Nice post. I've been following the conversation at zombie's a little. And I hopped over to the valve too. Even creative writing gets bashed too. I mena, I wanted to be a poet, not much money in that. 
Well, I'm definitely on your side, and I'm an outsider.
It's not accurate to speak of the Valve as a unitary voice. I agree with what George has written and what you say here, for the most part (I'm not much of a fan of Bloom, but I don't see how you could attribute a hostility to "multiple meanings" to him exactly), and I'm not the only one.
Jonathan is certainly aligned with the Forces of Good, and other members are all for "literary studies as it is actually practiced" (Burstein, McCann); but they're not getting too involved in the arguments. So I found this post of yours quite an anodyne to all that; thanks, Mel.
Bravo, Mel. I always enjoy your posts on the discipline of literary studies: they seem to me consistently attentive and eloquent.
In math we're at the other end of the spectrum. Most people are convinced that they can't do/understand math, and everyone believes us when we tell them that our abstract and arcane research is important.
Wow. What a terrific post.
The Valve got off to kind of a lop-sided start, mostly due to which posters had the most time and energy available to them at the time. I don't get the impression that most of us want a generic bash-each-others'-abstractions site.
I did notice, though, that the posts which _did_ look more like what I hoped for haven't gotten nearly as much attention or response as the couple of aggressive polemics. It seems even harder to resist joining a wrestling match than it is to start one. I swear abstinance, and then a tweak happens at an unguarded moment and I'm off again....
Great post. Different field, same issues. In fact, much of the recent curricular reform we just went through had its roots in precisely these problems.
I can't stand that appeal to "love" myself, as though that were sufficient to have something to say. And I doubt very much that any of us would go through the trials of a Ph.D. and the irritations of acadmic life (including dealing with ill-informed "critiques" such as you mention) if we did not have a deep and abiding love for the object of our study.
I wonder if these critiques aren't at base the manifestation of a fear of the power of knowledge, which remains difficult to control in a society invested in the total commodification of the world.
That would be the hope.
jwb
This is a wonderful post, and I wish I had written it. (Instead, I made the mistake of suggesting on The Valve that the "pro wrestling" you describe is boring. Then someone tried to pull me into the ring.) I think that what is really useful is your discussion of pleasure, and your focusing in on it as the source of confusion and conflict. My own sense, too, is that pleasure has much to do with why literary studies (as the synecdoche of the humanities) generates so much ire. It's not only that some people wrongly assume that we drain reading of pleasure, it is that we have jobs -- and jobs for life if we are tenured -- that revolve around such an intensely pleasurable activity. We are not, as others have said, alienated from our labor, and that is something at odds with the rest of the world we inhabit.
Fantastic post. Mel, you're so smart.
I don't recognize these discussions as they're being described here and a few other places. The Valve conversation in reply to John Holbo's lengthy and thoughtful essay seems very respectful and very much about the ideas you're setting out here. In fact, here it seems to me that you're close to the ideals of at least some of the Valve's contributors, and even in tension with the constrained version of historicism that some of us have been talking about.
Here's my proposal for this or other threads, for blogging in general: let's stop characterizing conversations about the weakest or least charitable responses that are made, or around the worst bloggers we can find. Let's engage the meat rather than the gristle, and make good conversations rather than ones where we frame ourselves around our disappointments. This is a hard thing to do: I know I'm often motivated more to post by the sentiments which aggravate me or disappoint me the most, and sometimes that's as it should be, especially when it's a complex sense of disappointment. But still.
Beautiful post! Thanks.
Great post. As a student of literature, I was really inspired by it.
in response to Timothy: One of the reasons I posted this on my blog, rather than in comments at the Valve, was because I was using the several related threads at CT & Valve as a jumping off point, rather than choosing to wrestle individually with various commenters. I fail to see how I'm not "making good conversation" when I'm simply writing my own thoughts on my own blog.
You are making good conversation. I just don't get the negative comments being made about the other conversations, at least parts of them.
Profsynecdoche wrote: We are not, as others have said, alienated from our labor, and that is something at odds with the rest of the world we inhabit.
Isn't that true of any academic discipline, though?
the difference between those of us who practice literary studies and the people who are suggesting that our departments be disbanded is that we don't think that intellectual engagement or logical analysis destroys passion, love, or pleasure.
...because I really liked this, and wanted to see it again.
David Moles asks, above, about whether my comments regarding pleasure and alienation might not be said of any discipline. My sense is that they both do and do not extend to other disciplines. On the one hand, yes, from what I can tell other disciplines derive the same kind of pleasure that I do from mine. (My brother and sister-in-law are chemists, and they are batty about it.) But the difference is, I think, that most non-academics don't look at chemistry or economics and say: what a pleasurable activity! how could doing that all day be considered real work? Or at least they don't do so to the degree that they do for literary studies. Or so it seems to me.
I can see that. (Likewise art history, for instance, maybe, or media studies, if anyone out of contact with academia even knows there is such a thing.) I guess I was thinking in terms of the Valve conversation, and of the parts of Mel's post that seem to be defending literary studies against attacks not from outside the academy, but from practitioners of other disciplines.
Mel, I think I want to respond, but I have to ask: who do you consider to be part of the 'CT/Valve crowd'? (If you are going to kick some ass I must courteously request that you take some names to go with.) Am I part of the CT/Valve crowd? Is part of your annoyance that a philosopher professor (that's me!) is critiquing literary studies culture? Are the authors at the Valve part of the Valve crowd? Or some of them? Or just the commenters? If so, which commenters? Michael Blowhard? (I would say he is more a member of the 2blowhards crowd.) Henry Farrell? Who?
You say this post is 'jumping off' from various threads. But, like Tim, I'm not seeing the jumping off point(s). I'm quite serious in asking: please tell me who you are talking about.
Great post. But in response to profsynechdoche's comment about how we are not alienated from our labor, I'm not so sure I'd agree. That comment seems to pastoralize our corporate university world. Would there be a need for grad student unions if academic labor wasn't alienated? And, speaking even as a tenured prof who considers himself a child of theory, there are days when I feel quite alienated from the academic world--committee work, petty politics, and those moments when the ugliness of jargon outweights the beauty of theoretical insight.
John H., I think we know each other from Berkeley days. French class, summer of 98.
Viet, I said something similar to this on the valve comment board; your point is very well taken. The corporate university is certainly doing everything it can to alienate us from our labor (annual reports are another example). I have days, lots of days, when I feel exactly the same way. But one of the reasons I'm frustrated is because corporatization interferes with the work I want to do: teaching and research.
I was surprised to hear some of those who felt called upon to defend literary studies responding much as the democrats did recently in response to the "charge" that they aren't "in touch with the Lord": we love reading great books for aesthetic enjoyment as much as (or more than) anybody else, but we just don't wear our pleasures, tastes, and passions on our sleeves.
And why not? Well, the response goes, because we're interested in a broad range of questions, many of which happen not to have much to do with the aesthetic aims of authors and the aesthetic interests of readers.
Fair enough. But it seems to me that what concerns some serious folks--not the ill-informed wrestling fan on the street that the poster thinks has been chiefly involved in these recent debates--about literary studies, as practiced in recent decades, is the widespread acceptance, on the basis of arguments that are neither valid nor sound, of ideological demystifications of taste, of highly moralistic conceptions of literary value, of interpretive practices that treat developments in literary form and style not as the results not of authors' aesthetic choices but of historical or economic forces, and ofa thoroughgoing skepticism about the possibility of any sort of objectivity in matters of interpretation.
There is, of course, good reason for thinking that the canon isn't quite right, that great books are solely the work of genius creators who are never influenced by their culture, that there are a broad range of interesting questions about literary works that have little to do with their aesthetic value, and that interpretions of different kinds and of different works can aspire to objectivity in only some ways but not others, etc. But to acknowledge these subleties, so the worry goes, is to acknowledge--in ways most literary studies scholars do not--that it is important to talk about why some works of literature are really very good, aesthetically speaking, and why some writers are really damned praiseworthy, for making the aesthetic choices they did.
Zehou: I don't recall anybody saying that there is nothing to be said about aesthetics. (I may have my doubts as to the merits of eschewing the sociology of taste, but I don't think only the sociology of taste matters.) On the other hand, this is an attempt to define rather narrowly and exclusively literary scholarship:
"If literary scholars are not “enthusiastic about the object of study per se’’--that is, works of literature--but are instead pursuing other “intellectual questions,” then I can’t see why they would still be called literary scholars. They might be acting as sociologists, or philosophers, or political activists, but they’re not acting as scholars of literature."
Pedro: The conditional you cite is not an "attempt to define rather narrowly and exclusively literary scholarship," in my view. Rather, on the face of it, it is an attempt to suggest that questions about the aesthetic value of particular literary works ought to be recognized as questions of central importance in the study of literature, so that something has gone wrong when the vast majority of literary scholars are spending little or no time exploring such questions in their teaching and writing.
This is not to say that sociological, economic, historical, and philosophical questions (etc.) have no place in literary studies. Nor is it to say that sociological questions (etc.) are less important than aesthetic questions. They're interesting and important questions, and literary scholars surely have SOME relevant expertise.
But what sort of expertise is appropriate for certain sorts of inquiry is a serious question. I do not think there is anything intrinsically wrong with the idea that literary scholars might engage in explorations of sociological (etc.) topics in which literary works figure, even though literary scholars are not trained sociologists (or what have you).
But I do not subscribe to the idea that expertise in the analysis of the literary and rhetorical features of language qualifies one to study anything at all. Most literary scholars do no serious graduate coursework in logic, statistics, finite model theory, epistemology, semantics, pragmatics, philosophy of science, action theory, etc.
Knowing how certain uses of language resonate with audiences who are familiar with those or similar uses from other aspects of a long and complex literary tradition is a good thing to know for engaging in certain sorts of inquiry. It is also one hell of a lot for a person to know. (I'm endlessly impressed at just how much literary scholars, fiction writers, and poets can keep in their heads.)
But expertise in understanding the literary and rhetorical aspects of language use is hardly sufficient preparation for making good judgments concerning which theories of authorship, creativity, taste, judgment, government, justice, meaning, rationality, beauty, racism, self-deception, tolerance, etc. one has good reason to adopt.
Model theory is an interesting mention. Who do model theory? Mathematicians, logicians, philosophers, and computer scientists. I assure you that some computer scientists have more expertise on finite model theory than many mathematicians whose specialty is the more general rubric of abstract model theory.
Similarly, just because literary scholars are thinking about sociologically meaningful concepts in relation to literature, that doesn't make them "amateur" sociologists. In fact, it is by and large literary scholars who have been thinking seriously about literature in society.
As to whether Daniel Green was trying to narrowly define the field, I stand by my take. His rhetoric was one of exclusion. He constantly claimed that people who don't have the attitudes he prescribes should not bear the name "literary scholar". That amounts to academic bullying, in my humble opinion.
I apologize, Mel. This conversation doesn't belong here.
I thought we were ignoring the silly people with silly views and little knowledge about what literary scholars do, and talking instead about plausible views that might have a family resmeblance to the silly ones.
Is it really "by and large" folks with PhDs in lit studies/comp lit/english who have been "thinking seriously about literature in society?" Well, keep in mind that the chief agent of the so-called "ethical turn" in literary studies (Nussbaum) was at the time teaching in a philosophy department. And the most rigorous work on many "lit & society" topics has been done by folks with PhDs in history or philosophy. And don't forget the MFAs--folks who actually write literary works have written quite a lot on that subject.
Again, my suggestion was that there is a version of the silly complaint that is worth attending to, and it is this: the range of appropriate subjects of attention in literary studies is VERY broad; however, questions about the aesthetic merit of particular literary works (along with the interpretive issues impact those questions) are among the central questions.
IF one thinks this is so--as a few lit studies folks, loads of serious contemporary fiction writers and poets, and many serious academics outside of lit studies do--then the ALMOST complete absence of attention devoted to questions of the aesthetic merit of particular literary works by folks with PhDs in english/lit studies/comp lit in recent decades, especially in courses but also in the major journals, is striking, strange, and even disappointing.
What seems especially strange is that, as interest in these old questions is replaced by interest in new questions, the training of new PhDs has remained rather similar--at least in so far as PhDs in english/lit studies/comp lit mainly read literary works for their courses, rather than actually learn the methodologies of the border disciplines they're interested in.
Of course, as you (and I) have already noted, one needn't be a trained sociologist in order to have something helpful to say about the relation between lit & society. But the more you have in sociology (and logic, etc.), the easier it is to avoid making mistakes out of ignorance.
Anyway, once again: the new questions that engage literary scholars are interesting. Sometimes very interesting. Sometimes very important. And sometimes not. I'll let you decide which are which:
Why are comic books not better respected?
Why do male writers persist in thinking they have a right to write books and poems with first person female narrators/speakers?
How did the market force the development of the psychological novel?
Why were masturbation and the novel discovered at the same time?
How did writers laboring under a quick-to-censor government manage to hid subservise political messages in their work, and how--and when--did readers learn to decode them?
How does the practice of reading support the myths that the self exists, that there is free will, that one can escape one's social role, etc.?
(Obviously, these are just random drops in a very large puddle.)
For my part, I often find the
Actually, Pedro & Zehou's conversation serves as a good example of the kind of conversation my post was responding to:
(1) I suggest (among other things) that literary scholarship & teaching makes more forms of pleasure and meaning available by intellectually engaging with "the contexts (aesthetic, formal, historical, social, cultural) of a work of art" and its "specific semantic nuances, rhetorical strategies, and artistic choices." For me, the aesthetic is part of understanding how literature works in the world. But there are other aspects that are important to understand as well.
(2) Zehou claims "it is important to talk about why some works of literature are really very good, aesthetically speaking, and why some writers are really damned praiseworthy, for making the aesthetic choices they did." He thus claims that the evaluation of literature, rather than the analysis of it, should be the primary goal of literary studies. Such claims often seem defensive to me in their wish to "protect" literature from analysis. As his division of literature into "good" and "damned" suggests, there is often a logic of exclusion at work as well, which works to protect "good" literature from contamination.
(3) Pedro brings us back to the critiques of literary studies that my post responded to, and cites as an example Daniel Green's Valve post, which includes this claim: "If literary scholars are not “enthusiastic about the object of study per se’’--that is, works of literature--but are instead pursuing other “intellectual questions,” then I can’t see why they would still be called literary scholars." Green's claim is one of those I had in mind in my first bullet point (there's a footnote for you, John H). Which boils down to claims about who has the right to be "enthusiastic" and in what ways. I agree with Pedro that Green is narrowly limiting what kinds of responses "ought" to be possible.
(4) Zehou says "questions about the aesthetic value of particular literary works ought to be recognized as questions of central importance in the study of literature, so that something has gone wrong when the vast majority of literary scholars are spending little or no time exploring such questions in their teaching and writing." This is that language of "crisis" that I referred to in my post. Which in this instance is just another way of saying "what I think is important ought to be what you think is important." My original post was reflecting on why such claims get made against literary studies as compared with other fields. The claim itself? I don't accept any attempt to limit intellectual inquiry as valid. Nor do I see evidence that literary scholars spend "little or no time" on questions about aesthetic value. We just might not be doing it in the way that he wants us to.
Why do I get the feeling there's at least three to seven different sides here, each of which thinks there's only two?
Zehou: sorry about that. Haloscan has a word limit. (It's happened to me before.) You seem to be arguing that aesthetic matters ought to be more central to the discipline than they are as the discipline is practiced now. Daniel Green was arguing that not to share that view was reason enough to withdraw the title of literary scholar to literary scholars. I trust you see the difference.
I'm not a literary scholar. I married one, and I respect what she does. I actually find what she does to be quite intellectually sophisticated, and very interesting. Yes, it has to do with race, gender, etc., i.e. it shouldn't be "central" according to the certain people, but it is good stuff. In fact, it connects with some rather important conversations (the origin of nationalism, for example) among historians (notably Hobsbawm, Gellner, Anderson, and Anthony Smith), conversations from which the kind of archival work that my wife has done is absent.
Just as I am enormously skeptical of evo psych accounts of IQ differences among races or genders, I am also quite skeptical of accounts of literary value that eschew the elephant in the closet: class, or aristocratic taste, if you prefer. But I'm not going to dismiss, a priori, work that I haven't read. I'm not going to say that it isn't worthwhile to think about what aesthetic choices make certain authors succeed--in a given cultural and historical context--in achieving a somewhat uncontroversial status of prominence. In other words, I have nothing against scholarship of the type that you wish were the choice of more people in literary studies. I just don't endorse Mr. Green's exclusionary rhetoric.
For what it's worth: I am an outsider, and I should probably shut up. My beef is with prescription, in general. I don't wish to tell anyone what to do with their research. That would be horrible! I'm sorry if that's how I've come across.
Pedro: just to clarify, in case your last comment was directed at me--I didn't think you were the one trying to prescribe or limit other people's research. I think, however, that is the implication of Green's remarks, and also perhaps Zehou's.
A good post and interesting conversation. A colleague who teaches in the business department once admitted to me that it was discouraging that so many majors in his field were there because they hoped that they'd get good jobs afterward, but almost no one was there for love of the field. We agreed that was one advantage that English departments had; as you say, students were there because they wanted to be.
Not to be a pain, Mel, but - OK, I'll simplify - will you please tell me whether you believe ME to be a member of the 'Valve/CT crowd' or not? What I really want to know is: have you concluded that the things I am doing, in particular, are invalid? Or that I have made mistakes of some kind in criticizing certain aspects of literary studies culture? Or that I have suspect/bad/disreputable motives? I can tell that you don't like Green - thanks for the footnote. But he is just one author, hence too few to make a crowd. Also, he is writing from within academic literary studies - although he has voluntarily left - so he can hardly be the target of your 'why are these outsiders gunning for us' complaint. As a philosopher, I am a likely candidate for 'outsider come gunning' and I want to know whether you are talking about me.
This might seem a rather self-centered question, but I don't want to write a rebuttal on the assumption that I was part of the group being criticized and then have you say that I wasn't.
Viet? (French class, yes I vaguely remember? I think?)
'Zehou claims "it is important to talk about why some works of literature are really very good, aesthetically speaking, and why some writers are really damned praiseworthy, for making the aesthetic choices they did." He thus claims that the evaluation of literature, rather than the analysis of it, should be the primary goal of literary studies.'
Actually, my claim neither logically nor conversationally implies what you claim it does. To claim that a topic is important is not to claim that it ought to be the sole "primary goal" of a field. (You're committing what those of us who teach informal logic courses sometimes call "the fallacy of assumed equivalence.")
'Such claims often seem defensive to me in their wish to "protect" literature from analysis. As his division of literature into "good" and "damned" suggests, there is often a logic of exclusion at work as well, which works to protect "good" literature from contamination.'
I neither offered--nor do I endorse--any such "division." In my view, all aesthetic merits and defects are pro tanto merits and defects, respectively, and the goal of the interpretation and aesthetic evaluation of literature is never to justify such silly verdicts as 'good' or 'damned', in the canon or out of the canon, etc.
Instead of talking about the evil motives or criticable character traits that you suspect might be "at work" in me, could we please talk about the views in question, and what reasons one might have for refining, rejecting, or endorsing them?
'Zehou says "questions about the aesthetic value of particular literary works ought to be recognized as questions of central importance in the study of literature, so that something has gone wrong when . . . " This is that language of "crisis" that I referred to in my post. Which in this instance is just another way of saying "what I think is important ought to be what you think is important." . . . I don't accept any attempt to limit intellectual inquiry as valid.'
That is NOT what I 'said' (i.e., asserted)--rather, it is the interpretation I offered of a passage pedro quoted.
What, by the way, is wrong with trying to persuade someone that you what you judge important is, in fact, important?
Of course, if I had suggested that what literary studies scholars do is NOT important, then that would be a not very nice thing for me to suggest at all. But I didn't. (In fact, I suggested that a wide range of inquiries are appropriate and important.) What I suggested was that, according to a more charitable version of the vehement criticisms voiced in recent days, there is a topic that is important that is not treated as such.
One more thing: I think it is an interesting and helpful suggestion that some of the silly critics of contemporary literary studies are motivated by the old "reason is the killjoy of our pleasure" view.
As I'm sure you know, this view was rather decisively refuted in Mendelssohn's important Briefe uber Empfindungen way back in the 1750s. So there's no point in taking it--or arguments built around it--seriously.
However, I don't see any evidence that that's really what is driving the criticisms you mention. Rather, the folks you're bothered by are charging that their lit studies teachers focus on sociological and other topics to the exclusion of aesthetic ones, not that knowledge of--or interest in--sociological aspects of works kills or blocks pleasure.
But perhaps I'm mistaken--I couldn't bear to read those obviously wacky comments very carefully.
Naw, Z, there are definitely wacky comments that go beyond your own "this important aspect of study receives insufficient attention" and do indeed say "lit studies departments are doing it all wrong and don't deserve to live unless they completely change their approach." Gzombie and Tim Burke, among others, have been very good at refuting that eliminationist argument when it's arisen in the discussions in question.
Right, Josh--that's why we ought to ignore them, right?
I also feel that there's some talking past the more interesting issues to address either the out-and-out trolls in some of these discussions or to obsess about Daniel Green, who though not a troll, takes an extreme position in my view both about the ideal subject of literary criticism and the extent to which it is legitimate to define the normal intellectual practices of many scholars as "out of bounds". Many of Zehou's more modest observations are ones that I would share in, to some extent. I feel that Mel and George Williams and others are, in objecting to the extreme comments, drawing certain kinds of disciplinary boundaries with far too much aggressiveness. The mode of contemporary literary studies that they are legitimately defending is not purely local to literary studies: it heavily overlaps cultural history, anthropology, cultural studies, critical theory and other subdisciplinary variants and practices. At least some of those taking an interest in such matters are not attempting to prescribe for others what should be done to them: they're attempting to work out the desirable terms of a shared set of intellectual practices.
I also agree with Mel that thinking about context seems to me to be a necesary part of thinking about text. I can't imagine an "appreciative" or aesthetically-minded literary criticism that would studiously blind itself to context, history, to questions of reception, circulation and production, to canon formation, and so on.
At the same time, it seem to me that some literary criticism in the past two decades de-emphasized aesthetics and evaluative language while also overly emphasizing a kind of instrumental or functionalist language about context. There seems to be some consensus that this is not an unreasonable criticism. I'd very much say the same about cultural history and cultural studies, two disciplinary branches in which my own practices are very much centered. I wonder a bit at the extent to which Mel seems comfortable sidelining evaluative language altogether, in part because I think it's never really gone away from literary criticism: inherited canons may be criticized and analyzed and tinkered with, but they continue to structure the selection of topics and interests and above all pedagogy in literature departments. If that's so, why not try to make peace with the crazy old aunt in the attic, and actively return to theorizing and considering an evaluative language in literary studies? It doesn't require losing all the insights and reconstructions of the canon: I think too many literary scholars hear behind the desire for an evaluative language a return to a canon of dead white male "greats". I think you could talk about evaluation in purely technical terms: to ask what makes fictions or other writings work the way they work without always referring that question to externalities, to a kind of functionalism that assumes that texts do the work that they do largely because of embedded histories or socialities. Why not explore the question of how literature (or culture) works with its audiences less of a sense that we already know the answer? I really feel there's a happy medium here that is neither Bloom's eternal verities of literature nor strong historicism; some literary critics in the academy already operate in that happy medium. But perhaps not enough.
There's very little there that I would disagree with, Timothy, and I'm quite sure I couldn't have said it any better.
One remark about 'studiously' blinding oneself to context, etc. The idea that all aesthetic merits and defects are purely formal is not really on the table. But I'm not sure I see why facts about the 'reception' and 'circulation' of a work are relevant for approaching it with evaluative interests in mind.
Also, I think most folks manage to engage in evaluative disputes about particular works without ever talking about 'the canon'. Further, prominent figures in contemporary taste theory (Ted Cohen, George Dickie, John Bender, Marcia Muelder Eaton, Alexander Nehamas, etc.) don't seem all that much worried about canons. So I'm always a bit surprised to say 'taste' and watch SOME contemporary literature scholars hear 'canon'.
I'm surprised to hear my recent writings on this issue as an attempt to "[draw] certain kinds of disciplinary boundaries." I'm not trying to draw boundaries at all. I am, however, objecting to the mischaracterization of what we do by otherwise intelligent people like Henry Farrell. I am also suggesting that people who do not actually read any of the published scholarship they are talking about don't deserve a place in the conversation. That's not elitist.
I agree that they should read what they're criticizing. That seems a minimum responsibility, especially from the people with the strongest feelings. I agree that some don't seem to live up to that.
But I also feel--as I do about a great many things--that when many people seem to share a sentiment that I feel is misguided or lacks evidentiary soundness, I'm curious about that, and not content to quickly assume that it's utterly baseless. I think in this case it's people overhearing fourth-order hearsay versions of much more sophisticated discussions "inside" the academy and aligning those with some personal dissatisfying encounter with literary interpretation in college or elsewhere.
Which I think may underscore as much an opportunity as a danger. If people are hungry for an evaluative form of criticism, I'd like to come back at them and ask: why? Isn't it true that in matters of taste, there are no disputes? Isn't it elitist to *wish* for more erudite readers to tell everyone else what is good and bad literature? What's driving the desire here at a more populist level (leaving aside the people who truly have no motive other than hassling academics maliciously)? I'm actually authentically curious about that: what is the vanished function of criticism that the cruder critics imagine renovating? What is not happening that they think should be happening, and why? What is missing from their experience of culture? Perhaps there's some way to respond to those desires other than simply criticizing them as ignorant, even though there may be some justice to that.
On why reception and circulation are important to evaluation, I think at the simplest level, it's because they tell you something about the inherited practices, traditions and boundaries of reading that inform your evaluation. How does this work of literature come to you in the form it comes? It makes a big difference that a work is widely intertwined in popular culture or that it is highly obscure. It makes a difference if a work has had enormous past influence or if it is a kind of mutant or freak. It makes a difference if there is a huge tradition of interpretation gathered around a particular book or very little. You could do evaluative or textual criticism without paying any attention to those things, I suppose, but it would be an unnecessarily reduced or limited kind of criticism.
Thanks for the helpful reply, but I'm afraid I'm still not following.
Suppose I'm on my way to the bookstore and I want to know whether you think a novel you've just read is a good one.
You say:
Yes, it's "intertwined in popular culture."
Yes, it's "highly obscure."
Yes, it's "had enormous past influence."
Yes, it's "a kind of mutant freak."
These all might be interesting and perhaps even very important features of the novel in question--features worth thinking and talking and writing about. But I'm not clear how they bear on whether it is a good novel in any ordinary sense. (The last might, if it implies that the work lacks unity in some respect in which unity is called for.)
And as for the old bit of latin about aesthetic disputes cited above: well, it's an old bit OF LATIN. As Hume pointed out, it is not a part of genuine bit of common sense, but rather a specious bit of medieval philosophy that gradually seeped down into popular culture.
Timothy:
You've said several things in your last few comments I partly or mostly agree with. I think part of what is at issue here has to do with disciplinary differences. For instance, I think we are using the word "evaluation" differently. When you said "I think you could talk about evaluation in purely technical terms: to ask what makes fictions or other writings work the way they work without always referring that question to externalities, to a kind of functionalism that assumes that texts do the work that they do largely because of embedded histories or socialities" -- for me, that is a description of rhetorical, symbolic, or other kinds of linguistic analysis, rather than evaluation. To analyse how a text works -- locally/internally or socially/externally is precisely what I'm saying is what we do in literary studies. So I think we're agreed, thus far.
What I was responding to in some other people's posts and comments is the notion that the goal of such analysis is an evaluative judgement free of context: this text works in such a way and therefore it is Good (or Not Good). I'm with Barbara Herrnstein Smith on this one -- evaluations are always made within a particular context. You can't ask simply, "is a book good"? you have to ask "what is this book good for"? Those who claim to have the inside scoop on final aesthetic judgments are simply masking the context of that judgement.
So, rather than completely sidelining evaluative judgement, in my own teaching and scholarship I strive to make the contexts of my analysis explicit. I may teach one novel in order to explore the socio-cultural dynamics of popular literature in a particular time period; I may teach another text in the same course in order to illustrate particular formal or rhetorical features of the novel genre. The first book might not be useful for the second purpose, and vice versa.
To John Holbo:
Yes, I think I consider you part of the "crowd" referenced in my post. A lot of things have been said over the past week and I didn't keep clear notes on who said what. I recognize that you're no Green. And we might agree about some things.
But not about the ALSC and the idea that, as you said, "it is sincerely felt that literary criticism and literary works are getting muscled into [cultural, political, theoretical] position, en masse, in intellectually incompetent fashion." It seems to me that your essay strives to keep your own personal opinion somewhat muffled as you try to acknowledge different viewpoints on these issues. But it seems (perhaps I'm misreading) as though you share some of this "discontent" that you also locate in Booth's essay.
From Booth, such criticisms are located in his career, decades of rhetorical analysis and writing instruction. The Aristotelian Chicago school folks are committed to a certain model of rhetorical inquiry that he's upholding here. Note his language of evidence, thesis, and inquiry.
Your sentence (from the paragraph following your quote of Booth) is really a different, and broader claim. And, coming from someone outside the field of literary studies, it (and similar sentences) cause me to question (as I did in my own blog post) why people outside the field get so riled up about what they think they see going on in literary studies.
I attend the MLA regularly. I present papers at MLA, and at other conferences. I have taught at two very different research universities. I review manuscripts for academic presses. What I know as my field (both my intellectual specialisation and English-language literary studies more broadly) looks nothing like these descriptions of the "mugging" violence done by the MLA which would "cause" the ALSC folks to flee. (to what, a safely gated community in the surburbs?)
I think "What is this book good for?" is potentially as problematic a question as "Is this book good?" In fact, I think in a nutshell that sums up how a kind of instrumentalist/functionalist sensibility has crept into literary studies. This is one heart of the whole metadiscussion: at least some of the people pining for an evaluative mode of criticism are asking that the "good for" at least be deferred. That its implicit functionalism be muted or softened, and accomodate pleasure, the cultivation of the self, and so on to boot.
In such a case, then, one would be asking
"is this book good for making me into a better person? for giving me pleasure? for teaching me about the human condition?"
I'm not against the asking and answering of those questions. But I don't believe those are the only questions that should be asked about literary works.
At the philosophical level, I don't understand how you think any evaluative question can logically be asked without a context. Is a wool sweater good? well, it's good for wearing if it's 20 below outside. Not so good for wearing if it's 95 degrees. But if you were going to hang it on the wall as fiber art, then it would be good no matter what the weather, if it met your criteria of beauty etc. The question of whether it is a well-constructed sweater is a different sort of analysis. To say, for instance, that only sweaters with heavy yarn, tight knitting, and strong seams are well made sweaters implies that you think a good sweater is good for protection against cold weather.
Man, I wish I could express my point of view as clearly and as snark-free as Mel expresses hers.
'At the philosophical level, I don't understand how you think any evaluative question can logically be asked without a context. Is a wool sweater good? well, it's good for wearing if it's 20 below outside.'
'Good' is an attributative (not a predicative) adjective, and so sentences like 'is x good' are elliptical for 'is x a good thing of sort S'. And yes, the sort of value literary works can have is, as everyone agrees, instrumental value: x is good in so far as it yields such and such a good (a moral good, a valuable aesthetic experience, a political good, etc.)
But that is not to say that literary works are valuable, when they are, only in one way ('all and only novels that are good aesthetically are good' is a principle nobody endorses, right?). Nor is it to say that there is one type of literary value (aesthetic value, e.g.) that is the most important type.
So yes, of course: normal evaluative talk presupposes a context. But it doesn't presuppose silly principles (e.g., 'all and only sweaters that protect against cold' are good). Nor is it often particularly urgent to point that context out--speakers manage to identify the relevant context without feeling very much in the way of puzzlement and confusion.
If I ask you if your sweater is a good one, and you tell me it's very warm, that conveys all that needs conveying about the context, right?
And in the literarure case, if I ask you if the novel you've just read is a good one, your reply will convey the relevant features of the context.
Accommodate for whose pleasure and whose cultivation of the self? I think that's a fair question, and incidentally, not necessarily a derisive one. (Perhaps the idea is to identify the aesthetic choices that make certain books acclaimed by a particular cultural elite? That sounds like a perfectly reasonable line of inquiry.)
On the other hand: somehow, this notion that aesthetics scholars can identify books for the betterment of pedro's self comes across as rather paternalistic (I can play the game in reverse, too, you know), and the idea that such evaluations can be carried out prior to any consideration of context--however instrumentalist and functionalist considerations of cultural context may seem--comes across as rather... dare I say simplistic?
So, I ask again: whose pleasure, the betterment of the whose self?
Finally, I guess this debate fits right into the frame: description vs. prescription. If you are interested in describing how a book is good, you have to consider the context in which it is regarded as good. Prescription is what I find distasteful. But that's only me.
Disclaimer: Questions of style, form, symbolism, etc., seem interesting to me. My rant is not against considering those questions.
I missed Zehou's comment. I want to ask Zehou: is it fair to say that you're interested in describing what sort of things people mean when they say that 'x is a good book'--possibly in a particular cultural context? That sounds interesting. Perhaps even more so if you control for social class, etc., even if you're primarily interested in aesthetic form and not so interested in what the relationship says about class. (Oh, and model theory rocks, Zehou: may I ask what made you mention it?)
Pedro,
In my view the basic tools of model theory are helpful for addressing certain ongoing debates about how to understand literary contradictions and the relations between fictional and actual persons, places, things and truths in works. For those who are interested in such things, that is.
As for your question about what I'm interested in: Among other things, I'm interested in what evaluative properties (unity, pretentiousness, subtlety, opulence, profundity, obscurity, stateliness, novelty, etc.) certain works have, how one goes about discovering that those works have them, and how their having these features impacts their aesthetic merit.
There's an interestingly perpendicular relationship in my own experience with the way this conversation plays out in literary studies and the way it plays out in cultural anthropology (and then again in liminal spaces between the two, say cultural studies, for example).
A lot of scholars in cultural anthropology developed an excessively negative reaction (in my humble opinion) to any hint of functionalism some years ago, even before notions of thick description and then culture-as-text settled in to stay. But I understand the sources of that reaction--to the excesses of structuralist-functionalist anthropology of the Levi-Straussian kind on one hand and to Parsonian functionalism and its influence on American social science on the other.
The proposition that came out of that reaction is that culture is essentially always too layered and complex to be clearly "read out" in readily instrumental or functional terms, that cultural practice is determined in part simply by precedent and a kind of "tectonic drift", that what happened last influences what happens next, but also that change enters into practice simply by the act of practice. But also that culture is pushed, prodded, pulled and contested by so many agents and so many different vested forms of agency that its products and forms should always be understood as meaning many things to many people, and many things to a single person, and that no one in a given society has a bird's eye view or a transparent understanding of what they're doing in the world of everyday practice and ritual.
Now I persist in thinking that historicism in literary study has sometimes moved, admittedly subtly, in a different direction: towards the notion that the increasingly active incorporation of the historical and the social, the contextual and intertextual, produces an increasingly clear answer to the question, "What "work" does this work do?" or "Whose purposes does this work and its reading serve?" In other words, more rather than less functionialism, more rather than less instrumental in its strategies of reading.
So when I suggest deferring the question, "What or to whom is this work good for?", the question, "What does this work actually *do*?" it is because I've seen that deferral produce some fruitful results in other analyses of cultural practice. It doesn't mean that you must utterly stop asking questions about interests, instrumentalities, function: but I think those questions are best answered in diffuse, roundabout ways.
The other problem is that it seems to me that the question, "What is this text good for?" or ""What does this text do?" are best answered by social/cultural history or social/cultural ethnography, if they must be asked in that form. Which is of course what has driven the move to historicism: literary critics can see that as well as anyone. But as long as that's the move, the question naturally arises: and what is disciplinarily left for literary criticism to claim as its own professional terrain which distinguishes it? This works in both directions: the "cultural turn" in history led to the importation of a whole raft of methodologies from literary studies.
One answer is one that historians sometimes offer: what is left is not the discipline but the specialization. E.g., that specialists on the Atlantic world in the 18th Century, whether in Departments of English or History, are the same, but they know something that non-specialists do not. For various reasons I find this unsatisfying.
But I'm radical in academic terms: I'd be perfectly happy dissolving disciplinary bounds between English, History, Anthropology. A Department of Cultural Analysis would make me content. So I have no need to clarify the significant differences between history and historicism, for example. For anyone who does, the more that you want to ask, "What is this text good for?" or "What does this text do?" the more you may be generating an accidental supplementary question: "What is literary studies that makes it best at answering those questions? Is it just a specialist branch of historical or social inquiry? If not, what else is it?"
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