Literary Theory

Series 2: Handout #12

”What you don’t know hurts me.”

Orpheus Bruno, "The Importance of Being Portly": One of the most obvious and affectionate caricatures: none other than the Falstaffian Harold Bloom, Yale eminence, esteemed back in the early 70s for his notion of “The Anxiety of Influence” (i.e., that authors engage in an oedipal struggle against their literary forebears—Melville wanted to be the American Shakespeare, etc.). The Yale School that Bloom headed was big in its day; Bloom later mentored Camille Paglia, the famous academic gadfly. Bloom is now best known as a public intellectual, explaining the aesthetically great works of literature to the general public in bestsellers like The Western Canon (1994), an attack on what he calls “The School of Resentment,” and How to Read a Book and Why (2001). See his major point on page 68. He is beloved by undergraduates at Yale—packed classes—but he is shunned as career poison by graduate students and ambitious academics (“Banish plump Jack and banish all the world.”). His popular books have made him as rich as Croesus.

“Literature is delightful”

Marjorie Perloff, “Crisis in the Humanities? Reconfiguring Literary Studies for the Twenty First Century”: The humanities are in trouble, but, perhaps, it’s not clear what the humanities include, except to say that they are “soft,” that is, they have no practical value. The humanities have lost their “symbolic capital” because they have become so diffuse that they can include everything and have no real identity—unless it is a tendency to endorse left-wing political issues. We have no way of ascertaining merit, either. Maybe the solution is to get back to the basics, namely, formalist criticism, regarding literature, once again, as something that transcends—through artistry and the fictive— the mere particulars of an historical period, like an ephemeral newspaper. What is the point of studying literature for political purposes when one could much more effectively study other things that are much more directly related to power: economics, management, politics, and so on? If it’s all about power, why not forget literature and become a lawyer or at least a social scientist? Meanwhile, areas that literature could serve, such as providing aesthetic appreciate for a larger audience (via the Internet) is being ceded to amateurs. Bottom line: we have failed to articulate a vision of why it is important to read literature, and, as a result, we do not read literature anyway; we read theory without ever reading the works the theory is meant to theorize. (Why, for example, do we have such a hard time finding a literary work that we all know—that was not the case 30 years ago?) Finally, the purpose of literature is not usefulness but . . . delight, and that brings us full circle, back to Arnoldian aestheticism.

“Let’s get back to basics.”

Robert Scholes, “Presidential Address 2004: The Humanities in a Posthumanist World”: Maybe the decline of the humanities is a rhetoric that has always been with us, like the lamentations of generational decline: “those disrespectful whippersnappers!” Maybe the humanities are defined by a sense of being on the heroic defensive against other fields of unjust power (as Bourdieu would put it). That’s our collective move, for all time, however we argue about the particulars (see what N. Mack Hobbs has to say next time). But, what if the humanities don’t humanize people at all—the Nazis were humanists too? Unfortunately, we cannot return to a naïve, optimistic, Arnoldian vision of literature as “the best that has been thought and said.” The humanities, we cannot assume, will make people virtuous. Moreover, the humanities cannot be made “rigorous” like the sciences, without capitulating to the technobureaucratic institutions we claim to oppose. So, how can we resist the twin poles of pragmatic relativism and intolerant fundamentalism? We can’t become precious belletrists; we must engage with the political texts of our time. We must address beauty but also develop interpretive tools for use in the real world of power. Theory failed because it lost touch with the world (732)—but what a tangled, contingent, cautious, indictment. Scholes final recommendation, similar to Perloff’s, is a return to the prehumanistic trivium: attention to grammar, logic, and rhetoric, and a return to humanism, meaning a generalist outlook instead of narrow specialization. Essentially, we should return to the tradition model and methods of the kind of liberal-arts education in which Hope College, among others, specializes.