Vanderbilt Report: Literary Studies Without the Literature

What follows is an excerpt from Advocacy in Literary Studies, a report published earlier this month under the auspices of the Vanderbilt–WashU Commission on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and Humanistic Social Sciences. Its Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences was published in April and excerpted in Quillette.

Mathematicians and physicists typically do not instruct students in the history of their disciplines. What is old is outdated. That is not true of great literature. As nineteenth-century British essayist William Hazlitt pointed out in his essay Why the Arts Are Not Progressive?, literature, unlike the hard sciences, does not progress. Aristotle’s Poetics is still relevant in a way that his physics is not. Any first-year physics student knows more physics than Aristotle, but no dramatist has surpassed Shakespeare. Novelists of the present have not created works as significant as War and Peace and Anna Karenina. To be sure, the canon of great works changes, and unjustly neglected works are added. Still, some works survive numerous shifts. The monuments of the past are usually more impressive than those of the present.

One source of the greatness of literary works is their inexhaustible capacity to enter into dialogue with readers from different cultures and epochs. One does not have to locate them in their particular originating context to appreciate their greatness. Indeed, the distinction between literature and other documents may be that literature is designed to be meaningful without reconstructing the original context (although it is often enlightening to do so). Hamlet has something to say to those with no interest in Renaissance England, and Crime and Punishment to those with no interest in tsarist Russia. These works may resonate with readers whom their authors never imagined and with people from lands they never considered.

Activism, especially as it is now sometimes practiced, not only impedes the passing on of a heritage, but often rejects it as a proper purpose. Many courses given in English and language/literature departments often do not teach literature at all. The very idea of “great literature” is often regarded as suspect.

Courses in literary studies traditionally provide students with the skills needed to read great literature. Reading Paradise Lost is hard, and recognizing why Dostoevsky’s understanding of human nature is so profound may require practice in reading novels and grasping how they work. If activism replaces the teaching of those skills, students do not learn to appreciate and understand masterpieces. Activists may decry this traditional purpose as a focus on “aesthetics” or “intrinsic” properties which, it is argued, do not exist.

If literature and literary studies do not progress in the way the sciences do, why does anyone expend resources to support them? The answer is that society appreciates the value of keeping a heritage alive and available. The wisdom of the past, based on timeless aspects of human nature, may save us from the blindness of reigning prejudices. It may free us from the prison house of the present moment and of the cultural norms we take for granted. Not only is culture not guaranteed to progress, but it often regresses, especially when people imagine that present wisdom is bound to be right. Understanding past geniuses may guard against presentism.

Great literature poses ultimate questions: Does existence have a meaning? What is a flourishing life? How shall we regard other people? What is love, and does it come in kinds? Such questions should be a part of college education. This is the time and place for those questions to be asked. If they are replaced with political activism, one purpose of college education is lost. Education becomes stunted.

The rise of activism in scholarship has severely weakened the ability of both scholarship and teaching to perform these functions. New orthodoxies, which have been accumulating for the past three decades or so, have insisted that there is no such thing as great literature. Not everyone agrees, of course, but those who do not have long been on the defensive. Predominant opinion usually holds that greatness is entirely relative, and there are no “intrinsic” qualities to make a work superior. There are no great works per se, only those called great by “hegemonic” oppressive powers.

If so, there is no pressing need to teach the supposedly great works of the past, and they may be appropriately replaced, either by recent popular literary works more in agreement with current prejudices, or by nonliterary works of political and social theory. There is never a shortage of issues felt to be more urgent than preserving and understanding past masterpieces.

Philosophers and scholars from the social and hard sciences often marvel at the confident ignorance with which literary scholars discuss topics without knowledge of the disciplines long devoted to them.

But if literature departments do not teach literature, why do we need them? Why should society support them? One may also ask: why does training in literary studies enable scholars to pronounce on pressing current issues (such as climate change)? Philosophers and scholars from the social and hard sciences often marvel at the confident ignorance with which literary scholars discuss topics without knowledge of the disciplines long devoted to them.

It is important not to confuse a defense of literary greatness with a refusal to expand the canon of great works. On the contrary, a belief in greatness may lead one to include the masterpieces of non-Western culture, such as The Tale of Genji, the Bhagavad Gita, and The Dream of the Red Chamber.

If one accepts a relativist or politicized view of canonicity, however, there is no good way to acknowledge such masterpieces; instead, one is likely to include lesser, more contemporary works that seem more useful in confronting our current political concerns. Other cultures are examined insofar as they are useful in attacking the shortcomings of ours. It’s rather like the joke about the person who tells her friend: “That’s enough about me; let’s talk about you. What do you think of me?”

”Theory” once meant “theory of literature,” which addressed questions like: What is a genre? Through the 1970s (or later), a theoretician might ask: In interpreting a literary work, should we consider the author’s intention or only the text itself? Is the reader a passive decoder of the work, or is the reader’s role more active? Is there a sort of dialogue between the text and the reader? Why does literature change over time? Do new genres and movements reflect social needs or are they generated from the internal dynamics of literature itself? If both, how do the two interact? What, if anything, distinguishes literary works from nonliterary ones, and one genre from another? How do plots in different narrative genres work? What is the relation of literature to the other arts?

But these are no longer the sort of questions “theorists” usually ask. Instead, they more often consider topics that are essentially social and political and may have little or nothing to do with literary works. Hence, “literary theory” has been replaced by “theory” (or “critical theory”).

Research and courses on topics such as climate change, racism, prison reform, and imperialism indicate that theorists in (formerly) literature departments have expanded their domain to include topics previously addressed by other disciplines. That is why such “theorists” can make sociological, political, economic, and anthropological observations without training in or knowledge of those disciplines. On what basis? The answer is “theory” itself.

One may roughly describe the process like this: literary critics moved from ascribing meaning to authors or texts to claiming that meaning is entirely the property of readers. Since readers differ, this move opened the door to radical relativism. The next step was to attribute authority not to specific readers but to “interpretive communities,” which made the relativism not individual but social in nature.

From there, it was a short step to focusing on questions that are essentially social, and then to ones that are political in nature. Culture (broadly understood) and society (understood in terms of “social justice”) often became the main areas of concern. If “social science” disciplines considering such topics arrive at different conclusions, they may be impugned for devotion to the discredited ideas of impartiality, objectivity, or other forms of naïveté about language and meaning, as exposed by the canonical texts of “theory.”

Excerpted from Advocacy in Literary Studies, a report published earlier this month under the auspices of the Vanderbilt–WashU Commission on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and Humanistic Social Sciences. Its Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences was published in April and excerpted in Quillette.