The Future of Literary Studies?* Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht (bio) Introduction Transforming a phrase like “the future of literary studies” into a question is by no means an unquestionable operation. Is it a “philosophical question,” a question which according to a definition by Jean-François Lyotard, 1 has no possible answer and which, therefore, we only ask with the intention of producing a proliferation of further questions? Or is it what one might call a “real question,” one for which there is a concrete (perhaps even an “existential”) need? For many decades now, literary critics have been philosophically confronting questions regarding the future and the social functions of their disciplines. These have inspired some of the most intense debates in the profession, and have thus greatly contributed to keeping it alive in potentially difficult times. Simultaneously, however, the future of literary studies has also developed, if one may say so, into an increasingly real question. Even more than in Europe, this is evident in American academic culture. Students have to pay dramatically growing tuition fees and professors feel a rising pressure to take into account, in their teaching and research, the economic conditions that determine their salaries. When counseling undergraduate students about applying to Ph.D. programs, an American professor expects that the question of the financial rewards of academia will play a central role in their decision. Graduate students are legitimately concerned (and often obsessed) with determining which predictions [End Page 499] about the academic job market they should take as an orientation in their choice of instructors, seminars, and research topics. And finally, it is a normal practice, at least for private research universities, to confront any curricular and structural planning proposed by their faculty with questions concerning the (economic) future of the disciplines involved. All in all, the status of questions regarding the future of literary studies proves to be inevitably ambiguous. On the one side—and especially in the light of recent sociological arguments about the impossibility of predicting, under contemporary conditions, the future of any social system 2 —such questions remain unanswerable and may therefore, more than ever before, claim the dignity of being philosophical. On the other side, the concerns that motivate those questions have become so pressing that professors of literature can no longer afford to take their unanswerability as a promise for the survival of “literary studies” as a profession. It was in the context of a very concrete—and “real”—debate of this kind that I first became aware of how much some scholars of my generation tend to identify comparative literature with the future of literary studies. 3 During the academic year 1992–93, the Department of Comparative Literature at Stanford underwent a review that was expected to provide a recommendation to the dean of the School of Humanities and Sciences regarding the question whether, after six years of its existence as a department, it should be definitively confirmed as an administrative counterpart to departments grounded on national languages and cultures—or be demoted to the status of a program. 4 While the review committee (two linguists and a historian of undoubted academic reputation and institutional authority) seemed impressed with our achievements and regarded them as a paradigm for future developments in the humanities as a whole, our colleagues confronted us, at an early stage of their work, with the question whether “comparative literature” was not an inadequate name for what we were actually doing. Our reaction was ambiguous. Of course we felt flattered by the avant-garde status which (at least tentatively) was attributed to our work; nevertheless we argued that, among leaders in the field of literary studies and among the most qualified graduate students, comparative literature was generally and normally recognized as the name for an intellectual and institutional space where experimental thinking relevant for the future of the humanities could take place. Any other name-tag, we feared, could be misread as a sign for a reduction in our deliberately pluralistic theory agenda 5 or, even worse, as a shying away from a commitment to participate actively in an ongoing intellectual and institutional transformation within the humanities. There was reason to suspect, however, that the review...