Friday
My Ljubljana colleague Jason Blake alerted me to a Chronicle of Higher Education article that wrestles with the question of whether studying literature should be fun. It’s a fairly confused piece, with Baruch College’s Timothy Aubry conflating a number of issues better treated separately. Nevertheless, it’s worth a response because Aubry addresses questions that non-academics periodically raise about literary studies.
Aubry explains how the issue of fun came up:
When I started a Ph.D. program in literature in the late 1990s, aesthetic judgment was pretty much taboo. I was at Princeton, not exactly a bastion of tenured radicals, but even there our seminars focused almost exclusively on literature’s ideological function. In applying to graduate school, I had written a statement of purpose declaring that I wanted to pursue a Ph.D. because I believed that “studying literature was fun.” One of my professors crossed out that line with the comment, “STUDYING LITERATURE IS NOT FUN!!”
It’s not entirely clear whom Aubry blames for this. He appears to have a beef with our polarized political climate generally (who doesn’t?), with how literature is taught in graduate school, and with leftwing literary ideologues. Let’s look at the latter two.
Aubry’s complaints about graduate school are nothing new, long predating New Historicism and the various political approaches. Here’s what he has to say:
After getting to grad school I came to regard the remark [about literary study being no fun] as a warning: not only of the myriad ways in which being in a Ph.D. program is no fun at all, but also of the systematic refusal of aesthetic pleasure within academic literary studies. Looking back, I see the two motives as aligned: Disavowing aesthetic pleasure is precisely how academics have sought to signal their professionalism and affirm the job-like nature of the work.
Terry Eagleton makes a similar observation as he traces “the rise of English” in Introduction to Literary Theory. He concludes with his characteristic dry humor:
Fierce rearguard actions were fought by both ancient Universities against this distressingly dilettante subject [English literature]: the definition of an academic subject was what could be examined, and since English was no more than idle gossip about literary taste it was difficult to know how to make it unpleasant enough to qualify as a proper academic pursuit. This, it might be said, is one of the few problems associated with the study of English which have since been effectively resolved.
Aubry’s subsequent description of English graduate school could, with minor adjustments, apply to pretty much any discipline:
It is impossible to overstate just how much professional anxiety graduate school can produce even at a well-funded program like Princeton’s. Everyone around you seems to have read more and more intelligently, and in more languages, than you. Professors make conspiratorial quips about the naïve responses of their undergraduates (responses that resemble your own since you have, after all, just finished undergrad), and constant mini-trials, some casual, some official, test whether you are successfully evolving from said naïve undergraduate to deserving member of the academy.
Then there is the pressure to master bodies of knowledge of vast but uncertain magnitude and simultaneously to think up some original contribution to that knowledge. A dissertation needs first to be proposed, then researched, then written, then defended, and the ever menacing, impossibly contracting job market is waiting to finish you off in case you manage to get that far through the oversight or careless charity of your busy advisers. Your daily fear is that you will discover that you are doing everything wrong. So, when all your professors advise against seeking aesthetic satisfaction from literature, you comply.
So okay, grad school is a pain and I too remember having to learn how to love literature again after emerging. On the plus side, I got good training that I appreciate to this day. Aubry’s mistake is confusing “aesthetic satisfaction” with studying aesthetics. Take it from one who went to grad school in the latter days of the New Criticism: literary formalism could be just as stultifying as anything Aubry has experienced.
That’s why the following incident represents a false polarity:
I might have made lasting peace with the complete eradication of aesthetic criticism from the academy, if only that eradication had been truly complete. But taste lingered, manifesting itself at unexpected moments. A professor delivering a Marxist interpretation of Middlemarch would pause after reading the novel aloud to gaze wistfully at some spot above our heads, and then remark, “It’s just such a beautiful passage, isn’t it?” before proceeding with his analysis of commodity fetishism. To reply, as I desperately wanted, “Wait! What exactly makes it beautiful?” would be to appear unsophisticated.
I’d like to know the particular George Eliot passage cited by the teacher before allowing it to prove that beauty and Marxism are at odds. Marx wanted to build a society that liberates humans’ creative potential, and 19th century authors like Eliot, Dickens, Balzac and others similarly pushed back against forces treating humans as commodities. Aubry thinks discussing “commodity fetishism” will self-evidently banish all joy from literary studies, but perhaps the beauty detected by the teacher was what Eliot was fighting for. In any event, Aubry thinks that, by simply pointing to the phrase, he’s proved that Marxist criticism banishes all joy from literary studies. To riff off of a Keats passage, as though the words are “like a bell/ To toll me back from thee to my sole self!” (The word in the poem is “forlorn” and it wrenches Keats out of his sweet nightingale revery.)
To be sure, commodity fetishism, like any concept, will result in distortions if used poorly. Marxist scholars actually have a phrase for those who mechanistically judge every work by its class politics, calling them “vulgar Marxists.” Engels chastised an author once for trying to make her novel politically correct rather than searching for the truth; Marx said he learned more about capitalism from the monarchist Balzac than any economist; and Eagleton defends reactionaries Joseph Conrad and T. S. Eliot because they capture so well the spiritual emptiness of late capitalism. Literature can’t be reduced to politics any more than it can be reduced to a pure aesthetic text.
Back to the issue of fun (or “aesthetic satisfaction” or “aesthetic criticism”). Perhaps Aubry’s fun-hating professor worried about his students remaining as beach readers who focus only on character and plot. If so, every literary scholar would agree with him here.
Here’s an analogy I use with students to explain how literary criticism can be enjoyable. If one is a casual American football fan, one might watch a Sunday afternoon game for fun. Such viewers focus on completed passes, long runs, and the final score.
If one is a “student of the game,” however, one pays attention to less obvious things—for instance, the block by an offensive guard that opens up a play or a linebacker disguising his intentions to fool the quarterback. This is a different order of fun, and many will watch special commentaries educating them on football’s intricacies. Sports analysts don’t ruin the game by going into the x’s and o’s but get us to further appreciate it.
If you like analyzing sports but not literature (or vice versa), you are like one of the contrasting figures described by George Bernard Shaw’s devil in Man and Superman:
There is no physical gulf between the philosopher’s classroom and the bullring; but the bull fighters do not come to the class room for all that….[In England] they have great race courses, and also concert rooms where they play the classical compositions of his Excellency’s friend Mozart. Those who go to the race courses can stay away from them and go to the classical concerts instead if they like: there is no law against it…And the classical concert is admitted to be a higher, more cultivated, poetic, intellectual, ennobling place than the race course. But do the lovers of racing desert their sport and flock to the concert room? Not they. They would
suffer there all the weariness the Commander has suffered in heaven.
In short, what is fun varies from person to person. I guarantee that what Aubry finds to be “exhilarating” in the following passage would send many of my students fleeing to their version of the bullring or racetrack:
The possibility that power both produces and contains its own subversion— that ever-versatile Foucauldian premise — became a conundrum no less exhilarating to contemplate than your average metaphysical poem.
So how do Intro to Lit teachers get their race enthusiasts to appreciate literature? Aubry may scoff at those who connect literature to “the major headline-grabbing issues of the day” (which sums up a good half of my blog essays), but from the dawn of time people have turned to literature to address their concerns. Try teaching Beowulf after a reported mass shooting if you want students to feel its urgency. We interpret and reinterpret according to who we are.
Regarding Aubry’s concerns, I suspect he is sick of politics and wants to retreat into a non-political world. We can sympathize with his desire—such a desire contributed towards New Criticism’s escape from history following World War II–without accepting his characterization of politically-oriented scholars as humorless ideologues who fail to delight in literature.
We should never forget our love for of books and poems—Aubry is right about that—and we should hold on to that delight as we explore literature in whatever ways feed our souls. Since Aubry is complaining about political approaches, I’ll conclude with a different take from someone a bit older than he.
When I entered college in 1969, I found myself put off by English because the teachers didn’t acknowledge the mammoth issues going on in my life. (I had been a plaintiff in a landmark Civil Rights case and my Vietnamese War draft number would be 51 once my student deferment ran out.) Because the teachers talked about literary form as though it floated in a disembodied realm, I majored in history instead, writing about Beowulf, Chrétien de Troyes, Diderot and Rousseau from that angle.
Over the subsequent decades, people like me had to fight to get the discipline to accept historical context and reader responses as acceptable subjects of scholarship. Then, in the 1980s and 1990’s, we found ourselves fighting a second battle as figures like William Bennett, Allan Bloom and the Reagan-Bush NEH appropriated authors I loved for their reactionary agenda. Aubry complains about progressives applying politics to the classics, but conservatives are just as guilty. In fact, because literature is bound up with life, people have always done so. Some of Plato’s displeasure with Homer’s emotional power may stem from his fear of Athenian demagogues appealing to the public’s base instincts.
In short, returning to a 1950’s emphasis on form isn’t going to take the politics out of literature.
If Aubry is right about English Departments being captured by political activists at the expense of text (I’m dubious about this characterization but let’s grant it for a moment), then some return to formalism is not only justified but inevitable. The pendulum always reasserts itself. In the meantime, however, we can celebrate that new approaches mean new populations are finding themselves in literary works (old as well as new) and literary scholarship is far more varied than it ever was in the past.
In his article, Aubry lumps together college campuses embroiled in first amendment battles, myopic graduate programs that murder to dissect, and politically doctrinaire English professors that don’t acknowledge literary beauty. Some of his generalizations are suspect and the connections he makes are more emotional than rational. The college that emerges from his description is not one that I recognize from my experience of teaching for 35 years at a small liberal arts college.