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  • Does the Study of English Matter?Fiction and Customary Knowledge
  • Catherine Belsey (bio)

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Over time, we in English departments have resigned ourselves to prophecies of doom. Our discipline is said to be in terminal decline, and civilization with it. Usually, it is our own fault: the value of our work, so the story has gone, is threatened from within, whether by submission to esoteric theories on the one hand, or by dissipation into the banalities of cultural studies on the other. Our only hope, they tell us, is the immediate restoration of the old pieties, as these were cemented in the nineteenth century: literature teaches moral values; poets redeem from decay the divine element in mortal beings; a knowledge of the best that has been thought and said makes us more humane.

Moral panics come and go, while teachers of English continue to do their best in difficult circumstances. But this time the threat is serious and it comes from outside. The recession has singled out the humanities in general, and the study of English in particular, as luxuries that a shrunken economy can do without. In America cuts are threatening the replacement of faculty and the size of classes. The study of fiction butters no parsnips. Where, our hard-headed fellow citizens ask, is the cash value of our discipline? In the UK the cash value is called "impact," a euphemism for measurable usefulness — to business or to the makers of social policy. The British government is demanding that we demonstrate the utility of our research, book by book, and paper by paper. Research is the only category the authorities can now subject to inquisition in the name of taxpayer accountability, since the teaching of the humanities in higher education is no longer to be supported by state funding.

It is hard to believe that the British combination of the free market with micro-management can lead anywhere fruitful: it puts the curriculum effectively in the hands of the students, while research grows ever more conformist for fear that any new departure might antagonize the established scholars who act as assessors. But there are signs that the shock of the new financial regime, where it has not led to paralysis, has raised again, and more urgently, the question whether what we do in university English departments is genuinely beneficial. [End Page 114]

I have no commitment to the old pieties. And I do not believe that the research we do should be expected to have quantifiable utility. But I do maintain that our investigations matter. Fiction, I believe, is a source of knowledge. This is not, in my view, a moral knowledge. True, ethical positions can be extracted from fiction, and some texts specialize in moral aphorisms. From Aesop to George Eliot, imaginative writing formulates and illustrates wise admonitions; more subtly, it invites our admiration for certain qualities or forms of behavior, and our revulsion from others. But there is no evidence that reading makes people behave better. It is easy to suppose that our own familiarity with fiction has influenced the exemplary lives we lead, but while I am perfect and you try hard to be good, it must be admitted that not all our colleagues are entirely free of failings. And our departmental relationships have a tendency to demonstrate that wide reading does not always guarantee generosity of spirit and mutual respect.

Nor is our profession best defended on the basis that it extends people's sympathies, though it may do that. The argument of fiction's civilizing effect might justify inculcating in students the habit of reading; it might possibly vindicate teaching them to appreciate the finer points of the books they read, though if it is the books themselves that do this humanizing work, our contribution would be minimal; but it is not obvious how the cultivation of student sensibility would support further research. And, worst of all, it would surely lead us to single out for attention works that could be counted on to extend sympathies in the right direction, for deserving causes, and by that means would take us straight back to the reconstitution of a canon, with all the misplaced passion...

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