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I'D LIKE to address one of the big questions of this professional moment and, I suspect, of many a professional gathering, particularly where those who are gathered bear the institutional responsibility for explaining and defending literary education. How do we describe, both to ourselves and to others, what is distinctive and central and valuable about our collective enterprise? What is it that we do--for students, to name the most immediate and obvious objects of our attention, but also for the world at large, that makes us worthy of support? How do we make the case to administrators, to trustees, to legislators, to tuition-paying parents, and to their spiritually hungry but also anxiously practical children that our departments of English language and literature are good places for them to invest their limited resources of money and time?
Some members of some of these constituencies--especially the legislators and the parents--will have absorbed from here and there partial and peculiar notions of the kind of work we do. At least a few of us, surely, have been challenged by a skeptical questioner to explain and justify the highfalutin, countercommensensical, and semiscandalous work that has allegedly overtaken the academy. Even more of us, I suspect, have been touched, but also nonplussed, by the high-minded gratitude of parents or alums looking back fondly on experiences of humane discovery that they recall from their literature classes. They are pleased to think, they tell us, that their children and successors in the literature classrooms of the current day are still being exposed to the profound truths of human nature embodied in Shakespeare's plays or, in rather different language, are still being offered the same holiday from harsh realities that they fondly remember as the fruit of literary experience. We smile politely, but we're also slightly embarrassed--at least I am--to be thanked for performing a task that isn't quite the task we perform and to hear a literary education being praised in terms that are so distant from our own, terms that were never quite the right ones and that require at the minimum a good deal of complicating and ironizing. Well, what terms would we prefer? If we are neither jargon-spewing revolutionaries nor purveyors of sweetness and light entertainment, then what are we?
Among other things, we are people who, when asked a set of questions like the foregoing, furrow our brows and say that the questions are difficult and the answers are complex. Fair--and true--enough. But we know we have to do a bit better. We have to do better for the hard, practical reason that more is demanded by those from whom we seek material and institutional support. And we have to do better because we demand more of ourselves. I won't answer these questions finally or fully, of course--I can furrow my brow with the best of them--but let me try to get our local and particular version of this conversation going with a few considerations and propositions. What I'll offer for the time being are both some negative prescriptions--some important ways not to respond to the challenges facing our profession--and some positive suggestions as well. If these positive suggestions take the form mostly of renovated commonplaces, I will have to take comfort in the fact that commonplaces generally get to be common for good reason and in the hope that the renovations are substantive and helpful. And if my discussion keeps steering me back into the elliptical orbit that is defined by the paired foci of literature and literacy, I won't pretend to be too apologetic about that. It's hard to disentangle the discussion of how we should represent our work from some discussion of what that work centrally is and should continue to be.
Under the heading of how not to respond to this moment of challenge, I'll start with a single and simple point. When asked by persons outside our profession what it is that we do and why it is worthy of support, we should not resent the question. Some of our questioners may seem--indeed may be--rude or clueless or suspiciously motivated; nevertheless, they have a perfect right to ask us to explain and to justify our work and thus our contribution. Taken in the aggregate, these questions are not just reasonable but salutary. It's good for us to be obliged to stop and think again about first principles, about the values and commitments that we do or don't share, about the motives that first brought us to this profession, and about the varieties of pleasurable or profitable experience that we hope to offer others. We'll disagree with one another, of course, and we'll frequently be baffled and outraged by the obstinacy with which persons both inside and outside the profession misconstrue our arguments and fail to be persuaded by them. But even so, we need to make the arguments, to modify and complicate and reinforce them in the face of challenges; to win some and to lose some. Through this effort of reflection and persuasion we will have persuaded at least ourselves that we do valuable work and that we have chosen that work deliberately.
An important corollary to this first point is that we should not condescend to these questioners or assume that we know where they're coming from intellectually or politically. It's neither wise nor practical to cast ourselves as the misvalued and misunderstood victims of a blinkered philistinism. For one thing, it's simply not the case that all or even most of our critics and questioners are anti-intellectual worldlings focused exclusively on the bottom line. Neither is it the case that we are without worldly concerns and considerations ourselves--concerns about salaries, resources, job prospects. And, indeed, we should be concerned with such things. We cannot offer an adequate account of our intellectual and professional lives if we are embarrassed either by our ideals or by our practical needs and desires. An oversimplified and reductive image of our critics will likely produce an answering reductiveness in our own arguments.
We should not be too confident, either, of the political motivations or implications of those who challenge or criticize us and of those whom we must persuade to support us. There may be political motives, of course, and there will surely be political implications when any large-scale challenge is offered to educational policy or practices. But there's little that's clear these days about the politics of the academy or the country at large. Persons seeking to do difficult intellectual work and to justify the study of difficult texts may find themselves criticized as obscure and overpoliticized by a tradition-loving, canon-upholding right or as obscure and politically irrelevant by a no-nonsense left; as unworldly and economically irrelevant by a populist and utilitarian right or as elitist and economically irrelevant by a populist and utilitarian left. And some of these criticisms will have some merit some of the time. Rather than tailoring our answers to individual questioners and, certainly, rather than knowing in advance that their challenges are valueless, we should be thinking hard about what we value and what we don't, about what we can defend and what we can't, and about offering as full and frank an account of our work as we can muster, describing its nature, arguing for its value.
So what shall we say? We can begin by looking at what we and our predecessors have said in the past, at the chief claims that our profession has traditionally made for itself. We have said, first, that we serve our students and, through them, the culture at large, by teaching broadly useful skills: the skills of reading, writing, and critical thinking. At the same time, we have claimed to offer our students the breadth of moral and aesthetic experience that is uniquely available in the most accomplished and challenging literature of the past and the present. Uniting and underlying these two claims is the assumption of roughly the last century that it does take special skills and special information, or at the least some informed guidance, to gain access to this literature. This guidance has taken a variety of forms over the many decades of institutionalized literary study--textual and philological, interpretive, contextual. But the belief has remained constant that most readers, especially beginning readers, can use some help in making sense of what they read, and we have presented ourselves as uniquely trained for the job. Finally, to the extent that special information has seemed a necessary complement to special skill, we have claimed to offer a valuable service, both to our students and to the world, by working to discover and preserve and keep current a body of varied, positive knowledge--the knowledge of literary history and literary biography, of textual and linguistic history, of immediately relevant literary contexts, and of critical and theoretical reflection on literary matters: the best and the rest that have been known, thought, and said both in and about literature.
At every point, of course, these different explanations and arguments branch and multiply and overlap. The advocates of literary education have laid stress sometimes on the benefits that it offers to the individual student; sometimes on the radiating cultural benefits that result when sufficient numbers of these students are sent forth into the world. These benefits, too, have been variously imagined and described. It is of practical value to the student, we have said, if a literary education equips him or her to do useful and remunerative work and of practical value to the culture if many students are so equipped. Broadening and deepening our case for the utility of literary education, we have argued that there is another kind and order of practical value (with the practical now more adequately and generously defined) in exposing students to a wide variety of human experiences and human types, an exposure that will render these students more sympathetically capable actors in the social world and that will thus make the social world more attractive and humane. Related to this last argument, but distinct from it, has been the claim that students who, with the help of a literary education, discover in themselves a capacity for aesthetic experience and aesthetic pleasure will have an improved quality of life.
How do we feel now about these various claims? What challenges have been offered to them, from both inside and outside the profession, and do we find these challenges persuasive? Can we revise and extend the traditional arguments for the value of literary study in ways that respond adequately to these challenges and to the changed nature of our own work and ambitions? I think that we can. But this depends on some antecedent decisions about what our proper work is, about what ambitions we share for it. I favor a particular conception of that work and of those ambitions. But of course I've been pushing for that particular conception all along in my repeated references to a literary education. I do think that that's what we should continue to offer our students and our institutions; I do think that our best arguments for ourselves--best in the sense of being both most admirable and most effective--will be those that define our work in relation to literature and to literacy.
That these are contested terms, I am well aware--indeed they are terms that we can and should redefine in ways that accommodate the breadth of contemporary critical practice and that acknowledge the force of some recent challenges to our customary practices. But there should be limits to this accommodatingness, too--at least, there are certainly limits to mine--for a couple of reasons. First of all, the most vivid recent challenges to the traditions of literary criticism routinely misdescribe these traditions in egregiously oversimplifying ways. We won't have to reject nearly so much of what I have referred to as "customary practices" once we have taken a clearer look at the character of literary-critical undertakings so various as never really to have congealed into customs. Almost without exception, contemporary arguments for moving beyond and away from literature and literary criticism offer reductive and caricatured accounts of the traditions that they seek to supersede, traditions that offer much more to us in the present moment than is generally recognized.
But there is a more immediate and practical reason to hold literature and literacy at the heart of our enterprise and to resist the redefinition of that enterprise as the investigation of all cultural expressions everywhere. If we broaden too much our ideas of our proper subject matter and, even more consequentially, if we broaden to the point of losing a sense of our proper skills, we run the serious risk of diffusing ourselves into intellectual and institutional nonexistence, of doing work that looks so much like sociology and anthropology and cultural history and popular journalism that it can best be done by sociologists and anthropologists and historians and journalists. I am not arguing against the efforts of recent years to democratize and internationalize the canon of works taught and studied. On the contrary, I think that we have been right to register and respond to the pressures from inside and outside the academy to open our minds and our courses to interesting and valuable writing to which we had previously been underattentive. At the same time, however, we should resist the corollary pressures to redefine our discipline as a special--or not so special--branch of cultural studies.
Back then to our opening question. How can we represent ourselves accurately and effectively in the institutional and cultural conversations of the moment? What can we still say to the world about why it should support us? Which of those traditional claims can we still make in good faith and with good hope of success, and which must we modify to suit our modified practices and the temper of the times? First, the question of skills, those skills that we practice and those that we preach and teach to students. Do we still teach students how to write? Is that still a specialty? We'd better hope so. In this area we should not modify our arguments but redouble our efforts and refine and strengthen our practices. No other one of our tasks is so easy to describe and sell--or so hard to accomplish--as this one of teaching students how to be clear and effective writers. We do this best and make the best case for ourselves in the old-fashioned way--by working at it and, especially, by seeing that the teachers who work at it include substantial numbers of our tenured and tenure-track faculty members. This is a simple and familiar idea, but it's as important an idea as we have when it comes to convincing the world of our commitment to serving our students. It's an embarrassment both internally and externally when our most highly regarded and highly rewarded faculty members don't make regular contributions to this task whose importance we feature so prominently in arguments for the value of our discipline.
This doesn't just mean that these faculty members should teach introductory composition and literature classes, though that's a necessary start. It means that we must continue to care for good writing ourselves and to attend closely to student writing in all our classes. It means that we abandon at our peril the special relationship between English departments and writing programs and the conviction that we have a special contribution to make to the evidently desirable efforts to teach writing across the curriculum. It means that we should think harder and better about the relationship between the teaching of literature and the teaching of creative writing, activities that lose sight of each other at great cost to both. I leave for another day and another writer--for many other days and many other writers--the consideration of how best to manage such programs and partnerships and just reemphasize here that this skill of writing, out of all those that we teach, is the one still most uncontroversially in fashion and most incontrovertibly in demand.
The ancillary skills of critical reading and critical thinking are no less clearly in demand, but they belong less clearly to us. Many disciplines can reasonably claim to be teaching critical thinking. That's as it should be. But we then need to say what's special about out contribution, and that's where critical reading comes in--or at least where it should come in. There's a risk, though, that critical reading will belong less clearly to us if we are increasingly hesitant to name it as the center of our discipline. To the extent that we do name it as central and make good on the naming by stressing it in our teaching and writing, critical reading can be the particularized form of critical thinking that is especially our own. We can say, as we always have, that we teach students how to follow and conduct complex arguments (though we will undermine ourselves if we don't break our habit of sneering at Enlightenment rationalism as a transparently flawed and even villainous movement). We can say, as we have begun to more frequently, that we train students to be skeptical consumers of argument. And if we continue to focus on literature and literary reading, we can say that we train students to be subtle listeners, alert to the tones and indirections by which so much is conveyed in cultural messages and signals of all kinds.
What about the traditional argument that a literary education improves a student's quality of life? What we might say now (it will be true if we do our jobs well) is that we offer students the frameworks of understanding and the skills in reading that will help them make discriminating sense of the vast quantities of cultural experience--of what we might call aesthetic experience--that will be coming their way. We don't say anymore--it would sound quaintly mismatched to the current character of our lives--that we teach students the arts of connoisseurship. But we should remember, and we should remind others, that we and our students and our fellow citizens are, in fact, constant consumers of a wide variety of art experiences. We and they do still read books; but in addition we, and especially they, listen to music, watch television, go to the movies, and make up the audience for many different kinds of shows and spectacles. The habits of mind and judgment that name, value, and organize these experiences are both intrinsically valuable and immensely useful. When we train students as critical readers, we help them to form these habits and thus to make sense of their experience and to avail themselves of life-enhancing pleasures.
It may seem that I've reversed field here, leaving literature and literacy behind for the glittering attractions of popular culture. But let me plead for a few commonsensical discriminations. When I say that we should remain focused on literature, I mean partly that we should keep it clearly in view as home base and as the most important object of our efforts and obligations. I mean, too, in placing stress on literacy, that we should be engaging in the same kinds of critical activity when we extend the boundaries of the literary and attend to other cultural texts and events as when we read the literature of the past. It's a serious intellectual and strategic error for those of us in departments of English to focus on the popularity of popular culture. We're not trained for such work, and thus we can't add much value to anybody's experience of cultural products. But that doesn't mean nothing on television or at the movies merits our attention. Indeed, there's plenty at the movies for us to pay attention to, especially if there's a revival house in the neighborhood, and I strongly support our entry into the burgeoning market for courses in film. Many of the greatest works of art made in the twentieth century have been movies, and our training as readers of narrative and drama makes us distinctively qualified to present those art works to students. Both students and the movies they study will be well served if that study attends to the longer and deeper traditions of dramatic representation of which movies are part. But we need to stay rooted in those longer traditions to keep our credentials and, more important, to do the job right.
I can't propose any clear guidelines about what's literary and what isn't or about what we should teach and what we shouldn't. In these areas as in most others there's nothing to do but judge and argue as we go. But I won't shrink from an example or two, so I'll just say quickly that I think a course in, say, the gender politics of situation comedy, featuring a contrast between I Dream of Jeannie and Bewitched, is a poor idea, one that pants too audibly after contemporaneity (though still missing it by a couple of decades) and that won't give students enough complexity and resistance to work with. It's also a course, not incidentally, that will give skeptical administrators or mischievous journalists all too much to work with. A course, however, that looks at the representations of gender and erotic antagonism in Much Ado about Nothing and Pride and Prejudice and then in His Girl Friday and Bringing Up Baby and half a dozen other films or plays or novels will give students plenty to work with; such a course might even venture a remark or two at the end about why Elizabeth Montgomery's witty Samantha, in Bewitched, is so much more formidable an antagonist, and thus so much more ambivalent and interesting a gender warrior, than Barbara Eden's kittenishly submissive harem girl in I Dream of Jeannie.
We can and should continue to extend our range in other ways, too, in readings of postcolonial narrative, of working-class autobiography, of women's diaries, of slave narratives; in readings of the broad range of philosophers and political actors and commentators whose work we have always shared unproblematically with a variety of neighboring disciplines. But extend is the right word, with its implications of a reaching out that also keeps one foot squarely planted on home ground. The definition of literature has always been loose and unpredictably accommodating, making way for Boethius or Robert Burton, for Darwin or John Stuart Mill or W. E. B. Du Bois, prompted by the eagerness of individual inquirers and permitted by ad hoc shifts and realignments of institutional responsibility. It's surely possible to hold the best poets, dramatists, novelists, essayists, memoirists, and sages at the center of our teaching and study while holding ourselves open to shifting senses of who those best are or of what constitutes their excellence and while regularly testing the generic boundaries of the literary.
It's necessary, though, to keep bringing to bear on all the objects of our study a distinctive--if also loosely defined--quality of attention. Most of what we study will and should be drawn from a familiar, although quite large and unfixed, list of literary texts and authors. But we can apply to all we study the skills that we have acquired and strengthened in our reading and teaching and writing about literature. Just as we can offer our students help in reading contemporary culture by exposing them to the long traditions of which it is part and the habits of critical reading that make new and better sense of it, so we can help our students and our colleagues and the readers of our scholarship by bringing to bear on a wide variety of nontraditional materials the skills that we have developed as readers of literature. The skills of literary reading--by which I mean reading that is closely attentive to forms and tones in their inextricable relation to meanings and messages, closely attentive to the dramatic shapes of phrases, sentences, paragraphs, and narrative, and closely attentive to the particular character and quality of the experience of reading a particular text--are the most distinctive thing we have to offer our colleagues when we turn our attention to extra- or quasi-literary materials that we might share with them as objects of interest. They are thus a crucial part of the case that we make for ourselves, a case for our indispensability to the scholarly conversation of the academy and the larger conversation of the culture. But we can only make this claim honestly and plausibly if we resist the invitation from some quarters to repudiate the very ideas of literature and literary reading.
We can make other claims, too. What, for instance, of that body of positive knowledge that literature departments have traditionally sought to preserve and transmit? If the ambition to preserve for posterity the best that has been known and thought seems now to beg more questions than it answers, it remains true that we are the conservators of a vast body of knowledge, culled and shaped and reshaped by many generations of scholarly investigation and critical judgment. "Dead white males" is one of those phrases that don't seem ever to have been used without the irony of implied quotation marks, and I usually don't like to hear it--not because of its anticanonical implications, but because it more commonly is trotted out in the course of a wounded and self-pitying defense of those whom it names, a defense that seems to me to be two-thirds mistaken. White males are still doing quite well in the marketplace and in the curriculum, and I am a staunch advocate of the forms of affirmative action that seek out for examination and inclusion those whose work has long been ignored or underappreciated. But the living are not in need of affirmative action either in or out of the academy--and certainly not in its curriculum. We do good, and in the long run we will also do well, by keeping alive our commitment to the great and good writings of the past. But this can't be a winning argument for us if we cancel too many sections of earlier literature to make way for the new or if we convey the sense to our colleagues and students, in misguided little bursts of fashionable disdain, that the new is much more exciting and alive than the old.
A last word about the past, and then I want to close with a few disclaimers. I haven't returned yet to the traditional claim that a literary education is a source of moral enlargement and thus of moral improvement. I'm skeptical about such claims if they are made in any but the most hesitant and carefully qualified terms. I don't dispute the important, but almost uselessly general, proposition that the nation and the world will be better off if more and more of our citizens receive better and better educations. But I'm dubious about any more confidently specified relationship between educational causes and social effects and would not wish to anchor our public relations campaigns or fetter our curricula to a program of civic and moral betterment. I'd rather follow wherever they lead the strange, various, and often antisocial writers that we study than to justify curricular inclusions--or, more worryingly, curricular exclusions--on the grounds of their tendency to lead us and our students to an already surveyed moral high ground. And yet I can't surrender, and we shouldn't surrender, the conviction that it's an intrinsically good thing--and the hope that it will also, however gradually or indirectly, be a socially useful thing--for as many students as possible to confront voices and forms of living different from their own. And this is where the past reenters the discussion. For along with all the forms of differences that we recognize, deplore, celebrate, and seek to turn to educational advantage in our contemporary conversation--differences of class, race, gender, religion, sexual preference--we must continue also to recognize and focus on and learn from the differences between the present and the thousand different versions of the past that our subject matter opens to us. A genuine engagement with the otherness of past minds and voices is as potentially mind-stretching and tolerance-creating as any other of the engagements with diversity that we rightly promote. If we let go of a primary commitment to the writing of the past, we will lose an important argument for our survival and we will have reneged on an important obligation to ourselves and others.
It is ourselves, ultimately, that we must answer to. There's no guarantee that the arguments we make to others will be effective, no guarantee, even, that the fortunes of the academy in general or English departments in particular will be significantly determined by the doings or sayings of academicians alone. The only law that will surely be enforced in these matters is the law of unanticipated consequences: technological, social, economic, and political forces will have their blundering way with us, as with everybody, in the long term. For now, however, and even in these very prosperous times (so how much more in the less prosperous times that will surely come?) we are asked in dozens of venues and circumstances and in dozens of moods and tones to explain ourselves and our work. Whatever the long-term future holds, we've got next year or next semester or next week in which to do better or worse in the competition for resources. And it's not just others we have to convince, not just institutional or financial support that we have to worry about. We've given our lives to this work; it's not a trivial exercise to determine what work it is, exactly, and to reconsider the substantial commitment of time and energy that we have already made. To justify what we have given and what we ask others to give, we should decide what's most important to us and rest our case on that.
The author is Professor of English at Wellesley College. This paper was presented at the 1999 ADE Summer Seminar East, hosted by Purchase College, State University of New York, in Rye, New York.
© 2000 by the Association of Departments of English. All Rights Reserved.
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