English Lit and Its Discontents: Some Thoughts After Re-Reading Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism

Why is literature central to the humanities? And why is it so difficult to study it?

The answers are related. The first thing to note is that among the humanities, literature is the odd man out because it is an art. Students and scholars of literature do not use specific, more-or-less scientific methods to study a specific component of human life; they study an art that takes human beings as its subject. Literature is the only art that inevitably takes human beings as its subject, which is one reason, presumably, that's it's grouped with the humanities rather than the fine arts. The other reason is that literature does not, like music, involve learning a new language, or, like music and the visual arts, isolatable and teachable techniques (the exception is poetry, which traditionally was grouped with the fine arts).

Literature was originally included in a liberal arts education, alongside the human sciences, because it was considered that a familiarity with the classics of literature was a necessary part of being a cultivated person. In order to become familiar with the classics of literature, however, all one has to do is read them. It has never been clear how one teaches these texts. After all, you don't “teach literature” the way you teach music, or teach painting, or teach dance. Art is represented in the humanities as Art History, but as such, like Religious Studies, it's taught as a special branch of history, looking at a cultural phenomenon on which great importance has traditionally been placed. Literature, on the other hand, is supposed to stand alongside History, as its own liberal art and area of the humanities.

The reason that literature, as an academic subject, has lagged behind the other humanities in becoming a type of (soft) science, is not that English students are especially backward or fuzzy-headed, but that at bottom, students and professors know that what they are there to do is read books. Literature students are not engaged in a practice, as historians are when they study history or philosophers when they practice philosophy. (Philosophy, the other non-scientific humanities field, asks many of the same broad questions about human beings and human life as science, but uses abstract reason rather than empirical analysis and testing to develop answers.) Literature students are reading books. Moreover, because of the status that canonical literature acquires, the humanists within Humanities departments often want to interfere as little as possible in the student's experience of the books, from which students are supposed to get everything they need.

Naturally this has led to a lot of confusion about what English, as an academic subject, is, and what its students and scholars are or should be doing. The confusion that what students are doing is studying literature as a cultural product leads to Cultural Studies and to attracting students to English with courses about popular new books (which can of course be made interesting through postmodern theory: everything can). We have already seen that students cannot be engaged in the study of literary history if English is, as it is taken to be, its own subject; although there is a large component of literary history to what English students do.

Another way in which English students become confused about their subject is that a large component of any university subject is reading books. In other subjects, however, the books present information or arguments about the subject (say, American history, or epistemology, or biology). In English, the books are the subject. Confusion about this difference leads to the idea that what one is studying is the author's ideas, making English into a less rigorous form of philosophy.

There are a couple of reasons why so much radical theory found a home in English departments, from Freud and Marx to feminism, queer theory, and postcolonialism. First, the literary canon has the peculiar feature of coming to stand for cultural authority, quite regardless of whatever ideas the authors represented in it may have had. We often view this as an ex post facto sacralization of literature, but although the phenomenon is most familiar from sacred texts (e.g. The Bible, The Koran), it occurs just as often with secular texts (The Confucian Four Books and Five Classics, The Iliad, Shakespeare). Although any art will acquire a canon, none of the others have anything like the cultural authority of the literary canon: no matter how visual the culture becomes, writing continues to bear authority. At the same time, humanists, understanding that literature is central to the humanities, mistakenly took this to mean that the literary canon exemplifies humanist values. Accordingly, those who are critical of or disappointed in humanism found a logical target in the literary canon, which is also a useful target because of its embodiment of authority.

As Frye recounts in the “Polemical Introduction” to the Anatomy: since neither English students nor English professors are exactly sure what they're supposed to be doing, professors have had to look outside of the subject area for ideas that are teachable, and have found no shortage of them. Since the nature of textual interpretation is such that you can make almost any text into an allegory for almost anything, literature turns out to be a fantastic way of teaching the ideas of the professor's favourite thinker; and as a bonus, you can also symbolically attack authority.

This is how English has gone, or always already went, from being about gaining familiarity with canonical literature as part of becoming a cultivated individual, to being about attacking canonical literature in order to prove you're duly sceptical of bourgeois Western values.

For Frye, rectifying this situation begins with understanding that what the literature student or scholar is doing (as the philosopher does philosophy or the physicist does physics) is not “literature”; literature is what writers do. What literature students and scholars are doing is criticism. It would therefore go a long way toward clarifying things to rename English, English Criticism.

This both is and is not a solution. Students who are avid readers will show up to gain a familiarity with literature; students who are pissed off (with good reason) about Western values or who just like symbolically attacking authority will show up for the other stuff. But I'm not sure who would show up to study English Criticism. We certainly believe that literature is as important as philosophy or history; but do we believe that criticism is?

And yet is makes sense. The philosophy student or professor who reads the work of a canonical or contemporary philosopher, as they will do in their studies, is reading the work of a person engaged in the same activity as they are. When an English student or professor reads the work that they are supposed to be studying, they are obviously not reading the work of a person engaged in the same activity as they are. Yet the literary works, and not criticism, are made central to the study of literature (which is exactly why humanists are always shrieking that they're losing centrality); and, moreover, justify it as a field of study.

For Frye, the real reason that literature is central to the humanities and the liberal arts is that it bridges history and philosophy, with the specificity, the ties to reality and necessity, of the former and the power of generalization and speculation of the latter. In doing so, it creates a hypothetical construct that liberates the reader by freeing her from having to recognize the mere contingency of the natural world (let alone the social world) as necessity. The impulse of imaginative literature is to always propose an alternative; and literature is most important to us of all when that alternative can't be realized, but can only be imagined. Behind these descriptions is presumably some kind of Kantian notion of art as the mental faculties of human beings in free play, liberated from instrumentalism and delighting in themselves.

Frye is all thunder and brimstone in his “Polemical Introduction”; curiously, in his “Tentative Conclusion,” as the title suggests, he has lost his fire, and states more than once that he's not suggesting that literary critics should change what they're doing. Supposing, however, that the study of literature were to become Frye's criticism, and were accordingly to become more scientific. This would doubtless be useful, since if nothing else, the magisterial, densely argued, wildly erudite, elegantly written, and occasionally mad-as-a-hatter Anatomy succeeds in showing what fascinating things can result if we stop reading literature as humanists, for the characters, author, and meaning (or their replacement, the oppressed and the means of oppression), and start studying it methodically and analytically.

This would be a great discipline that would definitely advance human knowledge more than the way we currently study literature does; but would studying literature in this way still do the humanist job that produces some of Frye's greatest flights of rhetoric in the Anatomy? For a man who wants literary criticism to be a science, he sure gets excited about the benefits of the liberal arts.

As an illustration (and only a minor one) of what Frye's kind of criticism can do, the portion of the Anatomy with most relevance to subjects I've written about on this blog is where he distinguishes between the different types of prose fiction (in the Fourth Essay): the novel (by which he means the social novel), the romance, the confession, and Menippean satire or anatomy. In other words, while public criticism currently consists of babbling about whether or not Sheila Heti or Karl Ove Knausgaard is really making art, Frye just throws confession (i.e., literary autobiography) in with “prose fiction,” which makes sense considering that particularly since Modernism, novelists have been blurring the line between fiction and autobiography, and, as Frye points out, the novel and the confession develop together and mutually influence each other. And yet we still can't get over this blurring, because in speaking of book-length prose fiction we have no vocabulary other than “novel” (by which we mean the European social novel) and “experimental novel,” which is every extended work of prose fiction that is not like “the novel,” although it may in fact be trying to be something else, and therefore be neither a novel nor experimental (even though the author himself or herself may make this same mistake).

We pay a huge price for reading literature the humanist way: not only a deeply confused academic discipline, but also an impoverished, ahistorical public criticism. No one took heed of Frye in 1957 and no one is going to do so now, but reading the Anatomy helps to clarify why English is the strange, fraught subject it is, as well as being extraordinarily, if fitfully, illuminating on the subject of literature. Frye manages the seemingly impossible feat of producing a methodical and theoretical work of literary criticism that is nevertheless consistently personal in tone, full of aperҫus and insights; which makes it, after all, the rarest and most valuable form of criticism, not scientific but humanist, a work of literature in itself, though not a work of (in the familiar meaning of the word) fiction – in a word, an anatomy.

My Partially Examined Life (As A Perplexed English Student), Part 2

Part 1 on this topic was one of those things where I didn't figure out what my subject was until I had finished writing the post (and didn't want to rewrite it to incorporate the new ideas). (That's what Part 2s are for.)

In Part 1 I outlined several threats to traditional (humanistic) literary studies, both within literary studies and external: postmodernism, pop culture, new media, cultural/media/communications studies, and the scientific and capitalist values of our culture. I gave Northrop Frye's idea of making literary criticism into a human science as one alternative to both traditional humanism and postmodern theory.

Frye wanted to get away from the kind of fuzzy-wuzzy, willy-nilly teaching of literature that was making his discipline a laughingstock in our new science-oriented culture. But unlike the postmodernists, Frye (writing in 1957, just before the mass media explosion) assumed that no matter how we studied it, what we would be studying was the literary canon.

There is, however, nothing intrinsic to his vision of the science of criticism that entails that you have to study masterpieces – or, for that matter, in most cases, that you have to study literature, since many of the generic elements Frye identifies are found in all narrative arts (as anyone user of TV Tropes knows). We could agree to study the canon because it's convenient, but then there'd be no obvious reason ever to allow a new work into it, because ancient literature plus five or six centuries of modern literature surely gives us enough to work on.

So we'd have to add to Frye that we are not only studying the masterpieces of literature to give us a theory of criticism; we are also developing a theory of criticism in order to be able to better understand the masterpieces of literature. With that proviso, a science of literary criticism could very well provide a compromise between the humanists and the theorists. It would not, however, look anything like the traditional humanist study of literature, and there remains no obvious link between the lover of literature, or man/woman of taste (to use Frye's terminology), and the scientific critic. That is, it's not obvious why the man/woman of taste would want to do what the scientific critic does; or, if they do (as I do), whether there's any connection between the two things.

The music student doesn't complain that “The point is that this music is so beautiful and moving! Why do I have to study this theory junk? Why can't we just study the music itself?” Although a music lover, the music student realizes that she will understand music, and be able to appreciate it more, when she understands music theory. Should literary studies move in this direction? Or is there something to be said for its remarkable resistance to being turned into a science?

The Books Themselves

Perhaps the notorious weakness of literary studies as a university subject is also, from another perspective, its greatest strength. While most of the humanities are in fact human sciences, and 20^th century Anglo-American philosophy has aped math and science, and the historical method follows scientific principles in its treatment of evidence – then there's English, where the true humanists go to weep and wail (myself included), “Why are we talking about Derrida, or Lyotard, or Girard, or Insert French Guy's Name Here? When are we going to talk about the books themselves?”

Of course, as we saw in Part 1, it's not possible to talk about The Books Themselves. We can talk about their form (language, structure, imagery), their content (psychological, social, philosophical), their historical context, their sociological interest. We can also talk about the ideas of various theorists. None of this, however, makes up a systematic study of literature. Humanist professors are the most mute of all. In the classroom, their enthusiasm for their subject is infectious; they can inspire students to also become people of taste. Their teaching is creative in nature: they observe closely, make inspired connections, stimulate students' thought. They do not, however, teach students about anything, as though there were a body of knowledge at issue, or how to do anything. Whereas history or philosophy students learn both: they learn information or ideas, and they learn how to practice history or philosophy.

Reading a work of literature is an experience, like listening to a piece of music: neither, in themselves, involve learning anything. Yet we get confused about this when it comes to literature, because, as Frye points out, we have such trouble distinguishing between literary and non-literary uses of language.

Based on what I've written, there are only so many outcomes possible for literary studies:

Humanism wins

By far the least likely. In this scenario, science relinquishes its hubris and we realize that humanism and science are two distinct and complementary orientations towards the world, each with its areas of strength. Science is great at getting things done, but the humanities help us to understand certain things in a different and more satisfying way that can never be replaced, let alone improved upon, by science. Literary studies ought to be allowed to be what it is and to be taught non-systematically; the emphasis should be on teaching, not research; and the teaching, like any research that is done, should be directed towards facilitating the student's encounter with the text. The teacher (like Frye's public critic, which he or she may also be) will model the man or woman of taste for the student. The student will continue to muddle along, guided only by his or her native intelligence.

It still leaves the problem that students will be faced with a canon made up of almost entirely of white men. There's not much we can do except teach the problem. As Graff points out in Professing Literature, criticism of humanism is a humanistic enterprise, which is probably just as much of a reason for the flourishing of this criticism in literary studies as the subject-vacuum of which Frye complains. Never was the glory of the Western tradition more trumpeted than by literary humanists, and so never would it be more harshly criticized than in literary studies.

Cultural studies wins

This is what Harold Bloom predicted, predictably gloomily, in either The Western Canon or that Shakespeare book, I can't remember which: English departments would become what classical studies departments are now, tiny and irrelevant; the study of literature would become an antiquarian enterprise; and cultural studies would take its place, with the unruly mob studying TV shows, comic books, maybe even movies, and other unspeakable trash guaranteed to send a shudder down the Bardolator's spine.

For a while I thought it might happen, too, and couldn't quite decide whether it was an apocalypse of the human spirit or the natural order of things (or both). But let's face it, from the perspective of capitalism, cultural studies and literary studies are equally useless.

We teach the controversy

That's Graff's suggestion with regard to the eternal battle between humanists and theorists. Sort of a “let the students decide” solution. Certainly postmodernism is a tendency in 20^th century thought with a lot to offer, and even students who find themselves falling more on the humanist side would benefit from knowing about the postmodern critique of humanism. However, personally I'd prefer for things to go all the way, one way or the other: I'd like us to choose either a non-scientific humanism (with the postmodern critique incorporated) or a scientific criticism. Or else I'd like to divide literary studies up between them and get a little of the best of both worlds.

Capitalism wins

Currently the most likely scenario. At present the war on the universities, and the humanities in particular, is taking the form of the degradation of undergraduate education by overworking and underpaying part-time professors who have no benefits or job security but do have massive student loans. Support for the arts, education, and arts education has to come from governments committed to not only reflecting but actually creating public interest in the arts, because they give more than zero fucks about their citizens being smart and happy people, that is, flourishing. In North American right now, however, our governments don't seem to give more than zero fucks about anything except big business.

Everybody wins! Yay! 

Sometimes I think that making literary criticism into a human science would be a disaster akin to the rise of analytic philosophy. (It seems to be in absolutely no danger of happening, though. Frye's own delightfully abstruse, esoteric, and eccentric system sure didn't found it.) Yet what draws me to Frye is the tantalizing realization that it's true – we haven't even begun to understand what this extraordinary thing, literature, is. We've barely started asking the questions. It's not work that has anything to do with reading literary masterpieces, necessarily, but it is work that could reasonably be expected to excite someone of a particular character who loves literature.

Rather than giving literary studies a scientific makeover, however, I don't see why we can't admit that the study of literature actually serves many functions. Undergraduates should be exposed to the humanist experience of reading the masterpieces of literature and studying them in non-systematic fashion with enthusiastic teachers. Since it seems to have been left to literary studies to embody humanist values, students should also be taught the controversy within humanism in the 20^th century. If students were made to understand how this controversy relates to their subject of study, rather than just having ideas and names thrown at them willy-nilly all the time, it might all fit together a bit better.

Other seemingly useful courses would include hermeneutics (most useful if interdisciplinary) and approaches to criticism from close to reading to deconstruction. Students can't be either responsible or creative interpreters (and we want them to be both) if they lack knowledge of the theory of interpretation and of a range of interpretive practices. Personally I'd also advocate a course (possibly interdisciplinary) on canon formation, to make students aware of the politics, contingencies, and utility of canons, as well as of the fact that they are not formed by universities; that universities are not the only institutions that can lend their authority to them; and that they are always in flux and always contested. (I'm aware, of course, that many of these things are actually happening in various universities, even if not all of them are happening in any one university.)

And then, at higher levels, we can move on to trying to understand literature as a whole. We would still have historical periods as one of the ways in which we divide the labour of literary scholarship, since in order to compare literature across periods we have to rely on the scholars of particular periods and figures. Presumably, some scholars will be drawn to particular periods and some will be drawn to theorizing about the whole. As far as I understand Frye's model, however (and I need to read the Anatomy again), you could easily spend your whole career studying one genre, especially if it's Menippean satire.

Those are the next things on my list: re-read the Anatomy, and finish Professing Literature. Perhaps then I can report back with clearer thoughts. Or – from what I remember of the Anatomy – maybe not.  

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. 

Bits and Pieces: The Case of Marcel Proust and the Attacking Rats, and, Should We Abolish Literary Research?

Reflections on Memoir, Autobiography, and Biography

From autobiography of a soul to autobiography: apparently autobiography is much on my mind lately, because I've started writing a memoir. No, I'm not secretly famous and you don't know it, nor do I have an inordinately interesting life. But, I am a writer, and an interesting thing happened to me, so, putting them together, I thought I might have a story to tell – a memoir of a specific aspect of my life, like the addiction memoir or family tragedy memoir or difficult childhood memoir or mental illness memoir. Mine is a prodigy memoir, about how I became a prodigy between the ages of sixteen and eighteen, with a play produced at eighteen that won $10, 000 in awards, without coming from a literary or intellectual or theatrical background of any kind, which set me on the course of a brief career in Canadian theatre so insanely frustrating that I chucked it by age twenty-four. Since then I haven't been able to figure out what to do. I got an MA in English relatively late in life, in my mid-30s, then decided to chuck that course as well given the poor job market for professors. Now, at 36, I'm back to trying to write, and after several attempts at novels, it occurred to me that a memoir was something I could write now, since finding time to do research can be difficult when you're working forty hours per week year-round whenever you can get it.

After writing around 150 pages, I thought my prose was lacking, so I picked up Remembrance of Things Past again. After reading about 50 pages of that, I wrote another memoir scene and discovered that the only thing worse than not writing like Proust is writing exactly like him. Hearteningly, in the introduction to my edition of the original Moncrieff translation, Ingrid Wassenaar writes, “Pastiche was one of the foundations of Proust's wit: he was a great, and cruel, mimic. The problem of separating out his own style from what he absorbed from others was one of his aesthetic dilemmas.” (Apparently Proust wrote a series of pastiches of famous French writers as if commenting on a diamond forgery scandal. I'd love to get my hands on that....) This sort of aesthetic dilemma can be difficult to overcome: Proust started writing A la recherche when he was 38, and worked on it for fourteen years, until his early death. He wrote little, and nothing that's considered of consequence, before that.

Less hearteningly for my project, Wassenaar devotes space to distinguishing between autobiography and Proust's practice in A la recherche, to the detriment of the former. She writes, “While his whole enterprise is to crown subjectivity as the wellspring of creativity, he is careful not to collapse subjectivity in general into his own personality and life history”; however, in the process of making this claim, she informs the reader that Proust was bitchy, spiteful, and got aroused by watching rats attacking each other. Would the novel be less great if Proust had included these characteristics in his self-portrait, or just different? I have to admit that in writing my memoir I've already come up against the dilemma of how unflattering to make my own self-portrayal – partly due to a desire (a need, really) for privacy, should I choose to publish it. A century on, we live in a more permissive age than Proust did, and one that's absorbed Freud, though not without (sometimes abhorred) resistance. I can't write the bildung of my adolescence – the formation of my identity, including my intellectual and aesthetic development – without talking about sexuality. I can't think about it without thinking about sexuality. But how much of myself do I dare expose – and aside from that, how much of it is relevant? Does every psychological quirk contribute to our understanding of a person?

I came across similar problems when writing my biographical plays about Orton and Halliwell and Jane and Paul Bowles – not issues of privacy (my own or others'), since I was using published information (and writing about people who were dead, in the case of Orton and Halliwell) – but issues of what biographical information was relevant. I didn't solve the dilemma satisfactorily in either case: rather, I tended to throw everything I knew from the sources I was using into the dialogue, “just in case” it was psychologically central. Although one thing I learned from writing plays about real people was that everything depends on context, and just because something is true doesn't mean it will give a true representation of the individual in a given context.

As to how important biography is generally, it's true we come to literature to discover ourselves, not biographical information about the writer – and to assume that we “really” want the latter is the basis of the biographical fallacy in literary criticism. But it's too hasty to say that we read even biography primarily to learn about the writer. As a teenager, I (obviously) loved reading biographies of writers, in which I “discovered myself” as much as, or more than, in reading fiction. For one thing, these biographies – and all of the biographies I read were of queer writers: Wilde, Colette, Capote, Orton, Jane Bowles – dealt with the subject of sexuality, which most of the fiction I was reading (with Jean Genet as the major exception) did not. Nowadays homosexuals are more certain about their sexual orientation than anyone else, and often claim to have known they were gay their entire lives. Sexual orientation isn't such a simple matter for many heterosexuals, which is why sexual confusion still characterizes adolescence, and the biographies of these queer writers were essential in helping me understand my own identity through the central (and still taboo, for all of our “permissiveness”) subject of sexuality, which is not similarly problematized in biographies of heterosexual writers.

Biography and autobiography occupy a curious place in literary history. Despite the growing popularity of the memoir and “creative non-fiction,” often positioned by both its critics and its advocates as being “in competition” with the reading and writing of fiction, there are few canonical autobiographies; only the major instances that transformed (and conditioned) our understanding of subjectivity: the Confessions of Augustine and Rousseau, the essays of Montaigne, Newman's account of the development of his religious ideas. And, of course, the novelistic explorations of subjectivity and consciousness by the Modernists, Joyce, Proust, and (in more Expressionist fashion) Kafka; or, beginning earlier, the quasi-autobiographical Bildungsroman proper, from Goethe to Flaubert to Mann to Mishima. As for biography, no matter how well-written, it does not seem to be included in that amorphous category, “literature,” that usually means fiction, poetry, and drama, but sometimes mysteriously includes autobiography as well. Lyric poetry, like the personal essay, often takes the author's inner life as its subject, dynamically recounting and working through a personal crisis. When I studied Donne's Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (from which we get his most famous lines, “No man is an island” and “Do not ask for whom the bell tolls”) in a graduate class, I placed it in the context of the crisis memoir, such as Joan Didion's memoirs of the deaths of her husband and daughter, The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights. In the Western tradition, the exploration of subjectivity – of the soul – has two, equally important sources: Christian and humanist. (Also the sources of the novel.)

We read biography and autobiography for many reasons. We may do it because we have had similar experiences, or want to know about an experience we have not had. We may do it because the subject is a fascinating person; or because, in the case of memoir, they are peculiarly insightful about their experiences; or because, in the case of the memoir of a famous person, we want to supplement our knowledge of their lives with their own perspectives. While cults of personality surrounding particular writers can be annoying (see, for example, this snarky LRB blog post about speculation on the manner of Jane Austen's death), there is nothing wrong with going to biography or memoir of artists or performers to learn more about the artistic process and personality. We hear a lot these days about young middle-class people who fetishize the idea of “the artist” rather than committing themselves to producing great art, but that's been going on ever since Baudelaire and Wilde, the original proponents of art for art's sake, decided that being an artist was a way of being in the world, not just something you did (and the idea can be traced back through Romanticism and the Renaissance). If you want to dismiss “neoliberal individualism,” you'll have to sweep away the Renaissance, Romanticism, and Late Romanticism, but I won't be joining you. The current degraded “consumerist youth” form is a small price to pay for the anti-puritanical celebration of “personality” within this long Western tradition. Personally I'm more annoyed with the vulgar popularization of “genius” in recent bestsellers by Harold Bloom, who ought to know better. But I'm utterly seduced by Roberto Bolano's simultaneously critical and celebratory take on the idea of the writer and the cult of personality surrounding the writer-genius in The Savage Detectives and 2666. There is no getting away from the writer-genius now: we must live with her and do the best we can to still write in those conditions.

No, most biographical facts about the writer, whether psychological oddities or their manner of death, don't help us understand the work better, let alone give its "true meaning." But we do live in a culture that believes that great writers, and artists generally, are more interesting than the average person; if not in their external lives, then in their internal ones. If someone can manage to write a biography of a writer that does not make them sound boring (no one has managed this in the case of one of my favourite novelists, Henry James, whose bizarre psychology. ignored by his academic cult, is one of the main sources of my interest in his work), I will happily read about them. I don't think that learning about Proust's sexual interest in rat behaviour has helped me to understand one of the greatest novels yet written any better, but I'm happy to know it, just as I was happy to learn, when forced to read her largely boring letters as a research assistant, that the unmarried, childless Jane Austen liked to make cruel jokes in private about difficult, dangerous births, a common and sacrosanct experience in her time. It's always interesting to gain a new perspective on an artist that complicates the picture we get from their work and the received view of them, or of what a "great artist" is like. Sometimes, such information contributes to making an artist of forbidding reputation seem more mundane, as when I recently learned that Nathanael West had a long-time-bachelor's overweening attachment to his dog. Biographical facts about artists can help dispel the false mystique surrounding art and artists, while building a better, more vital mystique. 

Now I've got that line from a Nichols and May sketch in my head: "Too many people think of Adler as a man who made mice neurotic. He was more."

"Much more."

"Much much more."

"Can you move over a little I'm falling off the bench. A great deal more." 

The Decline of Liberal Arts Education and The New Aesthetes

Speaking of the poor job market for professors, I read two recent articles on the demise of the university system in the US and the UK, one in the New York Review of Books, one in the London Review of Books. They reminded me of another reason why I decided not to devote the remainder of my life to being an English academic, the NYRB article by lamenting the relegation of teaching to exploited grad students and adjuncts (called “sessionals” in Canada: I taught one course as a sessional before, thankfully, there wasn't enough work for me in the city where I'm presently stuck) while a shrinking minority of tenured and tenure-track professors who are sequestered away doing the research that brings prestige and funds to their schools, the LRB article by seeking to distinguish between universities, where research is conducted, and other types of post-secondary schools, as well as by lamenting the sorts of “publish or perish” conditions that Paglia was complaining about in the early 90s, which preclude serious, long-term, ambitious projects in favour of frequent publication if you ever want to get on a tenure track.

This additional dissuading factor was my inability to believe in “research” in the field of English. I think it's a waste of the academics' lives and a waste of public funds. I agree with Paglia that the only useful scholarship that can still be produced in the liberals arts has to be inter-disciplinary in nature, with an overarching revisionist orientation (the sort of major, ambitious work that publish-or-perish conditions work against). The endless production of feminist, poststructuralist, queer, Marxist, etc. “readings” of canonical works, taught to graduate school-track students as “literary theory,” is a waste of minds that “advances” our understanding of literature about as much as medieval scholasticism advanced Western philosophy. In other words, it's a bunch of eggheads talking to each other in their exclusionary language that most of them don't even understand about things of no interest to anyone else; a dead end comparable to the simultaneous analytical trend in philosophy (although at least that taught me how to analyze an argument). Digging around in one's “specialist” area in a confluence of cultural studies and historicism (writing about literary ephemera produced in the era you cover – Renaissance, Victorian) seems equally pointless to me. I have a certain amount of respect for the scholarly collaborations that produce painstaking new editions of central authors, but the qualities necessary for that sort of work are patience and meticulous attention to detail – there is no exercise of the mind at all.

All of this is not to say that I consider only the most ambitious scholarship worthwhile. I am also a devotee of the critical essay – of criticism, not theory. My friend George Toles has been producing such essays on literature and film throughout his academic career, and although they are more academic than the early 20^th century Anglo-American critical tradition I admire (Wilson, McCarthy, Hardwick, Esslin, Bentley, Trilling, Sontag), they are superior in quality of writing, in independence of thought (valuing the Paterian impression), and in close, loving attention to the object than the vast majority of academic criticism. There is always room for more well-written close readings of both canonical and relatively unknown figures by erudite, insightful critics who believe in the art of the essay; such essays are works of literature in their own right, and bring both pleasure and instruction to readers who love the arts under consideration.

Restricting myself to commenting on English, the subject I studied, I'll give my radical idea of what the priorities of an English professor should be. Teaching, including the teaching of undergraduates (now relegated to grad students and sessionals), should be the first priority – about 80 per cent of the job description. The NYRB article claims (based on studies, I presume) that a liberal arts education still provides students with a greater ability to write and reason than new, more pragmatic programs like business. (And English students are notorious for complaining about education students in this regard – tragically.) Presumably, being able to write and reason will ultimately help a person in any career, but these abilities should also be valued in their own right, as the primary purpose of post-secondary education – of becoming an educated adult individual. English professors should impart these abilities to students along with an appreciation of English-language literature (I think the degree should actually be in Literature, and include language requirements at the undergrad level as well as world literature in translation, but that's another reform) – which are not separate aims. Undergraduates do not need to be taught “critical thinking” via the application of critical theory to the literary canon. They need to be taught how to enjoy reading, which the vast majority of them do not, and so leave university with poor writing and reasoning skills, which will never improve since they have not learned how to enjoy difficult extracurricular reading. The goal of undergraduate education in English (whether it is a major or a requirement) should be exposure to great, difficult works, discussion of their content and formal qualities, and instruction in formulating reasoned critical arguments about them (the simple adoption and support of a position based on textual evidence).

The Anglo literary canon is an education all by its lonely, parochial self, from which the instructor can branch out into discussion of specific historical context, major historical events, and the history of ideas. Educating young people in this way – creating citizens, the traditional function of the university that has all but been lost – should be the prime role of the English professor. How, then, to measure the “productivity” of professors in order to judge who should get better positions? Perhaps instead of publishing articles, they could submit chapter drafts of ongoing major works, or research progress reports? Major works (including biographies) and critical essays – I see no reason for English professors to write anything else. (Among major works of 20^th century English or aesthetic theory – works that do, in fact, count as “literary theory,” though not as schools or applications of it – I would include Hauser's The Social History of Art, Frye's Anatomy of Criticism, Cavell's The Claim of Reason, and Paglia's Sexual Personae.) Ambition, which is necessary for real contributions to scholarship and thought within a discipline, is what should be rewarded, not business-model “productivity.” In their spare time, professors should not be whipping up spurious articles that'll make a splash at conferences in order to gain a reputation and pad their resumes, but reading, both within and outside of their “specialization.”

English literature is not science. English literature is a tiny portion of world literature, albeit one with an outsized influence. But the possibilities for useful, significant research are not endless. Frye thought that criticism should be the study and theorization of what literature is and how it works, but no one has taken him up on this, although a group of kids online have extended the project of the Anatomy to include popular culture (in the universities, the territory of cultural and media studies) in the marvellous ongoing open collaboration TV Tropes, which is spontaneous scholarship for pleasure. Meanwhile criticism, abandoned by the universities and, for whatever reason, no longer supported by Anglo-American conditions in journalism, has also moved online – in literary blogs like this one (as well as high-profile ones) and “zines” by former students like The New Inquiry, recently featured in The New York Times. Here ex-English students informed by their love of great critics from the era of the public intellectual, like Wilson and Sontag, can practice their influence free of the constrictions of publication in academic journals, while also being influenced by the new, pop culture-friendly mood that the cultural studies approach has spread through academia, though the pressure, I think, is from outside of the academy. 

I think literary scholarship would be better served by a publication ban on professors for the first ten years of their career, so they could concentrate on teaching, reading, and developing their thought instead. The only dignified, culturally significant role that an English professor can serve is as an instructor teaching students to write, reason, and enjoy reading. To think, in the unique way that a humanities education can supply, that an education in science or mathematics cannot. And the emphasis on writing (learned, in part, through continuous exposure to good writing) is crucial here, and should be kept central; an education in history or philosophy cannot supply this component of learning how to think either. (These are the reasons that my philosophy professors and, once, a physics professor I took a theory of physics course from, nearly fainted in gratitude when they received my papers. Every academic discipline values the writing skills that English students learn more than English does.) If, in addition to teaching students, English professors also happen to be good critics (which requires being a good writer, but more, a good reader), or original thinkers, or to produce ambitious works of scholarship, more power to them; but the function that makes English departments necessary is the classroom encounter, not research.

Viewed from another perspective, as Frye arrogantly asserted, far from literary scholarship being dried up, the project of literary criticism hasn't even begun yet. The study of English literature has never been properly intellectualized, and imported French theory didn't accomplish that, either. The building blocks of the discipline haven't even been identified – that was what Frye attempted in the Anatomy. But the rebuilding of literary criticism from the ground up to turn it into a genuinely productive field of study can't be accomplished in a publish-or-perish environment where endless applications of French and feminist (or now “gender,” but arguably still feminist) theory are de rigueur, and where professors are now turning their attention to pop culture, including popular literature, in a desperate effort to engage students who are increasingly, bizarrely, stuck in a mire of reading YA fiction well into their 20s (and beyond). Which to me only shows that many students are attracted to English as a subject for reasons that have nothing to do with a love of literature, and succeed in it for reasons having nothing to do with an advanced understanding of it. (It may, in fact, be much easier to grasp the fundamentals of “literary theory” than to achieve an advanced understanding of literature. Certainly, the cleverer students think it's a lot cooler; and certainly, professors work harder at instilling the former than the latter.)

Personally, I'd rather write an unread literary blog and read the Anglo-American critics of the 1930s-60s, where treasures of insight still await.