Making Space for Literature

Why Does Literature Matter? By Frank B. Farrell. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004.

As a newer member of the profession, I have been struck by the diminishing role of literature in the field of English. Literature seems to have been supplanted, for numerous compelling reasons, from its privileged place at the center of the English studies. Literary study has tended to become cultural studies, and literary theory, critical theory. Required reading in many graduate courses tends to include fewer works of fiction, poetry, and drama than works of philosophy, psychology, and sociology. When literary texts are studied in postsecondary settings recently, more often than not it seems that they serve as instances of the workings of cultures or as illustrations of the operations of theory.

Because of my interest in this phenomenon, I found Frank Farrell's Why Does Literature Matter? intriguing from its very first sentence. Farrell begins his book with this observation: "To read widely in academic literary criticism of recent decades (that written from 1970 to 2000) is to wonder why literature matters at all" (1). Farrell goes on to describe the roles that literature is given in the field and what results from them:

The literary text appears as one more site, no more privileged than others, where cultural codes linked with issues of power reveal themselves; or it is a site where language seems an impersonal machinery generating meanings on its own, in a manner that confounds the human writer's attempts to speak about the world or to express intentional states. The result of either of these conceptions is that the arrangements of the literary text itself, the precise way the author has placed particular words in a particular order, seem to lose their importance. Authority passes to the critic, who is able to read the hidden cultural codes or will set the textual machinery in motion to generate effects that have little to do with the context of production or the work's specific arrangements.

(1)

Farrell is certainly not the first to claim that the roles given literary texts in academic settings of late tend to diminish the importance of literature, nor is he the first to call for a reversal of this trend. What sets Farrell's book apart from other expressions of concern over the recent direction of literary study is the way in which Farrell responds to this trend. A brief look at some other treatments of the marginalization of literary texts in academic study will provide a context for my evaluation of the significance of Farrell's contribution.

One of those who have written about the role of literature in academic English studies of the last few decades is Robert Scholes. In his book The Rise and Fall of English, Scholes (1998: 13) considers the removal of literary texts from the privileged center of English studies to be an inevitable necessity if the field is to regain its relevance in our market-driven society, admitting that this change comes with a sense of loss for him. Others hold a more optimistic view. Marjorie Perloff (2004: 17) acknowledges what may be considered a "crisis in the humanities" but claims that training in the skills of reading literary texts "will come back into favor for the simple reason that, try as one may, one cannot eliminate the sheer jouissance or pleasure of the text." Yet others have responded to the diminished role of literature with concern sufficient enough to produce a new professional organization, the now eleven-year-old Association of Literary Scholars and Critics (ALSC), established expressly to restore literary texts to the place of primacy which they no longer seem to hold in their typical treatment in the Modern Language Association. A recent ALSC publication argued that the importance of "defending literary values on campus needs no justification by outcomes" because "our literary inheritance is a value in itself, and the humanities professor has a responsibility to it" (Bauerlein 2005: 7).

But is it enough to appeal...