Grand Hotel Abyss

There’s some shit going round the academo-blogosphere (office hours of the soul!) about the decline and fall of literary studies as an academic discipline.  External factors play a large role of course: corporate Stalinism dictates that all monies will be spent erecting shiny silver and glass buildings to house the graduate school of business and the biomedical center for the production of new diseases to be treated by the pharmaceutical companies rather than clearing the asbestos out of the English professors’ offices.  And some of the internal factors in the fall of literary studies are symptoms of this problem rather than problems strictly endemic to the discipline’s, um, ‘logic,’ as we’ve come to say in literary studies.  The problem remains, however, even if it’s not much of a problem compared to what other people are going through.  

And what is the problem?  Well, as an insider, I would diagnose it this way: undergraduates (and I’m talking about English majors) don’t know how to read a literary text and we are not teaching them.  They can, by and large, say nothing whatsoever about tone, about literary tradition, about formal structures, and this is not their fault: they are following the cues of their instructors, particularly the young ones, who were themselves reared in a tradition of the most boring and finally pointless historicism.  Not a politically engaged historicism nor a philosophically informed one; neither Benjamin’s seizing of a flash from the past in a moment of danger in order to lend strength to a liberatory politics, nor Auerbach’s sweepingly inductive text-based cultural analyses, no, none of this.  Rather instead we have a procession of ‘recovered’ texts, recovered to no obvious purpose except to ‘complicate’ our notion of this or that, which texts then get used in an intellectually illegitimate fashion to say something about some giant topic (capitalism, empire, war) which would be much better remarked upon using the techniques of historical inquiry rather than masked behind a patina of literary criticism.  Some wag parodied the circumstance decisively by characterizing all current job talks as being about ‘novels written by pirates.’  Which wouldn’t bother me (I come not to defend any canon) if those job talks weren’t actually armchair attempts to do an anthropology of pirates based on some novels.  If you want to do anthropolgy, get off your ass!  Literary criticism is not anthropology, nor should it pretend to be.  

What is to be done?  I have one revolutionary proposal to urge: we in literary studies, unless we are actually involved in the preservation or editing of texts, must cease to see ourselves as scholars and must cease to characterize our pedagogical or critical work as having anything to do with the production of knowledge.  We don’t produce knowledge.  If it’s knowledge you want to produce, you should spend your time reading non-fiction books.  If you want to spend your time reading poetry instead, and only in this scientistic society could that be seen as a worthless pursuit, then you should realize that you primarily are in the business of producing affect and creating values.  The education we provide is of the sentiments fully as much as of the intellect; indeed, literature should be that discourse which recognizes no dissociation of sensibility.  To do this properly, one must attend to the text to understand the nuances of its affective power (and intellectual power as well) rather than ramming some historical factoids into its gaps for the hell of it, for want of anything better to do.  Again, I don’t care about canons and I’m not against imaginative historicism.  But I’m not a historian and history is made out of other things than literature, and vice versa.