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.