Beyond the Current Impasse in Literary Studies

Abstract

ions than in literary texts need to develop a rationale capable of explaining what we are trying to do, how these investigations can move beyond the agenda dictated by literary studies, and how our new object of study differs from a literary or nonliterary text. To develop adequate goals, rationales, and methods for studying this more abstract object, scholars currently within literary studies need to make alliances with like-minded scholars in various departments, to give up our sense of disciplinary superiority, and to develop languages that will enable humanists to talk to social and natural scientists without the defense of disciplinary jargon. Eventually, what now goes under the name of interdisciplinary studies will probably yield one or more new disciplines, which will need to be accorded departmental status by university administrations. In the short run, and in an attempt to discover the new disciplinary identities some of us want to forge, interdisciplinary institutes and seminars can provide sites where productive conversations can occur.16 Whether working within one of these institutes or not, scholars interested in new objects of analysis can begin to discover whether alternatives to formalism and empiricism can be legitimated within the university system; to do so, I think we need to admit that we are not mounting quasi-scientific demonstrations but simply conducting This content downloaded from 207.46.13.127 on Wed, 12 Oct 2016 04:11:12 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 372 Beyond the Current Impasse in Literary Studies thought experiments, which resemble scholastic demonstrations more than scientific trials. Second, I think that those of us primarily interested in need to find a new rationale for literary study. However we ultimately define it, this rationale needs to speak to at least three concerns. First, we need to rethink the goal of literary studies. At the very least, this will involve reworking the relationship between parts of the discipline that are now separated administratively: literary theory, literary history, composition studies, the history of the language, creative writing. This reworking might transform literary studies into the study of language through or literary studies might become the study of through language.17 Whatever its exact emphasis, literary study needs to make the study of language part of itself, for, as literature, for example, is increasingly frequently written in an English made to accommodate various dialects and sociolects, it seems foolish to pretend that language change does not affect what can count as literature in the university setting. The second concern we need to address, whatever goal achieves consensus, is the methodology of literary studies. If formalism is to acquire the theoretical coherence it has never enjoyed, it cannot be based on a theory of language so out of step with the current thinking about language in other disciplines. If literary studies is to embrace language studies in a way it has not done since the reign of the old philology, then formalist methods will need to find a new relation to language. If formalist methods are to be discarded, then another method-equally capable of specifying a discipline-needs to replace close reading. The rethinking of method will no doubt proceed alongside the third concern that literary studies needs to address-the rethinking of aesthetics. Given that the specification of an aesthetic domain was the basis upon which the study of was institutionalized within departments of simply to abandon aesthetics as naive or politically suspect seems self-defeating for anyone who works-or wants to work-within any department. If literary texts have some ontological identity, then literary scholars need to define and justify studying it, whether our justifications turn on appreciation or moral improvement, on beauty or truth. If literary scholars do not protect the domain of the aesthetic in a manner that seems credible, we risk losing it, either to a media increasingly tolerant only of sound bites or to a university system increasingly responsive to a narrowly defined corporatist rationale.18 One way to address these three concerns might be to reorganize the curricula of existing graduate programs to emThis content downloaded from 207.46.13.127 on Wed, 12 Oct 2016 04:11:12 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms American Literary History 373 phasize both the skills that our students' future employers actually expect and the kind of theoretical inquiry the discipline needs for its own reform. In such a revised curriculum, students might still concentrate in a literary-historical period or genre, and degree requirements might still make some gesture toward the coverage of literary history, but traditional seminars in literary history and theory would be supplemented by some array of required seminars on pedagogy, research methods, composition theory and instruction, scholarly writing, perhaps even evaluation (grading) and professional service (committee work). Among the seminars I would like to see departments include would also be seminars on aesthetics, literary method, and the relationship between and language, because I think that whatever new rationale our discipline eventually embraces should be generated by the students and faculty who constitute the future of the discipline. I do think that literary studies needs a new rationale, as well as a method more coherent than formalist analysis or the indefensible eclecticism epitomized by cultural studies, but I think the only way that the basic premises of literary studies can be rethought is collectively and from within a revised curriculum that assigns a place for such disciplinary selfinterrogation. In this essay I have tried to suggest why literary studies as we know it has reached the dire situation so many critics now lament. I have given theoretical studies of the novel particular attention for two reasons: first, because the two kinds of objectivity by which Henry James tried to award the novel legitimacy bequeathed institutionalized versions of literary study one of its most obdurate contradictions; and second, because efforts to describe how the a novel creates relates to the world outside it have recently produced innovative attempts to understand literature's contribution to extratextual abstractions. As I have argued, both the contradiction James set out and recent attempts to explore the novel's participation in a world beyond its pages have seriously eroded the very aesthetic domain James tried so hard to establish. While no one can predict the outcome of these developments, I am certain that any attempt to go forward will have to begin by looking back.