Andrew Del Banco’s review of recent books regarding the death of traditional literary studies (NYRB, Nov. 4) has deservedly attracted a great deal of attention. Unlike the numerous other predecessors in this particular genre, which might be described as “Debunking the New,” Del Banco’s writing evidences a certain amount of restraint and tries to present itself as a high-minded reflection on the current state of things literary and professional rather than as an exercise in simple anguished vituperation, laced with ignorance and motivated by inter-generational incomprehension and misunderstanding–the usual format for writing of this sort. What is the New that is so lamentable and is bringing down literary studies of a high kind and transforming it into something inappropriate and unsacred? In a word, it is culture, culture understood as a more general field of rhetoric, signification, and meaning, which is material, social, and historical in character. It is in effect a new discipline which, like the English that displaced the Classics and the American Literature that displaced the English Only model of study, has made keeping current in the profession a rather difficult undertaking. That should not be metaphorized as a “fall” but instead understood as an expansion, deepening, and focussing of the work traditionally called criticism. That expansion is akin to what happened to the sciences as they moved from the 18th into the 19th centuries. The absence of experimental techniques meant that science could proceed almost as a gentleman’s profession of guessing, hypothesizing, and perhaps, maybe finding an answer or two that fit how phenomena behaved. With the birth of the experimental approach to scientific work, an enormous deepending and expansion of knowledge occurred. A discipline or field of knowledge that seemed to possess a certain unity and certain firm boundaries suddenly found itself overwhelmed with what to many seemed a splintering and confused proliferation. The study of literature in the academy has undergone a similar evolution. It has moved from being a singular discipline with a common and easily learnable language to a number of different disciplines, just as Science became Chemistry and then Organic Chemistry or Physics and then Quantum Physics, each with its own language. Change happens. And it sometimes means that the old way of thinking and conducting ourselves dies and new ways are born. Del Banco registers the painful experience of those who have trouble accommodating this transformation. He wishes for a renewal of traditional forms of literary study that would focus on “works of art that somehow register one’s own longings.” But that is something like wishing for a world in which the stars stood for mythological figures, instead of being understood accurately as near-solidified gas clouds in distant space as revealed through newly invented telescopes of increasing complexity and accuracy, and lamenting the invention of telescopes. The English tradition of great works written by mostly white men and a few white women that produced those great works of art Del Banco misses has been submitted to scrutiny by new ways of seeing that make it almost imposssible for informed practicioners of literary study to go back to thinking of them as the cultural equivalent of figures in a horoscope. Moreover the old English Science has generated a host of new sub-fields akin to Organic Chemistry and Quantum Physics. The feminist study of cultural artifacts, which Del Banco singles out as a symptom of the new depravity, is as distant from his own ideal of literary study or from work that I do in the rhetoric of film argument as the new kinds of Physics, many of which can only be conducted in particle accelerators, are from what Newton understood as science. The very fact that in antiquity, Rhetoric was all that anyone needed to learn suggests just how generative the process of pursuing knowledge can be. Rhetoric used to suffice for what now is differentiated and expanded into Law, Sociology, English, Philosophy, and Government. The remarkable differences between those disciplinary undertakings suggests just how rich knowledge can become when it is pursued far enough. The pursuit of knowledge into more differentiated channgels necessarily exceeds the boundaries of what might have constituted legitimate knowledge in the original disciplinary site where the pursuit of knowledge originated. Rhetoric could no longer suffice to describe both Law and Governnment. As societies became more complex, Law had to separate itself out from the practice of persuasive language and provide itself with other tools for formulating social rules, thinking about appropriate models of justice, and the like. Even within Law, a remarkable differentiation and multiplication had to occur, as the general category Law proved incapable of encompassing Contract as well as Civil Procedure, Torts as well as Constitutional Law. What has happend in English Departments across the United States and elsewhere is similar to these transformations in other disciplines over time. The paradigm Del Banco remembers as having had such a pull on his feelings was indeed rarely singular in its dominance of the literary academy. New Critics in the 1950s, Del Banco’s unstated Golden Age, could persuade undergraduates that great works possessed a complexity of structure that distinguished them from lesser works (a point I unfortunately agree with). But the conclusions reached by this approach, while they accurately noted certain characteristic of literature (just as the perception that apples fall from trees because an invisible force draws them down accurately, though in a general and unspecified way, described the world) did not exhaust what might possible be known about literature if the pursuit of knowledge continued on and did not arrest itself at the road blocks the New Criticism erected (such as, do not take seriously fallen works of culture that do not qualify as “great literature”). What happened when the pursuit of knowledge continued on, stepping around the road blocks? First, people discovered that American Literature actually existed (and believe it or not, there actualy are English Departments where to this day the New Critical injunctions are so much in force that American Literature is not included in the English Major). But because the pursuit of knowledge is contagious and nomadic, that itself was not thought to be enough. American Literature spawned American Studies, a rather different undertaking which began to notice that any understanding of America required an investigation of a great many other cultural activities, from newspaper polemics in Philadelphia in the late 18th century to the curious way property rights were formulated in treaties with native inhabitants. Second, as Del Banco rightly notes, the 1960s happened and brought with them a greater sensitivity to writing by people of color and by women. That alone, of course, did not arrent the movement of knowledge; people eventually reached further and found writing by gays and lesbians, and they began to explore the boundaries of literature and found that television, film, music, and the like were places where issues very much like those raised in literature were available for study. That meant thinking about literature in more substantive terms than the New Critics preferred. As formalists, they were interested in technique, structural unity, and the like. Meaning was universal and quasi-religious. But once scholars began looking at literature for what it was about (and that was inevitable once it became clear that writing by African-Americans was about very different “universals” than those found in white writing), then such formal issues, while important, became less interesting (less satisfying of the quest for new knowledge that didn’t simply repeat endlessly already achieved conclusions) than the substantive issues that literature addresses. Indeed, if one were to sum up the changes that have occurred under the rubric of the “New
”
one would have to include, along with differentiation and expansion of the field, the replacement of formal with substantive (social, historical, political) concerns. Lots of literature was always about such things. But the works of art that Del Banco misses as the sole contents of the English curriculum tended to be of a more contemplative kind. The old paradigm of literary study that he misses was made possible by the exclusion and subordination of other kinds of writing, others forms of literature than the contemplative lyric that was the almost exclusive focus of New Critical attention. Perhaps this is why American Literature remains a dangerous other for English Departments still invested in the New Critical approach. Turn to American Literature, and it becomes evident right away that any discussion of great writing in the late 18th century must encompass Franklin’s hilarious, mischievous, polemical journalism. Well-written, yes. Organically organized, perhaps (there are occasional lapses). But also political, and any understanding of them that expands our knowledge in the way literary study should needs take the political situation of the journalism into account. It cannot rest content with a worshipful evaluation of the “work of art.” Franklin was not writing for quiet contemplation and the quiet realization of “longings” that might be similar to undergraduate longings of the kind Del Banco thinks should be at the heart of the English curriculum. He was artisitically writing political satires and polemics designed to change the world he lived in for the better. That also is literature, just as Quantum Physics (while very different from late 18th century science) is also science. Things change. But if we understand what we are all doing as science in the most positive sense of that word as the expansion of knowledge, then the pain of change becomes more bearable. We can understand the New not as a dangerous decline or fall but as a positive progressive expansion of knowlege in the direction of greater differentiation and refinement.
Michael Ryan
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The Fall of English and the Rise of Culture
Andrew Del Banco’s review of recent books regarding the death of traditional literary studies (NYRB, Nov. 4) has deservedly attracted a great deal of attention. Unlike the numerous other predecessors in this particular genre, which might be described as “Debunking the New,” Del Banco’s writing evidences a certain amount of restraint and tries to present itself as a high-minded reflection on the current state of things literary and professional rather than as an exercise in simple anguished vituperation, laced with ignorance and motivated by inter-generational incomprehension and misunderstanding–the usual format for writing of this sort. What is the New that is so lamentable and is bringing down literary studies of a high kind and transforming it into something inappropriate and unsacred? In a word, it is culture, culture understood as a more general field of rhetoric, signification, and meaning, which is material, social, and historical in character. It is in effect a new discipline which, like the English that displaced the Classics and the American Literature that displaced the English Only model of study, has made keeping current in the profession a rather difficult undertaking. That should not be metaphorized as a “fall” but instead understood as an expansion, deepening, and focussing of the work traditionally called criticism. That expansion is akin to what happened to the sciences as they moved from the 18th into the 19th centuries. The absence of experimental techniques meant that science could proceed almost as a gentleman’s profession of guessing, hypothesizing, and perhaps, maybe finding an answer or two that fit how phenomena behaved. With the birth of the experimental approach to scientific work, an enormous deepending and expansion of knowledge occurred. A discipline or field of knowledge that seemed to possess a certain unity and certain firm boundaries suddenly found itself overwhelmed with what to many seemed a splintering and confused proliferation. The study of literature in the academy has undergone a similar evolution. It has moved from being a singular discipline with a common and easily learnable language to a number of different disciplines, just as Science became Chemistry and then Organic Chemistry or Physics and then Quantum Physics, each with its own language. Change happens. And it sometimes means that the old way of thinking and conducting ourselves dies and new ways are born. Del Banco registers the painful experience of those who have trouble accommodating this transformation. He wishes for a renewal of traditional forms of literary study that would focus on “works of art that somehow register one’s own longings.” But that is something like wishing for a world in which the stars stood for mythological figures, instead of being understood accurately as near-solidified gas clouds in distant space as revealed through newly invented telescopes of increasing complexity and accuracy, and lamenting the invention of telescopes. The English tradition of great works written by mostly white men and a few white women that produced those great works of art Del Banco misses has been submitted to scrutiny by new ways of seeing that make it almost imposssible for informed practicioners of literary study to go back to thinking of them as the cultural equivalent of figures in a horoscope. Moreover the old English Science has generated a host of new sub-fields akin to Organic Chemistry and Quantum Physics. The feminist study of cultural artifacts, which Del Banco singles out as a symptom of the new depravity, is as distant from his own ideal of literary study or from work that I do in the rhetoric of film argument as the new kinds of Physics, many of which can only be conducted in particle accelerators, are from what Newton understood as science. The very fact that in antiquity, Rhetoric was all that anyone needed to learn suggests just how generative the process of pursuing knowledge can be. Rhetoric used to suffice for what now is differentiated and expanded into Law, Sociology, English, Philosophy, and Government. The remarkable differences between those disciplinary undertakings suggests just how rich knowledge can become when it is pursued far enough. The pursuit of knowledge into more differentiated channgels necessarily exceeds the boundaries of what might have constituted legitimate knowledge in the original disciplinary site where the pursuit of knowledge originated. Rhetoric could no longer suffice to describe both Law and Governnment. As societies became more complex, Law had to separate itself out from the practice of persuasive language and provide itself with other tools for formulating social rules, thinking about appropriate models of justice, and the like. Even within Law, a remarkable differentiation and multiplication had to occur, as the general category Law proved incapable of encompassing Contract as well as Civil Procedure, Torts as well as Constitutional Law. What has happend in English Departments across the United States and elsewhere is similar to these transformations in other disciplines over time. The paradigm Del Banco remembers as having had such a pull on his feelings was indeed rarely singular in its dominance of the literary academy. New Critics in the 1950s, Del Banco’s unstated Golden Age, could persuade undergraduates that great works possessed a complexity of structure that distinguished them from lesser works (a point I unfortunately agree with). But the conclusions reached by this approach, while they accurately noted certain characteristic of literature (just as the perception that apples fall from trees because an invisible force draws them down accurately, though in a general and unspecified way, described the world) did not exhaust what might possible be known about literature if the pursuit of knowledge continued on and did not arrest itself at the road blocks the New Criticism erected (such as, do not take seriously fallen works of culture that do not qualify as “great literature”). What happened when the pursuit of knowledge continued on, stepping around the road blocks? First, people discovered that American Literature actually existed (and believe it or not, there actualy are English Departments where to this day the New Critical injunctions are so much in force that American Literature is not included in the English Major). But because the pursuit of knowledge is contagious and nomadic, that itself was not thought to be enough. American Literature spawned American Studies, a rather different undertaking which began to notice that any understanding of America required an investigation of a great many other cultural activities, from newspaper polemics in Philadelphia in the late 18th century to the curious way property rights were formulated in treaties with native inhabitants. Second, as Del Banco rightly notes, the 1960s happened and brought with them a greater sensitivity to writing by people of color and by women. That alone, of course, did not arrent the movement of knowledge; people eventually reached further and found writing by gays and lesbians, and they began to explore the boundaries of literature and found that television, film, music, and the like were places where issues very much like those raised in literature were available for study. That meant thinking about literature in more substantive terms than the New Critics preferred. As formalists, they were interested in technique, structural unity, and the like. Meaning was universal and quasi-religious. But once scholars began looking at literature for what it was about (and that was inevitable once it became clear that writing by African-Americans was about very different “universals” than those found in white writing), then such formal issues, while important, became less interesting (less satisfying of the quest for new knowledge that didn’t simply repeat endlessly already achieved conclusions) than the substantive issues that literature addresses. Indeed, if one were to sum up the changes that have occurred under the rubric of the “New
”
one would have to include, along with differentiation and expansion of the field, the replacement of formal with substantive (social, historical, political) concerns. Lots of literature was always about such things. But the works of art that Del Banco misses as the sole contents of the English curriculum tended to be of a more contemplative kind. The old paradigm of literary study that he misses was made possible by the exclusion and subordination of other kinds of writing, others forms of literature than the contemplative lyric that was the almost exclusive focus of New Critical attention. Perhaps this is why American Literature remains a dangerous other for English Departments still invested in the New Critical approach. Turn to American Literature, and it becomes evident right away that any discussion of great writing in the late 18th century must encompass Franklin’s hilarious, mischievous, polemical journalism. Well-written, yes. Organically organized, perhaps (there are occasional lapses). But also political, and any understanding of them that expands our knowledge in the way literary study should needs take the political situation of the journalism into account. It cannot rest content with a worshipful evaluation of the “work of art.” Franklin was not writing for quiet contemplation and the quiet realization of “longings” that might be similar to undergraduate longings of the kind Del Banco thinks should be at the heart of the English curriculum. He was artisitically writing political satires and polemics designed to change the world he lived in for the better. That also is literature, just as Quantum Physics (while very different from late 18th century science) is also science. Things change. But if we understand what we are all doing as science in the most positive sense of that word as the expansion of knowledge, then the pain of change becomes more bearable. We can understand the New not as a dangerous decline or fall but as a positive progressive expansion of knowlege in the direction of greater differentiation and refinement.
Michael Ryan