Academic Literature Studies Research Articles

Literary Criticism 21: Academic Literary Study in a Pluralist World

At the most abstract philosophical level the cosmos is best conceptualized as containing various Realms of Being interacting with one another. Each Realm contains a broad class of objects sharing the same general body of processes and laws. In such a conception the human world consists of many different Realms of Being, with more emerging as human cultures become more sophisticated and internally differentiated. Common Sense knowledge forms one Realm while Literary experience is another. Being immersed in a literary work is not at all the same as going about one's daily life. Formal Literary Criticism is yet another Realm, distinct from both Common Sense and Literary Experience. Literary Criticism is in the process of differentiating into two different Realms, that of Ethical Criticism, concerned with matters of value, and that of Naturalist Criticism, concerned with the objective study of psychological, social, and historical processes.

A History of Russian literary theory and criticism: the Soviet age and beyond

This volume assembles the work of leading international scholars in a comprehensive history of Russian literary theory and criticism from 1917 to the post-Soviet age. By examining the dynamics of literary criticism and theory in three arenas--political, intellectual, and institutional--the authors capture the progression and structure of Russian literary criticism and its changing function and discourse. The chapters follow early movements such as formalism, the Bakhtin Circle, Proletklut, futurism, the fellow-travellers, and the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers. By the cultural revolution of 1928, literary criticism became a mechanism of Soviet policies, synchronous with official ideology. The chapters follow theory and criticism into the 1930s with examinations of the Union of Soviet Writers, semantic palaeontology, and socialist realism under Stalin. A more humanised literary criticism appeared during the ravaging years of World War II, only to be supplanted by a return to the party line, Soviet heroism, and anti-Semitism in the late Stalinist period. During Khrushchev's Thaw, there was a remarkable rise in liberal literature and criticism, that was later refuted in the nationalist movement of the long 1970s. The same decade saw, on the other hand, the rise to prominence of semiotics and structuralism. Postmodernism and a strong revival of academic literary studies have shared the stage since the start of the post-Soviet era. For the first time anywhere, this collection analyses all of the important theorists and major critical movements during a tumultuous ideological period in Russian history, including developments in emigre literary theory and criticism.

Uses of Literature (review)

Reviewed by: Uses of Literature Maura Spiegel (bio) Rita Felski.Uses of Literature. Oxford: Blackwell, 2008. 154 pp. Paperback, $32.95. Distinguished scholar Rita Felski’s recent book, Uses of Literature, is published in a series called Blackwell Manifestos. Although Felski expresses reluctance to call her book a manifesto, she has drawn some sharply polemical lines in the sand. Indeed, she has outlined a theoretical position that, as some scholars have already begun to note, has relevance for work in the health humanities—although health humanities is not a subject Felski takes up directly. [End Page 203] In Uses of Literature, Felski proposes that it is time for professors of literature to restock their theory-toolboxes. Students and faculty alike, she proposes, have grown weary of “problematizing, interrogating, and subverting” as the “default option” of literary criticism (2). Poems and novels do more for their readers than offer clues to diagnose social ills, and they do less to their readers than entrap or interpellate them into dominant discourses. Fresh strategies for engaging literary texts are called for to overtake the postures of suspicion and even paranoia that we have settled into over the past thirty years. In accounting for our current literary-critical predicament, Felski rounds up the usual suspects, French theorists Foucault, Derrida, Althusser, and Lacan, who, over time, have influenced generations of academics to adopt an “intellectual politics” that shies away from affirmative values or norms of any kind, lending prestige only to interpretive gestures of subversion and estrangement. How do we make a turn toward more “reparative reading,” in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s phrase?1 Such readings rely upon a positive valuation of literature, of the critical enterprise, of reading, and of the very idea of positive valuation per se. All this places Felski on thin academic ice. To those outside the insular world of academic literary studies, it might come as a surprise that it is daring or provocative to suggest that literary texts are nourishing to readers or that we find benefit of any kind in our fictions. I personally concur with Felski’s assessment that in English and comparative literature departments efforts to explore the rewards or merits of exposure to a poem or novel are commonly assessed on a negative scale that runs from naïve to reactionary. What feels especially welcome in Felski’s approach is that she wants to open up literary texts to experiential, aesthetic, and favorable social value without aligning herself with the conservative or anti-theory wing of the academic field. “Is it possible,” she asks disarmingly, “to discuss the value of literature without falling into truisms and platitudes, sentimentality and Schwärmerei?” (22). Drawing on a slim but impressive roster of allies that includes Paul Ricoeur and Sedgwick, Felski asks on what basis we can premise positive readings without discarding the crucial lessons of Foucault and company? Felski’s arguments are complex and multivalenced, and it’s not possible to do justice to them all, but at the core of her book, she proposes that the answer to the question of literature’s value lies in the reading experience. If we desist from teaching our students to disparage their own responses to texts as either rudimentary or entirely beside the point, we will discover the [End Page 204] crucial work in which these texts engage us. Indeed, she calls her colleagues to a new obligation, “to do justice to how readers respond to the words they encounter” (17). One has only to observe what readers actually do with texts—what complex, imaginative, self-searching and critical experiences reading can instigate—to locate worth. If we look closely, we may discover what she terms “a phenomenology of self-scrutiny” (35). It’s here, in the reader’s consciousness, that literature’s most potent social value may reside. As literary scholars and teachers, we need to find new ways to access that resource. Rather than encourage students to become detached from and disenchanted by literature, we ought to examine what takes place within the reader’s immersion in a text. What are the positive uses of enchantment? Of recognition? Of literature’s power to shock us? Felski gives us...

Avhandlingen som kritisk praktik

The Dissertation as Critical Practice: Other Forms, Other Media
 This article (a talk presented at Lund University on October 12, 2012) explores linguistic and rhetorical form, and formal operations, in academic studies in comparative literature – and their relationship to form in poetry and fiction writing. The article also discusses how an awareness and exploration of academic language and formalistic decisions contributes to the academic text. Some examples (by Charles Bernstein and Christian Bök) of such an understanding of the critic’s language are discussed, and, eventually, the question of how new media and, more specifically, digital text can transform the language and form of academic literary studies is addressed through a brief look at the important online journal Vectors.

Currents of Trans/national Criticism in Indigenous Literary Studies

Currents of Trans/national Criticism in Indigenous Literary Studies Daniel Heath Justice (bio) So much of the literature by Canada's Aboriginal writers is written against forgetting, against the obliterating narratives of conquest and progress and profit that have made the nation possible. These writers give us stories of dispossession, of the loss of land and language and identity, but they also, crucially, give us narratives of persistence and survival and even celebration. They remind us of what has been lost, but they also remind us that not everything is lost. After a fire, something always remains: something that must be accounted for and honoured if we are to have any idea where we are and where we are going. Warren Cariou (Métis), "Going to Canada" First Thoughts: For the Tortured Teachers of Literature Recently, when preparing course materials for English graduate students on the practical skills and theoretical dimensions of teaching literature, I surveyed the literature on the "state of the field" of literary studies in English (and the entire concept of a liberal arts education), ranging from high-profile monographs to various commentaries in academic publications, including MLA Profession, College Composition and Communication, and Pedagogy. What I discovered was illuminating but somewhat appalling. It seems that the perennial (and perhaps self-perpetuating) perception (especially in MLA presidential addresses) is that—whether the commentator is coming from the right or left of the political spectrum—literary studies are in decline, that the public has [End Page 334] little understanding or regard for the value of literary analysis or literature in general, and that scholars of literature are toiling in the service of something that is vaguely important but almost impossible to effectively define or articulate, even to ourselves. 1 Add to this the conservatives' sense of tradition betrayed and the progressives' sense of access denied—and their shared perception of influence thwarted—and you have the makings of a rather vexed and anxiety-provoking shroud of doom sweeping over the discipline. This commentary will not follow in this particular rhetorical vein. Are the liberal arts appreciated to the degree I would like? No, but then again, they never have been, so to bemoan this state of affairs without an appreciation of its historical context would seem to be both mildly narcissistic and significantly self-defeating. Does literature receive the appreciation I think it deserves? No, but then again, it's never been in an unassailable position inside or outside of the academy. Do the skills required by the thoughtful study of literature offer an effective response against habits of ignorance and larger pressures of uncritical thinking? Yes, but not in isolation, and not when presented from a defensive position of intellectual exceptionalism. We're part of a larger network of historical, intellectual, and disciplinary relationships, and these all require hard work, realistic perspective, and intellectual flexibility to offer whatever it is that makes our work as literature scholars, teachers, and readers distinctive. To this end, Gerald Graff 's comments from 1987 seem to resonate with particular significance for our own field: In the final analysis, what academic literary studies have had to work with is not a coherent cultural tradition, but a series of conflicts that have remained unresolved, unacknowledged, and assumed to be outside the proper sphere of literary education. To bring these conflicts inside that sphere will mean thinking of literary education as part of a larger cultural history that includes the other humanities as well as the sciences even while acknowledging that terms like "humanities," "science," "culture," and "history" are contested. 2 It seems to me that, as a field, Indigenous literary studies is offering precisely this double vision of literary education that Graff asserts: a self-critical (and always contested) understanding of literature as both artistic [End Page 335] expression and political instrument and an assertion of literature within a larger matrix of relationships, influences, and effects. Why Indigenous Literatures Matter For example, in the concluding pages of his book Red Land, Red Power: Grounding Knowledge in the American Indian Novel, Cherokee Nation scholar Sean Kicummah Teuton asserts that "in anticolonial struggles, claims to freedom can be made in the name of knowledge. On...

Rebecca Laroche, Medical Authority and Englishwomen’s Herbal Texts, 1550–1650, Literary and Scientific Cultures of Early Modernity (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), pp. xii + 196, £55.00, hardback, ISBN: 978-0-7546-6678-3.

Rebecca Laroche, Medical Authority and Englishwomen’s Herbal Texts, 1550–1650, Literary and Scientific Cultures of Early Modernity (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), pp. xii + 196, £55.00, hardback, ISBN: 978-0-7546-6678-3. - Volume 55 Issue 2

Harry Potter and Historical Consciousness: Reflections on History and Fiction

The enormous popularity of J K Rowling’s series of Harry Potter novels makes it an important part of contemporary popular culture and consciousness. Debate over the novels’ meaning and significance is lively, not only on innumerable fan-based websites but also in a range of academic disciplines, including education, literary and cultural studies, sociology, law, political science and international relations. History, however, is scarcely represented in this scholarship, and this article argues that were historians to join the discussion, they would have much to gain and contribute. It goes on to suggest that history is important in the novels both as a form of useful knowledge and as powerful allusion. In this discussion, I am less interested in the (very real) divergences between history and fiction than in the ways each draws on and illuminates the other. Historians have reason to welcome the popularity of Rowling’s novels, given their sense of the importance of the archive and of critical historical knowledge.

Remembering René Wellek

For almost three decades after the Second World War, Rene Wellek exercised authority in the academic study of literature of a kind given to very few scholars in any profession. Because he was so defining a figure in his discipline’s history during a unique moment in its existence, his name is now frequently invoked as a symbol for that period. ThusWellek currently is perceived not just as a figure from the past, but as a kind of eponym for a particular stage in the ancient history of his discipline. Indeed, the gulf betweenWellek’s period and our own is so great that not only he, but the very subject he spent his life studying – literature – is now perceived by many as conceivable only in a remote and long abandoned past. His achievement may have been historical, but many now feel it was enabled as much by the innocence of an earlier stage in the profession as much as it was byWellek’s crushing erudition or institutional innovation.

Inscribing whiteness and staging belonging in contemporary autobiographies and life-writing forms

This paper enters the dialogue on representations of white South Africa in the contemporary historical moment. It asks whether the configuration of white autobiography has shifted and altered over time, and whether certain modes of representation continue to hold a significant place in the South African culture of letters. Clearly, autobiography still occupies a prominent position in this culture : the genre is hailed as having resuscitated local narratives by narrowing the gulf between the academic study of literature and the reading habits of the 'ordinary' South African. A cursory glance at the shelves of mainstream literary outlets, such as Exclusive Books and the CNA, demonstrates the popularity of this genre - in various forms, including those that blend fiction and life-writing, it populates the South African literature sections of these institutions. Leading this trend are novels like John Van de Ruit's Spud series, a trilogy championed in media reviews for its popularity with both highbrow and lowbrow audiences (100 Young South Africans 1).

Knowledge-stating Verbs and Contexts of Accountability in Linguistic and Literary Academic Discourse<sup>1</sup>

In academic communication, the notion of accountability is central, because academic discourse essentially involves the communication of knowledge – knowledge for which someone must assume accountability. This paper considers the use of knowledge-stating verbs in knowledge statements. It investigates the accountability contexts (High accountability, Medium-to-High accountability, Medium-to-Low accountability and Low accountability) for seven knowledge-stating verbs in order to ascertain if different knowledge-stating verbs appear in different kinds of accountability contexts. The verbs investigated are argue, claim, suggest, propose, maintain, assume and believe. The empirical basis for the investigation comes from two different academic disciplines, linguistics and literary studies, and the investigation also addresses the issue of whether the knowledge-stating verbs considered appear in the same or different accountability contexts across the two disciplines. The conclusions to be drawn on the basis of the investigation are that (i) individual knowledge-stating verbs do feature in different kinds of accountability contexts, but (ii) there is little evidence to the effect that there should be any significant differences between linguistics and literary studies with respect to the accountability contexts associated with the individual knowledge-stating verbs.

IP telephony in the enterprise network: comparing operating costs of PSTN and IP network

Today, internet telephony has become a commonplace application in enterprise. Along with the wide acceptance of IP Telephony (IPT) in business, many academics and practices have been mainly focused on internet telephony's technical migration from the existing public-switched telephone network. While there have been a small number of its cost studies in academic literature, they have been for abstract networks, or they have not included the operating costs. This paper compares the network operating costs portion of a traditional telephony network (PSTN) and an IP-based network as a case study. We have found that the operating costs differential between IP and circuit switching is small.

The Chameleon Principle: Reflections on the Status of Arthurian Studies in the Academy

As an historian of the disciplines of medieval philology, medieval studies, and medievalism, I am used to a certain amount of 'cloaking.' After all, I often abandon recognized academic work on the so-called 'nitty-gritty' of literary or linguistic study 'proper' for the somehow 'improper' realms of meta- or paraliterary observations. In order to be accepted by those who stay within the established boundaries of literary and linguistic study, I have to make sure that the grail keepers at the gates delimiting those boundaries (journal editors, publishers, bibliographers, indexing specialists, conference organizers, hiring committees) realize that I am capable of wearing two hats: one that makes me recognizable as one of theirs (Uther Pendragon's normal headgear, so to speak), and one that I may put on when I write 'on' linguistic and literary study (Merlin's camouflage gear). Securely grounded in this, my own, academic role playing experience, I should like to propose that the status of Arthurians in the academy is intimately entwined with the interdisciplinary, international, and non-class specific nature of Arthuriana on the one hand and with the history of the academic study of literature and language on the other. What I would like to suggest, then, is that Arthurians, in order to survive in the competitive scientistic habitat of the academy, tend to practice a form of chameleonic mimicry. Although Arthurians investigate what may well be the largest thematically unified body of secular literature in what is commonly universalized as the western tradition, they often shift academic identities until they are hired and/or tenured, upon which time they feel at liberty to uncloak and reveal themselves as the motley-colored 'saurian reptiles' they often are.1 I should like to make three short observations to support my thesis and historicize the current situation: 1) The study of Arthurian texts suffers from the separation of academic from nonacademic reading and interpreting practices accompanying the birth of the modern university in the early nineteenth century. Thus, while Arthurian texts themselves thrive and reach large reading audiences nonspecific to social class and education, the very popularity of these texts appears to be an obstacle to their open and acknowledged study at the university. The career paths of Tolkien scholars in the contemporary academy (I am thinking for example of Jane Chance, Verlyn Flieger, Tom Shippey) provide an illuminating parallel. 2) The separation of serious academic 'work' from the non-academic enjoyment of Arthurian literature by more or less educated dilettantes and journalists (those who write on the quotidian matters of the 'jour' instead of producing 'lasting' texts for posterity, i.e., scholarship) begins-at least for English Arthuriana-during the Renaissance, when proponents of the New Learning (commencing with Polydore Vergil and Roger Ascham) expose the mythographic nature of foundational Arthurian texts from Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae through Thomas Malory's Morte D'Arthur and attack the problematic morality propagated by medieval romances as unfitting for the ideal of the educated gentleman. John Leland's and Michael Drayton's desperate attempts at bridging the emerging chasm between the popular/national attraction of Arthuriana and Renaissance scientism are fascinating case studies which demonstrate this process.2 3) While recent and current cultural climates outside the academy and the advent of postmodernism in the academy would allow for scholars' reading and studying of the various historical and contemporary popular Arthurian traditions, the longue duree of academic mentalities still suggests to scholars that they select those areas, periods, genres, or authors within their respective disciplines commanding sufficient cultural capital for finding jobs, securing promotion and tenure, or obtaining a book contract with a publisher. …

The Rhetoric of Aleksandr Veselovskii's 'Historical Poetics' and the Autonomy of Academic Literary Studies in Late Imperial Russia

This paper analyses the rhetorical strategies of Aleksandr Veselovskii's 'Historical Poetics' — the most significant body of Russian literary theory before the Formalists. The paper focuses on the way in which Veselovskii negotiated the autonomy of literary studies as an academic discipline, both explicitly, in methodological texts, and implicitly, in his theories of literary evolution and poetic signification. It depicts Veselovskii's discourse as engaged in complex conceptual manoeuvres around five key boundaries — those of 'poetics', 'language', 'poetic form', 'metaphor', and 'tradition', which symbolically delimited the boundaries of literary scholarship itself.The paper relates Veselovskii's construction of particular 'dynamic models' of poetic evolution and signification with the problem of legitimating the autonomy of literary studies as an academic discipline. Although Veselovskii's priority seemed to be to ensure stable boundaries for literary studies, his model of autonomy is exposed as a complex of metaphorical re-descriptions and conceptual doublings that in performative fashion and through rhetorical play continuously both constructed and problematized the autonomous identity of literary studies.

Literary Meaning and the Question of Value: Victorian Literary Interpretation

Recent attention to the institutionalization of English literature has reminded us that the academic study of literature has a short history, with literature entering the universities as a subject only at the end of the nineteenth century. It is worth remembering that what we do now in the classroom has a history, one that has consequences for our classroom practice. We take it for granted now, however much concern for context and culture has become part of our practice, that interpretation is one of the fundamental responsibilities of the critic. But widespread interpretation of secular texts has a relatively short history and grew out of a tradition of Biblical hermeneutics. In considering that secular transition, I want to suggest that our practice in teaching both the Victorians and the history of criticism needs to be modified to come to terms with the literary sophistication with which the Victorians are rarely credited, and, more important yet, to throw light on our current critical practice by showing the kinds of problems literary interpretation faced as it developed out of the religious hermeneutic tradition. It is sometimes assumed that interest in the theory of literary interpretation is a twentieth-century phenomenon. Anglo-American critics in earlier periods did not reflect on the problems of interpretation; they simply took meaning for granted and pushed on straightaway to make evaluative or ethical judgments on a text’s literary merits or content. Discussing eighteenthand nineteenth-century British criticism, for instance, K. M. Newton (1990: 1–2)

Editor's Introduction

JML's Editor's Introductions, as I have fashioned them over the seventeen years of my editorship, have never simply announced the contents of a particular issue. I have seen them instead as an opportunity to speak both of the Journal's stable philosophy and practice in a rapidly, some would say disastrously, changing world of academic literary studies, as well as of my own philosophy as an editor and critic. Maurice Beebe created JML as a venue for old fashioned scholarly studies—"hard scholarship," he used to call it—centered around archival studies, literary history and biography, and especially the revelations, both scholarly and critical, that are made possible in the rich manuscript collections to which JML has always been linked. (The Directors of many of these collections have long been among our Advisory Editors.) I pledged from the start to continue Beebe's general philosophy; I agreed to succeed him in 1986, after his untimely death, only in order to keep JML from becoming a theoretical journal, as some of our colleagues then desired. I did so even knowing that this was a journal in which I myself was never very likely to publish very much.

Fathering the Man: Journalism, Masculinity, and the Wordsworthian Formation of Academic Literary Studies in Victorian England

(2001). Fathering the Man: Journalism, Masculinity, and the Wordsworthian Formation of Academic Literary Studies in Victorian England. Journal of Victorian Culture: Vol. 6, No. 2, pp. 201-230.

Poetry at One Remove

Poetry at One Remove John Koethe (bio) The installation of poets in the academy is now so complete that it is easy to forget that the relation of poetry and contemporary literature—let alone poets and contemporary writers—to departments of literature was once considered problematic. It was not really until the establishment of the New Criticism that contemporary poetry became an acceptable object of academic literary studies, and even then the methods of reading it applied, and the readings of the works of high modernism those methods yielded, tended to ignore issues of authorial presence and of the ways in which works of literature were actually produced. True, most of the major poets of the generation succeeding the high modernists—Delmore Schwartz, Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Randall Jarrell, Elizabeth Bishop—spent at least parts of their careers in English departments. But more often than not this was as teachers and scholars of literature, as with Berryman and Schwartz, or, as with Lowell and Bishop, as individual teachers of writing, whose roles were sui generis and left them only distantly connected to the departments to which they were formally attached. It is only recently, with the explosion in the number of creative writing programs, that the idea of poetry as the basis of an entire academic career has emerged, a career in which one receives formal instruction in the writing of poetry both as an undergraduate and as a graduate student, and having thus acquired the requisite credentials, joins the professoriate in a capacity structurally no different from that of a professor of German, philosophy, or economics. My own situation as a poet has always placed me at one remove from formal literary studies and the teaching of writing. In high school I was deeply fascinated by literature, particularly modernist fiction, and did a certain amount of writing myself. But these were secondary to my primary interests in mathematics and physics, which I intended to pursue as a career. In college my interest shifted to philosophy, and I began writing poetry seriously. At that time there were at Princeton a number of undergraduate poets, most of them (even those who were English majors) united in their disdain for the English department and the contemporary poets of whom its faculty approved. R. P. Blackmur did serve as a source of encouragement and inspiration, though of course he was himself an autodidact whose relationship to academia was [End Page 93] a somewhat uneasy one. Several little magazines were edited on the campus, some with ties to poets of the New York School, and discussions of poetry were usually intense exercises in what nowadays would be called theory. As a graduate student in philosophy at Harvard I found the relation of students who were poets to the university to be different, with a much greater sense of allegiance to the institution and to the writers associated with it. I found this atmosphere uncongenial, and came to think of my role in the university almost entirely in terms of my philosophical studies, while associating myself as a writer with the poets and artists I knew in New York, in the completely uninstitutional setting of the small part of the literary world they constituted there. And I have continued to think of my role as a philosopher as a professional and academic one, and of the writing of poetry as at some level an essentially gratuitous act. And while it may be making a virtue of necessity, I have a vague feeling that this sense of estrangement from the idea of writing as an academic profession is not entirely disadvantageous, and that it has had a distinctive effect on the way in which I think of poetry and on the actual poetry I write. At least that is what I want to try to explore here. There are certainly incidental effects of coming to poetry from outside the arena of literary studies, and of coming to it from the practice of philosophy in particular. There is a kind of orthodoxy in contemporary poetry that favors the concrete, the vivid, the evocative, and the particular, and avoids the discursive and the abstract. I think that it...

Literature and Discovery

Literature and Discovery Brian Boyd If “To be or not to be” is the most famous phrase of the seventeenth century, the most famous of the twentieth, again only six syllables, must surely be “E = mc2 “. What is the place of literature and literary studies in a world where discoveries such as Einstein’s can transform not just what we know of our world but the world itself? To what extent does literature involve discoveries—on the part of writers, readers and critics—that can be compared with those of science? Science involves bold questing for explanation and then hard testing in search of counter-evidence or counter-explanations. Through proposing its answers and trying to criticize them severely, science learns where our attempts have fallen short and we need to think again. Literature involves no rigorous testing of this kind, although of course writers do test what comes to mind against an imagined audience’s response; readers pit their first hunches about a work’s direction or sense against what comes next; and rereaders or critics set hypotheses about the part against the whole or the whole against the part. But in literature the stress is naturally on invention rather than on selection, on imagination rather than adjudication. That is one of its strengths. We do not need and would not be able to test Austen’s view of life against Dickens’s or Flaubert’s or Tolstoy’s or against possible counter-evidence, though we may assay them all against our intuitions, and find indeed that our intuitions become richer when we accept, as new windows on our world, Austen’s ironic but scrupulous attention to our actions and reactions to others, Dickens’s celebration of the generosity behind the variety of things that calls for an answering generosity in us, Flaubert’s cool analysis of the banal illusions we pursue to escape our banality, Tolstoy’s exact calculus of the interplay between [End Page 313] life’s infinitesimals—its usually overlooked minutiae—and its grand forces. But the absence of hard testing in literature can mean that some who specialize too soon in the subject fail to appreciate either the need to test explanations or the power of negative evidence. There is a wide-spread and naïve methodological assumption in literature departments that if someone amasses evidence for an argument, that suffices, as if evidence against were not so much more decisive. As a consequence, many in academic literary studies can accept ideas long discredited, like “the paradigmatic pseudoscience of our epoch,” 1 Freudian psychoanalysis, and its Lacanian reflection, which seem especially welcome because they make it so easy to generate evidence for an interpretation, and never mind everything that counts against it. And never mind, too, the extraordinary work being done in the new sciences of the mind, which one would have thought so germane to literary studies, both in terms of subject—human experience, and the reasons why it takes some forms and not others—and in terms of method—how minds understand and respond to words and worlds. The very dominance of science in our times has of course produced reactions like the postmodernist critique of science as “just another narrative” 2 —actually a form of science blindness since it derives ultimately from the limited and long superseded linguistics of Saussure, and the nugatory evidence for relativism advanced by a Margaret Mead 3 or a Benjamin Lee Whorf. 4 Philosopher Richard Rorty is at least not blind to science, but he urges philosophy to reject “science envy” and calls for a return to literature as the center of philosophy, literature as conversation rather than science’s hard inquisitions after truth: a cosy lounge where we can chat with Austen and Dickens, Flaubert and Tolstoy, say, rather than a cold laboratory where the evidence rudely rejects what we propose. Rorty writes: “English departments can always be made to look silly by asking them what they have contributed to knowledge lately. But humanists can make biology or mathematics departments look bad by asking what they have done lately for human freedom.” 5 Rorty is wrong on several counts: science departments make undoubted contributions to...

An Interview with Phillip Brian Harper

An Interview with Phillip Brian Harper Charles H. Rowell This interview was conducted on August 6, 1999, by telephone between Charlottesville, Virginia, and New York City. ROWELL How did you arrive at your different projects? Please speak autobiographically without reservations, and talk about the kind of work you wanted to do when you were preparing for the profession of English language and literature, as we used to call it. Did the work of the preceding generation of scholars in African-American literary and cultural studies make a serious impact on you? In production of texts, your generation seems to be surpassing that of the earlier generation. Of course, your generation had, as the expression goes, to stand on their shoulders in order to prepare yourself to speak. HARPER Yes, and they were actually incredibly productive, as far as my purposes are concerned, in that they gave me remarkably solid shoulders to stand on! This was especially important, considering that I came to this whole enterprise in a state of profound ignorance as to what was entailed in academic literary study. I began by thinking of myself—certainly through college and the beginning of my graduate career—as a poet. That’s how I came to professional work in literature. I entered college at the University of Michigan in 1978 with the express purpose of honing my skills as a poet, and I was very intensively studying creative writing in that period without having a particularly clear sense as to how I was going to make a living, needless to say. It seemed most feasible to me to pursue a career in college or university teaching, and consequently I thought, well, if I want to do that, then I will at least have to get a master’s degree in creative writing. That was the extent of my understanding about what I would have to do. So I applied to MFA programs in creative writing. I did that for a couple of years before I actually decided to attend one. And in that intervening two years when I was applying to programs and not actually attending them, I had this revelation—that if I was really serious about wanting to pursue a teaching career in higher education, then I really needed to get a PhD. And so the second round of applications that I completed for graduate schools I decided to orient both to master’s level creative writing programs and to PhD programs in literature. This was in 1982. By some great good fortune I was accepted to Cornell, which was ideal for me because at Cornell you could pursue jointly and simultaneously both an MFA in creative writing and a PhD in English Literature. So that’s what I did—again, without any full understanding of exactly what that would entail. [End Page 855] I still thought of myself as primarily a poet—certainly through the first year or year and a half that I was at Cornell. And, in fact, the courses in literary history and literary criticism that I was taking for the sake of the PhD program were quite eye-opening to me. This was primarily because Cornell’s PhD program was extremely sophisticated theoretically whereas I had not had a very extensive education in literary theory at all as an undergraduate. So for the first year or so in those courses I felt relatively at sea—intrigued but at the same time befuddled by the sorts of discussions that were going on and, on the other hand, intensely engaged in my verse writing. But about the third semester that I was at Cornell, I wouldn’t say that I had an epiphany but something clicked. I finally felt that I was getting a handle on the critical conversations that were happening in my classes for the PhD program. ROWELL You were becoming more at ease with the theoretical discourse. HARPER Yes. And when I say that Cornell’s program was quite theoretically sophisticated, what I mean in particular was that, during the early 1980s, it was the site of a great deal of high-level work in post-structuralism and deconstruction, as well as psychoanalysis...

Social Dimensions of Epistemological Disputes: The Case of Literary Theory

Epistemological reflection has been a major source of innovation in the human sciences while having very little influence on the arts or sciences. This variation is explained using a sociological framework emphasizing the organizational forms that underpin or are implicit in epistemological positions. The fine arts and the harder sciences are, respectively, too weakly and too strongly organized to be open to epistemological influence. By contrast, the human sciences might plausibly be organized either more loosely or more tightly, and epistemological argument is used in part to urge movement in one or the other direction. This perspective is applied to the academic study of literature both historically and in relation to a current epistemological dispute between realist and relativist scholars. The argument is unresolvable in practice, it is argued, because of constraints on scholarly interpretation set by consumers. Parallels are drawn with circumstances in sociology.