Employment of English. Michael Berube
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or only one—between reading treaties and treatises, and reading Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, as texts concerned with the English slave trade?
Had Levine stopped here, his introduction would have set us the worthy task of determining the cultural and evidentiary status of literature—a task sometimes neglected by cultural studies, partly because cultural studies too often attempts an analysis of “reception” without an explicit theory of reception aesthetics (the road not taken in American criticism thus far) or a theory of genre (a road neglected since Frye, with two major exceptions—Fredric Jameson’s neglected revision of Frye in The Political Unconscious, and the dissimilarly neglected work of Ralph Cohen). But Levine does not stop here; instead, he goes on to ask whether it’s worth reading literature at all “if what we want to know can be discovered through other materials,” and then to ask, apropos of D. A. Miller’s The Novel and the Police, why we should bother reading literature if we find it complicit with things we don’t like:
Miller’s answer, as I understand it, is that [the Victorian novel] enables readers to see how this bourgeoisifying project is carried on in other, contemporary, forms. In effect, the point of reading literature sensitively is to warn readers against reading literature. If one objects to the idea of the “liberal subject” and to the political regimes that rely on it, why further propagate texts enlisted on the side of the enemy? (9)
This is another set of questions altogether. It’s one thing to ask whether and how literary texts can provide us the material for “broad cultural conclusions”; it’s quite another thing to ask literature to provide us with a unique kind of informational content that can be found nowhere else in the world. And then it’s another thing to ask whether it makes sense to read influential texts and authors whose influence one may regret or wish to contest. And then it’s yet another thing to ask, as Levine does two pages later, whether the “aesthetic” might be a discursive realm of relative autonomy from purposiveness:
Does literature have any standing that might, even for a moment, exempt it from the practical and political critiques to which all other artifacts of culture are apparently subject? When art seems, directly or indirectly, intentionally or inadvertently, openly or surreptitiously, to sustain, create, justify, or forward politically or socially objectionable ends (from whose perspective?), are there any grounds for giving it the privilege disallowed to other enemies of the good, the true, and the just? (11)
Here too, there’s a trenchant question buried in an infelicitous formulation: what does Levine mean by “exempt,” and what does it mean to be exempt for a moment? Surely no working critic, not even the most besotted follower of Jameson, Said, et al., isso foolish as to call the police when Macbeth murders Duncan. So literature is probably exempt from the demands of quotidian practicality in that sense. But what kind of momentary exemption should we grant Ezra Pound when he writes, in his Pisan Cantos, that the goyim aresheep and are led to slaughter in great numbers by international Jewry? Are we to forswear our “practical and political” responses to this kind of profound obscenity, as did the 1948 Bollingen Committee, on the grounds that Pound’s work, as poetry, should be considered “exempt” from such concerns?
At this point we’re not yet halfway through Levine’s introduction, and perhaps we will be forgiven if we confess to confusion: what exactly is wrong with contemporary criticism? Let’s review what we have thus far. Does it neglect to ask whether literature is a meaningful category? Does it attempt political indoctrination as a result? Is it too cavalier about deriving broad cultural conclusions from relatively little documentary evidence? Is it inattentive to the possibility that its informational content might be unique? Does it attend to major writers merely to unmask their complicity in evil, and is it heedless of the dangers of further propagating the enemy’s texts? Or, having failed to ask the first of these questions, is criticism blind to the possibility that literature might indeed have a “special” status that exempts it from “practical and political critiques”? These questions, I should note, are not mutually exclusive: one can certainly say all these things about contemporary literary criticism, and one can even add, if one has a mind, that it’s poorly written, carelessly footnoted, inelegantly punctuated, shoddily bound, callously marketed, shamefully reviewed, and brutally expensive, too. But not all of these objections—Levine’s real ones, or my petty hypothetical ones—constitute or even license a close examination of the aesthetic.
Our confusion is real; it is, in many ways, the occasion for this book. Why, indeed, should the aesthetic be a critical component of the disciplinary definition of literature, as distinct from music, dance, or the plastic arts, where form is easier to distinguish from propositionality? More curiously, why should an aesthetic definition of literature be a critical component of the franchise of the English department? After all, we do not live in a world where university trustees, legislators, parents, and journalists rise up in arms whenever English professors fail to do justice to the sublime and the beautiful; as I’ll point out again in chapter 3, public furor over the mission of English rarely addresses anything other than basic writing courses—with the occasional exception of your standard-issue right-wing media campaign that alerts Americans to the shocking fact that Shakespeare is no longer taught in literature classes. What, finally, is the relation between the subject matter of literary-slash-cultural studies and the public legitimation of the discipline known as English? What is the relation between the field’s internal self-definition and its external constituencies?
We (I) cannot answer these questions directly, because they admit of no definitive answer; but we (I) can describe their parameters and suggest what’s at stake in trying to grapple with them. Fortunately, the reason the questions are not directly answerable is intimately tied to those parameters: the potential constituencies of the field depend largely on what the discipline of English means institutionally as a subject in college and high school courses, and what English means institutionally is dependent in turn on a congeries of social and economic movements well beyond the control of any one professor, department, or syllabus.
To grasp the relation between the subject matter of the field and its public legitimation, then, we need to inquire into the status of literature as cultural capital, as John Guillory has done in his landmark Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation. Guillory says almost nothing about cultural studies in nomine, but his book does theorize the relative “decline” of literary studies so provocatively as to afford us an explanation of why cultural studies might have become, for much of the discipline, the ideal self-description du jour. For Guillory, the status of literary study is inseparable from the larger social conditions that make literary study either valuable or superfluous as cultural capital:
It has proven to be much easier to quarrel about the content of the curriculum than to confront the implications of a fully emergent professional-managerial class which no longer requires the old cultural capital of the bourgeoisie. The decline of the humanities was never the result of newer noncanonical courses or texts, but of a large-scale “capital flight” in the domain of culture. . . . The professional-managerial class has made the correct assessment that, so far as its future profit is concerned, the reading of great works is not worth the investment of very much time or money. The perceived devaluation of the humanities curriculum is in reality a decline in its market value. If the liberal arts curriculum still survives as the preferred course of study in some elite institutions, this fact has everything to do with the class constituency of those institutions. (45–46)
Let me flesh out Guillory’s analysis with a brief anecdote, mediated by way of Richard Ohmann’s observation, in Politics of Letters, that
for Wesleyan students (and for those at Yale, Stanford, Wellesley, etc.) there is still no penalty for pursuing the humane and pleasant activity of reading good books and trying to understand the world. These students have a reserved place waiting for them in the professional-managerial class or the ruling class, some by virtue of having made it into an elite college, most by birth and nurture. (12)
When I first went “on the market” at the 1988 MLA convention in New Orleans, I interviewed for jobs at a wide array of schools, and nothing made the stratification of the profession