Two Cheers for Aesthetic Autonomy

Ernst ist das Leben, heiter ist die Kunst.
(Life is earnest, art is light-hearted.)

—Friedrich Schiller, prologue to Wallenstein

Perhaps nothing expresses the state of professional disorientation in literary studies more than the appearance in the PMLA of a forum on the significance of literature. Tellingly titled "Why Major in Literature—What Do We Tell Our Students?" it hung out for all to acknowledge a row of dirty linen: waning enrollments of literature majors, declining interest in literature within and outside the academy, loss of authority to cultural studies and pop culture. Most revealing was the public admission of professional self-doubt, namely, that professors of literature are uncertain what to advise students. That the question had to be posed at all, noted Carlos J. Alonso, the editor of the PMLA, "reflects a state of affairs removed from business as usual" (401).¹

It is significant that such a crisis of confidence could follow thirty years of theory, during which time critics turned their attention to a host of hitherto neglected issues. Having investigated every conceivable topic, how is it possible that critics are so indecisive about their object of study? Why do they have difficulty in justifying literature to their students, the outside world, themselves? Why are they so defensive about the aesthetic? Why are they uneasy talking about the pleasure of aesthetic contemplation? Are mathematicians, engineers, biologists, or lawyers uncertain about the value of what they teach? Is this reticence related to an anxiety felt by American intellectuals that, although they live in a society worshiping work, they reflect on play and ornamentation? Does this explain the ever-present need to politicize art and intellectual work?

The lack of disciplinary confidence among professors of literature has much to say both about the current state of literary studies and the position of the arts in society. Although a manifestation of the chiliastic crisis mode in the humanities, this self-doubt has serious implications for the teaching of literature and the profession itself. Since we have not articulated an ethics for literary study relevant for today's students, how can we justify support to the humanities or literary study in particular to the university president or the state governor, themselves skeptical about the value of literature in comparison to utilitarian disciplines?² If we consider the aesthetic an oppressive category, how can we fight measures to terminate funding for the arts in elementary schools? If we believe art has no special value, what arguments can we muster against politicians who attack galleries for displaying controversial works? It is ironic that critics who have disparaged aesthetic disinterestedness in literary criticism are uninterested in questions so vital to their profession.

Lurking beneath this crisis is an anti-aesthetic stance adopted by many critics today. The position extends beyond the familiar grumble that "only undergraduates are allowed aesthetic enthusiasm for, say, Shakespeare, Milton, Emerson" (Levine, 3). For a significant number of scholars "the recent theoretical revolution has made the term 'aesthetic' and the cluster of ideas it contains outmoded and irrelevant" (Elliott, Caton, and Rhyme, 9). Winfried Fluck refers to the dismissal of aesthetic concerns today as commonplace in literary and cultural studies (79–80). Those who speak about the literariness of texts or their aesthetic function, Heinz Ickstadt argues, often arouse suspicion and appear reactionary (263). For decades, Elaine Scarry complains, people have "either actively advocated a taboo on beauty or passively omitted it from their vocabulary" (117). It is fair to speak of an anti-aesthetic among writers on the Left, a position that Isobel Armstrong insists has effectively abandoned this realm of human experience to conservative thinkers (5).

Often writers demote beauty by elevating the status of the sublime. In her examination of the rejection of beauty in twentieth-century art, Wendy Steiner finds that modernist artists and critics associated beauty with a feminine mode of thinking and the sublime with a masculine Weltanschauung. By treating beauty and the sublime as poles in a binary opposition, they were able to denounce beauty as charm and ornament while associating the sublime with reason, austerity, and depth...