Profession’s Progress; or, The Ways We Are

Where do we find ourselves? Not exactly on a stair, whether Langston Hughes’s “crystal,” Theodore Roethke’s “winding,” or Led Zeppelin’s “to heaven.” Urged to a story of disciplinary progress by the privileged model of scientific research in the universities where we work, and to one of political progress by our own privileged status and instrumental aspirations in the unjust world where we live, we nonetheless cannot chart a linear or a singularly purposeful course.

So this collection of reviews of “New Books from the Last 20 Years” implies in its conception and confirms in the selections and testimony of its contributors. That important books from the last 20 years may be “new” to us concedes that they have not adequately informed our professional practice or self-understanding heretofore, or contends that our project’s shifting conditions, values, and needs have cast these books into fresh relief and demand. Neither case bespeaks an integrated or directional disciplinary narrative. Nor do the collected accounts of the 20 scholars represented herein, who argue that our “central preoccupation . . . [is] the propagation of moral criticism at the explicit expense of dispassionate analysis” (Esteve) and that “the current climate [is] of a ‘new formalism’ in literary studies” (Lye); that the “call to examine the continuing present has largely been ignored” (Castronovo) and that close examination of the past is too often sacrificed to “the needs and desires of our own contemporary moment” (Levine); that “national exceptionalism and literary nationalism [have yielded] to literary origins stories that reach across rather than reinforce national divides” (Levander) and that “an unthinking resort to the nation [remains] the organizing principle for both our scholarship and our teaching” (Claybaugh); that we must break the “pattern of over-investing in political projects on the cultural side” in favor of “politics writ large” (Haralson) and “shift away from close reading” and its “preoccupation with the intangibles of individual consciousness” in favor of “deeper and more sociological attention to the institutions of spokespersonship” (Irr), and that we must reassert and defend “the frontiers of an interior world” (Anderson), be schooled by the reading practices of nineteenth-century lovers of poetry (Burt), recover literature as resource not just as symptom (Pfister), and make the “anthropological [and political] case for the importance of aesthetic experience” (Thomas).

Having agreed to comment on the proceedings of this special issue in part as a way to regain my bearings in the field after a decade spent mainly creating forums for intellectual exchange among multi-disciplinary and non-academic constituencies, I confess that my colleagues’ dissensus over first principles, present opportunities and dangers, and appropriate methods and horizons gave me more comfort than distress. For one thing, it seemed in keeping with my characterization of literary studies in a recent session of a year-long seminar on “The Human and its Others,” attended by faculty fellows from various humanities, fine arts, and social science departments, including a few—like Environmental Studies and Communication and Speech Disorders—that spilled over into the natural sciences. I had demurred from the general enthusiasm for a historian’s essay on how discourses and practices of animal husbandry and display in Victorian England buttressed and naturalized class hierarchies on the grounds that, though elegant, the piece only confirmed, rather than interestingly complicated, a familiar analysis. A psychologist in the group, a prominent researcher in the fields of human and animal personality, said, “Wait a minute. In your discipline, is complication a good thing or a bad thing?,” to which I replied glibly, “It’s the defining thing.” Not every contributor to this issue will agree, of course, nor do I in every mood, but let it stand provisionally as a heuristic, an aid to reflection on the tangle of disciplinary commitments and assessments here in evidence.

Had I realized when I made the remark that I was channeling Richard Poirier, I might have amended “defining” to “venerable.” The essay “Venerable Complications: Literature, Technology, People” stands at the center of The Renewal of Literature: Emersonian Reflections, which appeared in paperback exactly 20 years ago. Its summary definition of “literature...