Trading-In Literature, or Swapping It Out Robin Truth Goodman (bio) Even as "World Literature" is gaining critical attention as a seemingly expansionist critical trend, the definition of literature is narrowing, its contents pillaged with the onset of positivism inside the literary sphere, and this definitional narrowing has material consequences. In fact, the narrowing of the definition of literature within disciplines traditionally tied to literature has contributed to a turning away from attention to narrative structures and potentialities that push out against the political imaginary. When faced with a legislative mandate for core introductory classes, for example, my department instituted a required second year composition class that used as source material multi-modal "genre"—blog posts, chat rooms, data bases, and the like—instead of literature, in the name of what Rhet/Comp faculty were calling "data driven" "best practices" that "proved" literature got in the way of learning to write. In classes where literature provided the source material for composition courses, students, we were told, were confused about whether the course was about literature or writing, two categories which did not intersect. Literature classes were too particular and had too much particular content, whereas "genre" as "concept" did not consider subject matter; it was meant to introduce students to writing that was accessible for everyone as process and could translate into different situations for different purposes and audiences. As transmissible knowledge, genre unlike literature could travel between fields and disciplines, and was efficacious because it allowed students to acquire skills which would thereby be applicable in other classes throughout their college careers and beyond. Writing here becomes a concept instrumentalized for perfect exchangeability across disciplines and economic sectors, as Adorno may have predicted. The "data driven" claim that literature inhibited learning to write was particularly surprising to literature faculty. We are allowing Rhet/Comp researchers to define literature as dangerous to the existence of English. We could trace some of the developments that turn literature into a marginal practice separated from a broader category of writing—the autonomy of the literary text insisted on by New Criticism, for example, or the complicated jargon that overtook the field during the heyday of theory, or the rethinking of the parameters of the literary text in the heyday of Cultural Studies, or—as Elaine Showalter scolds, that "[d]uring the 1960s and 1970s, teaching [End Page 397] literature became an explicitly political act for radical and minority groups in the university" (2003, 23). These trends do not, however, amount to a full explanation for how this trend in Composition Studies holds our own best practices against us. One problem with the existing research is that Composition Studies claims its methods produce "success" or "efficacy" without stating what the criteria are for such measurements or providing controls. In a document called "Principles of the Postsecondary Teaching of Writing," the Four C's discusses the settled consensus on these "advances" due to the "empirical research" conducted by the "existing statements developed by the field's major organizations," including the Four C's. In other words, Composition faculty have conducted research that has proved beyond all doubt that Composition faculty are the only ones who know how writing can be taught effectively. Addressing some of these issues, Emily Isaacs notes that very few scholars of literature have researched this topic, and those who have, like Mark Richardson and Peter Elbow, assume that what Composition Studies refers to as "imaginative writing" is the "richest and most intellectually challenging of the human arts" (2009, 99); such an argument, Isaacs concludes, would not be "convincing to anyone who did not share this opinion" (99). In other words, literary scholars have not pursued this research, and when they have, their conclusions were dismissible as interested, unlike the conclusions developed in the empirical bent of Composition faculty (though the methodologies for measuring efficaciousness here are never brought under scrutiny). The reason literature faculty have not pursued such research, perhaps, is that Composition faculty have monopolized the definition of the field of literature as contrary to writing—literature, in this rendering, has become unrecognizable to specialists. We might be able to attribute this attack on literature to the errors of metaphysics...
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Oct 16, 2019
Mukul Sharma 
Open Access