Literature at the Barricades

Little did we know when we began organizing a workshop in 2009 at Ohio State on the importance of literature that literature would be in the news so frequently. First came the announcement about the crisis of Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies at King's College, London. Then the shocker exploded on our email screens that the president of SUNY Albany was closing French, Italian, Classics, Russian, and Drama. Suddenly we are all threatened. We are all professors in SUNY Albany now. We could at any moment be made redundant.

Of course, some of us here in the United States have tried for years to warn about the vulnerabilities of modern Greek but we were chastised, particularly by colleagues in the United Kingdom, for being alarmist and for projecting a peculiarly American problem upon the world. (On this controversy and what I had termed then as "Ohiolology," see the May 1998 issue of the Journal of Modern Greek Studies to which Vangelis Calotychos refers in his own contribution here.) The situation was different in the United Kingdom and in Europe, we were assured.

How much the terrain has changed since 1998 in the United Kingdom, Europe, and to a certain extent, Australia. How many positions have been terminated with no hope of renewal? From the perspective of February 2011, the United States seems to be the most hospitable place for Modern Greek Studies outside of Greece.

It was with these developments in mind that we brought colleagues to the campus of Ohio State in April of 2010. The two-day workshop, "The Teaching of Modern Greek Literature: What are the Texts in the Class?" considered the place of literature in Modern Greek Studies. (Two of the papers appear here in the special Interventions section.) Although the discussions were wide-ranging, participants seemed to agree that the predicament of Modern Greek Studies extended beyond this particular field.

All universities will be facing financial constraints in the foreseeable future. The most vulnerable programs in the arts and humanities, and particularly those European languages that are less-frequently taught or no longer considered strategic, will feel the effects of these cuts. It is not reasonable to ask whether fifteen people can be retained to teach German while another fifteen must cover every language and literature from Afghanistan to China. We have obviously and painfully reached the point where universities can dispense with entire programs and departments in certain European literatures.

To a certain extent we have been caught off guard by these events. Preoccupied by the struggles over theory, we have not paid sufficient attention to the importance of what we do. Why is literature significant? Why should it be taught? What reasons can we provide our students to take our classes, rather than sign up for psychology, political science, or English? The days are long gone when we can breezily inform the world that there is something dignified and self-evident in teaching Dante, Tolstoy, Proust, and Solomos. These traditional arguments no longer hold sway, even in Europe.

But there is a deeper crisis in literature itself. As I have tried to argue recently in Fiction Agonistes. In Defense of Literature, we have not provided an adequate justification for literature or art in general. This is not because, as some may still insist, theory has blinded us or that it killed literature. Rather, we as a society share a deep ambivalence about literature itself.

Consider the wild success last year of David Shield's Reality Hunger. A Manifesto that questioned the capacity of fiction to portray history (2010). We are obsessed with reality, Shields argues, reality television, autobiography, biography, and have little time for fictional representations. We reach for the memoir to make sense of traumatic political events, rather than, say, the novel.

You don't have to accept Shields's apocalyptic argument, however, to realize that literature as an institution no longer enjoys the cultural prestige in the West that it once did. We live in a time when you can't expect your colleagues, let alone your students, to read literature as regularly as they did fifty years ago. Of course...