The Reading Experience

Sclerotic and Irrelevant

In the Times Literary Supplement, Peter Brooks (author of Reading for the Plot) recently wrote of the conquest of academic literary study by "theory" that "the coming of theory actually rescued the study of literature at a time when it was threatened with sclerosis and irrelevance. In particular, it brought students back to literary studies with a sense that there was something exciting going on."

There are several things wrong with this contention, although I do not myself believe that "theory" of the kind Brooks discusses (he is reviewing a book centered mostly on figures like Foucault and Derrida, the "poststructuralists") was itself necessarily a bad thing for literary study. Much of Derrida's work, for example, is perfectly compatible with the kind of "old-fashioned" literary study focused on the close reading of literature for what it as literature has to offer us, and he could not have been happy when the notion of "deconstruction" eventually became, among some alleged "followers," essentially a synonym for trashing the place.

But I do have problems with idea that the study of literature needed to be "rescued," and I do not believe that the coming of theory "brought students back," since they hadn't gone anywhere in the first place and since every account I have read about the level of student interest in English or comparative literature or Romance Languages suggests that enrollment in such departments has only declined since the advent of theory. If Brooks has the graduate study of literature in mind, then bringing students into a field where finding a job upon completing one's study, no matter how "exciting" it may have been, has now become difficult approaching impossible performs a service for no one.

More to the point: literary study may or may not have become "sclerotic" pre-theory, but so what? If this means that literature professors were just teaching students how to approach works of literature--defined sclerotically as poetry, fiction, and drama--so they might read them more profitably, and were trying to point them to the kinds of novels or poems that might be worth their attention, then they were doing their jobs as efficiently as it could be done. Unless you think that studying literature in this way just isn't peppy and glowing enough and requires a dose of "excitement" in order to show it off in meetings with the Dean. But this is just another step in the process of making "literature itself" secondary to other more suitably "advanced" methods of academic inquiry, methods that have now become themselves the subjects of academic literary study, leaving literature far behind.

This yoking of literature to other purposes and other causes is equally typical of more traditional humanists who wouldn't otherwise countenance notions about the "subversive" quality of critical inquiry. In a recent essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education (June 4, 2004), Vartan Gregorian pleads for a return of liberal arts instruction to higher education. In many ways, this essay is just the usual blather one would expect from a certain kind of college president, pitched at such a high level of generality that he really never even bothers to define what he means by "liberal arts." It's pretty clear nevertheless that included in Gregorian's liberal arts curriculum would be the study of literature, perhaps even as its centerpiece. But what Gregorian wants is "to integrate learning and provide balance," to "help our students acquire their own identity," to "provide a context for technical training" so students may "understand the general nature and structure of our society, the role of the university, or the importance of values." All worthy goals, I suppose, and if you wanted to include works of literature in an ethics class, or a psychology class, or a political science class, this might be a perfectly sound strategy. But if you set up whole departments devoted to literary study, and then charge them with helping to "understand the general nature and structure of our society," you're using extremely indirect means to arrive at results better pursued in other ways. And you're implicitly demeaning what literature might really do for individual readers quite apart from your social engineering scheme--although perhaps that's really the point.

Probably what bothers me most about Peter Brooks's claims about theory is the appeal to the potential "irrelevance" of literary study without it. I'm not even sure Brooks himself means to suggest that literature ought to be "relevant," given that immediately following the passage I've quoted he goes on to say that theory "was something that might in the long run turn out to be unsubstantiable, and perhaps unusable--but then most literary undergraduates aren't planning to build a career on how they have read either Milton or Foucault." Thus Brooks acknowledges that the study of literature is indeed irrelevant in the context in which universities generally function. A few students are in college or graduate school just to learn, literally to become "learned," less ignorant, but everyone will acknowledge they're a vast minority. Even fewer would like to become more skilled readers of literature. But this is really the only authentic consituency literary study has. Everything else is just defensiveness and empty rhetoric. Literature can't be relevant to civic responsibility and reform agendas except in defying them.

To be defiantly irrelevant. How subversive is that?

That Was Then, This Is Now

Since I was (or tried to be) an academic "specialist" in contemporary American literature, you might think I would approve of this trend in high school English classes, as reported by USA Today. According to the article, "Faced with declining reading scores on national tests and the steady buzz of movies, TV and video games, teachers trying to entice students are increasingly turning to contemporary literary fiction and non-fiction, often picked fresh from best-seller lists." Although I cringe at the idea that teachers are turning to "best-seller lists," in theory I do in fact think that using more recent works of fiction or poetry to introduce readers (not just students) to the possibilities of literature could work perfectly well.

In some ways, using contemporary literature in this way is the most accurate and honest way of teaching literature. If "literature" is something that is still vital and ongoing, then the poetry and fiction being written now is the most representative example, perhaps the only representative example, of what is currently understood by the term; what writers and readers seem to agree is "literature" at this historical moment really has the only plausible claim to be in fact regarded as literature. This doesn't preclude acknowledging that certain works of the past ought also to be regarded as such--in many cases as providing the inspiration for current writers--but exactly which works are to be seen as particularly "literary" and for what particular reasons are matters that each generation of writers, critics, and readers is always going to be debating and reevaluating.

The alternative, formulating a rigid definition of "literature" rooted in past practice and long-gone assumptions and then judging all subsequent "literary" efforts by this standard, only results in a) contemporary works (including contemporary works later generations consider unambiguously great) being slighted as inferior to what has come before and b) the works of the past being saddled with a portentous amount of baggage that newer readers understandably don't want to carry. Literature--or at least English--becomes that proverbial subject that everybody hates.

On the other hand, I don't see many indications in this article that those advocating the contemporary over the classic have any better idea of what these works are being taught for. From the remarks made by the teachers quoted, there seems scant justification for the change other than that current books seem easier for the students to read and easier for the teachers to teach: "There's a lot more competition for people's attention than there was in the '70s"; "No one is going to read The Scarlet Letter until they're reading something they're enjoying." That some students are led to enjoy reading these books is probably a good thing, but why is it being done in school?

The closest thing to an explanation of what's being done with these books is this (actually from a Colorado State professor): "Whereas we might have taught Great Expectations because it was a classic, because you could talk about plot and setting and stylistic details, it is not a book that contemporary teenagers ... can relate to. So it loses its value." If teaching "plot and setting and stylistic details" means introducing some of the principles of literary criticism (which in turn might have salience beyond the analysis of literature per se), this is unobjectionable, but what such a thing usually amounts to is establishing some supposed norm that works of literature are supposed to embody, not a preliminary way of illustrating how, in general, the human imagination can be organized in various ways to create what we choose to call literature. And my suspicion is that the ultimate goal of teaching any and all of these books is really just to find something the kids "can relate to," itself a goal without substance as far as teaching is concerned.

I have myself almost come to the conclusion that literature ought not to be taught in the schools at all. Any use of it is destined to reduce it to stale schoolroom platitudes and musty classification. The most common justification is the one quoted above, that students will be led to read The Scarlet Letter after they've read Tuesdays With Morrie. It doesn't happen, or at least it only happens with students who were probably going to seek out Hawthorne or Dickens for themselves anyway. It happens so rarely that if this is the primary reason why literature is taught in school it's going a long way and to a lot of trouble to accomplish very little. Perhaps students who show an interest in reading serious literature should just be given a list of books they might want to seek out. If they'd like, maybe they could talk it all over with the teacher after school. In this scenario it wouldn't matter if the books were contemporary or classic, just as long as the student wasn't made to hate them or to trivialize them and maybe even indicated an interest in reading other books without being prompted.

F.O. Matthiessen

A while back, I offered a list of older works of literary criticism that I think are increasingly neglected but still have a great deal of value. I considered putting F. O. Matthiessen's American Renaissance on this list, but I had not read the book in quite a long time, and it was besides somewhat more narrowly focused on a particular period in American literary history--roughly the mid-nineteenth century--than I thought was appropriate for a list of "general" criticism.

I have now re-read the book (itself an act of supreme patience, since it contains over 650 densely-packed pages), and I would have to say I still would not include it on a list of critical books that non-academic readers might want to check out--at least not at first--but for reasons that have nothing to do with its quality. It is in fact, a book of great erudition and discernment, and is probably more responsible for the very concept of the "American Renaissance," and thus for the multitude of survey courses on this period that followed in the wake of the book's publication (1941) for at least the next fifty years than any other single work of literary criticism or scholarship. It may even be said to have provided the model for this kind of "periodization" in academic literary study in the first place.

Furthemore, the book clearly has played a large role in the way its five chosen writers--Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, and Whitman--are understood by subsequent readers interested in the period. I think Matthiessen undervalues Emerson, overvalues Thoreau, and exaggerates the degree to which Hawthorne was simply trying to provide a more sober view of human nature than was implied in the transcendental assumptions of Emerson and Thoreau. However, I also think the chapters in American Renaissance on Melville and Whitman are just about the best things I've ever read about those two writers. At any rate, the overall picture that emerges from this book of the literary goals and accomplishments of each writer is probably the starting-point from which different pictures might ultimately be portrayed.

But ultimately its impressive learning and lengthy explications are, paradoxically perhaps, the very reasons I probably would not recommend the book to readers without an existing interest in these writers and this period or who would rather read the writers themselves than such an extended work of critical commentary. Matthiessen's approach is essentially historical (in the "undertheorized" way of scholars from this generation more interested in literary history than in "subverting" this history), although Matthiessen also states that his primary interest lies "with what these books were as works of art, with evaluating their fusions of form and content." In essence, he wants to understand what these writers thought they were doing, how each of them in turn influenced what the others were trying to do, to let them as much as possible speak for themselves through judicious analysis of selected texts and passages, ultimately to help readers understand why these were and are writers worth reading and taking seriously. What a concept!

However, this has become in so many ways such an alien concept that many readers of American Renaissance might think it quaint, even a little bizarre. Why would someone so obviously spend so much time reading Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, and Whitman so thoroughly, so clearly attempt to think through the implications of why and what they wrote, so patiently take the reader through their essays, fictions, and poems and invite this reader to think further about it all him/herself? Where's the attitude, the jargon, the theoretical superstructure, the knowing superiority to the writers being examined? Matthiessen barely mentions Whitman's homosexuality (or Melville's suspected same-sex orientation), isn't much interested in gender (although is plenty interested in class), only touches on these writers' attitudes toward race, doesn't seem concerned to pivot his analysis in an appropriately progressive political direction, actually thinks the writers he discusses ought to be read on their own terms. In some cases, these omissions are indeed problematic (the omission of race particularly), but more to the point, the book's overall focus on those qualities in these writers that make them important writers in and of themselves just isn't done any more.

And American Renaissance is admittedly somewhat digressive, moving ahead or backward from one writer to the other seemingly in midstream, breaking off for a discussion of the painter Thomas Eakins before returning to the homologies between Eakins and Whitman, etc. Its very breadth of knowledge can be intimidating if not irritating--it isn't always clear why we need to know quite so much just to appreciate Hawthorne's stories or Leaves of Grass--and its footnotes frequently insert what just seems superfluous information. It's a book for readers of its five chosen writers who are already convinced of their centrality--at least it is for readers now--and who would like to know more about why they wrote what they wrote when they wrote it.

Which is finally why it probably wouldn't be of interest to those who wouldn't already describe themselves as readers of this sort. Anyone who really wants to know what the "American Renaissance" was all about and what these five writers contributed to it couldn't really claim to have this knowledge without reading F.O. Matthiessen, but I fear there aren't many people around anymore who want to know these things. Maybe they shouldn't. Maybe books like Matthiessen's were written according to a "scholarly" model that is ultimately inappropriate for the appreciation of literature. I sometimes think this myself. But I'm glad to have read American Renaissance (twice), and my subsequent readings of Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, and Whitman will be richer and more informed because I did.

Teaching Literature

Terry Eagleton now appears to find the state of literary study to be as dreadful as he claims the late Edward Said found it to be. Given that both Eagleton and Said played major roles in bringing academic criticism to the dire straits in which it now has trouble maneuvering, it is on the one hand difficult to have much sympathy with Eagleton's own current displeasure. However, one might on the other hand see the later frustration of both Eagleton and Said as a welcome sign they had come to see their own contributions to the politicization of literary study to be a terrible mistake.

Yet, that Eagleton finally doesn't really get it is revealed to me, at least, in this seemingly innocuous comment about Said: "Said's concern was justice, not identity. He was more interested in emancipating the dispossessed than in celebrating the body or floating the signifier. As a major architect of modern cultural theory, he was profoundly out of sympathy with most of its cerebral convolutions, which he correctly saw as for the most part a symptom of political displacement and despair."

This is all well and good and, for that matter, I believe that Said (Eagleton as well) was indeed concerned with justice and with "emancipating the dispossessed." But why in the world would either of these men have thought that a good way of achieving these ends was to become literature professors in British and American universities? To the extent that both of them (Said more than Eagleton) actually took their concerns into the real world and acted on them in properly political ways, I admire them. To the extent they used their sinecures in academe to pollute literary study with political dogmatism, I find their actions pernicious in the extreme.

In championing Said's "humanism," Eagleton asserts that "What he is after. . .is what one might call a reconstructed or self-critical humanism--one that retains its belief in human value and in the great artistic works that embody it, but which has shed the elitism and exclusivism with which literary humanism is currently bound up. We would still read Dante and Proust, but we would also extend the very meaning of humanism in order to 'excavate the silences, the world of memory, of itinerant, barely surviving groups, the places of exclusion and invisibility.'" What I myself finally don't get about this project is why reading Dante and Proust would ultimately have anything to do with the desire to "excavate the silences," etc. What it does suggest is that it really is impossible to "teach" literature as an academic subject without in the end resorting to literature as a secondary means to "teach" something else entirely, whether it be humanism, postmodernism, gender studies, or all the other possible "approaches" one could take to not reading literature.

I would really not even have commented on Eagleton's brief essay-review if I hadn't also at about the same time read two very thoughtful and intelligent posts on academic weblogs dealing with the very subject of what's wrong with academic literary study. Erin O'Connor, who maintains the weblog Critical Mass, recently discussed her reasons for leaving her tenured position for a job teaching at an independent high school. Her reasons are all most honorable, and she should be commended for her decision. But this was the passage in her post that struck me as most revealing: "[Others who have made the same decision say] they are able to do the sort of intensive, personalized teaching they dreamed of doing as college teachers, but could not do in a higher ed setting; all say they feel more intellectually alive than they did in academe; and all say, too, that they have a much greater sense of purpose and of professional satisfaction than they did in academe. They are palpably happy, and the differences they are making in kids' lives are real and meaningful."

Even those academic scholars who don't have an allegiance to a particular agenda probably feel as O'Connor does about what their job is really all about. It's about making a difference in "kids' lives," about (ideally) "intensive, personalized teaching." I certainly wouldn't say I have an objection to any of this, but for O'Connor teaching literature is first about the teaching, not about the literature.

In an equally sensible reply to O'Connor, Tim Burke, in attempting to formulate solutions to the problems from which O'Connor is fleeing, writes that "Graduate pedagogy needs to shift its emphases dramatically to meaningfully prepare candidates for the actual jobs they ought to be doing as professors, to getting doctoral students into the classroom earlier and more effectively, to learning how to communicate with multiple publics, to thinking more widely about disciplines and research."

Again, this proposal is all about making academe a more congenial place for the teacher, and again I don't object to it per se, but I do note that neither in O'Connor's nor Burke's post, nor in Eagleton's essay, is there much consideration of the role literature itself plays in literary study. This disjunction seems to be so commonplace, so much taken for granted by "literary" academics, that it makes the academy seem an even more disembodied, insular place than it actually is. (And it truly is disembodied and insular.)

I don't have a proposal of my own for changing the situation. The prerogatives of academic life are always going to take precedence over a mere interest in or concern with the intricacies of literature. Teaching literature is not the same thing as writing it or even reading it. It may even not require that the teacher actually like or respect it. All of which suggests, perhaps, that literature would be better off if the teachers stayed away from it. At the moment, it certainly isn't benefiting from their ministrations.

Attention Please

Notwithstanding this rather hysterical response to it, the Camille Paglia essay recently featured at Arts & Letters Daily is really very good. It's in the more scholarly mode of Sexual Personae, and is well worth reading. Here are her main points:

Decade by decade since the 1960s, popular culture, with its stunning commercial success, has gained strength until it now no longer is the brash alternative to organized religion or an effete literary establishment: it is the culture for American students, who outside urban centers have little exposure to the fine arts...

Interest in and patience with long, complex books and poems have alarmingly diminished not only among college students but college faculty in the U.S. It is difficult to imagine American students today, even at elite universities, gathering impromptu at midnight for a passionate discussion of big, challenging literary works like Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov. . .

Young people today are flooded with disconnected images but lack a sympathetic instrument to analyze them as well as a historical frame of reference in which to situate them. I am reminded of an unnerving scene in Stanley Kubrick's epic film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, where an astronaut, his air hose cut by the master computer gone amok, spins helplessly off into space. The new generation, raised on TV and the personal computer but deprived of a solid primary education, has become unmoored from the mother ship of culture. . . The ironically self-referential or overtly politicized and jargon-ridden paradigms of higher education, far from helping the young to cope or develop, have worsened their vertigo and free fall. Today's students require not subversion of rationalist assumptions—the childhood legacy of intellectuals born in Europe between the two World Wars—but the most basic introduction to structure and chronology. Without that, they are riding the tail of a comet in a media starscape of explosive but evanescent images. . . .

Since Paglia herself has been among the most vocal champions of "popular culture" among academics and intellectuals, the essay can almost be read as a kind of apology for her own excesses in encouraging us to "become unmoored from the mother ship of culture," or at least as an expression of second thoughts about her own possible collusion with the powers that be in the academy in "subverting" literature and the fine arts.

Anyone who has tried to teach literature to either high school or college students over the past 15 years knows, however, that she is correct in her description of these students' capacity to read not just long books but any works of literature that require careful attention. It is also true that the prevailing models of literary study actively encourage this corruption of reading by dismissing, both implicitly and explicitly, what gets called "elite" culture as the encoded propaganda of the Oppressor. Students are assured that they don't need to take art and literature seriously because it will only hurt their feelings, or worse. (This is itself an inherently patronizing approach, since it assumes that only the tenured among us need to consider such works in the first place in order to determine they are indeed bad for us.)

I don't think computers have much to do with this state of affairs, although television certainly does. Computers--the internet more generally--requires the active agency of its users, and there's nothing wrong with sampling some of what art and literature have to offer for the first time in cyberspace rather than in a museum or classroom. Television, on the other hand, is entirely passive and does promote the kind of impatience with anything that can't be reduced to its demands that Paglia discusses.

Paglia then goes on to describe the way she tries to introduce her own students to visual art, and although her approach seems reasonable enough, others more competent to assess it would have to do so. I'm also not sure that this kind of remedial, catch-up work will in the long run be very effective. It may be too late. My impression of much of the current discourse on art, music, and literature, even among professed enthusiasts, is that all of these arts have gotten too "difficult," too "cerebral," too far away from what "common people" like. In discussions of literature, much of this criticism seems to take writers to task for not writing books that could easily be made into movies and tv shows. If the experience of reading a novel is ultimately judged by whether it seems like watching television sitcoms, then there's no reason to read (or write) novels at all.

In the response to which I linked above, Paglia's analysis is labeled "cultural conservatism." It is only conservative if we stick to the core meaning of the term--to "conserve." Given that presently in American culture there's not much left of either the ability or the desire to experience any works of art in a substantive way, conserving it is now probably beside the point. Bringing art and literature back into the lives of people of any age--or at least the knowledge of how to do that for themselves--would actually be a fairly radical act. It's the partisans of the current media culture and the mavens of academic criticism who have become the "cultural conservatives."

Politics and the Novel

There's an interesting interview with Scottish writers Alasdair Gray and James Kelman in the newest issue of the journal Contemporary Literature--interesting in large part for the way in which the interviewer (described as "a research assistant in the departments of literary theory and English literature at the Catholic University of Brussels, and a Ph.D candidate at the Catholic University of Leuven") keeps pressing the two writers to identify their work as essentially political writing, an invitation both writers consistently reject.

Before discussing further the particulars of the interview, a few words about Contemporary Literature. Like almost all "academic journals," CL does not make its issues available online. Archived articles from such journals sometimes make their way into cyber print, but even then getting access to them is frequently so difficult that indeed only the scholar squirrels among us would be tempted to try. Not that these journals, including Contemporary Literature, print that much of interest to ordinary readers--they're not even intended for "specialists" anymore, since all academic literary scholars are now taught to specialize in the same mind-numbing chants of formula and cliche--but occasionally a useful interview or interesting book review still does appear. It would be in everyone's interest for this material to be more available online.

(It is particularly ironic that CL has become as preoccupied with the politicized platitudes of academic criticism as any other journal, since it and other journals focused on contemporary literature were once viewed with condescension in the academy, contemporary literature itself not being worth any serious person's attention. Unfortunately, Contemporary Literature has now situated itself securely in the mainstream of useless scholarship.)

The interview with Gray and Kelman clearly enough has been included not because both are accomplished writers of worthwhile books (as they are, in my view Gray especially so), but because as members of an oppressed nationality they can perhaps plausibly be examined under the aegis of "colonial" or "postcolonial" studies. Certainly the political situation obtaining in Scotland plays an inevitable role in their fiction, but both Kelman and Gray try to make it clear that this situation is not uppermost in their minds when they're writing their books. Says Kelman, "It's important to get out of the way a possible misunderstanding. . .My politics is really irrelevant to my work; there's no place for it. If you are committed to a certain political thing anyway, I believe also that you can relax as a writer, even if you feel that events are so oppressing in the world that there's no time to sit back and write stories and you have to be political or something." Gray says much the same: "I became a writer who wanted to draw attention to myself by being an entertainer, by pleasing people. I became a writer for the same reason I became a reader: I read to be entertained, to be shifted into a rather different world from that which I occupied, or to get a view of the world I occupied that made me feel free of it."

Yet the interviewer keeps pressing them to admit to the centrality of politics, as if he can't believe Kelman and Gray would say such things. It all speaks multiple volumes about the mindset among "literary" academics, who have almost come around, one is pushed to say, to the condescending view of the frivolity of trying to seriously study "contemporary literature" once expressed by the snootier of the tweedy academics convinced it was better to stay with the tried and the true, to stay burrowed in the past. Current academics are less inclined to live in the past, but they certainly occupy their own kind of burrow.

Reclaiming Literature

I do not intend for this weblog to become obsessed with the academy or an excuse for my recurrent attacks on academic criticism, although since I am trained as an academic critic and continue to monitor such criticism, I probably will occasionally comment on developments in this corner of what we might still want to call the literary world. The current posting is occasioned by 3 articles/essays that have appeared recently that do provide an opportunity to assess current attitudes toward literature in the academy.

The January 27 issue of the Christian Science Monitor contains an article, "Theory in Chaos," that purports to reveal that literary theory no longer has the appeal among academic critics it had a decade ago. While this may be true (pure theory has been out of fashion even longer than that), it does not follow that the academy is returning to the study of "literature itself." Certain political orientations (feminism, Marxism) unquestionably still obtain, but these approaches are themselves now put in the service of what is generically called "cultural studies," which increasingly dominates most up-to-speed English departments. Cultural studies approaches literature as just another form of expression (just another kind of "text") to be examined for its cultural and political implications. In other words, literary study in these departments is becoming merely a branch of sociology. The "traditionalists" referred to in the article are no closer to regaining control of the study of literature than they were in the salad days of high theory.

In the January 16 issue of the Times Literary Supplement, Peter Brooks reviews Gerald Graff's Clueless in Academe. Even more than the title itself, Graff's subtitle says it all: "How Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind." I actually have great respect for Gerald Graff, who has been willing to consider the state of higher education, and the place of literature more broadly, with honesty and in plain language. However, even though Graff at least implicitly concedes that the study of literature no longer plays a significant role in the academic curriculum, he doesn't show much concern for it once this has been granted. Instead, his commitment is still to the academy--or to the "life of the mind" more broadly--and he continues to look for ways to reconfigure the curriculum so that English professors, at least, continue to have a role to play. As Brooks points out, Graff now focuses on the teaching of English composition as a way to maintain some integrity in the English curriculum. (Previously he had emphasized the possibility of accenting the "conflicts" among different approaches to literature, but that has not worked out so well.)

In ths same issue of the TLS, Patrick Wormald, a Cambridge don, has an essay, "The Proper Study," that rehearses all of the familiar arguments for retaining the Humanities as a core part of the academic curriculum. Wormald's arguments are all cogent enough, but by now such a brief on behalf of the "elevating" and "humanizing" benefits of the study of the humanities, in this case specifically history, sounds like mere boilerplate. It is precisely this insistence that we get our history and our literature from attending "the university," in fact, that has bleached both endeavors of all visible color. Both Graff and Wormald take for granted that the life of the mind, an interest in history, a love of literature, are all synonymous with occupying a place, as student or as teacher, in the academy. Why should this be so? Inevitably, as has happened with literature, the priorities of academe take precedence over the substance of the "subjects" being taught, so that something like the current mess that is literary study becomes more or less inevitable.

Somehow or other, literature needs to be rescued from those in the academy who have almost tortured it to death. One reason I have become interested in the weblog phenomenon is that it might potentially become part of such an effort, along with the appearance of literary web journals and other literary sites that seek alternative ways of publishing creative and critical work (and perhaps with a move by mainstream literary magazines to revive general interest literary criticism). Literature--embodied in its writers and its readers--has nothing to lose but its soul.