What is the Value of Literary Studies?

I. Two Paradigms of Literary Study

What is the value of involvement with literature? The twentieth century has given a scientific answer to this question: because it is there. I call the world view underpinning this answer the "knowledge" paradigm. The nineteenth century, by and large, gave a moralistic answer: because it makes us better people. The view at the base of this answer I call the "wisdom" paradigm. Most of the problems facing our conceptualization of literary studies in the West today come from the fact that we are only slowly becoming aware of the disadvantages of the "knowledge paradigm" but do not wish to return to the discarded "wisdom" paradigm, whose disadvantages are clearer. This leads to a reliance on an unacknowledged patchwork combination of both, and so to theoretical confusion.

Literary studies in twentieth century America, as we learn from Gerald Graff's illuminating Professing Literature, were different from literary studies in the nineteenth century. ¹ Graff sketches an involvement with literature that began with a focus on texts in Greek and Latin, largely from a linguistic point of view; was subsequently subject to German influence in the form of an influx of philological studies; and then in the twentieth century began to resemble the "field-coverage" professionalism with which we are familiar today, with its organization into the units of epochs, individual writers, or approaches to literature.

The wisdom and knowledge paradigms for literary studies are found in purer form in, respectively, religion and natural science; literary studies, it appears, took over the knowledge paradigm from natural science as this displaced religion as an object of general intellectual respect in the late nineteenth century. (In using the seemingly Kuhnian word "paradigms" to refer to patterns of thought, I nevertheless presuppose that these patterns are consciously introduced by the people using them to solve certain problems. "Paradigms" in this sense are thus not quite the same as those of which Kuhn speaks in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, where they are considerably less amenable to conscious manipulation by those who adhere to them.) ²

This easy dichotomy of two paradigms, two centuries, is meant only to serve as a heuristic tool. And certainly the wisdom paradigm continued to hold sway in many areas in the twentieth century, a fact which I consider subsequently. Still, blurring our eyes a bit to render the minor blips on the seismograph invisible, we may perceive literary studies as a unified whole; what unifies the professional study of literature nowadays is an implicit belief in an external world of texts that is approached from without by the professor, whose role is conceived of as analogous to that of a researcher in the natural sciences. The relation between researcher and literature is that of objective involvement: we may "specialize in" Hölderlin or Saul Bellow, but we are still involved in the same enterprise as our colleague down the hall who "works on" Beowulf or Phyllis Wheatley.

Nineteenth-century literary studies were defined by a relationship with texts that was teleological rather than objective in this twentieth-century fashion. Both the group of texts considered and the nature of the involvement were consciously defined, and the exclusion of those texts not studied was part of the content of the enterprise. The literary world, the manifold of study, was, therefore, constant, in addition to being limited in scope--at first to texts in Greek and Latin, later expanding to works in the vernacular, and only gradually to contemporary ones. At the same time, texts were seen as mines of moral lessons, with the lessons known beforehand: the only question left was, Where would these be found?

The wisdom paradigm, therefore, is frankly and overtly reductive. It limits its field to certain texts, or certain kinds of texts, and in the case of many of those it is willing to consider, it "sees through" the text to something underneath which must everywhere be...