��� The state of literary studies is not good, and it is not likely to improve. I call this situation deinstitutionalization. What I mean by this term can best be seen via a recent historical analogy. In the late 1980s, after a decade of various legal decisions and subsequent changes in policy, it was clear that the deinstitutionalization movement to stop warehousing the mentally ill and disabled (putting them in “cold storage,” as it was termed) had succeeded in changing the legal system and many attitudes. It was also clear it had failed to follow through on securing reliable government funding for the community half-way houses and centers that could keep off the streets those formerly incarcerated in large, impersonal, and cruelly neglectful and often abusive, institutions, whose abolishment represented real savings, in every sense. Having a cousin in one such institution since his childhood, a place that gave its distinguished British name, Penhurst, to a decision for its ultimate closing by the US Supreme Court, I had been a strong supporter of deinstitutionalization. Over time I became disillusioned by this failure to follow through, and by the winning lawyer in this case. For when I again asked him some years later, “What can we do to insure the necessary funding?” he responded snappily that “someone else, sooner or later, will come along to make his name” by tackling that issue. Similarly, but please remember all analogies limp, once literary study had been deconstructed, ideologically critiqued, and found to be historically complicit with patriarchy and the rise (and now fall) of the bourgeois; and once the “literary” had been found everywhere, in all popular discourses, not isolated in the special rarifi ed language of so-called works of individual genius only understandable by a well-trained and enlightened elite or “priesthood of the imagination”—it was even to be found in student writing; then literature as an institution began to dissolve, roughly thirty-fi ve years or so, its elements (iconic representations and themes) re-absorbed into where, 1 Review of David Bromwich, Moral Imagination: Essays. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2014.