Editor's Introduction

Editor's Introduction Jeffrey Williams Of late, there's been a trend of prominent and sometimes aggressive professions of love for literature and testimonies to its inspirational power. Richard Rorty, at this past year's MLA in Chicago, gave a paper on the dangers of the technical knowingness of cultural studies and called for a return to our imbibing the unmediated inspirational power of literature, that ought to sweep you away like a love affair. Marshall Brown, on an official Literary Criticism Division panel, likewise targeted the dangers of cultural studies and called for a return to a literary criticism that focuses on style, the ineffable signature that bears personality and opens to the pleasure of literature. And the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics, founded in the early 1990s, bemoans the theoretical turn of the past thirty years and likewise prays for a return to the hallowed object of literature. The ruination of literary studies, in their view, has been its overall theoretical hijacking. As a recent ALSC Newsletter puts it, '*the study of literature was metamorphosing into a morally compromised degraded branch of politics and the social sciences," and suggests one dispense with Foucault et al., to return to the works "she loved as a graduate student: Stendhal and Balzac, George Eliot and Dickens...." It would be easy to dismiss all of this as right backlash, given the political climate, coded in the form of nostalgia for an imaginary golden age. (To wax literary for a moment, it's almost like a Jane Austen or Henry Fielding novel, in which the heroine makes a bad marriage, or she's carried off by blackguards and despoilers. Virtuous, feminine, ineffable literature has been deflowered!) As some dismiss the recent turn to autobiographical criticism as the expression of mid-life crisis, one could dismiss this trend as the last gasp of near-retirees, who came into the profession (if one might even call it the same profession) under entirely different conditions (when men were men and literature was literature), and who seek to recover the old, true faith. However, I don't think it's quite that simple—it's notjust a matter of old-age stubbornness that a newjack journal can scoff at—but signals precisely those conditions of the institution of literature that have vastly changed and in fact do threaten the previous dispensation of the thing called literature. On a professionalist read, this trend reveals a crisis narrative of legitimation; these professions and pronouncements take the form of jeremiad, to castigate the congregation in order to reconfirm its faith and sense of mission. In the threat to the actually existing institution of literature, very materially in the present embattlement of public higher education under the auspices of the evisceration of the liberal state and its assumption of public entitlement, they provide a renewed professional rationale. From where I'm sitting, though, this reaction to current conditions of literary study performs a 6 the minnesota review wholesale denial; it ignores actual threats to the institution of literature , to jobs, teaching lines, course loads, student loans, ad infinitum, and recoups an ivory tower of relaxed reading and enjoyment. Bluntly, it circles the wagons to retain the aura of privilege in a troubled time— at least for those who are fortunate enough to have secure jobs in the current sorting out of academic employment. Not to put too fine a point on it, the problem is not what people are doing in literary studies , but the sheer economic and ideological evisceration of university study as a public franchise. This series of the minnesota review on "The Institution of Literature"—and especially this issue explicitly addressing "Institutional Questions"—constitutes an attempt to foreground those conditions of literary studies that in a very real sense inflect if not determine our work. To that end, this issue takes up questions of disciplinarity , professional organization, the job market, the position of graduate students, unionization, the political vista of university work, actual access to higher education, the reconfiguration of universities and the general corporate conscription of education. The insistence of these conditions no doubt brings us a long way from literature, or from its abstracted appreciation...