Why Study English Lit? A Partial (In Both Senses) Examination

When I started this blog it was going to be my literary blog, but since I prefer to read fiction but only read non-fiction quickly, that wasn't giving me much material. And when I at last finish a novel, it requires far too much thought than I can give to a blog to put my feelings about it into words – unless I hate it, and I prefer to spend as little time reading and thinking about books that I hate as possible. Again – I find it easier not only to read but also to talk about non-fiction, and now that I've decided to shove as many non-fiction audiobooks into my brain as possible (since I really don't care about the sacred act of reading if I'm mainly interested in a book's informational content), I should have more topics for posts.

So it became my movie blog, and then a way to offer my opinion on ephemeral trends and furors, from popular or controversial TV shows to minor internet outbreaks of feminist outrage (and only the minor ones, because I lack the will or energy to get into the major ones). And then I got so sick of doing that, that the blog stopped. I'm the last person who should be writing about TV – I'm not a true believer in the New Golden Age or a big fan of any one particular show, and there are may better writers on TV on the internet.

And yet here I am again. As I've mentioned before, having a “live notebook” where you know that there's an immediate chance of an audience, however tiny, produces a certain kind of thinking and writing that I don't do anywhere else. I don't write like this in private notebooks, and I imagine I wouldn't if I were writing an article. (I imagine because I've sometimes tried to do that, and thought, no, I'd rather be blogging!) The tone I have here is – although it wasn't intentionally cultivated – sort of like me thinking out loud with the idea that someone might be overhearing me. And lately I've been moved to reflection again, this time by listening to podcasts – and particularly the philosophy podcast The Partially Examined Life.

I've also been podcasting myself, with movie and comics blogger David Fiore. We've started a podcast with the aim of watching every time travel movie ever made, Another Kind of Distance (Facebook page here), and we're about to start another on (mainly) classical Hollywood cinema, The Acteur Cast (Facebook page forthcoming). So far we've got two (out of an initial three) eps on Bette Davis in the can, and by can I mean hard drive. (Not toilet.) So that's where my movie criticism/fandom energy is going these days. Other things I've been doing during this break include finishing a 231, 928-word (so, 22, 811 more than Moby-Dicks) Bildungsmemoir about the first 22 year of my life, which you probably won't find on a bookshelf near you, or e-store of your preference, any time soon. 

Embattled English, Within and Without

This blog revival was inspired, specifically, by the Partially Examined Life episode, “Why Do Philosophy? (And What Is It?)” The surprisingly popular podcast is made by several Philosophy Ph.D. dropouts who are now doing it strictly “for fun” (among the other reasons given in that episode). I am currently contemplating obtaining my Ph.D., although the job market is so grim for Ph.D.s that I think I have about as much chance earning a better living at the end of it than I do now, working at an entry-level retail job, as I have of winning the lottery. These bleak late capitalist conditions were the backdrop for the reflections stirred up by the episode.

“Why do English?” is, for me, really two questions: What was the value for me in studying English literature, when it doesn't seem likely that it will ever lead to me crawling above the poverty line – and resulted in me acquiring over $15, 000 worth of debt? (And that was after family help, awards and scholarships, working part-time during the school year, working full time summers and during breaks of months or years, and practicing extreme frugality.) And what is the value of English literature in general, that we could advance against our culture's increasingly blatant exclusive focus on the bottom line?

Humanities or liberal arts subjects deal with the study of human beings (e.g. anthropology, archaeology, history, psychology, sociology) and the cultural activities of human beings that we deem most important (e.g. philosophy, politics, literature, comparative religion). They are not useful to the world, as science is; and they are not useful to the student, giving you the kind of knowledge you need to practice a particular profession. However, the original purpose of a liberal arts education was to equip individuals to become useful citizens who can take part in public life, and presumably even now it's possible to argue that a person with some knowledge of history and the history of ideas is likely to be a more reflective – and liberal – member of society.

Literature and languages were first included in humanities education in the form of classical literature and languages. Not until the end of the 19^th century and the rise of the modern research university do we get the idea that our present culture can or should be studied. Literary studies once stood in relation to the classics as pop culture does to literary studies now. Film has already found strong enough advocates for its artistic merits that it has broken away from English departments to form its own field. It remains to be seen if the same thing will happen to new media, or if they will continue to be studied as part of Cultural/Media/Communications Studies.

The difference between the traditional approach to literary studies and the cultural studies approach to pop culture is, as far as I can make out, that cultural studies takes it for granted that pop culture is culturally important while suspending judgement about whether it is culturally valuable. That is, it is descriptive, not prescriptive. While some cultural studies scholars certainly think that the particular kind of pop culture they're studying is culturally valuable, and/or are studying a certain kind of media due to a deep love of it, others are interested in their subject from a purely sociological standpoint.

I think cultural studies is a legitimate and fascinating area of scholarship, and in fact my idea for a Ph.D. dissertation leans more in that direction than in the traditional English direction. Nevertheless, I don't think cultural studies should replace a traditional literary studies education. Canon-formation is not an oppressive activity of authority-wielding professors: every creative field has its ever-evolving canon. There is no such thing (yet) as a Department of Rock 'n' Roll, but part of growing up in the Anglo-American world is learning what the rock canon is. Canons are formed, and challenged, by practitioners (the musicians or writers), critics, and fans. Professors, too, have their influence: they can bring attention to neglected figures by writing a paper or bringing out a biography, starting a trend, occasioning new editions. Mainly, though, their purpose is to keep alive the reputations of long-canonical figures. Would the classics of English lit remain in print? And what would happen to more marginal figures if scholars weren't around to give them revivals? Literature has lost a great deal of its prestige, and who's going to defend it except the few of us left who love it?

What is the Study of Literature?

What we have so far is, on one side of the “study of literature,” the work of the scholar who tries to make it possible, and on the other side the work of the public critic who assumes that it exists. In between is “literature” itself, a game preserve where the student wanders with his native intelligence his only guide.

Northrop Frye, The Anatomy of Criticism

There is no obvious connection between being a little kid who got obsessed with novelizations of Disney movies about dogs and growing up to study Shakespeare and Milton at university. But that was my own trajectory. I loved books, knowing nothing of “literature”; when I hit puberty I briefly read horror, true crime, a bit of sci fi and fantasy, and maybe two YA novels (it not being a significant genre at the time), before I learned that there were books that people considered great; so great, in fact, that they were still being read after hundreds of years. Those were definitely the books I wanted to read. Why should I resent people who already knew about this stuff pointing me towards the coolest books ever written?

It didn't have to go the way it did for me. Some kids get to adolescence and discover that they only, or mainly, like particular genres. Some get to adulthood and join book clubs, looking for challenges within middlebrow parameters. Many women never stop reading YA lit, now, which is probably preferable to reading “chick lit” supposedly aimed at adults. (It may even be better than most “literary fiction.”) A small number of grown-up readers keep their eye on developments in global modernism, and/or worship cult heroes (Murakami, Bolano, DFW). There are lots of different ways to be a reader and a book-lover. But, as much as we (the dwindling number of we) reverence the idea of reading, none of those other ways treats books like secular scripture in quite the same way that a traditional literary studies education does.

The New Critics, with their “close reading” method, were pretty overt about this, but also (as Harold Bloom has complained) tended to project their WASP Christian values onto the texts they studied. Still the way undergrads are taught to read, “close reading” can only be brought to bear on texts that we consider deserving of, and capable of repaying, that scrutiny. Once they are brought into the universities and surrounded by scholars and scholarship, canonical works become sacred texts of inexhaustible meaning and whose function is to generate exegesis.

This tradition was started with the classical texts, whose greatness, confirmed by their antiquity, was unquestionable. There was no doubt on the part of the culture that exposure to them was, in and of itself, good for students. How to teach them was another matter, and for a long time they were used to drill students in grammar and etymology. We have never really known what teaching literature should entail. One reads a philosophy text in order to uncover, and think about, its ideas and arguments. There are any number of things we can talk about when teaching a work of literature: content, language, structure, images, the characters' psychology, the author's ideas, the historical context, or, most popularly, somebody else's ideas altogether.

Northrop Frye pointed out that this confusion results in people not teaching literature at all – or rather, criticism (which is what he thinks our subject actually should be) – but rather using literature as a way to teach whatever actually interests them, which is not the book in front of them at all. Which is how in English you will find yourself exposed to a whole parade of thinkers and schools: Freud, feminism, Marx, the Frankfurt School, Marx, Derrida, Foucault, gender studies, queer theory, postmodernism, all manner of sociological thought – and, not least, humanism itself. These ideas have plenty of intellectual interest and some social utility, but it's hard not to feel in literary studies like you're always off-topic.

I should add that I don't think Frye's archetypal criticism, which is the part of his critical theory that's been widely used pedagogically, is a solution, although it does allow for comparison between all narrative arts. However, everything else he has to say in the “Polemical Introduction” of the Anatomy remains important. Let's just hope that there will be English students in the future to take up the question: am I studying English in order to read great books and find out about postmodernism and feminism (which is pretty cool), or am I here to learn something specific, namely criticism (which maybe makes more sense for an academic subject)?

Is Scholarship Necessary?

Why Do English isn't quite the same question as Why Do Philosophy, because while nobody “does philosophy” outside of universities, people do read outside of universities. Yet “doing English” isn't quite the same thing as reading. So there are two separate questions (different from the two I listed above): why read, and why study literature at the university level. Probably fewer people question the value of reading than question the value of doing philosophy. Philosophy is considered something esoteric; reading is not.

Since Frye hasn't been taken to heart, currently there is only one reason to study literature at the university level, which is to expose yourself to great books. If you want to know what to read, learning what your culture has thought is great is as good a place to start as any; you are free to disagree. I do believe in the autodidact option, and as much as I enjoyed most of my classes as an undergrad and MA student, and as provocative as some of my professors were, I can't say that acquiring over $15, 000 in debt for the two degrees was worth it when I could have studied on my own. That option, however, requires not only the health of public libraries, but, as I suggested above, the whole scholarly apparatus.

As Oscar Wilde argued in the same essay that gives this blog its title, there can be no literature without literary culture – without criticism and scholarship. Wilde may be remembered as a “pure aesthete,” but he didn't think it was possible to understand or, therefore, appreciate a work without scholarship. I have no interesting in fetishizing “unmediated” textual encounters, either. I discovered literary criticism at the same time that I was learning about the literary canon, at the public library, and always liked reading about literature as much as I liked reading literature – maybe more.

Why do English is the question: do we believe that reading and writing literature are among the most valuable of human activities? Our late capitalist, scientific culture holds only two values dear, both material: making/having money, and creating technology. Anything that has to do with the cultivation of one's own subjectivity is strictly immaterial. Science does not give the best explanation of all areas of human life, and should not replace the humanities, but work together with them to give us a complete description of reality. That is not, however, the way that things are going.

As for the war in literary studies between the humanists and the postmodernists, or the one between literary studies and cultural studies – now that late capitalism is destroying the universities, with the humanities being most vulnerable in our materialist culture, those wars are fading into insignificance, or even starting in retrospect to look like attestations to the continued vibrancy and vigor of these areas of the humanities. All we can hope, now, is that they'll be able to continue.

Art: Better Than Science, Money, and Religion (But No Hyperbole)

Technology is helping us to live longer lives, and our affluence in North America should be helping us to build better lives, instead of which making money has become a bizarre end in itself. From the time I was a small child, my idea of the good life was doing nothing but reading; later I realized that what I thought was the most important thing in the world was broader than that, and it was called “art.” I remember a Catholic professor making the pronouncement that the Modernists wanted art to replace Christianity – and saw that it failed. I took his word for it at the time, since it's a common thing to say about both the Modernists and the late 19^th century aesthetes, but upon reflection – although that may have been true for the original aesthetes and Modernists, who were nostalgic for religion, the fact is that for me, art is not only as good as religion, but much, much better. And I say this as someone who was raised with religion and accepted it as a child.

In fact, I abandoned religion around the same time that I discovered art, in early adolescence, and I think there was a connection: art was a much better principle around which to organize my life than God was. It was humble, it was modest; it didn't promise you eternal life, but what it did promise – the aesthetic experience – it could deliver on a regular basis. And best of all, as Walter Pater put it, the aesthetic/experiential life didn't require you to subscribe to any externally imposed “facile orthodoxy”: “The theory or idea or system which requires of us the sacrifice of any part of [our] experience in consideration of some interest into which we cannot enter, or some abstract theory we have not identified with ourselves, or of what is only conventional, has no real claim upon us.”

We group literature and film with the humanities, but usually not art (only “art history”) or music, I guess because literature and film have human content (characters and events that impact them), and not only when they're “narrative.” Both aesthetes and postmodernists often like to pretend that we don't care about that human content; that it makes no difference to the book's aesthetic quality, or is trying to hoodwink us into believing in a stable subject and other suspect neo-liberal concepts. Focusing on form rather than content was not, of course, intended to stop fiction writers from ever engaging in social criticism. On the contrary, it often served to protect writers from moralists so that fiction could explore unconventional topics – including taking issue with the morality of the day.

You could make a movie with no human beings in it (or characters – in the case of animation, non-human characters, etc.), just landscapes, animals, architecture. But we can't do that with books, because books are made of mind. A film can't simply present the world to us without comment; there will always be comment in the selection of images, the framing of shots, editing. But it makes a difference that a movie is made of images, while a book (or this blog) is made of thoughts. There is always a mind there, although often not much of one.

Science tells us facts. It tells us what things are, and what we are. The humanities tell us who we are. Not in the sense of cultural studies, as though we're anthropologists looking at our own culture. Instead, we look at great thinkers, great writers, who, we think, have had the most interesting things to say about that question. And we think, or some of us do, that great writers are even more interesting on the question than great thinkers, because they create characters who are at once mysterious and convincing in their behavior, like the people in the world around us – or like ourselves.

In Part 2, I'll talk some more about the potential solution to the humanist/theorist impasse offered by Frye, and the problems with it, and fantasize about a university curriculum that would make everyone happy and hug like drunk Care Bears, except for Capitalist Bear, who thinks we're all a bunch of morons.