Literary Studies and Literary Experience

A crisis of literature?

We live in an era that loves to lament, and countless texts repeat the same refrain: a death notice for literature, condemned to decline in a world which, we are told, is becoming more and more hostile to culture in general and to literature in particular.¹ If we are being honest, the complaint is not unique to our time: it has long been an obligatory gesture in the humanities. This is certainly not enough to disqualify such a complaint. What does disqualify it, however, is that it is false.

Perhaps it is banal to observe that the future of literature is not threatened. Never in the history of humanity have people read as much as they do today. The first reason for this is that never before has so large a proportion of humanity known how to read and write. This is especially true in "developed" countries. Although a few pockets of illiteracy exist in our societies and there are a few localized eruptions of ignorance, we should not forget that today's literacy rate is far superior to what it was at the end of the nineteenth century. This is even more true at the global level: since the middle of the twentieth century access to writing has grown exponentially in all regions of the world. The current expansion of the internet is part of this progression. It is at once an effect and a cause: an effect because mastering the use of online information presupposes that one can read and write; a cause inasmuch as technical access to the internet is itself a catalyst for learning to read and write. Thus, if reading and writing do not have the same place in cultural life that they did a few generations ago, this does not mean that they have a lesser place. Their places have simply changed.

However, those who bemoan the decline of literary culture—and in the same breath, sometimes, decline of culture in general—do not necessarily deny the existence of a global rise in the practice of reading and writing. Rather, they maintain that this development, "driven" by technology and "massification," far from benefitting literature, abandons it. That the new readers, according to this vision, do not read "real" but ersatz literature is but one of the signs of the generalized lack of education that characterizes contemporary societies. Instead of Joyce or Musil, they read superficial and stereotypical best sellers. Instead of reading and learning by heart the verses of Walt Whitman or Mallarmé, they listen to and learn by heart the songs that stream out of the radio and the television.

It is, alas, undeniable that every society is threatened by ignorance. But a good deal of bad faith is needed to claim that ignorance is encouraged by the political and social democracy in which the populations of certain societies, among them Europeans and Americans, happen to live. Comparison with the experience of totalitarian or even "merely" authoritarian regimes should encourage us to refrain from such assertions. It is true, however, that the democratizing dynamic that has characterized our societies since the nineteenth century has ceaselessly reconfigured the relationship between high culture and vernacular culture. Over time, the two have become so permeable in both directions that any such distinction becomes useless, if it were not already, to describe the relevant practices when we ask not only about the modalities of cultural transmission, but also their creation.

From "Literature" to the crisis in literary studies

The supposed crisis of literature hides another crisis that is quite real: that of literary studies. It is in fact a triple crisis, affecting at once the transmission of literary values, the cognitive study of literary phenomena, and the training of students in literature. Where does it come from? I hypothesize that this crisis results from our tendency to reduce "literary culture" to one of its established representations, namely "Literature"— precisely that which is said to be in crisis. This vision of the literary was established by the separatist educational model of the nineteenth century and it continues...