
What's Wrong with Literary Studies? - samclemens
http://www.chronicle.com/article/Whats-Wrong-With-Literary/238480?key=4RKr4qKcf4rcS4jgH7bQLkI1VfpssaW3_gvnZZsWLv4iGqEJPIeGd0g4ZKvUyI74ZWM4N2ZiX3U4QlhnLXBwZjFjMVdxcnpOMTJrUVVFd1FpSWZXQ0FtV2Nacw
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jseliger
The criticisms match my experience. In a comment to "The New Intellectuals: Is
the academic jobs crisis a boon to public culture?"
([http://www.chronicle.com/article/The-New-
Intellectuals/23835...](http://www.chronicle.com/article/The-New-
Intellectuals/238354?key=dCUViR9a-EOigReN8KYScIihtePPbbZQqhqYiy7iOHA8Hz3LH5C1xjtKFu4h1LrMN2N2N1hfZm85akpmempEb0VHcHVIeVNBT3ZPbEtrMkRJSTY2RzhMVW9iMA)),
I said that I went to grad school in English Lit and this resonates:

 _By the time I started to draft journal articles and map out my dissertation,
I became frustrated by having to write articles no one else would read that
had to cite other articles no one else would read in order to satisfy peer
reviewers and engage in a process that seemed internally self-justified to
fill CVs and have an academic career but didn’t have much effect. " He found
more satisfaction writing his blog, which reached readers around the world._

I write more here: [https://jakeseliger.com/2012/09/22/the-stupidity-of-what-
im-...](https://jakeseliger.com/2012/09/22/the-stupidity-of-what-im-doing-and-
the-meaning-of-real-work-reading-for-phd-comprehensive-exams/) and here:
[https://jakeseliger.com/2013/02/12/a-lot-of-academic-
researc...](https://jakeseliger.com/2013/02/12/a-lot-of-academic-research-may-
barely-count-as-research-by-many-definitions/), but academics in the
humanities act like their peer-reviewed work doesn't matter at all. There are
no pre-print services and no sense of urgency. Whether an article is published
today or five years from today seems to be treated as if it's of little or no
importance. The whole system is wildly dispiriting from an intellectual
perspective.

Teaching, meanwhile, gets subordinated to the world of fake research, to the
detriment of professors themselves and the students they're supposed to be
teaching. Yet literary studies are, or should be, among the most accessible
academic fields.

~~~
adpoe
Have you ever read this old essay?

Masocriticism by Paul Mann:
[https://www.jstor.org/stable/3685366?seq=1#page_scan_tab_con...](https://www.jstor.org/stable/3685366?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents)

Basically a meta-critique of the whole system you describe--saying the only
reason one would engage in it at all is for sake of pure masochism. (It's
meant to be both humorous and a serious critique of the seeming pointlessness
that you described, but very deadpan.)

One of my profs recommended that one to me, years ago, while I was also
studying literature as an undergrad, and it's always stuck with me.

Sidenote: Later, I made a career for myself writing software instead of
essays. But I actually do think that my initial time spent studying literature
was very beneficial--personally, professionally, intellectually, and so on.

Which brings me back to the original point--what's "wrong" with literary
studies? Probably that the main focus has been studying literature for its own
sake, rather than viewing how it can make a positive difference (for the most
part). So I do very much appreciate what Felski is doing here. Interesting
work.

------
_rpd
> "I believe that the profession can’t really move forward until we shed our
> fear of saying and thinking things that colleagues would call ‘humanist.’ "

Why on Earth has humanism fallen into disrepute among literary studies majors?

~~~
anigbrowl
It hasn't, but if you say humanism you're exposing yourself to dual charges of
cultural Marxism from the right and sneers of wasting money on a 'useless'
degree from people who think education should serve vocation.

~~~
metaphorm
> education should serve vocation.

yes, it's commonly said, and it's politically supported as well with all the
emphasis on promoting STEM subjects.

however...vocation and $dayjob are not the same thing and the conflation of
them is, I think, one of the roots of a profound cultural problem we're
currently facing.

I don't mean merely to argue the semantics of the word "vocation", which I
know is frequently used as a reference to "vocational training" which is an
unfortunately named term that refers to practical job skills training.

I'm arguing that the reason we make this mistake of semantics in the first
place is because on a deeper level our culture has lost touch with the notion
of what a vocation really is and really means. It means _calling_. Education
really _should_ serve vocation, except that vocation and job aren't the same
thing and now we have confused the two and so our education is confused as
well and no longer but illuminates but instead obscures. Case in point: the
difficulty of claiming to support "humanism", or want to study "the
humanities".

~~~
gbersac
I think on the other hand that vocation is a think since only a few decade. In
ancient time, your only option was to do the same thing that your parents.
There weren't as many professions.

Vocation is a luxury. You gain money by serving other people's needs, not by
following your vocation. It's a luxury humanity has been able to afford since
only few decades (except aristocracy).

------
awinter-py
The 'technical critique' tricks felski is advocating against are also bad
anthropology -- if literary critics deny the experience of the reader and deny
an analysis of the writer's experience, background and techniques, we're not
left with much.

Anthropologists have 'Verstehen', a term which has gone through a lot of
iterations but used to mean that you should be careful interpreting the
meaning of a ritual from an alien culture. Critics' rejection of the inner
life of readers and writers alienates them from the art they analyze.

------
AnimalMuppet
This whole critique mindset is kind of a self-inflicted wound on literary
studies. If you destroy the ability of literature to say what the author
intended it to say. This hurts literary studies for two reasons:

1\. It takes what is great about literature and replaces it with something
less. _Hamlet_ is better than any of the critiques or deconstructions of
_Hamlet_. It's better than any of the criticism of _Hamlet_ , too, but the new
approach is worse. The old criticism tried to show how the work could have
been written better; the new critique tries to make you try to ignore the
author's point.

2\. The critique approach destroys itself. If one applied the techniques of
literary critique to any literary critique, what would survive? Almost nothing
- certainly not the author's point.

Then why bother doing literary studies, if we're going to ignore what the
authors are trying to say, and if we can also ignore what the papers published
in literary studies say? What's the point? Why bother with the whole exercise?

[Edit: I read further, and...

> "Today’s anti-pedophile," Ruddick writes, summarizing the analysis,
> "perpetrates the ‘potential violence’ of ‘speaking on [children’s] behalf.’
> " Such ideas violate scholars’ private convictions, Ruddick says, but they
> go unchallenged because they seem to mesh with the ideology of the group.

I try to avoid profanity, but: What the _hell_ is wrong with these people?
They see speaking on a child's behalf as "potential violence", but ignore the
_real_ violence that pedophilia does to the child? And that viewpoint meshes
with the ideology of the literary studies establishment?

Words fail me. This is appalling.

Now, at least, "such ideas violate scholars' private convictions". Thank God
for that much. But if they don't dare go against the seeming ideology of the
group, which seems to be the ideology of the group because nobody else dares
go against it either, that's getting pretty close to "systemic evil".]

------
resfirestar
>Felski attacks critique’s stature as the most radical form of thought. Here
she draws on the work of Bruno Latour, a French anthropologist and
sociologist. Latour questions the assumption that being suspicious and
critical makes you a progressive thinker, in contrast to the purportedly
credulous and complacent masses. He points out that conservative thinkers are
now just as likely to draw on the forms of suspicious questioning associated
with critique. Think of climate-change deniers, or all those Trump voters so
deeply suspicious of elites.

Ah, I see one reason why this might be finding favor. Claim to have found the
source of the Trump voter's paranoid way of thought, and you have everyone's
attention. Claim you know how to defeat it, and the grants line up for you.

>Ruddick interviewed about 70 young academics, mostly Ph.D. students, at seven
major research universities. She found that two types of scholars tended to be
satisfied: those with a political commitment to an issue favored by the field
of English, and those who, not especially stirred up by theory, study
literary-historical questions

Literary history scholars being happier is interesting, but it seems
potentially flawed to rely on self-reporting to determine political alignment.
Two students, both committed Marxists. One is cynical, depressed, and hates
his Ph.D program, the other is loving his program and life, and has enough
energy to be an activist as well. Which one is going to tell you he's a
Marxist? Hopefully it was more systematic than "interview" suggests.

I'll try and make the case of Felski's skeptics, based on my experience with
post-critical academics in multiple disciplines.

The hopefully obvious counterpoint to Felski and others who seek to
depoliticize criticism is that their supposedly apolitical stance is in itself
political. By being "post-critical", you abandon a defined political reading
and attempt to triangulate either the perspective of the author or what you
perceive as the perspective of the casual reader, in order to avoid the messy,
critique-y situation when your perspective and the author's perspective aren't
compatible.

For example, and since I watched The Crying Game last night, a queer viewer
could conceivably take issue with how Dil is written in "The Crying Game"
because she sees the reality of the straight writer, not her own. The queer
critic tries to deconstruct (sorry) the the elements of the script and why she
believes it doesn't do a good job of showing how Dil experiences the story.

But if that viewer identified as a post-critical critic, she would shy away
from diving too deep into the topic. The post-critical critic is trained to
avoid the impulse to critique, and instead must search for a meaning that, to
put it bluntly, won't offend anyone who loves The Crying Game and doesn't like
anyone skeptically picking apart bits of it. The instinctual reaction to
deconstruct (oops, did it again) an idea or representation that rings false or
is just plain interesting is suppressed, because the post-critical mind must
be along for the ride and try to derive ideas from the author's conclusions.
It's interesting, but I wouldn't describe it as being liberated from "the
barbed wire of suspicion".

This is only looking at one element of post-criticism that I particularly
dislike, and of course their perspective has some value. I just wanted to push
back on the idea that these people are the vanguard of intellectual freedom.

------
Vampires123432
When I was in grade school, I had an exam question regarding "The Outsiders"
and why Dally told Ponyboy and Johnny to hide "in an abandoned church".

My response was that it was abandoned. I got marked off because "it
represented a chance for salvation".

I was raised an atheist. Go figure.

~~~
nickff
I'm not sure if you're being serious, but it seems that the teacher was asking
you to interpret why the author had the characters hide in a church (i.e.
symbolism). A similarly reductionist (to your) answer would be 'because that's
what the author wrote'.

I must also say that your answer was more agnostic than atheistic; the
atheistic answer should be 'because they were fools'.

~~~
Vampires123432
I wrote to S.E. Hinton to ask about the significance of the church. "Why an
abandoned church?"

She responded and told me there was an abandoned church where she grew up. She
liked to hang out in the building because it was a convenient place to read.

I have the letter stowed in a box somewhere in my parents' attic.

~~~
anigbrowl
The author's intent is only one aspect of literary criticism; it's not the
'correct' answer. If enough people subscribe to some other explanation, then
that will become the 'meaning' of a literary device for all practical
purposes, regardless of what the original author had aimed to communicate. For
that matter, I've frequently gone back to my own creative output and found
myself reinterpreting stuff _I_ wrote from a completely different point of
view to the one I consciously had when I was writing it.

Your conscious reasoning is often a mere rationalization of some underlying
subconscious drive whose object or direction may be obscure until later in
life, if at all. When you hear people talk of 'literary novels' they're often
speaking of work which addresses such questions. In such stories the stakes
often seem low, and the disinterested reader easily gets bored because nothing
much is happening besides the characters reacting dramatically to ordinary or
even dull events, compared to genre fiction where the stakes are frequently
life and death, and the characters are _forced_ into rapid and highly
consequential decision-making.

~~~
metaphorm
impressively done. in the comment thread discussing an article titled "What's
Wrong with Literary Studies" you have managed to summarize the topic
succinctly, and by accident too!

~~~
anigbrowl
What leads you to think I didn't apply exactly the same analysis to my own
comment before posting it?

