Death of Literary Studies 1

At a small liberal arts university where I taught at one time,
an associate professor of philosophy made the following argument.
He said during a faculty curriculum meeting that fewer literature
courses should be offered at our university (during the semester of
his complaint, 7 literature courses were being offered to a student
body of about 650), and that furthermore the English major should
be dissolved. With fewer literature courses to teach, he said,
full-time English faculty could teach more composition courses.
Now, philosophy and literature, for various reasons, are allied
fields of study, differing only in their approach to very similar
material. So when the philosophy professor makes such arguments,
what are people in the sciences, business programs and engineering
departments -- all fields of study enjoying much more widespread
cultural prestige and support than literature and philosophy --
thinking?
And what are the people in the English department thinking? The
answer is that they are thinking the study of literature is in hard
shape, at least outside its own private context. And they are feeling
isolated and estranged, not only from their own campus
communities, but also from society at large, which sees them not
even as composition instructors, but as eccentrics dabbling in what
is at best a quaint hobby and at worst an impractical waste of time.
Of course, not every English department and instructor in America
feels estranged. And not every person outside the English
department feels literature is an academic anachronism. Plenty of
people still read and even understand the value of literary study, and
plenty of people, including undergraduates, are curious about
learning to read and write with refinement. If you don't think so,
compile for yourself some statistics on the number of applications
to English graduate programs each year. The number is large and
should encourage those who believe that literature can still play a
vital role in the life of a culture. But the English department is
losing cultural ground, not because of a total lack of interest, but
because the number of disinterested people far outstrips the number
of interested people. The English department is a small minority of
its own.
The unemployment rate for new graduates from doctoral programs
in the humanities is about 55 per cent (Boufis and Olsen 2). This is
not because there are fewer colleges, or fewer students, but because
there are fewer full-time teaching jobs in English, philosophy,
history, classics and so on. This situation is seen by some English
professors as evidence that the study of the humanities -- and
literature in particular -- is not valued. Others view it more
mechanistically as part of a trend in higher education to cut back
humanities programs. In this trend, faculty positions in the
humanities are dealt with in one of several ways. They are left
unfilled after retirements and resignations (one well-respected
English department of my acquaintance recently had an
accumulation of 14 full-time English faculty lines unfilled and
unsearched); the positions are cut outright when vacated; or in worst
cases, they are eliminated while still occupied. Alternatively,
traditional disciplines such as literature, philosophy and history
may be collapsed into single administrative and teaching units,
resulting in a need for fewer faculty. This action is taken ostensibly
to keep current with educational theories calling for
multidisciplinary programs as opposed to traditional majors --
which are described as narrow, limiting and, by the way,
administratively inefficient.
I think probably a whole ecology of factors accounts for the decline
in status, importance and size of humanities programs during the
past 30 years. But I want to say that there are two main reasons for
the particular decline of literary studies. One reason is that its
importance is not
understood, and the other related reason is that the English
department has dug its own grave.
Well, what are we talking about exactly? What is the study of
English?
On the face of it, English studies consists of the study of literature
and linguistics. Linguistics is relatively speaking a sparsely
populated field in America. Not much interest in it, not much
demand for courses, not many jobs. The study of literature per se
consists of, maybe, four subfields: textual interpretation, evaluation,
literary theory and literary history. Many other academic
disciplines view the English department's main -- or only important
-- role to be the training of competent student writers. As it happens
this role is widely thought by academicians (not students, by and
large) to be exceptionally important, and therefore few people think
of totally responsible for humanities budgets, composition can be
taught very effectively by graduate students and part-time faculty

holding master's degrees, and in general the trend to cut back on
full-time positions can be rationalized in this way. (Another
university English department of my acquaintance in a recent
semester farmed more than half of its roughly 100 sections of
writing and literature to part-time faculty.) Composition is
important; literature is, well, forgivable but at crunch time,
dispensable.
Let me generalize about the English department's historical role in
this situation. In the middle of the 20th century, when the notion
that science holds the keys to all human problems had entrenched
itself in our culture, the humanities disciplines made concerted
efforts to validate their academic credibility by attempting to
develop scientific approaches to their material. In other words
English studies, for example, tried to develop an explicitly scientific
approach to literature. You can read Northrop Frye's influential
comments about this in his Anatomy of Criticism, first published in
1957; literary criticism may be viewed as a science, he in effect
states. On the one hand the scientific approach to literature evolved
into the systematic study of linguistics. And on the other hand, there
was the problem of what to do with literary texts themselves. The
prime mover in this effort was of course the New Criticism, or
"formalism," which was developed by T.S. Eliot and his
contemporaries during the 1930s and after.
For the uninitiated, let me explain. Since trying to ferret the
author's real experience or real philosophic intention from a text is
objectively impossible -- there is always a doubt about what the
author "really means" -- then to maintain scientific credibility in a
scientific age, an objective approach to interpreting the text's
meaning is needed. The New Criticism's explicit objective approach
is known as "close reading," a method whereby one infers, through
close and systematic attention to the diction, imagery and structure
(that is, the form) of a poem the poem's true meaning. Another
response with similar intentions was structuralism, which supposed
that deep structures could be objectively identified in any literary
text worth its salt. A slightly later response was semiology, which
supposed that linguistic structures could be identified which
demonstrated how a text came to have its effectiveness (greater or
lesser).
These things proved to be no more scientifically sound than the
search for the author's real intentions. Jacques Derrida and some
others in the 1960s made the astounding discovery that no two
people understand any given combination of words in exactly the
same way because no combination of words can possibly have only
one meaning. Of course, people have known this for millennia. But
Derrida and his cohorts were objecting to the use of objective,
Aristotelian, either/or logic in which either a poem means this or it
means that, and the idea that it might mean both things was a matter
for sharp debate, sometimes dismissal, and oftentimes ridicule by
scientifically minded formalists. As in science, someone had to be
right and someone had to be wrong. Literary studies, at this point,
had problems because while it insisted on its historical alliance
with the scientific method, it simultaneously began to demonstrate,
through Derrida's revelation and the use of careful scientific testing
of its own methods, that it could not offer either/or information.
In reaction, it began, like a spoiled child refusing to cooperate with
its parents, to do exactly the opposite. Derrida's revelation was like
the opening of Pandora's box. Through the 1970s and 80s, a major
catchword in literary studies was "deconstruction," which amounted
in theory to the idea that most linguistic texts subvert their own
efforts at meaning, and in practice to the idea that any combination
of words can be shown to reveal just about any meaning at all.*
Parallel to this approach was the more constructive school of
"reader response" criticism, in which one carefully monitors one's
own internal response to each passing word and phrase, taking into
account the fact that one's own knowledge, experience, interests and
biases deeply influence one's understanding of what the text
"means." Any given group of words could still reveal an astonishing
array of radically different meanings. (Meanings you sometimes
think required more work to compose than did the original text.)
Although deconstruction is now more or less passe, this is roughly
where we stand today, and I will speak more about this further on.
To many scientists, of course, this playing around with unverifiable
possibilities for meaning is all meaningless because in such an
activity there really cease to be any Facts. That is, if it is not the
words themselves we study, then it's the fantasies of the reader, and
that aspect of reality is the realm of psychologists, not professional
readers. It begins to look like literary critics, as Frye feared, really
have no credibility or function at all. A forestry professor once
instructed me very sternly over lunch that literature and philosophy