The Debate with Method in the History of Literary Studies

Drawing on a number of histories of literary studies from the United States, Britain, and France, this article reexamines the debates on the institutional self-definition of the subject. The ideals associated with research and scholarship, it is argued (following an analysis proposed by Hans Blumenberg), have their historical origin in the concept of method introduced by Descartes, and subsequently central to the natural and the social sciences. This ideal is here argued to represent an unacknowledged line of continuity between the philologists and historical scholars with whom academic literary studies began, the New Critics, and contemporary theoretical modes of literary studies. This article points to the dissidence to this model which appears in each of the national traditions of literary studies. This dissidence, it is argued, has its foundation and its legitimation in the distinction between the subject of reading (and criticism) and the subject of method. While this distinction was made as an objection to the research model, it could not have been articulated prior to the establishment of literary studies as a field of academic research; in this sense, it can be said to be the question that the field itself has posed, and ought to be integrated into its self-understanding.