Literary Studies

Literary Studies

Although this is the only chapter of the Handbook that is focused on literary study, a glance through the Contributors Notes will show it to be far from the only one whose author is housed in a literature department. The large number of contributors who either are now or have been at some point in their careers members of English or Comparative Literature faculties is an index of literature's enduringly powerful position within the disciplinary spaces where cultural theory and analysis are practised. Though departmental divisions and emphases vary significantly from one institution and one country to another, the general rule at most of the world's colleges and universities is that literature departments are larger than departments of art history or music or film studies, and larger than the ‘cultural wings of such departments as communications, sociology, economics or anthropology, even in the wake of recent shifts that have enlarged the disciplinary apertures of the social sciences with respect to traditionally cultural matters. No other form of cultural practice has been as thoroughly subjected to academic scrutiny, as written about by scholars, or as widely promoted and disseminated by the educational apparatus as literature has.

And yet, according to what has lately become a persistent and intensifying complaint, literary study has practically disappeared from many higher-educational institutions, and the true literary scholar is today a largely residual figure. Though the number of literature departments remains large and the number of bachelors degrees they award each year, in the USA and worldwide, has risen over the last quarter century, it is said that what is studied in those departments is no longer literature in any important sense of the term. The literature faculties are viewed as having turned their backs on literature while devoting attention to works of ‘popular culture such as movies or comic books; to instances of ‘discourse’ drawn from a predominantly non-literary archive in which novels or poems serve as historical evidence alongside newspaper reports, ships logs, and criminological treatises; to sociological ‘data’ such as consumption patterns or production figures; or to the cultural politics of ‘class, race, and gender’, in terms of which literary works hold [Page 127]no interest or value beyond their perceived utility or disutility as tools of identity-based social struggles.1 From this standpoint, the Handbooks list of contributors tells a different story: here, as in the profession at large, there seem to be many literature professors but scarcely any of them writing about literature.

How is it that literary study can occupy this radically ambiguous position within the academy, at once thriving and imperiled, expanding and vanishing, envied for its centrality and lamented for its marginality? What, really, is its place on the field of contemporary cultural analysis, and what are likely to be its contributions going forward? To give good answers to these questions, we need to trace the longstanding connection between literary form and institutional form, between scholars concern with the formal particulars of ‘literature itself’ and their collective, ongoing struggle for recognition and security in the modern university.2 Form is not just the fulcrum around which the important debates in literary theory have revolved; it is also the point of articulation between those abstract debates of ideology or method and the concrete institutional stakes that have been in play. It was by focusing on the analysis of specifically literary form that English and the other fields of modern literary study first managed to gain and consolidate institutional legitimacy within the initially inhospitable higher-educational apparatus of the early and mid twentieth century, and it has been through tactical modifications (rather than outright abandonment) of the main principles and protocols that took shape in those decades that the discipline has managed to guard some of its advantage, albeit at a certain cost, within the even more hostile academy of the neoliberal era. The impetus behind recent demands for a ‘return’ to form is not merely philosophical, nor is it wholly attributable to the cyclical or generational rhythm of intellectual fashion. It is institutional and strategic, having less to do with any actual disappearance of formal or aesthetic emphases from literary study than with the struggle for resources and status in a period of rapid and threatening higher-educational rearrangement.

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