cases, and a diminution in their size in others. For the first time since the creation of modern literary studies in the early 20th century, the study of literature in the university may actually be at some real peril. 

As a kind of implicit response to these rising voices of dissatisfaction--but more specifically as a response to the efforts of Felski)--Bruce Robbins has written what he calls a "polemical introduction" to the subject of politically-motivated literary criticism, titled simply Criticism and Politics. Robbins wants both to trace the development of such criticism and to defend it. The two dominant influences in Robbins's analysis are the various "liberationist" movements of the 1960s and the work of Michel Foucault. Robbins essentially identifies post-60s academics as the inheritors of the civil rights/women's rights/gay rights struggles of the 60s, translated into the various preoccupations these academics have pursued in scholarly work, while an in-common methodological inspiration is Foucault's critique of the circulation of power in Western culture. Robbins's "polemic" could be said to begin in the limitations of Foucault's approach: Foucault teaches a deep-seated skepticism about the presence and exercise of power, ultimately ruling out any overarching political commitments beyond its diagnosis, since all such efforts would themselves be assertions of power. Robbins doesn't caution about an excess of commitment to politics in academic criticism--he wants it to go even farther, becoming more comfortable with the role of "governing," not just analysis. Only when criticism has led to action can its full promise be fulfilled.

If the notion that university English departments might one day comprise the ruling party in Congress seems too ludicrous even for dwellers in the ivory tower to entertain, I should note that for the most part when Robbins refers to the "literature professor" in this book, he does not have in mind the tweedy gentleman extolling the virtues of Shakespeare. The literature professor now does not really profess literature at all, but continues to go by the name for its institutional status and prestige. The model of the critic Robbins evokes is Matthew Arnold, but Arnold is a critic of culture, not of literature per se, and, despite Arnold's reputation for upholding cultural values the modern academy has come to reject, it is Arnold's attitude to the culture of his time--that it was going in the wrong direction--and his conception of the task of criticism--to oppose "the way things are" in a wayward society--that implicitly motivate academic criticism in the years since the 60s. Robbins casts Foucault as an heir of sorts, "the closest thing the last half century produced to a Matthew Arnold," but whose skepticism toward culture is even more pronounced. 

Literary criticism, then, has become almost entirely cultural criticism. At best, strategies associated with the close reading of literary works might be applied to cultural objects in general, but to think of academic criticism as literary criticism in its more traditional guise is so anachronistic that most critics would not even begin to think of their work in such terms. This is not at all a recent development, but it is one that Robbins takes for granted in his reflections on the political work of criticism. However, as someone who believes in the hoary old notion that literature is literature and politics is politics, that the two mix uneasily at best,  I can't really begrudge Robbins his political program: Literature actually has precious little to do with this program, and if he and others want academic criticism to be a discipline engaged in cultural critique with the ultimate goal of political transformation, I suppose he is welcome to it. I confess I find his belief that academic critics might thus accomplish "governance' (except of its own practices) more or less delusional, but "criticism" in this form has become so divorced from anything that interests me or that I recognize as literary criticism, its ultimate fate leaves me indifferent.

For me, a book like Criticism and Politics leaves lingering in its wake the summary question of why institutional support for the systematic study of literature ultimately failed so utterly to maintain itself. Certainly it showed itself to be vulnerable to shifts in critical fashion. It was arguably New Criticism that solidified the establishment of literary study as part of the curriculum of American universities (although other methods also developed in parallel with New Criticism), but when challenges to the purportedly "disinterested" qualities of these methods began to be heard (presumably from the post-60s insurgents Robbins examines), soon enough a seemingly perpetual series of methods competing for the role of acceptable substitutes ensued, each more determined than the last to avoid the stigma of appearing to be "merely literary" in their assumptions, leading to the current situation in which the literary has finally and emphatically been eliminated altogether. Perhaps academic literary study was always destined to evolve in this way, given the expectations of scholarly "progress" implicit in the academic system, but the ritual scapegoating of New Criticism for its methodological sins has persisted now for so long that it seems to suggest a true antipathy for literature except insofar as it can be enlisted for the scholar's own more "serious" agenda--politics, of course, being the most serious subject of all in our present dispensation.

Presumably the idea of progress in literary study came to seem in conflict with the more "conservative" justifications for the literary curriculum offered by some (but not all) of its 20th century proponents. Such advocates spoke of "preserving" a heritage or "appreciating" a tradition, and while such notions surely did influence the establishment of the "coverage" model in departments of English--attaining the knowledge offered by literary study would require some familiarity with all periods of English and American literature--the methods of teaching these courses always varied according to the predilections of the professors involved, not all of them so focused on reinforcing tradition. The overall effect of this older curriculum was no doubt largely to "conserve" a coherent program of literary study, but so too were all the subsequent efforts to reorganize and transform this curriculum in order to meet changing expectations. Today's literary curriculum is surely not simply random and arbitrary. The difference is that the older one cohered around an informal but mostly understood definition of literature, while the present one coheres around an informal but mostly understood conception of social relevance.

I myself chose to major in English because I wanted to acquire this knowledge of literature. I wanted to read all the books I could that might conceivably be part of literature, although of course I knew that this was something that could not be done simply while I was in college but would be a task that would take a lifetime to complete. If I were entering college today I would not make such a choice. Even if I wanted to read all the books that might conceivably be related to social justice (the option I would now be given), I would see no reason to major in English or literary study to do it. Perhaps my younger self is no longer very representative of the aspirations of artistically or intellectually-inclined college students. But I have to suspect there still are youthful readers who want to discover worthy literary works of both the past and present, works that expand horizons and enlarge experience that have value in themselves as literary art rather than their utility as a means to arrive at the correct political analysis. Of course, these readers do not finally need a program of academic course offerings to accomplish this goal. Indeed, such readers likely need to resort to this sort of self-directed even now,  and the gloomy prospects for the future of literary study in the university at all may mean that a self-education in literature will be the only option available.

Something like this seems to me the only plausible future for literary criticism as well. There are academic critics who review new fiction in newspaper book reviews or general-interest publications, but this sort of criticism remains separate from the work that is rewarded by the academy, which, if not explicitly political in the mode described by Robbins, must still remain in the broader realm of cultural criticism that confers disciplinary credibility. Otherwise, already literary criticism exists only in nonacademic venues, although this does not mean either that most book reviews are engaged in rigorous analysis, or that all book reviewers focus their efforts on assessing the work at hand for its own sake. Many book critics are also more interested in cultural assessment than aesthetic analysis, or at least make their evaluation of a particular book contingent on its value in representing tendencies in culture. Still, this approach mostly rises from the assumption that the literary value of a work, particularly a work of fiction, is in fact to be found in its ability to register the complexities of social and cultural life, not the outright denial of the literary as the subject of critical attention. I am myself not much in sympathy with this mode of critical writing, but if a rejuvenation of literature-centered literary criticism is to occur--and I'm not predicting such a thing--it will have to happen among critics in the popular press, who at least still do not wholly subsume the literary to the project of political transformation.

The metamorphosis of academic literary criticism into the instrument for this political transformation is ultimately regrettable to me not just because my primary commitment as reader and critic is to literature and the critical explication of literature but also because my own political orientation is not that far removed from the aspirations motivating academic criticism as they are delineated in Robbin's account--although I do believe that the appropriate means of political engagement is through direct participation in political actions and not indirectly through politicized scholarship. This is not to suggest that scholarly work should never be political, but the current situation essentially mandates that it should all be political. Similarly, I would not deny the legitimacy of literary works that engage with political themes or express a political commitment. Political questions are as relevant to human reality as any other social influences, and when a skilled writer represents them with the complexity they deserve, of course criticism must attend to the writer's political themes or ideas, but without losing sight of the interplay of these ideas with form or style--the qualities of a piece of writing that make it literary in the first place.

For all of his focus in on the political mission of academic criticism, Bruce Robbins discusses virtually no works of literature that are political in this way. To be sure, his book is a "polemic" about politics and criticism, not politics and literature more broadly, but this omission only reinforces how thoroughly literary study has dislodged literature as its disciplinary subject and academic criticism has ceased to approach the objects of its attention as discreet expressions whose features the critic attempts to make more fully apprehensible. It's no longer just that critics have substituted various works of popular art and media for literary works, but that finally it doesn't really matter what form of expression is involved: the goal of criticism now is to valorize itself, to assert itself as the most essential discursive activity. For Robbins, it is on the verge of seeking real power, "having an impact beyond the world of scholarship" and helping to achieve "solidarity." What is the mere analysis and appreciation of literature when we can instead become a vanguard of liberation?

With the reelection of Donald Trump, doubtless this ambition seems even more quixotic. Academics, in fact, are never likely to be more distant from political power than they will be during this presidency, and the powers that be promise to increase that distance by marginalizing universities even more emphatically, while university administrations will probably only accelerate their defunding and deemphasizing of humanities programs in particular. Of course, academic critics might just redouble their efforts to fashion a newly militant form of academic discourse, but it is hard to figure out exactly what constituency they would be addressing. (The election results suggest that a significant portion of the constituency on whose behalf they assumed they were working actually shifted toward Trump.) This would seem to be the time to recommend some sort of return to the bygone days when academic critics focused their efforts more squarely on studying "literature itself," but this hardly seems a realistic goal--even in the long term, it seems improbable that academics would regain the enthusiasm for simply teaching literature that characterized the discipline's earliest years. The availability of the internet as a medium for engaging in critical discourse, and possibly finding an audience, holds out opportunities for cultivating and sustaining a form of literary criticism not subject to the whims of academic fashion and the regulations of a disciplinary establishment, a path that some readers and critics still drawn to literature might follow. But the era in which perceptions of Literature are dominated by its residence in the university curriculum is about to be consigned to the dustbin of literary history, a history that long preceded it and that will continue after its demise.

Comments

[JARED CARTER]

Brilliant analysis. Throughout the essay one might substitute other terms and phrases -- e.g., contemporary poetry, current visual art -- and the analyses would yield the same conclusions.

[Thomas Cox]

As I was watching the movie "Shakespeare in Love" many years ago, it dawned on me that the play "Romeo and Juliet" likely had zero impact on the politics of Elizabethan England. Instead, it had brought into being a moment of beauty which has now had a 400 year run, and its presence in our lives will outlast current theories about it (those focused on power, etc.) because of this quality. (I leave undefined for now the definition of the quality of "beauty.") The current theories about literature have no doubt made some contribution to our understanding of the great works of art, but I suspect they have had their day, and the current practitioners would do well to be a lot more humble about their contribution and how it will appear centuries from now. For myself, I am grateful I took literature courses years ago when the new criticism helped me find the beauty in works of art and great literature.

[Jerry Dobin]

To those of us with an interest in the humanities, but who are outside the academy and uninterested in Leftist politics, it appears that the public, tuition payers, taxpayers and donors are being sold something called "English Departments" but are actually being defrauded into paying for Leftist activism. Given the political direction the public is going in (and the utter indifference of tuition payers to anything but receiving a degree), it should surprise no one if the future of the university is apolitical STEM and economics/business institutions. This lack will be particularly damaging in an era of shrinking attention spans and increasingly vapid pop culture, but if actual humanities aren't going to be taught, why should the public pay for someone else's political activism?

[Anthony Nassar]

If you consider yourself to be on the Left, then, to sort of agree with Jerry Dobin above, it's you who have been defrauded by English departments. You thought you were going to get political efficacy; what you got was political irrelevance and, most likely, marginal employment for the rest of your life. It was not necessary to tell me, "My own political orientation is not that far removed from the aspirations motivating academic criticism as they are delineated in Robbin's account..." Why would I care? Are you worried that someone will attack you as "conservative"? When I recall the actual political judgments of more-theoretical-than-I fellow graduate students, and the pitiful extent of their actual political activity, I despair. For several decades the Left lied to itself about the working class's slide to the Right (and, arguably, into authoritarianism), while defending more and more opaque "theoretical" (the usage of this term would be risible to a scientist) language as somehow radical.

[Dan Green]

I never wanted "political efficacy." I never wanted politics at all. I only wanted to study literature.

[bryanlsteele]

Thank you for this insightful article. I was a student of Jacques Derrida et al at University of California, Irvine, in the late 1980s. The shift in literary criticism taking place at the time was palpable. For instance, it was verboten to use the term “post-modern” in class or papers.

I see the shift you describe in a slightly different way. I understand the shift in literary criticism away from the literary as being the direct result of abandoning the constraints of post-structuralism. Specifically, abandoning the relationship of the human as the observer engaged in imperfect observations to the human becoming the actor influencing/controlling the observed.

I use Judith Butler’s 1988 article, Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory, as the point of demarcation (others may have a better example). Here, I argue in my new book, Truth, what is it good for?, Butler is a heretic because in this essay she asserts the claim that humans are able to transcend perception, to become like gods, and control that which is being observed. This is heresy to the post-structuralist that assumes some degree of perceptual humility by understanding the imperfect nature of both human perception (Nietzsche) and language (Derrida).

May I suggest that there is no need to distinguish between the literary and non-literary text when it comes to language analysis because at the end of the day, productive analysis is about the play between human perception and the nature of language. Our need is to simply be honest about the limits of perception and language, be aware of how others manipulate those limits and use that as a foundation for general understanding.

[Curtis White]

Bravo. I witnessed this grim evolution between 1980 and 2010 at a state university in the Midwest. My attempt to maintain the relevance of literary aesthetics has itself become irrelevant. Few people even bother to try now. I too read Derrida and Marx but my position was more like that of the murder victims looking down Anton Chigurh's gun barrel in Cormac McCarthy's No Country For Old Men: "You don't have to do this."

[Baal]

Two points: 1) I love History and Literature. I never considered majoring in them in University. I just read a lot of books in both subjects without someone telling me what I should think about each book 2) I think one of the main things wrong with current literature is that it preaches to you and tries to sell you various viewpoints (either to the right or left). Mixing literature studies and politics is fatal and many universities have lost the plot and will soon lose the funding.

[Colin Sargent]

I have to admit I can not stomach most criticism these days. I do not think it is of much value at all after a certain point. It is useful when you first start out, as the weight of all the literature throughout history is immense and seemingly insurmountable. And of course, you know nothing at all about literature in the beginning. Or at least you think you don't.

These academics seem so much wiser and so much more knowledgeable and to have read so much more than you ever could, but slowly you start to come along and pick things up. I have read a whole lot of criticism and I think all it's done for me --save for a few exceptional critics-- is to show me which aspects of literature have little value.

The reality is that we all have a good sense of it from the start and these secondary and explanatory sources serve only to keep us from actually reading the great works. It just takes quite a long time to realize this for yourself and then even longer to understand the fundamental truth of this. Once I realized that Joyce was "padding his stats" with clever tricks as far as the depth and breadth of his reading went I calmed down and stopped worrying about much of this. He did not read as much as he let people believe, he did most of his reading from anthologies and he would champion the lesser known works of his favorites which gives the impression he knew more about them than others, which he of course did, but he did not even come close to reading everything, he just let people believe that he did. This isn't to diminish Joyce, he was and is as great as everyone says, all I'm saying is that we sell ourselves far too short and position the exceptional among us far too high and out of reach.

We do not know our own limits and capabilities and I find that most criticism is an attempt to knock writers down and to make literature what the critic thinks it should be. Fortunately it never works. Also, there is nothing wrong with the state of contemporary literature because all that really matters is the creative, sentient individual. What the general literary world is up to has no real pull on the individual writer unless that writer allows it to.

[Sam]

Sorry to be the only comment that criticizes your premise, but I think there's a lot to disagree with. Personally, I never went through and English department so I can't comment much on how they operate. I do, however, think there are a lot of problems with your argument, even though it seems to spark a lot of zeal in those who agree with you.

But as an outsider, one big thing I found missing in your argument is what you mean by "political." To me that might be directly advocating for particular candidates or registering people to vote. So what is it? I think it may be more something like what I'm told are popular focuses in English departments these days, such as queer or feminist lit, but you don't specify what you mean so your point remains somewhat ambiguous to those of us who are skeptical of what you say.

But that does beg the question, do you mean the offering of queer and feminist lit as being "political?" And if that is the case, is what you really mean by "political" things that would generally offend conservatives? And if this is simply an exercise in getting rid of anything that would offend conservatives, isn't that "political" in itself?

Also, I think you are walking on very thin ice when you limit "aesthetic analysis" to a point it excludes "cultural assessment." That too is an entirely political choice on your part, and in doing so you are attempting to erase a couple of generations worth of literary theory, and I'm sorry, you have entirely missed the mark I think it's at this point your whole argument falls apart.

I don't see anything in your argument that shows anything new in English departments that haven't been there for something like fifty years. To say these "political" things have destroyed English departments over what, the less five to ten years, tells me you are not seeing the facts of the matter very clearly; you seem to be merely climbing on the zeitgeist train which mysteriously seems to follow exactly what reactionary billionaires want to see removed from our society. And that too is a uncompromisingly political position you have taken.

Feel free to publish my comment or not (my guess is you will not), but I hope you can at least see that aesthetic analysis, or "critical taste," would be horribly thinned, devolved and distorted if you force out cultural analysis, or even the political. Also, your argument is no less "political" than those you so angrily denounce.

[Dan Green]

I mean by "political" what Bruce Robbins means by it in Criticism and Politics. His account of the current orientation in academic criticism is the focus of my critique.

[Colin McGillicuddy]

I drank myself out of a Biochemistry undergrad into which I had originally enrolled mostly to appease my father (a P. Eng), and backed into an English degree in second year primarily because that was the subject for which I was awarded the prize at my high school graduation. I ended up leaving grad school after my MA in English almost 40 years ago now for a variety of reasons, not least that I foresaw a discipline increasingly fragmenting into n-many sub-sects mostly about something else entirely. It also occurred to me that the hiring landscape in academia was going in a direction that would favour those who were more ready to embrace it or who could be seen to embody it in certain ways which weren’t likely to suit me. If this essay is any indication of the current state of Literature studies it would appear that my instincts weren’t entirely terrible. It’s good nonetheless to see that there are those out there with more commitment to the field than I could muster, still struggling to maintain some sort of focus on the texts themselves and resisting the centripetal forces which make it so difficult.

I don’t regret the time I spent all those years ago, much of it engaged in close reading of poetry which increasingly had no readership — poems appearing in British newspapers on the occasion of Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow, for instance. And I still can’t give up the habit of annotating the books I read (now primarily political economy); some habits are more difficult to break than others.

[Sam]

Thanks for your response. I must admit I was not expecting it, but really it's a strange response. Why reference a book rather than make a direct argument? I don't understand, does some reference to a book make a case? No, it could only be a footnote, of course. I'm not sure what your argument is here. I don't think you answering legitimate skepticism towards your position. Why does Bruce Robbins legitimate the dynamiting of a half century of literary theory so people who blanche at "the political" can go to their 'safe space,' so to speak? If anything "political" disturbs you, what does society owe you? What do English departments owe you? If you don't like queer lit, for instance, why not simply not take the class instead try to have it abolished for not being copacetic to your "critique of taste" (or aesthetic theory)? If including culture or politics in literary aesthetics (critique of taste) makes it bad, what if I think it makes aesthetic theory (critique of taste) richer? I'm not sure why your personal distaste of the political should mean I can't find it valid and acceptable in an English department. Sorry, I just don't think you have a solid position.

[Dan Green]

I referenced a book because the post is a response to that book.