What is Literature?: A Response to Richard Terry

I am concerned only with the category or ‘space’ of literature, and I maintain that one can speak of this space in isolation from any theory that might purport to define its nature.

— Richard Terry ¹

Fields of cultural production propose to those who are involved in them a space of possibles that tends to orient their research, even without their knowing it, by defining the universe of problems, references, intellectual benchmarks...in short, all that one must have in the back of one’s mind in order to be in the game.

— Pierre Bourdieu ²

Professor Terry’s history represents several problems for me. I do not believe that the “nature” of literature exists in a space beyond theory, but rather that literature is socially constructed by institutions and the critical apparatus that is generated through them. Professor Terry seeks to refute not only the view that literature was “invented” in the eighteenth century but also the broader tendency to conceive of canonization as an institutional process concerned with the reproduction of cultural authority. His history of the poetic canon that was established in the previous centuries follows Trevor Ross’ “Just When Did ‘British bards begin t’Immortalize’?” ³ including Ross’ use of Poets’ Corner to demonstrate that a shared conception of English literature had been enshrined before the eighteenth century. Professor Terry has provided references to Ross and to those such as Wellek, Williams, Eagleton, Kernan, and Patey who have maintained that the modern conception of literature dates from the eighteenth century. Readers can easily turn to those sources to examine the historical evidence, which is far more broadly interesting than the history of the word “literature.” Thus I will respond by examining what seems to be at stake in arguments over the historical authority of institutionalized conceptions of literature.

Professor Terry claims that his opponents’ assumptions are “so badly flawed that no argument resting on them should command authority” (p. 86), but I do not feel compelled by his history. His attempt to distinguish the history of words from the history of ideas depends on a reductionist reading of historians such as Raymond Williams, who are dismissed as laboring “in the lexical dark” (p. 82). Professor Terry states that his intention is to free the history of the canon from “larger cultural phenomena” (p. 80). Such elliptical references are a rather indirect way to repeat the criticism of Williams’ cultural materialism that Professor Terry included in the companion essay cited above. Professor Terry accuses such historians of “professional hubris” (p. 90) for maintaining that canons are deployed as a means of cultural reproduction in schools, but he seems to me to be more concerned with the cultural politics than the professional ethics of his opponents. In opposition to those who have foregrounded the political purposes of modern conceptions of literature, Professor Terry represents the entombment of English literature within the Church of England as “simply” part of “a native literary heritage” (p. 94); but aren’t such national monuments a form of “canon-making as a discourse of power” (p. 98) of the same sort as the teaching of English literature in Scottish universities?

Professor Terry dismisses the introduction of English (or rather British) literature into the university curriculum in Scotland by arguing that the canon that was institutionalized there “ultimately failed the test of time” (p. 93) because it was concerned with such values as clarity and correctness rather than beauty as an end in itself. Here as elsewhere, Professor Terry deploys the disinterested authority of history to defend the English canon as “a native literary heritage” (p. 93). While acknowledging that the “modern literary canon” does not stand above politics, impervious to the sort of utilitarianism that shaped the teaching of British literature in Scotland, Professor Terry is careful not to state what purposes his sense of the canon serves, nor how it might be related to what gets taught in literature courses. Then as now, criticizing and teaching English literature generally seem to be very different sorts of activities, for few professors of literature use their work in the classroom...