Literary Culture in a World Transformed: A Future for the Humanities (review)

Literary Culture in a World Transformed is a heartfelt, well-meaning, and profoundly confused book. Though William Paulson wants desperately to define a mission for the humanities and to preserve literary culture from all that encroaches upon it, the terms in which he sets forth the task wind up undermining the task at almost every turn.

Almost every turn: for along the way, Paulson delivers a bracing and judicious critique of the guild mentality in the academic humanities, in which hyperspecialists write chiefly for each other in an extremely restricted field of cultural production. (One wonders whether, despite Paulson's general antipathy to the Internet, he would approve of the profusion of web logs created by younger humanities scholars over the past few years.) And who in his or her right mind would want to take issue with Paulson's desire to find a salient role for the humanities in the face of genomics, global ecological devastation, and the instrumentalization of higher education? Though there are severe problems with this book, they are not problems of the spirit; they are, paradoxically enough, problems with the way Paulson conceives of letters.

The minor problem, under that heading, is that Paulson follows a Bourdieuian account of literary history in which art's increasing autonomy from church and state, from the eighteenth century forward, leads to the dead-end of aestheticism. On the one hand, Paulson writes, "a commitment to creative freedom, to cultural specificity and dignity, and to artistic autonomy, though often contested and imperfectly realized, has remained among the most distinctive and positive features of literary culture over the past two centuries" (42). On the other hand, as he charges a few pages earlier,

A crucial consequence of the ideal of autonomy (and of attempts to practice it) in literary culture has been a long history of disengagement from such matters as politics, governance, economics, and technology. This disdain for involvement with the undistinguished business of the nonliterary world, no less than a sense of the aesthetic distinctiveness of the literary field, has shaped the critical stance of modern literary culture vis-à-vis society. . . . In nineteenth-century Europe, however, once the context of literary culture was a partially democratic and heavily commercial society, once the writer's or thinker's despised Other was no longer the noble or the churchman who disdained the material world, but the bourgeois who made it his business, literary and intellectual critique became gradually more distanced from the world of commerce and things, at least in the culturally and economically dominant nations of Western Europe. With a sense of aesthetic specificity and distinction came a distaste for involvement with much of the everyday world.

(34)

This may be true of Huysmans or Mallarmé; it may be true of the entire branch of modern literary history that ends in aesthetes and avant-gardists. It may even be true as a gloss on the history Thomas Mann chronicles in Buddenbrooks. But it is hardly true of Balzac and Zola, to say nothing of George Eliot, Thackeray, Trollope, and Dickens, all of whom were writing in some of the culturally and economically dominant nations of Western Europe. And it is hardly true, as Paulson notes a few pages later, of contemporary literary culture, in which "today's community of writers has little of an autonomous community about it, and even less of an avant-garde," and "the distinction between serious literature and works for the mass market grows ever shakier, and from Gabriel García Márquez to Marguerite Duras to Don DeLillo, writers esteemed by their peers seem to be the first to benefit" (42).

It turns out, then, that Paulson's account of the dark side of artistic autonomy is meant to serve as a gloss not on contemporary literary culture but on the cloistered nature of contemporary literature departments in American universities. "Where once one might have fulminated against some subversive vanguard of writers and artists...