The Reading Experience

Teaching the Book

Miriam Burstein correctly notes that to the literary historian "aesthetic objections are neither here nor there" if a particular text has proven to be influential on subsequent writers. Whether that text might be "overrated" in purely aesthetic--or, for that matter, any other--grounds is irrelevant if an accurate account of genre or period is your concern or if looking at the broad sweep of literary history is of more immediate importance than the aesthetic credibility of a single work.

However, Miriam expresses her concerns about the relevance of "aesthetic objections" in the context of pedagogical practice, of the way in which literature is taught in academic courses: "I still have to teach the book (if it's in my field, anyway)," she writes, "whether or not I want to throw it into the nearest recycling bin." Balancing historical and aesthetic issues is "the great challenge of developing a survey course."

I don't disagree with anything Miriam says here, but what she says does underscore the extent to which the prerogatives of academe, of instruction more broadly, dominate our view of "literary history," perhaps in some cases even shape the way literary history is brought into being in the first place. The purpose for which surely all novelists or poets want their work to be received--to provide aesthetic pleasure, to entertain and provoke--is displaced for the academic critic by the need to chronicle, categorize, and contextualize. Indeed, as Miriam herself concedes, "from the POV of literary history, it's quite possible to 'overrate' a novel's importance (the extent to which it attracted imitators, was genre-changing or -originating, etc.) by pointing to its aesthetic superiority."

As a move made as a reponse to the perceived requirements of a "field," such overrating makes sense. But if the requirements boil down to a novel's capacity to spawn imitators or alter genre conventions, then plenty of aesthetically superior works are going to be excluded from survey courses. Tracking the development of formulas and genre-bending (not breaking) becomes the "subject" of literature courses and scholarship, and, although this approach does not displace actual literature from literary study as directly and thoroughly as does the focus on theory or cultural study, it does still remove the experience of literature--the opportunity to read the most potentially rewarding works of fiction and poetry--from the center of attention. From the perspective of a "literary history" by which such history makes us aware of the most rewarding works it has produced, this makes less sense.

But then the attempt to make literary study a way of invoking this understanding of literary history has already failed, anyway, as William M. Chace's recent article in The American Scholar attests. It probably deserved to fail, since the emphasis on deep reading experience was never really compatible with the accompanying belief held by many older-style literary humanists that, as Chace puts it, "this discipline had certain borders and limitations and that there were essential things to know, to preserve, and to pass on." Either reading great works is a series of singular experiences during which "essential things" are always open to question or it is part of a pre-established curriculum to be preserved and passed on. It is either the opportunity to find and follow one's own reading bliss or it is done within the context of a "field" to be demarcated. Since in each case the latter is much easier to accomplish than the former in an academic setting--to even justify as academic activities--it is unsurprising that determining what are the best books to teach has won out over discovering what are the best books to read.

Selectivity

In a post discussing his list of "Best American Fiction, 1968-1998," D.G. Myers makes this assertion:

Literature just is a selection of masterpieces. There is no getting around this obstacle. The problem is what criteria of selection you are going to use.

I really can't imagine a more reductive and, especially for a literary scholar who professes to love literature, a more implicitly dismissive view of the value of literature and literary study. It's all about choosing up sides and announcing that your "criteria" are better than the other side's?

That "literature" is determined by selection--ideally, in Myers's case, by scholars, but presumably by whomever--would surely come as a surprise to all those writers who thought their own efforts to define and redefine the "literary" through their work had something to do with the way "literature" is received. Apparently literature has nothing to do with reflection on how a work of fiction or poetry might be created, or how it might appropriately be read, nothing with determining how literature differs from other kinds of writing, with the possibilities of language, with human imagination, nothing to do with the evolution of literary forms over time and across cultures. It's a competition to see how many lists onto which the work in question might appear. It's certainly true there's a long-term "selection" of books that make it onto our collective reading list--the test of time--and the judgments of critics play some part in this process, but individual lists of masterpieces are just momentary bursts of opinion.

Putting aside the difficulty of determining which works count as "masterpieces" in the first place, at least once you've gathered the usual suspects, why must we concern ourselves only with masterpieces? Is there no pleasure to be found in a "minor" but still accomplished work, nothing to be learned from the flaws in an unsuccessful one? I admit that I myself am sometimes overly impatient with books that don't engage my interest early enough, but in some cases I probably would have found something of value if I'd stayed with them, even if I'd never put them on a list of Best This or Best That. In other cases I really can't see any contribution to "literature," but such books still raise questions about definition and method that do contribute to the discussion about literature, and for that reason are worth reading.

Later in his post, Myers claims "For literary critics there are, as I see it, only two choices. Either the course of intellectual honesty, where a man admits that there are books that are not worth reading, or the course of literary preening, where he pretends to enjoy books because he thinks he should." I'd suggest a third: admit that there are books not worth reading but in doing so don't conclude you've engaged in an act of criticism or made some contribution to the proper definition of "literature." Making lists does not make literature magically come into existence, although it does make the prospect of teaching literature more manageable and does allow one to make one's points about whatever subjects one's selection has made available. Presumably they will be those points opposed to the points being made by the guy who has selected the books "he thinks he should." In this way, literature surely does become more than "a selection of masterpieces." It becomes the act of overcoming that "obstacle" and casting literature aside in favor of promoting one's own wisdom.

Unmoored

I agree with Jonathan Mayhew that for literary study "Mere 'appreciation' seems a little cloying, a little narrow, in prescribing an attitude of silent awe." The experience of literature is grounded in "mere appreciation" (although I would contend that "appreciation" is a much more concentrated and difficult task than its connotation as passive "admiration" usually suggests), but if the study of literature is to go beyond the initial (or even repeated) intensified encounter with the work, it does need to, in a sense, leave the "appreciation" of the work behind. Even a more methodical analysis of the specifically aesthetic elements of a text has to suspend immediate appreciation in order to focus on the particular devices the text incorporates and on the effect these devices create--in other words, on how the text works. "Silent awe" is hardly a useful response when the actual study of literature takes place.

But I can't agree--based on my reading of most scholarly articles published in most "name" academic journals--that for very many academic critics "it is simply taken for granted that there are other questions to be asked aside from 'what makes this poem beautiful?' and that the discipline can't go anywhere being confined to that question. In other words, appreciative admiration is assumed (somewhere in the background) but is not itself the goal." It is true that "there are other questions to be asked" aside from the aesthetic ones, but I don't believe that academic criticism in its current manifestation assumes "appreciative admiration, " foreground or background. Or if it does make such an assumption, it does so only to dismiss aesthetic appreciation as the concern of naive readers who haven't been apprised of the strategies employed by academic critics to transcend the "merely literary" in favor of more "serious" issues of politics and sociology.

And it may be true that the "discipline"--literature as submitted to the protocols and conventions of academic inquiry--can't remain "confined" to the question of aesthetic beauty, but this is a problem not for literature per se but for the subject "literature" as it is defined within the academic curriculum. In a recent profile in The Chronicle of Higher Education of M.H. Abrams, Jeffrey Williams comments in passing that "Today the New Criticism, the dominant approach to close reading from the 1940s until the 1960s, seems narrow and constraining." New Criticism was constraining only to the extent that to use it meant to attend entirely to the literary qualities of literature, to withhold biography, history, and politics as subjects tangential to the focused analysis of literary writing. Presumably those more interested in history or politics than in literature would indeed find New Critical close reading "narrow and constraining," although one could ask why such scholars chose literature as their course of study as opposed to, say, history or politics. As Jonathan himself says, "when literary studies forgets the aesthetic, watch out! The discipline becomes unmoored from its reason for being, confused in its aims."

I'd have to say that the discipline of literary study has become more than unmoored and confused. I'm afraid that "the overt hostility to aesthetic questions in certain quarters," as Jonathan puts it, has become the mainstream attitude among academic literary critics. Some writers might still be valued because they can be used to shore up ideological positions, but "literature" as the record and register of literary art is held in contempt, at best the avocation of amateur readers (including bloggers), at worst a fancy instrument of oppression wielded by hyperliterate elites. If the only way works of literature can usefully be brought into the classroom or the pages of academic journals is to examine them for their "social constructions", or to expressly belittle mere aesthetic questions, in my opinion, as I've said here before, the best thing for literature would be to remove it from academic curricula altogether.

Learning How to Write

William Bradley at the blog Incertus takes issue with the recommended "goals" of creative writing instruction for undergraduates as expressed by AWP. The first two goals listed are "An Overview of Literature" and "Expertise in Critical Analysis", while "Understanding of the Elements of a Writer’s Craft" comes in third. Bradley asks:

Does it seem odd to anyone else that "Understanding of the Elements of a Writer's Craft" is listed as the third goal for creative writing instruction? Doesn't it seem like learning how to write should be priority number one? Yes, getting a strong background in literature and honing critical thinking skills are important, but aren't they important in a creative writing class because they help facilitate the goal of students learning how to write?

I do find it odd, but only because I would have thought that by now the AWP would have given in to complaints about requiring literature courses for creative writing degrees and given its approval to craft-driven approaches. This would only be in keeping with the general drift toward "practical" relevance in most undergraduate degree programs, and it's to the AWP's credit that it hasn't yet gone with the flow.

Learning how to write should indeed be the ultimate goal for students in creative writing, but exactly how one would learn this without the widest possible familiarity with literary history and with the basic principles of literary analysis is not at all apparent to me. Students who take "learning how to write" seriously are not learning a set of rules or some generalized standards that simply need to be applied. They are learning how they might eventually write poems that do not just invoke the name of "poetry" as it has been codified into a set of established precepts or write fiction that does not just perform some known variations on the "well-made" story. They can do these things, in my opinion, only when they are relatively familiar with the "tradition" that gives their own work definition and that in turn they hope to revise or modify. (This can certainly be done by any aspiring writer without the mediation of an academic program, although an academic creative writing program should make this encounter with tradition more focused and more organized, or else it really has no useful reason to exist.) And I really don't understand how a "strong background in literature" can "facilitate the goal of students learning how to write" unless it comes first. Otherwise, works of literature are used only for imitation, to illustrate ""pacing" here or "characterization" there.

To approach creative writing instruction with the assumption that "the elements of craft come first" is to reinforce the idea that "writing" can be reduced to a collection of techniques and devices the student must master in order to become a certified writer. Creative Writing programs probably already do reduce the writing of poetry and fiction to a simple "how-to" process, and perhaps for reasons that at one time, at least, were unavoidable. "An Overview of Literature" and "Critical Analysis" (mostly understood as formal analysis and "close reading") were expected to be at the heart of literary study as offered by most English departments, to which was added "creative writing" as a kind of practicum. Over the past twenty-five years, most English departments have more and more withdrawn from this arrangement, offering less and less of an "overview" in order to concentrate on Theory or Cultural Study, and programs in Creative Writing, both at the undergraduate and the graduate level, are going to have to pick up the slack by providing more critical-literary instruction or else their students will have practically no "background in literature" at all.

One of the first things they should do is to insist that there is no "craft" involved in writing poetry and fiction unless this simply means that both forms have a history that provides us with models of how the form was used at some point in the past. Imitating those models might have some initial pedagogical value, but ulimately the best writers will learn how to discard them. Beyond that, craft becomes only the self-applied anasthetic of literature.

Analytic

In his post on "Everything Studies," Joseph Kugelmass suggests that

If the humanities were to re-shape itself in order to accomodate the changing shape of culture, all of the analytical disciplines would combine—Philosophy, Political Science, English, Comparative Literature, History, Sociology, Anthropology, and the rest—while the creative disciplines would remain separate, including Creative Writing, Dance, Theater, Visual Arts, and Musical Composition. Critics and scholars are not always good artists, and vice versa. The grounds for such a merger would be basically ideological. If we accept the idea that our beliefs about the world are essentially constructions, then it makes sense to give the study of those constructions the widest possible scope . . . .

I would be willing to accept this proposal (with one proviso, discussed below), but there are actually a number of assumptions about both art (the "creative disciplines") and about academic study that need to be unpacked from this passage I've quoted.

That the humanities needs to be re-shaped because of the "changing state of culture" signals the extent to which the "humanities" as a marker of a certain kind of academic study has completely lost its original meaning. The "humanities" disciplines were those that resisted the scientific modes of inquiry in favor of a more impressionistic, a more humane (as in "humane learning") approach to certain kinds of human productions and experiences. That these disciplines now focus almost exclusively on a quasi-scientific study of "culture" suggests that "humanities" as an umbrella term ought to just be dropped in favor of the more descriptive "cultural studies," which might indeed include "everything."

"Analytic" is of course a nice term to be used whenever it's necessary to distinguish between mere emotional and instinctual artists and real thinkers--the intellectually rigorous (and properly credentialed) "scholars" who can cut through all the artsy-fartsy rigamarole favored by the "creative" types and let us know what all cultural activites are finally really about. Thus dividing existing disciplines into the "analytic" and the "creative," while potentially liberating for the "creative" endeavors, is also partly a good way to get the academic dilettantes out of the way of the Serious people.

The notion that "our beliefs about the world are essentially constructions" (revised in the next paragraph to "the world is constructed by human beings"), however much it may ultimately be true, is also a neat way to marginalize the "creative disciplines," which are merely engaged in fashioning aesthetic objects and not "the world" (at least not until such objects are interpreted by the analytic disciplines.) The Everything Studies or Cultural Studies or Symbolic Systems Studies scholars are dedicated to understanding "the world," not just the trinkets or the word-games created by artists. Art and literature are useful tools if they can be enlisted in the larger "ideological" project of establishing social constructionism as the dominant worldview (at least among intellectuals), but they surely don't merit consideration as aesthetic constructions in their own right.

Joseph's distibution of "disciplines" to be included as "creative" is tellingly literal: "creative writing" but not English or Comparative Literature; "Visual Arts" but not art history; "Musical Composition" but not music history or analysis. It is certainly the case that "Critics and scholars are not always good artists, and vice versa," but surely the study of artistic forms is enhanced by some appreciation of artistic practice, just as, more importantly, programs focusing on artistic practice benefit from some attention to "analytic" questions. Partitioning the "creative" subjects so thoroughly from criticism and scholarship may seem to remove a source of contention so that both the creative and the analytic disciplines can get on with their "real" work, but I think it would ultimately only make disciplines such as English or Art (to the extent they don't just collapse into the sociology that "Everything Studies" wants to be) even more unappealing to students (who usually pursue these disciplines out of an initial enthusiasm for reading fiction or poetry or for experiencing works of visual art), and would almost certainly further marginalize creative writing or theater or music as "soft" performance-based programs useful mostly for "nurturing" writers and artists.

Thus I would endorse the Kugelmass Proposal (as if it needed my endorsement or not) only if, say, "creative writing" was understood to include not just a series of writing workshops but also a critical component that offered some exposure to literary history (emphasis on "literary" rather than "history") as well as some focus on literary criticism. This ought not to bother the faculty in Everything Studies, since this criticism would be "analytic" of literature as literature, not as another way of registering "the changing state of culture." It might have the happy consequence of returning the term "literary criticism" to its rightful place as the criticism of literature--especially new works of literature--and of transforming the academic criticism that has so misleadingly appropriated the term into something else--"everything criticism," I guess. But since academic critics have long eschewed examining anything so trifling as the merely literary, and are so eager to move on to Everything, I can't see why they would object.

Note: You can read my lengthier proposal for an expanded Department of Creative Writing here (text here).

Open Paths

King Wenclas is not wrong:

Literature can't be taught. All the instructor can do, at most, is leave the student an open path. Then, through reading, the student finds the meaning, his own meaning, for himself.

Rather than classrooms I would have silent reading rooms with widely spaced armchairs, so the student can read-- whatever he wants, but read. Reading is the only way to learn what literature is about.

On the other hand, he's not completely right.

"Literature" can't be taught, unless it's construed as a unified collection of "great works" embodying "the best that has been said and thought." That is, unless it's viewed as Universal Wisdom or essentially as propaganda, to be used to illustrate cultural or national greatness.

Students can be taught to read more efficaciously, however, thus sending them on their "open path" more prepared to find what they're looking for and better able to determine what's worth reading and taking seriously in the first place.

They can be taught to read for style and form, for subtlety and implication, rather than for just "the meaning," whether such meaning is subjectively held or not. This can be done not to satisfy the fancypants vanity of the overeducated instructor but to enhance every individual reader's ability to have a fully satisfying reading experience, an experience that includes but goes beyond extracting "meaning" and allows the reader to reconstruct the aesthetic strategies the author employed in embodying meaning, and in some cases to perceive effects of both manner and meaning of which the author him/herself was not necessarily aware. That some "plegmatic professors" use critical discussions to reinforce their own authority does not make all methods of critical reading and analysis inherently invalid.

However, by and large I agree with the King. Beyond a certain point what readers "get" from literature comes directly from, well, reading. There were times in my otherwise benighted career as a literature instructor when I did indeed think the best thing I could do for my students was to lead them to "silent reading rooms with widely spaced armchairs" where they could burrow deeply into the text at hand. But this is not an MLA-approved pedagogical procedure, and I can't say I miss the days when I would desperately search for an approach to teaching literature that was pedagogically sound and that would justify my taking up space at the front of the classroom.

This essential incompatiblity between the protocols of the classroom and the imperatives of literature--defined as particular works read for their immediate literary value--is probably what most explains the decades-long move in academe away from an emphasis on "literature itself" to an emphasis on literary theory and cultural studies. At best, the literature classroom can only be talk about literature, not the opportunity to experience literature. Students can share their experiences after the fact, but this has limited value as well; it's not a practice around which an entire curriculum of study can be built. Theory and social analysis lend themselves much more easily to classroom pontification, and more readily provide a patina of coherence and intellectual sophistication that focusing on the "merely literary" cannot so easily provide.

The student who would prefer to study literature for its own sake might indeed have to do that "for himself."

What's Already Been Written

The recent very valuable interview with Stephen Dixon in the Baltimore City Paper contains this exchange:

CP: According to a recent National Endowment for the Arts study, "Reading in Risk," [today's students] are worse at reading. They're writing a lot more and reading a lot less.

SD: They're right. They're actually right. When I give stories to undergrads, I'll ask who's read Tolstoy. Nobody's read Tolstoy. Or I mention James Joyce, when we read a story from Dubliners, maybe one or two have read a story in high school. When I first started out, kids were much more serious as readers, and I could actually have literary discussions with them, which I cannot do now. Even the ones who are the most avid writers are not avid readers. They just want to write.

CP: Everyone has a novel inside them, but no one reads anybody else's, then. Is that a problem?

SD: It's a paradox. It hasn't really stopped undergrads from becoming better writers than the readers who were writing before. You would think just the opposite. But then there's a problem. We grew up on Dostoevsky, Conrad, if there was ever a serious name, we read that writer. It also told us what not to write, because if the thing has been taken up already, and you have a history of having read it, you want to go on to something new. So a lot of students are sort of writing what's already been written.

Dixon seems to be suggesting that writing programs are good for raising writing abilities up to a point--the point at which mere "craft" leaves off--but that great writers are produced only through the inspiration of other great writers, and this as much through learning "what not to write" as through imitation. As Dixon says, "if the thing has been taken up already, and you have a history of having read it, you want to go on to something new."

Too much current literary fiction--which certainly is produced in greater bulk than even twenty or thirty years ago, mostly due to the proliferation of writing programs--too obviously bears the influence of being "workshopped." It's competent, tidy, duly serious, but ultimately just another version of "what's already been written." Workshops instill conformity and a respect for the "mastery" of pre-established skills, but if a truly innovative writer emerges from one or another of the MFA programs, it's usually an accident, something that's happened despite the strictures of the workshop or because the writer was gifted to begin with. Conrad or Faulkner would have been laughed out of most "creative writing" programs.

Dixon's own work is a good example of the kind of fiction that would be smacked down in most writing workshops. All those absurd run-on declarative sentences, those characters who sound alike, those circular, stop-start plots! Yikes. Didn't anyone ever teach him what a well-made story is like? Doesn't he know that Hollywood producers would never even pause over such idiosyncratic stuff when scouting out their next "source material"? What's Barnes and Noble going to do with it?

A good argument could be made that if creative writing programs don't produce better readers , they're not worth much. Certainly conventional literary study is no longer focused on perpetuating a culture of reading, on inculcating the reading habit and cultivating a readerly sensibility. If the remaining area of academic study still ostensibly dedicated to literature as literature and to fostering literary talent is now a place where "literary discussions" can't take place because writing has been severed from its roots in reading, the future of "creative writing" is a bleak one indeed.

The Ways That Poetry Gets Taught

In a debate about the efficacy of "teaching poetry" as a way of increasing the audience for it (with, among others, Josh Corey), Eric Selinger asserts:

I would say that some poets don't have many readers because of the sorts of poems they write, but that the reason most poets don't have many readers is because of the ways that poetry gets taught in this country--or not taught, as the case may be--from grade school onward. If poetry were taught, for example, as part of the national patrimony, with the assumption that elementary students should know their Whitman and Dickinson, Hayden and Hughes, because these are our great national poets, just as French students and Italian students learn Baudelaire or Petrarch early on, there would probably end up a wider audience for poetry.

I'm continually surprised by how thoroughly the idea that literature is ulimately something to be taught in schools has become unexamined wisdom. At best, works of poetry or fiction might be useful in building vocabulary or learning the role of figurative language, or as supplements to other courses such as history or social studies, but in these instances literature itself is not really the "subject" at hand. (Which itself is problematic. If literature is finally pedagogically helpful only as something that can be added for illustrative purposes to other areas of study, most students are likely to view it in their future lives as nonessential, purely as the means to another, more important, end.) To study poetry as poetry requires a sensitivity to language and to the possibilities and purposes of aesthetic form that, frankly, most teachers lack and most students have no interest in developing. But I'm not sure why either should be expected to possess such sensitivity. A taste for poetry is a minority taste, has always been a minority taste, and, despite all the efforts to make poetry "relevant" to readers who otherwise couldn't care less (perhaps because of them), will always be a minority taste. And I don't understand why this is considered to be a problem. Physics is a minority taste as well, but physicists don't seem to spend much time brooding over the fact that most people don't read physics journals..

Thus the only really feasible argument on behalf of teaching poetry in school is the one Selinger advances here--"as part of the national patrimony, with the assumption that elementary students should know their Whitman and Dickinson, Hayden and Hughes, because these are our great national poets." But this "national greatness" approach is probably the very worst way of convincing young readers to give a poetry a chance. Whitman and Dickinson get elevated (or, more accurately, reduced) to the level of all the other "great" historic figures whose achievements are duly recited but otherwise ignored. To tell these young readers that such poets are part of their "patrimony" is only another way of saying they should read poetry because it's good for them, a strategy that will only make it certain they'll never want to read a line of verse ever again.

I favor the opposite strategy: take literature out of the schools altogther, even out of college (at least as a required course). Those who might realistically develop an interest in poetry or serious fiction will come to it not because it's been forced on them but because it's been freed of all taints of the "academic," of something one learns in school and then forgets. Emphasize the way poetry embodies values and practices that are precisely at odds with the conformist attitudes enforced by "school." Take it out of the classroom and let it breathe.

Literary Illiteracy

Reason editor Nick Gillespie reports on a panel entitled "English Studies and Political Literacy":

The University of Chicago's Kenneth Warren emphasized the role of pre-college education, even as he gently chided moderator [Donald] Lazere for subtly equating "political literacy" with agreement on a particular political agenda. Lazere argued that instructors shouldn't shy away from politics in their classroom, because "literature can't be studied independent of political literacy." In fact, he said, they should bring in a wide array of sources, including The Nation and The Weekly Standard, where appropriate or relevant. That's all well and good. . . .

No, that isn't "all well and good." The notion that "literature can't be studied independent of political literacy" is bullshit. It's this idea that's brought ruin upon "English Studies" to begin with. It's just another way of trivializing literature, making it subservient to politics or culture or history or whatever. What other academic discipline has to endure this kind of marginalization, even on the part of those who belong to it? What would political scientists say if it were asserted that in order to understand politics one must first know poetry? Is it the case that, say, microbiology "can't be studied independent of political literacy"? Why is it only literature that can't be allowed its own autonomy, its own integrity as a subject that might be studied for its own sake and might provide its own kind of knowledge?

I am just old enough to have gone through graduate school before "English Studies" became entirely a hostage to political advocacy. I can attest that many of my fellow students were apolitical, at least as far as their approach to literary study was concerned. Some had decided to study literature precisely because it was removed from the hectoring insistence of political debate and required no political "literacy" in the sense this term is being used by Gillespie and the participants in this panel--i.e., they were free to ignore the inanities of politicians and other self-appointed cultural savants. Few of these students had any trouble separating politics from the study of Medieval drama or 18th-century fiction. Now we're being told it's necessary to consult The Weekly Standard in order to appreciate Wordsworth and Coleridge?

That Gillespie would so readily agree that political literacy is a necessary prerequisite to the study of literature only underscores the fact that conservative and libertarian critics of the academy are not opposed in principle to the politicization of academic literary study. They'd just prefer that the propoganda disseminated to college students be of the right-wing rather than the left-wing variety. Gillespie quotes Mark Bauerlein on the "diversification" of literary study: "Bring in a little less Foucault and a little more Hayek. Some Whitaker Chambers to go along with Ralph Ellison." Wrong again. Get rid of both Foucault and Hayek. Neither of them belong in literature courses. Pair Chambes with Ellison if you're interested in postwar intellectual history, but leave out Chambers altogether if you're teaching postwar American literature.

According to Gillespie, "Bauerlein also pushed for instructors to provide students with an American identity that is positive. 'Often the identity students get is too negative,' he said. 'We need not uncritical patriotism, but some line of argument about American history that students can espouse while criticizing other elements.' That sort of positive feeling would, he argued, make it easier for students to want to become engaged politically and civically." This is where the transformation of literary study into another mode of "political literacy" gets us. Left-wing "scholars" want to indoctrinate students with a "negative" view of American history, while their right-wing counterparts want to cultivate "positive feelings." A pox on both.

Dizzy

This post is an addendum of sorts to Mirian Burstein's excellent critique of Lindsay Waters' essay "Literary Aesthetics: The Very Idea." Miriam has insightfully pointed out the essay's conceptual flaws, and I would just like to amplify her suggestion that these flaws ultimately undermine what otherwise might be a valuable argument on behalf of aesthetic analysis in literary study.

"Literary criticism no longer aims to appreciate aesthetics — to study how human beings respond to art," Waters asserts. "Do you get dizzy when you look at a Turner painting of a storm at sea? Do certain buildings make you feel insignificant while others make you feel just the right size? Without understanding that intensely physical reaction, scholarship about the arts can no longer enlarge the soul." As Miriam notes, the ease with which Waters slides between "literary criticism" and "literary scholarship" is quite conspicuous. While I think it is manifestly true that "scholarship" (defined as the disciplinary discourse of literary study) has abandoned aesthetics as a focus of attention, it is harder to maintain that "criticism" has similarly turned its back on aesthetic "appreciation," especially if you are willing to grant that literary criticism might still be produced by critics outside the ivy-covered walls. Waters apparently shares the now reflexive assumption that all seriously intended literary commentary originates from the academy, but a more useful approach to the problem he identifies might be to encourage a renewal of non-academic criticism that does take "literature itself" as its object, rather than the maintenance of specifically academic norms and protocols.

Waters is if anything even more vague and amorphous in his ostensible definition of the aesthetic as the "feeling" one gets when experiencing great art. Nothing in Waters's essay conveys to me a very clear sense of what it is exactly that Waters wants us to return to when we finally do return to aesthetics beyond a rather saccharine idea of "emotion"--our "intensely physical reaction" to art. Waters doesn't seem to realize how close his notion of studying "how human beings respond to art" is to Stanley Fish's version of reader-response criticism--which posits that what counts in the literary experience occurs "in the reader"--while at the same time he identifies Fish as one of those pied pipers leading academic criticism astray. One could argue that both Waters and Fish are too quick to dismiss the formal qualities of literary texts--in my opinion, the elements with which all aesthetic analysis must begin--in favor of the reader's response, but if I had to choose between Fish's overemphasis on interpretation and Waters' overemphasis on psuedo-sensation, I think I'd take the former.

I agree with Miriam that Waters' concern for the reader's soul "treads close to elevating art to a form of religion." In their weakest moments, the New Critics were guilty of this as well, and in my opinion it was a discomfort with this tendency that led to New Critical formalism being supplanted by "harder" kinds of hermeneutics, reader-response theory being among the first. While feeling "dizzy" over a great poem is a perfectly fine response by individual readers, at some point one's light-headedness has to be dispelled for further discussion of the poem to take place. It would be hard to maintain that very much of scholastic value is taking place in a classroom full of vertiginous students.

I find Waters' invocation of Whitman particularly puzzling: "We cannot help feeling when we read Whitman's Leaves of Grass, for example, that we are being inundated by words, as the poet piles clause after clause after clause upon us. We have to grapple with finding order (not to mention a verb) — to assert some kind of control. That kind of experience embodies the experience of the new democratic order that Whitman was celebrating, gives us a sense, not an idea, of that order." The inundation by words in Whitman is real enough, but it seems to me that Waters has skipped over several steps in the reading process in his conclusion that we end up experiencing "the new democratic order that Whitman was celebrating." Isn't the first kind of "order" we struggle to find precisely a formal order, an aesthetic patterning or arrangement of the "clause after clause after clause" that will help us understand the innovations Whitman is introducing to poetry, the "sense" in which we are to appreciate Whitman's overstuffed lines as verse? Miriam contends that Waters "keeps moving back and forth between the critic's aesthetic response to art. . .and claims about what art itself does," but I never get even an "idea" of what Waters thinks "aesthetic" means as applied to Walt Whitman's poetry. It seems to me that he merely ushers meaning as proposition out the front door as he sneaks it back in through the side door.

A coherent account of the aesthetic effects of literature would have to include the reader's experience of works of poetry or fiction, but I don't see how a concept of aesthetics that focuses entirely on that experience could even be called "aesthetics" to begin with. The psychology of reading is a worthy subject of investigation, although surely the aesthetic is not simply a psychological state. Fish began emphasizing the role of the reader in the study of literature because some forms of "appreciation" threatened to devolve into simple veneration of the "verbal icon." Although I agree with Waters that in subsequent years literary scholars too often "continue to shuck text of its form, reducing it to a proposition to be either affirmed or denied," as far as I can tell what he calls "free aesthetic response" is just as oblivious of the effects of form in provoking "aesthetic response." In seeking to be "free" it substitutes emotional immediacy for attentiveness to the designs and devices that determine (and often defer) meaning. As John Dewey maintains in Art as Experience, such attentiveness is itself ultimately liberating, as it expands our apprehension of what "experience" might be like. When Lindsay Waters asserts that Dreiser's portrayal of Carrie Meeber allows us to "experience ourselves as vain and frail and ambitious," he's actually describing a response to the novel that constricts the literary experience, that reduces it to an opportunity for vicarious self-dramatizing.

Who?

In the April 25 New York Times profile of novelist Steve Stern, we get this from Harold Bloom:

"I started to read Stern thinking I would just dip into it," Mr. Bloom said in a telephone interview from his home in New Haven. "But he has gusto, exuberance, panache; this is immensely readable and vibrant."

And then Mr. Bloom asked, "Who is he?"

I have great respect for Harold Bloom as a literary critic. If anything, his response to Steve Stern only reinforces my high opinion of his critical acumen. But that Bloom was unfamiliar with Stern's work not only indicates the degree to which Stern is unjustly neglected by the current literary scene, but also how little we should in general rely on English professors, "literary scholars" more broadly, for insight about contemporary literature. Bloom keeps up with current writers more thorougly than most academic critics--especially for a critic whose specialty is Romantic poetry--but that a writer as accomplished as Steve Stern remains unknown to him speaks volumes about the essential disconnection between literary academics (excluding creative writers) and the larger literary world populated by writers and readers of contemporary work.

In my opinion, a good case can be made that the operative definition of what constitutes "literature" in the first place should come from the practice of current writers. They--and their readers--have inherited the literary tradition studied by academics and are expanding and modifying that tradition through their ongoing work. Thus critics and scholars interested in understanding the literary impulse, the nature of literature and the possibilities of literary form, ought to be attending to contemporary writers.

But this is not what happens, of course. Through academic study the procession of writers and works that make up literary history are carved into periods and "specialties," and academic scholars, even those most up-to-date on reigning theories or critical approaches, usually spend their time becoming experts on these periods. I know from experience that many such scholars think of "their" writers as the most interesting or rewarding writers one might study, and tend to regard contemporary writers as so much fluff, a sad decline from the standards set in the Renaissance, or the 18th century, or even in the first half of the twentieth century. In this context it would not be surprising at all for most English professors to respond to the names of even more well-known writers than Steve Stern with Bloom's "Who is he/she?" (A notable exception in the blog world is Miriam Burstein (The Little Professor), who specializes in Victorian literature but who frequently posts very intelligent reviews of current fiction on her weblog.)

Over the past thirty years or so an academic specialty called, strangely enough, "Contemporary Literature" arose partly as a reaction to this attitude on the part of literary scholars. It was designed by those who helped establish it as an academic discipline to bring more attention to contemporary writing, to demonstrate that it, too, was worthy of serious academic attention. For a while this happened. Current writers were the subjects of numerous very good scholarly books in the 1970s and 1980s, and courses in contemporary literature came to be taught in most English departments. But even this "specialty" in contemporary literature has, in my opinion, turned out to be mostly unhelpful in creating real interest in current writing and in contributing to anything that could be called a "literary culture" in the United States. It, too, has been carved into various sub-specialties, has become atomized and fragmented. Scholars of postmodernism don't often have much to say to scholars specializing in feminist writers, who don't generally have much to say to those studying minority writers, and none of these academic critics usually speak much to the creative writers.

Thus the last person you should probably approach for an informed opinion of contemporary literature would be an English professor. The best you will probably get is someone like Bloom, who is willing to read current writing and take it seriously; at worst you will get outright disdain or condescension. (Which doesn't mean the professor will refrain from making a pronouncement on the writer or work in question.) Most literature professors don't think that much about what "literature" might be as a vital, continuing practice, only about what it was at some time in the past. The word has indeed meant different things to different people at different times. "Historicizing" is a perfectly nice thing to do, and sometimes it tells us interesting things about the poetry and fiction we still continue to read. For myself, I generally prefer to concentrate on what serious writing can do for us in the here and now, which requires keeping up a little bit on the new books and writers who can help us achieve this goal.

Mediocre Novelists

Inside Higher Education reports on the discovery that a 19th century novelist named Emma Dunham Kelley-Hawkins (I confess to not having heard of her before) was not African-American, as previously believed.

In her [Boston] Globe article, [Holly Jackson] recounts how she made the discovery about Kelley-Hawkins, about whom relatively little had been known. In short, a tip led her to records revealing the author's parents, and that in turn led to the discovery that several generations of her family about whom records exist were all white. (Jackson explored, and rejected, the hypothesis that the family was "passing" for white.)

What's most interesting about IHE's report, however is the quoted reponse from Henry Louis Gates, who himself included Kelley-Hawkins in a series of books by African-American Women Writers that he edited:

He said Kelley-Hawkins was a "mediocre novelist" and that he thinks the primary impact of the discovery will be that people won't write about her any more. There are so few black women authors in the 19th century that every single one matters, he says. "Anyone matters," he said.

But Gates said that he doubted that feminist scholars would now start studying Kelley-Hawkins, since there are so many better writers for them to examine in the 19th century. "It's less important to add one more white woman," he said.

I've always admired Gates, but I find his reaction to this controversy rather astonishing in at least two ways.

First, why would he want to include in a high-profile library of African-American literarure a novelist he readily concedes is "mediocre"? Was the purpose of this series merely to have in print a few more books scholars could "write about" (and therefore are really just more cogs in the academic tenure machine), or did Gates believe ordinary readers might want to read these books as well? If the latter, what kind of impression of the quality of 19th century African-American writing does it leave if you implicitly encourage people to read mediocre novels simply because an African-American name is attached? Is it really the case that "anyone matters?" Matters for what? We all know why it would have been difficult for African-American women (and men) to write and publish novels in 19th century America, and we know further that plenty of talented African-American writers emerged in the 20th century. What real purpose--especially what real literary purpose--is served by preserving a "library" of books many of which presumably aren't particularly satisfying to read in the first place?

Second, how does Gates expect his comment that ""It's less important to add one more white woman" to be taken? Since he acknowledges that quality is not a particularly important criterion for "inclusion" on the list of authors academic scholars might "write about," what earthly reason does he have for excluding "one more white woman" from consideration? All those white women are the same, anyway? Same old complaints about patriarchy and the terrors of middle-class existence? And what can it possibly mean to say there are "better" women writers to study? If the purpose of constructing such lists and compiling such libraries is primarily just to identify as many writers of a specified identity as possible, what's the problem with adding "one more"? The more the merrier, at least where course syllabi are concerned.

But this whole affair only illustrates the deep-seated problems with installing identity politics as the basis of literary study in the first place. From the very beginning of this process, the "literary" drops out of consideration altogether, to be replaced by sociology and cultural history and group solidarity. Perhaps these are more worthy endeavors than the merely trifling study of literature for its own sake, but those engaging in them ought to admit they're no longer studying literature. After all, look what this very case says about the current corruption of academic literary criticism and schlolarship. In her Globe article, Jackson writes:

. . .the readings of Kelley-Hawkins's novels that have been offered over the past 20 years--as critics have labored to account for the overwhelming, almost aggressive whiteness of her characters--now seem notably strained.

Many noted black authors. . .have depicted light-skinned ''mulattos'' with blue eyes as a way of pointedly exposing race as a social construction, instead of a biological fact. Kelley-Hawkins's novels, on the other hand, lack any such political thrust. Scholars have explained this away by arguing that the abundance of white signifiers is actually politically radical, with some even going so far as to argue that this extremely white world depicts a kind of post-racial utopia.

In other words: By the current rules of academic commentary, unconstrained by silly questions of form or style or quality of execution, or any of those other outdated "literary" notions, you can take any book and, imputing to it the sociological or biographical characterstics of choice, make it mean anything you want it to mean.

In this case, literally, white is black and black is white.

Critical Methodology

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.

Literary Standards

Thanks to Scott Esposito for alerting us to this website. (Although it's actually pretty unpleasant reading; perhaps "thanks" is not exactly right, although it is certainly useful to have the ravings of these people accessible in such a form.) Since Missouri is my home state, the experience is even more disheartening.

Almost certainly there are other, although more informally organized groups like "Citizens for Literary Standards in Schools," and not just in the red states. To some extent, parents ought to be included in curricular decisions in local schools, or at least ought to be informed about them, or at least ought to take an interest in what their schools are doing. One suspects, however, that the CLSS is mostly in the control of a handful of parents or other "interested parties" who want to use such things as reading lists and assignments to wage a wider political war. (And I'm just as opposed to using reading lists in literature classes for left-wing polemical purposes as for the right-wing variety.) In this respect, it's all a pretty dismal example of what life could be like if the powers that be in Bushworld have their way.

What's most laughable about the Citizens for Literary Standards in Schools is their claim that they wish "to encourage the public schools to help our children develop a love of reading and gain a rigorous literary education through excellent literature choices" and that they wish to see "higher quality literature assignments" provided instead of the following offending books:

1. All the Pretty Horses
2. Animal Dreams
3. The Awakening
4. The Bean Trees
5. Beloved
6. Black Boy
7. Fallen Angels
8. The Hot Zone
9. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
10. Lords of Discipline
11. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
12. Song of Solomon
13. Stotan
14. This Boy’s Life

I'm not going to defend every title on this list as a great work of literature, but of course the likes of Cormac McCarthey, Kate Chopin, Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, and Tobias Wolff provide more "quality" in their work than, apparently, the small minds at the CLSS can be burdened with. (And isn't it interesting that perhaps the two most eminent black writers of the 20th century, Wright and Morrison, are included on this list, while on the CLSS's alternative list of "the best of the best" their children are not allowed to read there are precisely no black writers?) (It's also interesting that the CLSS disapproves of books "with extremely depressing messages," that "send the message that life is hopeless and meaningless," yet on this very alternative list are included Moby Dick and The Old Man and the Sea!)

The CLSS trots out the usual well-informed analysis when explaining its objections to books with sex in them:

While textual descriptions of heterosexual sex, oral sex, homosexual sex, anal sex, rape, and incest are not generally classified as pornography because they don't contain images, it's undeniable that descriptions of sexually-explicit scenes helps develop an appetite for more of the same. Unfortunately, that appetite easily and logically leads to pornography and sexual experimentation. (Anyone watching the news knows that students are engaging in oral sex at a greater rate than ever before.) While it may be a leap to say that reading This Boy's Life leads to increased sexual encounters among students, one thing can be said with certainty: It's not helping!

If the CLSS argument was that such books as they oppose including in the high school curriculum are simply not "age appropriate"--that is, they are adult books that adult readers might find to be of very high "quality" indeed--then I would have some sympathy for their position. It's arguable that, say, Song of Solomon and All the Pretty Horses are books that teenage readers (not all teenage readers) would fail to appreciate simply on a literary basis--they don't yet have the skills or the experience to understand the literary goals of these books. Indeed, sometimes forcing books like these on unsuspecting high school students is precisely what instills in them a lifetime hatred of "literature." (A personal illustration: I am infamous among my high school classmates for having brazenly torn up a copy of Huckleberry Finn in the presence of our English teacher as a protest against having been required to read it. I now consider it one of the greatest books ever written, but I doubt that many of my classmates have eventually come to the same conclusion.)

But of course this is not the objection. In branding the titles on their disapproved lists as essentially wicked books, they are also striking a blow against the wicked culture that has produced them. It's very hard to believe that many high school students these days are going to be shocked and appalled by the language and situations depicted in the novels in question. (Even when I was a high school student I might have been titillated by them in the usual adolescent manner, but I wouldn't have been horrified or unduly influenced by them.) It's the parents who are shocked and appalled, and fighting against all that depraved literature is a way of fighting the depravity of American society and those responsible for polluting it. By which they mean us.

General Symbolic Interpretation

An essay in the most recent issue of New Literary History ("The Critic as Ethnographer," by Richard Van Oort) gives the game away:

The discipline of literature is no longer restricted to literature. Literature still forms a large part of what we study in English and Modern Language departments, but our interest in the interpretation of classic works. . .has been extended to embrace all kinds of other texts, including texts that do not appear to be literary at all, for example, oral testimonies, rituals, advertisements, pop music, and clothing.

But in what sense are these nonliterary objects "texts"? They are texts because they invite interpretation. But what is interpretation? Interpretation is the symbolic process whereby we translate the significance of one thing by seeing it in terms of another. For example, to those who worship it, the totem at the center of the rite is not just a piece of wood (that is, an object to be described in terms of its intrinsic physical and chemical structure); it is also a symbol of the deity who inhabits the wood as a living presence. . .

This irreducible anthropological fact explains the current preoccupation in literary studies with culture as an object of general symbolic interpretation. For if humanity is defined as the culture-using animal, and if culture is defined as that object which invites symbolic interpretation, then it follows that literary studies stands at the center of an anthropology founded on these assumptions. For who is better trained than the literary critic in the exercise of searching for symbolic significance, of reading beyond the literary surface to see the deeper, more sacred meaning beneath?

This passage is if nothing else refreshingly honest in admitting that those engaged in academic literary study really aren't much interested in literature anymore. Even if you accept the qualifying statement that literature "still forms a large part of what we study in English," the rest of the passage makes it clear to what use literature is being put by the "ethnographic" approach described by this writer: The study of literature is merely an "anthropology" whereby, along with the other "non literary objects" mentioned, it serves as a case study for interrogation into "culture as an object of general symbolic interpretation."

The view of literature represented by Van Oort differs from that expressed recently by Amardeep Singh in a post on his blog, to which I have responded elsewhere. Amardeep wants to continue to teach and study literature because he finds it valuable in and of itself, but he has discovered that the most effective way to reach his students is through a "utilitarian" approach through which literature can provide "lessons for life." Van Oort advocates reducing the study of literature to a branch of the social sciences, bypassing whatever purely "literary" value a work of literature might have in favor of the social and cultural "information" that might be wrung from it. I would argue that this has become the most prevalent approach to literary study among academic critics, and its hold is only going to get stronger.

I don't particularly have any objection to studying such things as rituals or pop music or clothing, "texts" about which interesting things might be said using a method of analysis that could very loosely be called "literary"--one of my own academic subspecialties was film--but the move toward critically examining such things has a) siphoned off interest in literature itself, the subject that ostensibly forms the core of this discipline, and b) led to a general levelling of evaluation, by which literature is seen as no more interesting, meaningful, or valuable than these other objects of scrutiny. I don't even necessarily have a problem with this, but it does seem to me that those engaged in this sort of "general symbolic interpretation" ought to confess that they don't really care much about literature, and ought as well to be willing to relinquish title to "literature" as the nominal subject of their critical efforts. If "culture" needs to be studied in the way Oort would have it, fine, but why not allow literary crticism per se, which has now been held hostage by academic critics for forty years or more, to be returned to those who want to read and write about literature for its own sake?

In my opinion, many academic scholars want to retain "literature" as the name of what they profess because they perceive it to still have a certain intellectual cachet they couldn't claim if they admitted they'd rather study clothing. They do their best to dress up their real interests by talking about "interpretation" and "symbolic processes," but finally studying advertisements and tv sitcoms just doesn't elevate their sense of worth as highly as the title of "literature professor" in the college catalog. That Van Oort is driven to speak of the "sacred meaning" to be found in the subjects of "ethnographic" crticism to me only suggests that he and his like-minded colleagues are desperate to find profound significance in their study of trivia and detritus.

And not only is Van Oort's definition of interpretation itself--"searching for symbolic significance"--the sort of thing that has always struck fear in the freshman literature student, but it is precisely the orientation to reading and to the formal study of literature that Susan Sontag had in mind when she wrote "against interpretation" and called for a new "erotics" of art, including literature. The description of the "discipline of literature" provided here by Van Oort is one that indeed enforces "discipline" on works of literature, of a sort more reminiscent of the archaeologist than the anthropologist, digging "beyond the literary surface" to the foundational "meaning" to be discovered there. Sontag had this to say about such an endeavor:

Our task is not to find the maximum amount of content in a work of art, much less to squeeze more content out of the work than is already there. Our task is to cut back content so that we can see the thing at all.

The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art--and, by analogy, our own experience--more, rather than less real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.

Of course, I would not claim that something like Sontag's notion of an "erotics" of reading--an unmediated or aesthetically pure experience of a work of literature--could be the basis of academic literary study in any sustained way commensurate with the requirements of disciplinary scholarship, if at all. While I can't finally think of anything more truly useful to students of literature than the attempt to encourage this kind of reading, the difficulties of accomplishing it in a high school or college classroom are probably insurmountable. Finally it can only be left to individuals to learn for themselves how to value literature simply for the pleasure of reading it. But the heavy-handed approach advocated by the likes of Richard Van Oort is not an adequate substitute. If "ethnography" is the only way by which literature and literary criticism can be incorporated into a college curriculum or into academic scholarship, best to leave them be. As Robert Nagle put in a recent post at his blog Idiotprogrammer: "where is the harm of relegating the study of literature and culture to passionate amateurs? I’m not convinced that we need people permanently ensconsed in academia to keep the flame of humanism alive."

Use Values

In a comment on this post, Amardeep Singh writes:

My main question for you so far is why you feel the "literary" value of literary texts is separate from the other values those texts contain. Much of what one finds in really good literature has to do with philosophy, history, and yes, politics.

In a separate post on his own blog, Amardeep explains further:

The reason I feel confident teaching literature for its potential social usefulness (again, broadly conceived) is that I think that an overwhelming number of writers, British, American, and non-Western, themselves write with some idea of usefulness in mind. The value of literature is almost never just "literary," even for writers; one also reads (or writes) literature to engage ideas from philosophy (inclusive of ethics and morality), history, and politics. None of these related regimes of thought are by any means required to be obviously present, and some writers might really not be interested in things like politics or history. There aren't many of them, and most who say they aren't interested are lying. Even the great, "literary literary" T.S. Eliot explicitly coupled his taste in literature ("classicist") with a politics ("royalist") and a religion ("Anglo-Catholicism").

I well understand the point Amardeep is making--literature has potential use value in multiple contexts separate from one's purely "literary" experience of poetry or fiction--but quite frankly I do indeed feel that "the 'literary' value of literary texts is separate from the other values those texts contain" because otherwise the word "literary" simply has no meaning. If the literary value of a work of literature can't be separated from the other values Amardeep, or anyone else, finds there, then in what sense is there any such thing as literary value at all? Otherwise isn't the value philosophical, historical, or political? I suppose one could say that finally "literature" itself doesn't exist except as a vehicle for philosophy or politics, but I can't say that and never will.

Similarly, there certainly are many writers who want to engage with philosophical or cultural issues, but to the extent they become preoccupied with these issues it seems to me they are no longer fiction writers or poets per se. They've become philosophers or cultural critics. This is ok by me, but I don't see why I have to consider them as literary artists when clearly their goal is not to create literary art but to "say something." Just say it.

This problem has only become more acute as the goal of academic literary study has drifted away form the study of literature "in, of, and for itself" and toward adopting the practices of all other discpilines in the pursuit of "knowledge." This was probably inevitable, and I am really only responding to my sense of its inevitabilty by suggesting that perhaps literature and the academy have finally proven to be not such a good "fit." If historians or philosophers or sociologists (or literature professors, for that matter) want to use works of literature to illuminate or illustrate non-literary issues in those disciplines I surely have no objection, but I just can't see how such practices could be called part of "literary study" unless, again, the word "literary" is simply an empty expression having something to do with "writing." I have an especially hard time seeing how adopting such practices in courses nominally devoted to "literature" adds much to either the understanding of literature or any of the other "regimes of thought" Amardeep mentions.

"Are there forms of cultural expression that contain "literary value" that are not themselves literature?" I suppose if "literary value" is reduced to something like "storytelling" or "personal expression," then perhaps other, non-literary forms could be said to have it. Surely, however, this is so reductive that almost everyone would finally agree there isn't much point to hanging on any longer to either the concept of "literary value" or the category of works now called "literature." At what point do we say that, as far as the academy is concerned, both literature and "the literary" have become so thoroughly shorn of any values in particular that it's no longer very useful to claim them as subjects at all?

In, Of, and For Itself

The latest MLA convention has predictably enough sparked another round of discussion about the state of literary study and, more specifically, what the role of literary study ought to be. In my opinion, that this happens almost every year suggests in itself that most academic scholars and critics don't really know what that role should be, and the current drift in literary study simply reflects this underlying reality.

Some would like to persist in their denial of this reality, dismissing the low esteem in which literary scholars are generally held to be essentially a public relations problem. "They" just don't understand how vital the service we perform really is. Others, however, are beginning to acknowledge that the study of literature has lost its way. Amardeep Singh, for example asks:

. . .Do we really know what we're doing when we teach literature? If so, why do I have so many graduate students who -– even after doing classes, exams, and even dissertations with me –- don't quite know what it is they should be doing? Why did I myself feel this way throughout graduate school? Moreover, are we doing the best job we can with our undergraduates? What are we training them for?

These are admirably pragmatic questions, to which, it seems to me, there are really just two answers, although the second one does open up a Pandora's Box of additional questions. 1) We teach literature in order to introduce students to the inherent pleasures and challenges of poetry, fiction, by focusing on the singular qualities of "literature itself." 2) We teach literature in order to get at other issues of educational value, using literature as convenient illustration or as case studies. Amardeep acknowledges that literature does indeed have singular qualities, which in a way leads him to choose answer 2:

The Canon Wars question and the Social Relevance question come together in literary studies around the question of the Usefulness of the text, which can also be called the Educative Value of the text.

I find it increasingly difficult to reject the criticism that the humanities is useless on the basis that works of art are by definition intentionally, Sublimely Useless (that's Kant's idea, isn't it? Also Oscar Wilde's, as I recall). There has to be more to it than simply shrugging our shoulders at the technocrats who run things (including, in most cases our own universities). The dominant principle of utility can be accepted, but reworked so as to better explain (and defend) the value of literature in an era of multiculturalism, pop-culturalism, and instrumental technocracy.

I think that good Art is useful for a particular kind of educative function, which need not mean a crude idea of 'social improvement'. I mean that reading literature (especially in a classroom) is most interesting when readers expect to learn something about themselves or the world along the way. A John Updike story about a man trying to come to terms with the failure of his marriage and the failure of his divorce is educative in the sense that it aims to make a point about the difficulty in finding independent meaning or emotional stability in the contemporary world. George Eliot's novels, and even Joyce's Ulysses in a certain way of reading it, are also educative. Eliot's Middlemarch is an argument about the limits of individualism (especially as it relates to women). And Joyce's novel is perhaps an argument about reconfiguring the idea of family away from blood and legal status (marriage, paternity) and towards a voluntaristic idea of affinity. If presented that way, students might well be able to say, “this relates to me, I can learn something from this that will help me in my life, and make me a smarter person.” If presented as merely a virtuosic display of literary power and imagination, however, it means a little less.

Such an approach has the virtue of being honest in the setting of its goals: to help students "learn something about themselves or the world," something that will "help" the student in coming to terms with "life." There's nothing wrong with such goals in the abstract, although they could as stated be the goals of almost any other subject in the academic curriculum. Which is, I take it, precisely the point. The study of literature does indeed become like any other subject, inlcuded in the curriculum in the first place for its "educative" value: educative in a specifically "scholastic" sense--part of what we learn in school. It does, of course, almost necessarily exclude works of literature that are most intensely literary, most deliberately "useless," as Amardeep admits when he says his approach has trouble with "more esoteric, 'problem' texts," such as those of Gertrude Stein or Salman Rushdie.

Dr. Crazy also admits that literary study is "in the midst of a major identity crisis," but she doesn't think the answer is to halt the movement away from literature and toward cultural studies, a movement that, in my opinion, is the fundamental cause of that very crisis:

And I do think there is value in studying things like the word "dude" or orgasms or representations of defecation or whatever. Just because these things aren't boring doesn't mean they aren't worthy of study. Sometimes I think that's what the populace demands of us - that we study only boring things. . . These [former] things are part of our culture and they are part of the art that we study and that makes them worthy of our inquiry not just because they are racy things to talk about but because they potentially tell us more about who we are and about the cultural moment in which the text was produced.. . . .

Presumably it is literature that is the primary "boring thing" Dr. Crazy has in mind (although her post is ostensibly about "literary study," she doesn't really have anything else to say about literature at all.) I assume that at best it would just be one of those "things [that] are part of our culture" that are "worthy of our inquiry" because "they potentially tell us more about who we are and about the cultural moment in which the text was produced." This approach to literary study, which is probably shared by a large number of literature professors, has implicitly concluded that literature is not really capable even of helping students "learn something about themselves or the world along the way" and has essentially foresworn the study of literature altogether for the kinds of objects Dr. Crazy mentions. And even when a work of literature is the object of study, it is not for its literary value but because of what it reveals about "the cultural moment."

In both of these views of "what we're doing when we teach literature," literature itself, for itself, is omitted almost entirely, in Amardeep's case grudgingly, in Dr. Crazy's quite easily. Literature in this sense just doesn't have much "educative" value, doesn't tell us enough about cultural moments or provide sufficient excitement for the bored scholars and students. It simply doesn't have broad enough appeal.

And finally I myself don't disagree much with that conclusion. That some works of literature are exceptionally good, even great, and might repay the student's time in reading them really isn't enough to justify including them in an academic curriculum. Why do we need classes in literary study simply to say "read this book, you'll like it"? For a while the problem with this kind of simple "appreciation" was solved by making critical approaches to literature the real subject of literary study, but that obviously no longer suffices if it means abandoning the literature part altogetherfor more and more desparate attempts to trump the most recently ascendant critical approach. And this kind of critical one-upsmanship is probably unavoidable in the long run, given the academic imperative that disciplines must "create knowledge" on a continual basis. Even if the academy were to return to a focus on "literature itself," this would inevitably turn out to be only a temporary fashion, to be superseded by the next generation of cutting-edge "knowledge." Under these circumstances, the only real alternatives available are to do something like what Amardeep suggests, using literature for its most palpably utilitarian value as education for life, or to give up literature altogether as subject of academic study and return it to those who find it valuable in, of, and for itself. I have more or less concluded that the second option is the best.

Literary Pedagogy

In Favor of Thinking wonders why her students seem so intent on reading literature biographically:

. . .in the classroom, any discussion of an author's life inevitably seems incredibly reductive -- 10 minutes, 20 minutes even, to explain a whole life? And worse yet, some students want to take whatever tiny smidge of biographical information I or the anthology have given them, and construct elaborate and usually patently misguided readings of the texts.

This is not an issue only for teachers of literature. Many readers want to similarly reduce a poem, story, or novel to some expression of the author's life experiences, or at least to understand a given work by appealing to biographical information that might "explain" it, and thus this is an issue of concern to literary criticism as a whole. Literary study used to be, in part, about intructing inexperienced or casual readers to overcome this habit, to substitute for it a way of reading that did more justice to works of literature by focusing on how they work, that did more justice to the reader's own potential for reading skillfully by developing more informed reading skills. This is no longer the case, and no doubt most students, even students who have majored in a discipline ostensibly devoted to literary study, now emerge from college likely to go on misreading in the way IFOT describes.

Yet I sense in this post some dissatisfaction with the current state of affairs:

. . .faced with a text that might be deliberately ambiguous in its "message" or alluding to various layers of literary history that my students are relatively deaf to, they fall back on biography as the explanatory model. Obviously, my job is to explain those multiple layers of meaning, and I think I do that fairly well in the classroom. But then I still get one or two papers that insist "Robert Browning wrote this poem because he was jealous of his wife's success" with absolutely no way of backing up their claim. Sure, I can treat it as a problem of evidence, which I often do in my comments. But it seems to me there's a larger question about literary pedagogy here.

Indeed there is. And the real problem is that there isn't much that could be called "literary pedagogy" being practiced anymore. The students come to college with almost no familiarity with specifically literary questions at all--as far as I can tell high school literature classes are entirely about "issues for further reflection," but not about literature--and too many departments of university literary study are now only interested in using literature as just one of the possible subjects of "cultural studies." In these circumstances learning how to actually read works of literature is not just dispensable, but actually works against the larger goal of reducing literature to sociological evidence.

IFOT speculates that the source of the problem is that "our general culture still valorizes a Romantic model of artistic production that equates the text (or song, etc) with the author's own feelings and is very resistant to models of aesthetic signification that complicate or pluralize the possible meanings in a text. And, faced with a text that might be deliberately ambiguous in its 'message' or alluding to various layers of literary history that my students are relatively deaf to, they fall back on biography as the explanatory model." This is certainly part of the explanation, but since students are no longer taught to value "a text that might be deliberately ambiguous in its 'message'"--in other words, a work of literature--and there's no longer much interest in finding out about "various layers of literary history"--as opposed to cultural or social history--the Romantic model can't really be challenged.

Moreover, IFOT actually dismisses the very approach to literary study that did try to counteract the Romantic model. It's not, she says, that "I believe in Transcendent Literature that escapes all place and time (in fact, quite the opposite) or because I'm a staunch Formalist/New Critic /Deconstructionist who only wants to look for linguistic patterns of meaning." About the worst thing that can happen to a current literary academic is to be accused of harboring secret "Formalist/New Critic" sympathies. How dreadful to believe that literary criticism should focus on the literary qualities of texts, that literary study ought to be about literature! However, if students, readers in general, are going to be convinced to leave biography--or sociology, or politics--behind in favor of the actual literay work at hand, they'll have to be instructed in some form of this benighted method. There's no other alternative.

I have of course generalized, even exaggerated, the extent to which literary study has gone over exclusively to the cultural studies model. (I hope that certain very able critics of such generalization will forgive me.) There are, there always are, important exceptions to this practice, but I don't really think it can be argued that attention to the formal and aesthetic properties of literature is a priority among those practicing the predominant methods of academic criticism in the "advanced" quarters of the academy. If IFOT wants students to focus more on "the text," she might try to convince her colleagues to start bringing literature back into literary study in the first place.

A Show About Nothing

In many ways, "In the Penthouse of the Ivory Tower," Gideon Lewis-Kraus's essay in the July issue of The Believer, is just the latest rehearsal of what is by now a very tired journalistic routine: Go to the MLA convention and report on how absurd and silly most English professors are. (I've been reading versions of this exercise since at least 1985.) In this case, the author is able to cover the convention at somewhat greater length than usual, and he seems somewhat more interested and informed than most garden-variety journalists who have performed the routine in the past. He even tries to dredge up a little sympathy for the out-of-touch professors, although by the end of the piece this effort has mostly come to naught. However, the final verdict is expected enough: "So as much as I want to grab the panelists by their modish lapels and shake them and demand to know exactly what the hell they're talking about, it is not my right to do so, for I am not there by invitation, I am not a member of their community, and I have no right to expect that their words should mean anything to me. I still think their tortured, overwrought sentences are for the most part patently absurd. . . ."

It's not that I don't think that most sentences read aloud at MLA conventions--I've attended many--are "for the most part patently absurd." They are indeed. It's just that, like most of his predecessors in the laugh-at-the-professors genre, Lewis-Kraus doesn't really seem to comprehend just why they're so absurd, so overinflated, so utterly irrelevant. He thinks it's just a failure to speak in fathomable language, an unthinking capitulation to the professionalization of academic discourse. He thinks English professors are finally too insular. But that is not the problem, that is not it at all. English professors no longer have a subject. They are literally speaking and writing about nothing.

Almost immediately upon listening to the first group of speakers at the 2003 convention, Lewis-Kraus is struck by the degree to which these people are asking, implicitly and explicitly, what it is that an English professor is supposed to be doing: "what is an English professor for?" It wasn't that long ago that such a question had a relatively straighforward answer. English professors taught literature, helped to keep the tradition of serious literary writing alive, introduced students and others to this tradition through the classroom and what was called "scholarship" about literature. In the very broadest sense, English professors were the caretakers in charge of maintaining some historical perspective on the language itself, studying literature as the greatest expression of the possibilities of this language. No professor of English today could claim these endeavors as the justification for English as an academic discipline. English professors have now dedicated themselves to the task of "interrogating" the literary tradition, as if it were an intellectual infection whose toxic elements have to be identified. And the only interest in the language most of them show is in injecting it as often as possible with rhetorical formaldehyde.

Lewis-Kraus writes of the papers he hears delivered at one session that they "are so bizarre and freakish and sodden with jargon as to make them utterly incomprehensible." I don't doubt that this was the case, but unfortunately he is unable to give us much in the way of quoted illustration of this kind of discourse. However, in looking at the most recent issue of Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction (a publication to which I still subscribe and have myself contributed), one quickly comes upon a passage like this, from an essay on Richard Powers's The Gold Bug Variations: "Across the various epistemic systems of encyclopedic information, diachronic narrative processes self-organize reactions and catalyze reciprocal, feedback relations across the textual network. The structure of the system evolves as the product of co-evolution between system and environment, involving a multidirectional collection of linear and nonlinear processes." This is incomprensible enough, even, as far as I can tell, meaningless, but it's not really the jargon that makes it so. For comparison, here is the beginning of the second paragraph of Eric Auerbach's Mimesis, one of the greatest works of literary criticism ever written. He is describing a scene in the Odyssey:

All this is scrupulously externalized and narrated in leisurely fashion. The two women express their feelings in copious direct discourse. Feelings though they are, with only a slight admixture of the most general considerations upon human destiny, the syntactical connection between part and part is perfectly clear, no contour is blurred.

Later in the same paragraph:

The separate elements of a phenomenon are most clearly placed in relation to one another; a large number of conjunctions, adverbs, particles, and other syntactical tools, all clearly circumscribed and delicately differentiated in meaning, delimit persons, things, and portions of incidents in respect to one another, and at the same time bring them together in a continuous and ever flexible connection; like the separate phenomena themselves, their relationships--their temporal, local, causal, final, consecutive, comparative, concessive, antithetical, and conditional limitations--are brought to light in perfect fullness; so that a continuous rhythmic procession of phenomena passes by, and never is there a form left fragmentary or half-illuminated, never a lacuna, never a gap, never a glimpse of unplumbed depths.

I'm pretty certain that most students, as well as most other readers unpracticed in literary criticism, would find the Mimesis passages almost as incomprehensible as the previously quoted passage about "epistemic systems" or as the scholarly papers Lewis-Kraus sat through. The difference is not that one uses jargon and the other doesn't. (Keeping in mind that Mimesis is a translation.) Both use jargon of one kind or another. Any kind of considered literary criticism is almost by necessity going to be caught using language that offends general-interest sensibilities. The real difference is that Auerbach is attempting to explicate the text in front of him, to help the reader "see" more fully what is really going on in the scene from the Odyssey. He has to use terms ("direct discourse") one wouldn' think of while reading the scene for the first time. The discussion of The Gold Bug Variations, on the other hand, has itself translated the novel into something else, an excuse to use abstraction and scientific-sounding argot and to discuss a subject the critic has invented. It has nothing to do with the novel it otherwise pretends to analyze.

Which is why Lewis-Kraus is on firmer ground when he comments that the kind of "scholarship" to which he is being exposed exhibits "a truly virtuosic incomprehensibility that makes sense only as a kind of poetic performance." It's not even that these scholars are communicating only with one another. They're not trying to communicate. It's all self-display and an allegiance to external agendas of the scholar's own choosing, agendas themselves important only to the extent that the professor in question can give it his/her own scholarly spin. (For a more extensive discussion of this, go here.)

In a response to Lewis-Kraus's essay, Sharleen Mondal makes a valiant effort to defend the contemporary literary scholar: "Literary scholars already hold themselves to a very strict standard when it comes to the validity of arguments--we are supposed to contextualize everything to the nth degree, historicize our analyses, enter the academic conversation, offer 'evidence' through the use of quotations and page references, are supposed to be clear about what we are contributing to existing work on the topic, show which theorists we are using to construct the basis for our argument, etc. If a reader is willing to do what it takes to become acquainted with all these processes, then I am perfectly happy to consider criticism. But my sense is that the reason why our work is often inaccessible to people outside our field is that most people. . .simply aren't interested--the immediate and personal experience of reading is enough."

Mondal is living in another academic age. None of the things she describes are any longer important, except when a "senior scholar" wants to have an excuse for denying a junior colleague tenure. (Even in using the word "colleague," I can hardly manage to suppress a sneer at the idea that English departments are any longer involved in any kind of collective enterprise.) All of them presuppose an existing interest in literature and in advocating on behalf of literature, but the literary academy as a whole can no longer summon up such interest. Lewis-Kraus's essay makes this patently obvious. There's scarcely a mention of literature in it except as "what you teach to your students" for the professors on hand at the convention. The fact of the matter is that not even most English professors care much about the "work" being done by those who have inherited the space inside the ivy-covered halls. Charles Bertsch, a professor who accompanies Lewis-Kraus to the convention, practically admits he has more interest in PAC-10 basektball. Literature is passe, and it's hard to muster up much enthusiasm for a fragmented curriculum that mostly rewards self-obsession.

In my opinion, it's this self-obsession that Lewis-Kraus mistakes "for a faint tremor of heroism in the air" as he sums up his experience of the MLA convention.

Not in this Lifetime

I greatly admire Helen Vendler. She is perhaps the greatest living close reader of poetry, especially modern poetry, in the United States. She is also passionately committed to the task of explicating the value of poetry, of literature in general, to as wide an audience as possible, as her recent Jefferson lecture, "The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar," makes abundantly clear. Cynics are advised to not go near this lecture: not only will they immediately encounter a student of literature utterly convinced of its centrality to human life, but they may wind up convinced of this centrality themselves if they read the lecture through to the end.

But it is precisely Vendler's sincerity and her eloquent communication of her own passion for poetry that ultimately, for me at least, make reading this lecture a rather sad experience. She's right about almost everything she says in trying to argue for making art and literature the curricular centerpiece in the study of the "Humanities" in American universities, but given how thoroughly the study of literature (art more broadly) has been rejected in this country, by administrators, politicians, students, parents, employers, and most pathetically, by literature professors themselves, the context in which her words are offered make this lecture sound more like a funeral oration than an inspirational address, an elegy for what might have been than a proposal for curricular reform. It's almost as if she hasn't noticed that the academic and business elites in America ooze contempt for art and literature, or, more to the point, that literary academics long ago stopped pretending they had any real regard for what is supposed to be the subject of their scholarly study.

Vendler is certainly correct in saying that "When it became useful in educational circles in the United States to group various university disciplines under the name 'The Humanities,' it seems to have been tacitly decided that philosophy and history would be cast as the core of this grouping. . .Philosophy, conceived of as embodying truth, and history, conceived of as a factual record of the past, were proposed as the principal embodiments of Western culture, and given pride of place in general education programs." Americans' demand for "facts" and "hard" knowledge, their disdain for the fluff that is fiction or poetry or painting or music, were reflected even in that realm of academic study that was--grudgingly--ceded to "humanists." She is also justified in claiming that "Confidence in a reliable factual record, not to speak of faith in a reliable philosophical synthesis, has undergone considerable erosion. Historical and philosophical assertions issue, it seems, from particular vantage points, and are no less contestable than the assertions of other disciplines." Finally, she makes as compelling a case that serious engagement with the arts is good for you as anyone is likely to make.

But her answer to her own posed question, "If the arts are so satisfactory an embodiment of human experience, why do we need studies commenting on them?", is not so compelling, at least if she means by this, "Why study the arts in college?" Or, "Why create an academic caste of professional 'scholars' to comment on art as a 'discipline?'" I unhesitatingly agree that "reminders of art's presence are constantly necessary," but is the best way to do this to relegate the study of art to universities, where the most concrete result has been the very maginalization, the trivialization, of art and literature? Vendler's second reason for installing the arts in the curriculum of universities, that "such studies establish in human beings a sense of cultural patrimony" is, in my opinion the weakest argument that can be made on behalf of the academic study of art or music or literature, since it threatens to reduce them to a form of nationalist propaganda--or a reaction against such perceived propaganda, which is largely what has indeed happened to literary study in particular. But Vendler doesn't finally seem to believe very strongly in this argument herself.

The real weight of Vendler's defense of "the products of aesthetic endeavor" falls on her contention that studying works of art and literature "helps us to live our lives," and that scholars are best situated to show us how this can be true. The weight of this argument, in turn, rests on her reading of three poems by Wallace Stevens, poems in which Stevens does indeed speak of the indispensability of art--specifically poetry--and of the scholar's role in reminding us of this. I have no intention of disputing Vendler's reading of these poems. I couldn't plausibly do it even if I wanted to. But I do think she overgeneralizes Stevens's reference to the "scholar, separately dwelling," who "Poured forth the fine fins, the gawky beaks, the personalia,/Which, as a man feeling everything, were his" to mean the academic scholar of the sort we find in American universities. As Harold Bloom points out in Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate, the scholar of "Somnambulisma" is likely an allusion to Emerson's "American Scholar," who is not exactly the tweedy gentleman available for office hours we all know and love. If Vendler means in her discussion of this poem that it is desirable if not necessary that some people devote themselves to perpetuating the legacy of still vital poets and artists from the past, reminding us of the "pervasive being" Stevens identifies in his poem, I would have no quarrel with her. But I have a hard time believing there are many such scholars around any more, the very denotation of the word "scholar" now understood as it is to designate exactly the gentleman/woman in the office.

Bloom additionally points out that "Large Red Man Reading," the second poem Vendler discusses, as well contains allusions to Emerson, who also saw the poet's job as writing the "poem of life," was also concerned with the "vatic" power of the poet, but again it is difficult to imagine that either Emerson or Stevens conceived of this "earthly giant of vital being" (Vendler's words) as a "scholar" of the modern kind. Is it part of the job description of the scholar nowadays that he hold his students in rapt attention as he teaches them that "the experiences of life can be reconstituted and made available as beauty and solace, to help us live our lives"? If such scholars as Vendler seems to evoke here ever existed, they surely no longer stride through the halls of the general classroom building, if only because such activity as Vendler wants to describe through her explication of this poem will certainly not get you tenure. The "Large Red Man Reading" helps us pay attention to what we otherwise wouldn't notice; the modern scholar only notices what is otherwise not worth our attention.

Although clearly what Helen Vendler values most in art and literature is the stimulation and pleasure they afford in their own right, in order to duly place them at the center of humanities education, she is ultimately forced to appeal to other services they might perform ("training in subtlety of response," enhancing "scientific training" through the "direct mediation. . .of feeling, vicarious experience, and interpersonal imagination"), as is any proposal to include art in an academic curriculum. She is also led to adopt very dubious--and somewhat naive--theories about how training in the arts is to be accomplished: "Once the appetite for an art has been awakened by pleasure, the nursery rhyme and the cartoon lead by degrees to Stevens and Eakins. A curriculum relying on the ocean, the bird, and the scholar, on the red man and his blue tabulae, would produce a love of the arts and humanities that we have not yet succeeded in generating in the population at large." I am not aware of any evidence that the aesthetic domino effect--from the nursery rhyme ultimately to Wallace Stevens--actually ever happens with other than those students who were always going to get to Stevens or Eakins anyway. And if "the population at large" were going to be led to a love of the arts, we would already have witnessed the appearance of this heaven-on-earth, since much of the justification for teaching the arts and humanities to captive student audiences during the last seventy-five years was based on some such theory. Everyone should read Helen Vendler's poetry criticism, as it indeed can lead individual readers to an appreciation of what makes poetry worth reading. Her Jefferson lecture, however, mistakenly assumes that this kind of concrete experience of literary art can be universalized into a system of academic intruction, still mistaken no matter how well-intentioned the effort might be. Or how nice it would be if it could actually work.