The Discipline of Literature

Abstract

It would be tempting to use this occasion for autobiography, and a further temptation attendant on that one would be to praise past times at the expense of the present. Whether I shall, by the time I have done, yielded to these temptations, it will be for you to say. As to the first, I shall say only enough to explain my qualifications, such as they are, to have an opinion on my stated subject. And as to the second I shall at least hope to be thought judicious. My theme is discipline, or rather the various efforts that have been made throughout the twentieth century to establish the study of modern literatures as offering a measure of academic rigour sufficient to convince scientists and classicists that we deserve to exist. I hope to help save what was good in some older ways of going about this task, as well as suggesting that not all the innovations of the past thirty or so years are likely to be much help in the long run. I was a university teacher of English for fifty years and it would be strange if in a world so changed there had not been during that period great changes in the way we do things. One that is very obvious is the huge increase in scholarly publication. Fifty years ago we were already complaining that it was impossible to keep up with the secondary literature, appalled at the bulk of The Year's Work and the Annual Bibliography (though of course anxious to see our own work recorded in them). Now teachers are more specialized and few seem obliged to 'cover the ground' as young lecturers in the I940s were still expected to do, and it is probably beyond the capacity even of keen modern specialists to keep up with their subject, however much it has been narrowed, in quite the old way. I think they have more time for research than we had, for they seem to teach less, and mostly what they choose. Of course, there is on the other hand more of what we might call pettifogging, timewasting administration associated with the job than there used to be. But that constraint may be cancelled by a greater compulsion, exerted on the much greater number of teachers, to publish fairly frequently in order to keep their jobs. So the output of books and articles is necessarily vast, yet not many of them seem to be concerned with what interests me most, and seemed to many our most valuable and difficult activity: literary criticism. I have, clumsily I must admit, searched the internet for literary criticism, and found rather little, and what there is falls short of enticing. Of course, if I had looked under feminism or gay or cultural studies or Foucault I might have found more. Obviously the vast expansion of the universities since the war is the basic reason for the expansion of literature departments, and of publication by their members. The present state of affairs is almost an accident, brought about by developments in science and technology and the need to spread education more widely. The pressure of science is ultimately responsible for the growth in the humanities; the entire history of English and related studies in the universities could be seen as an epiphenomenon of science, which, having inadvertently or absent-mindedly created large humanities departments, has always forced them to struggle for respect and