In our quest for relevance, we teachers of literature have ended up becoming unnecessary. This thought comes to mind every time I read the latest news about the crisis in the humanities. English degrees have declined by almost half since their most recent peak in the 2005-2006 academic year, despite the student population having grown by a third during the same period. Romance languages—my area of specialty in a teaching career spanning more than two decades—have done little better. German departments are in free fall. Doctoral students from departments that used to concentrate on literary studies are confronted with a frightening absence of jobs.
In one common account, the responsibility for this collapse falls on the shifting preferences of students, who no longer want to read, and, by extension, on the shifting media landscape in which young people are now growing up. This explanation lets professors off the hook too easily. Students may be turning away from literature, but we abandoned it, too.
The sense of a worsening condition permeates my conversations with friends in academe. Even those who teach in the wealthiest universities tell me of a string of departmental contractions and the closure of tenure lines. They also complain bitterly about the increasing difficulty of getting any students, either undergraduates or graduates, to tackle the canonical authors of the traditions they teach: Milton, Cervantes, Proust, Clarice Lispector. It isn’t only that students have trouble reading works written in earlier forms of the modern languages such as The Canterbury Tales or the Poema de mio Cid. As Amanda Claybaugh, Harvard’s dean of undergraduate education and an English professor, commented in a New Yorker article published last year: “The last time I taught The Scarlet Letter, I discovered that my students were struggling to understand the sentences as sentences—like, having trouble identifying the subject and the verb.”
Reading this statement, I was struck by the dispassion of the dean: Far from the horror with which similar things are uttered in private conversations, she is understanding of and even sympathetic to this surge of illiteracy on one of the most elite campuses in the world. Claybaugh seems jovially resigned to the fact that “different capacities” of her students don’t allow them to access those things to which she presumably devoted her life: literature as a practice, as a set of exceptional texts, as a tradition, as a celebration of language. I could never summon such equanimity—in fact, it is one of the reasons why I retired from teaching.
I am not sure when a consensus settled in among deans, provosts, department heads, and instructors that young students don’t like to read—and that it is futile to expect them to have sufficient curiosity or passion to engage with the extravagant, unwieldy monuments that older and more literate times have bequeathed us. A great literary work enacts a complex coordination of a multitude of elements: sound and meaning, narrative structures and rhythmic patterns, references to the tradition, and flights into the new. How will students untangle the dense net of Borges’s “The Aleph,” which requires at least a general notion of Dante’s Commedia; or Joyce’s Ulysses, which demands some knowledge of what happens in the Odyssey?
A melancholic feeling has set in. If students prefer to avoid reading the works that we value, what can we do?
Three solutions were attempted in an earlier phase of this crisis, all guided by the assumption that students abhor the strange, the ancient, the remote, and like the familiar, the modern, and the close. The first was to replace or supplement books with newer media—film, TV, popular music, computer games, visual art—to which it was assumed that, since our students were native to them (“their capacities are different,” as Claybaugh put it), they would feel more attracted. The second was to reduce the amount of space in the curriculum previously held by the old novelists and poets (from the remote 19th century, for example) in favor of texts produced in very recent times. The third was to use cultural products of other periods and places as a way to discuss moral and political problems of our time.
“Less text, more image and sound; less past, more present; less aesthetics, more ethics.”
Less text, more image and sound; less past, more present; less esthetics, more ethics. Although these three moves were presented as responses to current undergraduates’ perceived lack of interest in the literary tradition, this curricular shift on the demand side had in fact been preceded by a similar one on the supply side. In the prior decades, writing dissertations on contemporary authors had become an acceptable, routine, and, indeed, the prevalent practice in many doctoral programs.
It hadn’t always been that way. Until three or four decades ago, contemporary literature was seen as not susceptible to rigorous scholarly treatment, because we lack the necessary distance to place it in the contexts that matter—in the trajectory of a writer, in the cultural framework of her time, in the long arc of history. But if what we want to think about is current ethical dilemmas or the pathologies of communication in contemporary societies, texts written in recent years by people like us are as good or better than others coming to us from distant cultural and geographic horizons.
The truth is that something peculiar has happened in academia: Literature professors developed a curious apathy when confronted with the literary texts that they had previously valued above all, and moved from structural, historical, or rhetorical analysis of these texts to cultural, gender, or area studies applied to all kinds of objects.
Already in the 1990s, the standard graduate seminar in literature departments comprised several chapters of books or short essays of some of the new (primarily French) authorities that were summoned to provide the clues for another, generally smaller, list of poems, essays, or narratives. Back then, we called it “theory.” Often, in practice, it was philosophy read outside of its native disciplinary context and thus understood in somewhat nebulous terms. Derrida’s work was elaborated in dialogue with the great representatives of the phenomenological tradition: Husserl, Heidegger, Levinas. There is no reason to expect a doctoral student in literature to be able to reconstruct this lineage or adjudicate the complex debates between these figures. The validity of the theories was decided in a cursory manner, often by way of a quasi-religious faith in the authority of theoretical texts.
Meanwhile, political talk largely edged out discussions about narrative structure, textual sources, or the sheer beauty of a given author’s prose. Faithful to an idea of the intellectual as overseer of social decency and as a moral tribune, literature professors took on the grand history of our time, the march of freedom incarnated in the struggles of one group or another, and the quest for emancipation and the resistance it met from reactionary forces. Discussions of the marks of sexism in this or that text faded into conversations about the condition of women today; the overt nationalism of this or that volume from centuries ago was introduced to discuss immigration in the United States.
Classes anchored themselves in the morning papers. I have a hard time recalling conversations about literature with colleagues during my years in academia. Instead, for the most part we commented passionately on the news, confident that our theories allowed us to see what more simple people couldn’t and assured that—morally and politically speaking—we were all on the same page. We wanted to bring the students onto that page, too, and were satisfied when the essays we wrote for us confirmed the rightness of our ideas about the world.
Literature professors became less enthusiastic about texts and more avid about audiovisual media or pop music, less likely to engage with the past than exploring the surface of the present, and less likely to discuss aesthetics (the singularity of Nathanael Hawthorne as a writer) than ethics (Hawthorne’s view of the Puritans). Out went the distant and the strange, its place taken by the familiar and the current, and the attention to language that was central to the discipline was summarily dismissed.
Retrospectively, it’s hard to say who abandoned literature first—students or teachers. As we moved on with our new interests, the distance between the classroom and the dorm decreased, and the conversations held in one place and the other became less distinguishable. Virtuosity in writing and originality of form stopped being celebrated, and students were increasingly taught social analysis with a moralistic bent, provided by instructors who too often had no higher qualifications for the task than any intelligent, educated citizen.
Having jettisoned literature, we professors lost whatever claim we had to expertise—and, in the process, our reason for existing.