American Studies in an Age of Globalization

I

There seems to be an increasing gap between the traditional concept of the university as a place of independent intellectual pursuit and the demand that it respond more adequately and more immediately to the needs of its social, economic, and technological environment. ¹ It is most of all the structural unwieldiness of our universities that has called their usefulness into doubt. Might not the much-needed chemists, engineers, and computer specialists be educated faster and more efficiently elsewhere? Should not these clumsy institutions of public education function at least as efficiently as a business enterprise, since they seem to be exposed to the same forces that presently accelerate the restructuring of economic, financial, or political formations on a global scale? In Europe, where the universities are caught between nineteenth-century ideals and the realities of the twenty-first century, and where nationally divergent university traditions are under pressure to develop transnational (that is, European) structures, the American university appears to offer the only convenient model for implementing this otherwise hopeless project. In his book, The University in Ruins, William Reading has, with some irony, called this model "the university of 'excellence.'" Such a university, he argues, will become the locus of a predominantly technological training and will not be in the service of the nation any longer but in that of transnational corporations.

Whether this will indeed be the future of European academia may be doubted: the inflexibility of its long-existing structures would seem to speak against it. But one can well see why; in an academic context changing along these lines, the humanities—and especially literary studies—have been steadily de-emphasized since they come under increasing pressure to prove their usefulness. "What good is literary study now in this new university without idea?" J. Hillis Miller publicly moaned not too long ago. "Can literary study still be defended as a socially useful part of college and university research and teaching, or is it just a vestigial remnant that will vanish as other media become more and more dominant in the new global society that is rapidly taking shape?" This loss of confidence in the legitimacy of literary study may well have contributed to what Miller calls "the self-destruction of the traditional literature departments as they shift to cultural studies" since it invited university bureaucracies to "gradually cut off the money in the name of financial stringency." ² Another aspect of the fundamental changes (and very likely connected to them) is the radical questioning of the field's national foundation and the pressure to redefine English literature in global terms. "Departments of English like my own," Giles Gunn wrote in his introduction to PMLA's special number on "Globalizing Literary Studies," "have routinely redefined their responsibility as all the literatures written in English, forcing themselves to teach the writing of regions from Southeast Asia to Sub-Saharan Africa, from Canada to the Caribbean." ³

If this is the effect of globalization, then—at least in the eyes of some—it spells disaster for the traditional concept of the discipline as well as for its institutional organization. However, for others, like Stephen Greenblatt, the prospect of such reinvention and reorganization in the sign of the global is less depressing and, in addition to being an intellectual challenge, also evidence of the vitality of the field, of its ability to map new areas of research, generate new questions, and stimulate new interests and intellectual energies in a younger generation of scholars. "We can always imagine alternative ways of practicing our profession; indeed, we are continually called on to explore such alternatives," write Stephen Greenblatt and Giles Gunn in Redrawing the Boundaries. "The very concept of the literary is itself continually renegotiated," and "continual refashioning is at the center of the profession of literary study: it is both a characteristic of the texts we study and a crucial means to keep those texts and our own critical practices from...