LIT SERVICE

posted by James Reel

I admit it: I have friends and acquaintances in literature studies (English, German and French), and I myself have a lit-oriented bachelor’s degree (French). But I have long complained that, especially at the graduate level, lit studies have been so consumed by competing critical theories that the programs are now concerned almost exclusively with theory, not literature. What a relief to discover that mine is not a voice in the wilderness; or, at least, there’s another wolf howling in the distance. Here’s part of what Bruce Fleming, a professor of English at the U.S. Naval Academy, writes in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

The major victory of professors of literature in the last half-century — the Great March from the New Criticism through structuralism, deconstruction, Foucauldianism, and multiculturalism — has been the invention and codification of a professionalized study of literature. We've made ourselves into a priestly caste: To understand literature, we tell students, you have to come to us. Yet professionalization is a pyrrhic victory: We've won the battle but lost the war. We've turned revelation into drudgery, shut ourselves in airless rooms, and covered over the windows. … We're not teaching literature, we're teaching the professional study of literature: What we do is its own subject. Nowadays the academic study of literature has almost nothing to do with the living, breathing world outside. The further along you go in the degree ladder, and the more rarified a college you attend, the less literary studies relates to the world of the reader. The academic study of literature nowadays isn't, by and large, about how literature can help students come to terms with love, and life, and death, and mistakes, and victories, and pettiness, and nobility of spirit, and the million other things that make us human and fill our lives. It's, well, academic, about syllabi and hiring decisions, how works relate to each other, and how the author is oppressing whomever through the work. The literary critic Gerald Graff famously told us to "teach the conflicts": We and our squabbles are what it's all about. That's how we made a discipline, after all.

The full article is here.