The Post-Literature World: A Note on the Future of Literature in the Neoliberal University

Many are worried about the future of literature. It is a nagging worry that only seems to worsen over time. This worry comes not from those who can't tell the difference between Dante and Dostoevsky. For them, literature is neither an object of affection nor a window to the world. It is a door within the house of knowledge that they cannot bring themselves to open. Rather, the worry mainly comes from those most familiar with literature. For scholars and admirers of literature who have explored its long history dating back thirty-three centuries to the Gilgamesh epic. For them, a most fatal concern has arisen of late: the real possibility of the emergence of a post-literature era.

The worry is not that there will be some massive fire like the one in Alexandria where vast amounts of literature are lost forever. Future generations will have even greater access to the literature of the world that has been passed down through the millennia. Nor is the worry that there will not be a coterie of scholars who will continue to study it for many years to come. Even the most ardent proponents of a decreased role for literature in the university do not believe that its study will or should disappear entirely. Rather, the worry is that what will happen to the study of literature is what happened to the study of Greek and Latin in the academy. Whereas a century ago, the study of classical languages was the mark of an educated person and a sign of a complete university education, today it is regarded as a non-essential, educational "luxury" item.

Just as the study of Greek and Latin in the twentieth century was an expiring holdover from the nineteenth century, the study of literature might be viewed in the twenty-first century as an expiring holdover from the twentieth century. Whether it is because literature is linked to an outmoded technology or because there is less sustained reading attention or whatever, there is a strong feeling that literature is being traded out today for something different. We might disagree about the specifics of these trades, but the fact that they are being made with increasing frequency seems obvious to most scholars and admirers of literature.

While some contend that declining interest in the book compared to other technologies of communication such as television, film, and the Internet is linked to the declining future of literature (Coover 2018), there are others who lay the blame entirely within the academy. These folks believe that fifty or so years ago the academy began the process of trading literature for theory. Supposedly, there was a time before the linguistic turn when professors and students studied literature, not the structure of language. The legacies of structuralism and poststructuralism brought about a turning away from literature, and replaced it with literary and cultural theory.¹

Last gasp efforts to purge theory from the university and recuperate literature in its wake such as postcritique and surface reading only serve to exacerbate our worries about literature lost rather than quell them.² Moreover, finding a new theory to recuperate literature in the academy after it has been effectively marginalized leads some to wrongly assume that theory was the principle cause of the declining value of literature in the academy—and not something else.

It is highly unlikely that "the hermeneutics of suspicion"³ led students to not want to study literature for nine out ten don't even know what it is. Students learn about theory through the study of literature, and learn about literature through the study of theory. If anything, theory kept literature in the university on life-support for longer than it would have been without it. Rather, academics began the process of trading literature when the university aimed to become a vocational training center.⁴ What we traded literature for were all of those other areas of study that allegedly make students better prepared for their vocation and the workforce. Business majors had no business studying...