Simon During notes, in an essay appearing in The Chronicle of Higher Education, that "There’s a conservative turn happening in literary studies, although it hasn’t received much public attention." By "conservative turn," During means not a sudden switch from a currently ascendant left-wing political agenda to a more right-wing perspective (perhaps more in line with the Trumpism that just triumphed in the recent Presidential election), but a "return to disciplinary bedrock, an insistence that the methods and purposes that first defined the discipline be respected and, in some form or other, resuscitated."
Readers interested in dispatches from an increasingly distressed discipline of academic literary study may have noticed this deviation in course, according to During, in the small but still significant number of books published by literary scholars in the last decade or so that have attracted some attention. Prefigured by Rita Felski and other advocates of "post-critique" (motivated by the belief that literary scholarship has become too invested in literary criticism as "critique" rather than a less heavy-handed appreciation of literary texts), these books include, most prominently, Joseph North’s Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History, Michael Clune’s A Defence of Judgment, and John Guillory's Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organization of Literary Study, as well as his most recent book, On Close Reading. During also cites what appears to be a shift in emphasis in the writing of Terry Eagleton, once a stalwart of critique who has exhibited a rather more traditional identification with the likes of T.S. Eliot.
During's use of the term "conservative" is probably unfortunate, since an association with the politically conservative is inevitable (although the extent to which Trumpism itself should actually be called conservative is questionable), and none of the books During cites could plausibly be labeled "conservative" in this sense. (Eagleton, of course, is in fact a Marxist). These writers implicitly contend that the current disciplinary ambitions to use the study of literature to help achieve social change (in During's words, to assume the role of "society's conscience") should be scaled back, in favor of a return to something like literary study's original purpose--to seriously inquire into the phenomenon of literature in the rigorous way expected of an academic discipline--but this signals no allegiance to political conservatism. Indeed, in his book Joseph North defends aesthetic analysis in specifically left-wing terms, contending that the current dispensation in academic criticism only reinforces the dominion of neoliberalism, which only the study of literature in its aesthetic dimension can combat.
During seems to suggest that this attempted rollback by (for now, at least) a small number of more tradition-facing literary scholars is ultimately motivated by the perception that literature as an academic subject is now threatened on several sides--by the devotees of the "evangelical humanities," who have enlisted in it their effort to establish social justice, by the forces on the right that have finally elevated their reaction against politicized academic scholarship into a political movement strong enough to dislodge it, and by the university governing bodies that are strangling humanities scholarship, especially in literature departments, of its institutional resources--and is in danger of being forsaken altogether. They want the study of literature to be reinstated on the principle underlying "first-wave academic literary criticism" starting in the 1920s and 30s, which according to During, was simple enough: this criticism "was based on a love of literature."
It isn't clear whether During is also contending that the authors he connects to the "conservative turn" also share a similar sort of deep attachment to Literature (it is more likely that During himself does), but I believe that describing the motivation behind the establishment of English (the study of literature more broadly) as an academic subject as merely the "love of literature" is at best an oversimplification, if not simply wrong. Gerald Graff, in what I consider to be still the definitive history of the emergence of literary study as a "field," Professing Literature, shows how a more rigorous approach to criticism ultimately overcame the resistance of the academic establishment, displacing philology (considered more "scientific") and proving more credible to skeptics of the study of literature than the kind of "appreciation" espoused by prewar humanists. If love of literature of a sort did underly the development of New Criticism (and other allied text-based approaches), the goal of these efforts was not to offer classes encouraging a love of literature but to secure literature as a subject worthy of serious study through creating the "knowledge" that a scrupulous method of literary criticism could provide. If there were always disagreements about what the proper methods of criticism should be, there was tacit agreement that the method used would contribute to the shared project of illuminating the object of study--works of literature, as well as their relation to each other in the unfolding of what could be conceived as "literary history."
This project was sustained until at least the 1970s and 80s, when critical theory began to overshadow the established literature curriculum--although in many cases the application of theory was consistent enough with the original goal of elucidating literary works. Since then, the objective of literary study has been more nearly reversed: the point is no longer to use scholarly or critical tools to enhance our encounter with literature but to use literature to amplify the contexts within which literary works are created, frequently reducing them to their facility in reproducing those contexts, their residual aesthetic value either ignored or implicitly denied. (Even works whose aesthetic value is assumed are explicated for their cultural and political meanings.) I well remember living through the beginnings of this shift, when I was just out of graduate school and would hear some in my professional cohort (other graduate students seeking work, young Assistant Professors) denigrating what had until then been the prevailing assumptions about the practice of academic literary criticism, most of them dismissed for "privileging" the literary text itself while neglecting the extrinsic conditions that brought it into existence and gave it significance. It did seem to me that such people were in fact mistaking these assumptions about the role of criticism for a "love of literature," regarded as unworthy of serious scholars, but which I, for one, would never have attempted to make the basis of practice, either in writing about literature or in the classroom.
I don't even know how a curriculum intended to transmit a love of literature would actually work. Simply presenting students with selected "great works" and inviting them to love (or at least like) them surely would accomplish nothing. Examining how they merit the characterization "great" (how they work) seems a more productive approach, although it then becomes unclear why the focus needs to be on "great" works, since "love of literature" doesn't seem restricted to only the greatest achievements ("canonical" works are sometime canonical for reasons not strictly related to their greatness). Nor is it apparent that this method need be in service to "love" of literature. Critical analysis seems a valuable skill in its own right, and could be profitably applied to lower-tier literary works, even those whose quality might be in question. Of course, the emphasis has now shifted from literature per se to criticism, but I fail to see how a program of literary study would be anything but a prodigiously extended reading group without a critical procedure to give it coherence. Old-fashioned Arnoldian humanists might want to give the veneration method a try, but I don't think the modern university would be a congenial place for it.
During actually seems to suggest a plan something like this, as he envisions the lovers of literature reduced to "a small cohort of erudite fandom" occupying the margins of academe (although I don't think "fandom" is exactly what Matthew Arnold had in mind). Good luck to him. Otherwise, a neotraditional curriculum of literary study attempting to renew its original mission, one that at least embodied a respect for literature if not unabashed love, that operated according to a belief that literature provides us with a kind of incorporeal knowledge, distinct from but just as important as the more conventional kind, requires a faculty dedicated to that belief. The books that During cites notwithstanding, I see little evidence that current academics still nominally identified as "literature" professors (at least in the trend-setting departments and professional organizations) hold any such belief.