Thursday
My cousin Faith alerted me recently to an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education critiquing a recent study, sponsored by Vanderbilt and Washington University, claiming that humanities instruction has become too political. The critique led me to the study itself, Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences, as well as the specific section dealing with literature departments. As someone who constantly applies literature to politics, I figure this is a good opportunity to elaborate where I stand on the matter.
The literature section, written by Kwame Anthony Appiah, essentially argues that literary studies has become too enmeshed in cultural politics and is neglecting aesthetic concerns. Professors, he believes, have become too “instrumentalist” in their approach, seeking to use literature to achieve political ends. At one point he writes,
The “political” part of the story here is that they think that the objectors are not just wrong but wicked: transphobic, say, or racist. Because it is so tempting, especially in an age of extreme political polarization, to think ill of people who disagree with you about matters that are important to you, it is essential to consider objections seriously, even if you disapprove morally of the objectors, and even if you doubt their sincerity.
In his Chronicle critique, Gabriel Hankins points out the irony of Appiah having written a book on W.E.B. Du Bois, who “lived by the dictum “all Art is propaganda and ever must be,” and how he himself has written dozens of books and articles and delivered hundreds of talks on the intersections of culture, race, and identity. It took politics for universities, and then the public more generally, to take African American literature serious, and there are rightwing culture warriors who would dismiss Appiah’s lifework as so much DEI.
Does he think that, by focusing only on aesthetics, he can wall himself off from political attacks. Or perhaps he feels so wounded by young ideologues attacking him from the left that he assumes they constitute English Studies as a whole rather than a small minority.
If so, Hankins says, he hasn’t done his homework and has no idea of the various currents in literature departments. “His report misses,” he writes, “the method wars that roiled literary studies a decade ago and the contestation of the canon as cultural capital 20 years before that; it appears to be unaware of current attempts to reclaim close reading, literary truth, aesthetic autonomy, and humanistic reason.” By focusing on judgmental ideologues—and yes, there are some—Appiah misses the fact (this voiced as a complaint by an activist scholar) that “much work in the humanities is reflexively anti-instrumentalist.” In other words, Hankins writes, “the position that Appiah wants to defend is…simply the status quo in the fields he claims to judge.”
So does literature have political agendas and are English professors out to indoctrinate their students? I take up the first question time and again in my book, including where I examine Du Bois’s declaration that art is propaganda. What I discovered is that even intensely political thinkers want literature to be non-instrumental. Sir Philip Sidney, Percy Shelley, Marx and Engels, contemporary Marxists Fredric Jameson and Terry Eagleton, and, yes, even Du Bois himself (contradicting his propaganda claim) all believed that the artist’s first obligation is to tell the truth, not to advance a political cause. Engels said he learned more about the nature of capitalism from the monarchist Balzac than from social scientists and economists, and Jameson and Engels labeled as “vulgar Marxists” those who applied political labels to works of art. For his part Du Bois wrote,
Thus it is the bounden duty of black America to begin this great work of the creation of Beauty, of the preservation of Beauty, of the realization of Beauty, and we must use in this work all the methods that men have used before. And what have been the tools of the artist in times gone by? First of all, he has used the Truth — not for the sake of truth, not as a scientist seeking truth, but as one upon whom Truth eternally thrusts itself as the highest handmaid of imagination, as the one great vehicle of universal understanding. Again artists have used Goodness — goodness in all its aspects of justice, honor and right — not for sake of an ethical sanction but as the one true method of gaining sympathy and human interest.
Activists and political commentators (as a blog writer, I include myself in the second category) can use literature to better understand the world and so direct their actions. But the literature itself, like a science theorem, must be true if it to be useful. To cite one example, I may disagree violently with the politics of David Mamet but I find his play Glengarry Glen Ross to be brilliant, providing powerful insights into male insecurities and the workings of capitalism. His play is more interested in capturing the reality of the cutthroat real estate business than in advancing an agenda.
Now to professors. In my experience, most of us are indeed anti-instrumentalist and strive to keep our politics out of our teaching. Instead, we hope that our students will come to love literature as much as we do, and we seek to foster the ability to think independently about what they read. This does not, however, mean cordoning off their aesthetics from the historical moment or the author’s life, as scholars chose to do during the days of the New Criticism, leading students like me to conclude that literature had nothing to do with the world. (That’s why I majored in history, switching to English in graduate school.) But if the discipline swung away from a disembodied formalism in the late 1980 with New Historicism, Hankins points out that some scholars have swung back in recent years. Just because corrections and overcorrections occur in disciplinary studies doesn’t mean that professors are creating revolutionary cadres.
And then there are readers, who were dismissed out of hand in the 1950s and 1960s but began to be taken seriously in the 1970s and 1980s. As professors, I believe we must honor our students’ responses to the works, even though they can be all over the map. I have discovered that, by listening closely to a response and then working with the student to articulate it into a full-blown interpretation, more interesting insights arise than anything I could have imposed on them. I teach not to turn out a mini-me but to foster someone to meet the challenges of a far different world than the one I had to negotiate.
To engage our students, we choose works that will open their imaginations, and most of us conclude that no one does this as well as Shakespeare, who appears in more literature syllabi than any other author. We also discover, however, that students respond well to authors who speak directly to their experience. When I was teaching at Morehouse College in Atlanta, no work in my two-semester humanities class elicted a more powerful response than Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, whose protagonist himself attends an all-Black college early in the novel. My students understood at a deep level what it is to be invisible.
At St. Mary’s, meanwhile, my first- and second-generation students recognized their experiences in novels like Amy Tan’s Joy Luck Club and Julia Alvarez’s How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents (taught in my Minority Lit class) while white students thrilled to the new worlds that they were introduced to. Rightwing attacks on English Departments are sometimes triggered by the fact that, once one encounters minority voices, one grants personhood to members of that demographic. This the right deem to be political since they would prefer people to believe that only white men (and an occasional white woman) are capable of writing great literature. (“Jane Austen, not Alice Walker,” as cultural conservatives used to say in the early 1990s.)
Great authors have been expanding the idea of whom to take seriously for centuries, however. As I write in my book in a discussion that begins with William Wordsworth’s celebration of leech gatherers, farm workers, and vagrants,
Through literature authors have entered the lives of the marginalized (Walt Whitman), the urban poor (Charles Dickens), American slaves (Harriet Beecher Stowe), Dorset dairy maids (Thomas Hardy), French coalminers (Emile Zola), Nebraska pioneers (Willa Cather), Harlem residents (Langston Hughes), African American sharecroppers (Jean Toomer), African American homosexuals (James Baldwin), bankrupted Oklahoma farmers (John Steinbeck), Laguna Pueblo war veterans (Leslie Marmon Silko), transplanted Pakistanis (Hanif Kureishi), West Indian immigrants (Zadie Smith), American lesbians (Alison Bechdel), and on and on. While we can see fiction introducing readers to the poor and the outcast as early as 1554 with a rollicking Spanish novel about a street urchin (Lazarillo de Tormes), and while Daniel Defoe’s early 18th century novels featured shipwrecked sailors, prostitutes, and thieves, the Romantic Imagination elevated lower-class figures to new levels of importance. In the process, it inspired generations of social and political idealists and changed conversations about public policy.
So is it political to teach Dickens or Steinbeck or Baldwin or Silko? One might just as well ask whether it is political to believe in a multicultural democracy. But whatever the implicit political message that comes with the works we professors choose, the idea that we can indoctrinate our students shows a lack of respect for these students. Like the Wife of Bath with her fifth husband, students rebel when they feel that a message is being shoved down their throats. To borrow again from my book, this husband, to transform his rebellious wife into a docile and submissive women,
every evening reads to her Stories of Wicked Wives. After a few nights of this, she leaps to her feet, tears three pages out of the book, and pushes him into the fire. And while, in response, he shifts from soft power to hard power, delivering a blow that renders her deaf in one ear, in the end she reasserts control and tells her own story.
Our students make up their own minds about what they believe. And if Appiah and the other authors of Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences want to know the real reason why humanities enrollments are dropping, I suggest they look at tuition costs, student debt loads, and a tight job market rather than at political professors. One idea we have definitely failed to foist upon our students—and goodness knows, in this instance we have tried—is that a liberal arts degree will help them find gainful employment.
