Death of Literary Studies 2

are not really branches of knowledge at all and are, furthermore,
essentially meaningless because they contain no factual answers:
Anyone can say anything he or she wants to, and be right! Whereas
a tree branch, to a dendrology student, either comes from an oak
tree or does not -- that's real knowledge. He held his hand up in the
air to demonstrate a student holding a branch in his hand,
symbolizing the concreteness of his point.
This poses a problem for literary studies. "What's the use of
studying Shakespeare?" is a question English professors have all
heard asked explicitly and implicitly, jocularly and exasperatedly,
shruggingly and resentfully. Critics have spent the last 40-50 years
trying obliquely to devise a scientifically and socially credible
answer to this question by inventing "critical approaches" to literary
texts. You can find lists of approaches, most of which vary from one
another, in introductory textbooks.
Unfortunately, hardly any of the approaches makes a direct reply to
the student who asks why s/he has to read Shakespeare. Instead,
most approaches work much harder to establish their own territory
in the greater body of critical approaches. A critic of critics, Grant
Webster, points out in his book The Republic of Letters that critical
approaches to literature come and go like trends and vogues in
fashion; their actual validity or usefulness or pertinence to reality
has in the last 40 or 50 years become a side issue. Literary study has
all the permanence of the style, cut and fit of this year's jeans. You
can extend this comparison pretty far, imagining the outrageous and
crazy fashions often seen in fashion shows, which no one ever
actually wears.
Because so few of the approaches respond directly to the reasons
people actually read (I will speak further about this later), literary
studies has devolved into a self-contained industry of little or no
interest to those outside its cliques and lexicons. Who outside of her
competitors and a few diligent classroom instructors cares whether
Helen Vendler changes her attitude toward Wallace Stevens, let
alone cares or even understands what the change consists of? Who
cares whether Harold Bloom wrote an immensely complicated book
to say a simple thing -- that young poets are influenced by their
misreading of older poets? Only literary critics and graduate
students, I'm afraid. That is, the people inside the cliques who know
the specialized lexicons. There seem to be few engineers, business
managers or hard scientists who understand or care what the
literary critics are talking about. Hardly anyone pays the least
attention to, or holds the critics accountable for, what they say.
This creates a context in which, in popular deconstructive fashion, a
critic can say anything about any text in almost any way and find
some limited audience: a class of glazed undergraduates, a few
readers of literary journals, a sparse crowd at a conference, or in
lucky cases, a couple of hundred scholars who read books on such
specialized topics (usually the same people as at the conference).
In this self-contained world, there is no reason why the study of
literature should not be simply a game. And unfortunately, if certain
hypothetical monitors of university academic offerings were to dig
into the details of what goes on in many college literature courses,
they would discover that, indeed, literary texts are often treated as
game boards, and that -- as the resentful undergraduates in the
required Shakespeare course well know -- English classes very often
have, indeed, nothing whatsoever to do with the world they, the
students, live in. Let me give some anecdotal evidence to support
this remark, which I hope to show is a very serious charge.
I recently attended a formal talk by a candidate for a faculty
position in English. This candidate received her doctoral degree in
the past year or two. Very near the beginning of her talk, she said
something interesting that was not really pertinent to her remarks,
but is of great interest here. She said (I am paraphrasing, but closely
-- her words were much like this): As a literary critic, my task is to
find something unique or unusual to say about the text I have before
me. Now this sentence rings clearly because it captures a sensibility
one encounters frequently, or even constantly, in the study of
literature. Literary study consists of inventing something to say
about a book or poem.
Now, twenty-odd years ago I heard the same assumption implied
during a graduate seminar I attended. One of the students in the
class was disgruntled about the grade she had received on her first
essay, an essay on Wordsworth, as it happened. She complained
before class one day that the professor was incompetent and did not
know what he was talking about or how to read student essays. She

told us with bitterness that the main purpose of critical analysis
was to find connections between unrelated things. "And I'm good at
it," she said with great confidence. "Professor X told me I am."
What she was good at, my friends and I knew, was what we called
"crossword-puzzle criticism." This sly approach is closely linked to
reader-response criticism, although you will never find it listed in
the introductory textbooks. When utilizing it, the critic or graduate
student selects from different parts of a text any images or words
which happen to get his or her attention. The critic next notes that
the words or images all occur in the same poem, stanza, page or
chapter -- or book -- and treats them as clues, the way you view
clues in a crossword puzzle. He or she then invents a rationalization
to show what links the clues together. In crossword-puzzle
criticism, the rationalization need make no mention of the story's
plot, characters, mood or general effect experienced when reading.
It need only align the selected words or images in a logically
coherent order. I once endured a two-week seminar discussion (with
Professor X) on Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson in which it was never
mentioned that the book is funny.
Sometimes when listening to crossword-puzzle readings, one gets
the vague impression that something does indeed link the selections
together, even though the critic has no idea what it actually is. But
more often the selection appears to be completely random, or a
matter for a psychologist. In crossword-puzzle criticism, the reader
invents something to say about the book, exactly as the candidate for
the faculty position had been trained to do. What else could there
possibly be to literature?
Many, perhaps most students come away from courses that utilize
such approaches either exasperated or cynical. English classes, they
surmise, consist of: 1) reading books which contain no useful facts
and 2) inventing responses which need not have anything to do with
the book they thought they had read, or with human experience -- or
indeed, with reality -- whatsoever. Why bother to study
Shakespeare?*
To bring this back to a more scientific level, this anecdotal and
deductive evidence suggests that contemporary literary criticism
approaches its material with this question: What can I invent about
it?
A different kind of reader, on the other hand, asks: What do I have
to learn from this text? This is the question most people
traditionally expect to ask of a book, and the question they --
perhaps naively -- expect literary critics and college professors to
ask. In college and even high school, however, they discover that
many instructors are not asking this question at all, and this results
in a quick loss of interest in literature. The students lose interest
because the instructors encourage them to invent their own
meanings; but unfortunately, many students have no initial
interest in what meaning they themselves can make. In other words,
most people do not view reading as an expression of their own egos
and ideas; most general readers are interested in what sense the
author makes, in what ideas and information the author is
conveying, and they want help in discovering what those senses,
ideas and information are, or at least, might be.
Outside the English department, literary studies are frequently seen
as a game of inventing whatever messages come to mind and
justifying them with self-propelled rationalizations that, like
crossword puzzles, have no application -- or even reality -- outside
their own self-contained world. I might suggest, at this point, that
English departments still exist at all only by the good luck that
many college administrators have simply neglected to eliminate
them. The neglect, I'd further suggest, stems from the fact that it is
easier to carry on with an old habit than to break it. It's entirely
possible that literary studies are still supported by universities not
because the administrators in general believe literary studies are
important, but because they lack the time and energy to break the
deeply ingrained habit of supporting them. Another way of putting
this is: Well, literary study has existed for a long time,
well-rounded people have read Shakespeare, so there must be
something useful about it and we'll just let them carry on for now,
as long as they don't cost us too much money and they keep offering
enough sections of composition. Even though, apart from teaching
writing, they offer no skill, knowledge or understanding seen as
useful outside their own classrooms.**

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