What's Wrong with Literary Studies?

The criticisms match my experience. In a comment to "The New Intellectuals: Is the academic jobs crisis a boon to public culture?" (http://www.chronicle.com/article/The-New-Intellectuals/23835...), I said that I went to grad school in English Lit and this resonates:

By the time I started to draft journal articles and map out my dissertation, I became frustrated by having to write articles no one else would read that had to cite other articles no one else would read in order to satisfy peer reviewers and engage in a process that seemed internally self-justified to fill CVs and have an academic career but didn’t have much effect." He found more satisfaction writing his blog, which reached readers around the world.

I write more here: https://jakeseliger.com/2012/09/22/the-stupidity-of-what-im-... and here: https://jakeseliger.com/2013/02/12/a-lot-of-academic-researc..., but academics in the humanities act like their peer-reviewed work doesn't matter at all. There are no pre-print services and no sense of urgency. Whether an article is published today or five years from today seems to be treated as if it's of little or no importance. The whole system is wildly dispiriting from an intellectual perspective.

Teaching, meanwhile, gets subordinated to the world of fake research, to the detriment of professors themselves and the students they're supposed to be teaching. Yet literary studies are, or should be, among the most accessible academic fields.

> "I believe that the profession can’t really move forward until we shed our fear of saying and thinking things that colleagues would call ‘humanist.’ "

Why on Earth has humanism fallen into disrepute among literary studies majors?

The 'technical critique' tricks felski is advocating against are also bad anthropology -- if literary critics deny the experience of the reader and deny an analysis of the writer's experience, background and techniques, we're not left with much.

Anthropologists have 'Verstehen', a term which has gone through a lot of iterations but used to mean that you should be careful interpreting the meaning of a ritual from an alien culture. Critics' rejection of the inner life of readers and writers alienates them from the art they analyze.

This whole critique mindset is kind of a self-inflicted wound on literary studies. If you destroy the ability of literature to say what the author intended it to say. This hurts literary studies for two reasons:

1. It takes what is great about literature and replaces it with something less. Hamlet is better than any of the critiques or deconstructions of Hamlet. It's better than any of the criticism of Hamlet, too, but the new approach is worse. The old criticism tried to show how the work could have been written better; the new critique tries to make you try to ignore the author's point.

2. The critique approach destroys itself. If one applied the techniques of literary critique to any literary critique, what would survive? Almost nothing - certainly not the author's point.

Then why bother doing literary studies, if we're going to ignore what the authors are trying to say, and if we can also ignore what the papers published in literary studies say? What's the point? Why bother with the whole exercise?

[Edit: I read further, and...

> "Today’s anti-pedophile," Ruddick writes, summarizing the analysis, "perpetrates the ‘potential violence’ of ‘speaking on [children’s] behalf.’ " Such ideas violate scholars’ private convictions, Ruddick says, but they go unchallenged because they seem to mesh with the ideology of the group.

I try to avoid profanity, but: What the hell is wrong with these people? They see speaking on a child's behalf as "potential violence", but ignore the real violence that pedophilia does to the child? And that viewpoint meshes with the ideology of the literary studies establishment?

Words fail me. This is appalling.

Now, at least, "such ideas violate scholars' private convictions". Thank God for that much. But if they don't dare go against the seeming ideology of the group, which seems to be the ideology of the group because nobody else dares go against it either, that's getting pretty close to "systemic evil".]

>Felski attacks critique’s stature as the most radical form of thought. Here she draws on the work of Bruno Latour, a French anthropologist and sociologist. Latour questions the assumption that being suspicious and critical makes you a progressive thinker, in contrast to the purportedly credulous and complacent masses. He points out that conservative thinkers are now just as likely to draw on the forms of suspicious questioning associated with critique. Think of climate-change deniers, or all those Trump voters so deeply suspicious of elites.

Ah, I see one reason why this might be finding favor. Claim to have found the source of the Trump voter's paranoid way of thought, and you have everyone's attention. Claim you know how to defeat it, and the grants line up for you.

>Ruddick interviewed about 70 young academics, mostly Ph.D. students, at seven major research universities. She found that two types of scholars tended to be satisfied: those with a political commitment to an issue favored by the field of English, and those who, not especially stirred up by theory, study literary-historical questions

Literary history scholars being happier is interesting, but it seems potentially flawed to rely on self-reporting to determine political alignment. Two students, both committed Marxists. One is cynical, depressed, and hates his Ph.D program, the other is loving his program and life, and has enough energy to be an activist as well. Which one is going to tell you he's a Marxist? Hopefully it was more systematic than "interview" suggests.

I'll try and make the case of Felski's skeptics, based on my experience with post-critical academics in multiple disciplines.

The hopefully obvious counterpoint to Felski and others who seek to depoliticize criticism is that their supposedly apolitical stance is in itself political. By being "post-critical", you abandon a defined political reading and attempt to triangulate either the perspective of the author or what you perceive as the perspective of the casual reader, in order to avoid the messy, critique-y situation when your perspective and the author's perspective aren't compatible.

For example, and since I watched The Crying Game last night, a queer viewer could conceivably take issue with how Dil is written in "The Crying Game" because she sees the reality of the straight writer, not her own. The queer critic tries to deconstruct (sorry) the the elements of the script and why she believes it doesn't do a good job of showing how Dil experiences the story.

But if that viewer identified as a post-critical critic, she would shy away from diving too deep into the topic. The post-critical critic is trained to avoid the impulse to critique, and instead must search for a meaning that, to put it bluntly, won't offend anyone who loves The Crying Game and doesn't like anyone skeptically picking apart bits of it. The instinctual reaction to deconstruct (oops, did it again) an idea or representation that rings false or is just plain interesting is suppressed, because the post-critical mind must be along for the ride and try to derive ideas from the author's conclusions. It's interesting, but I wouldn't describe it as being liberated from "the barbed wire of suspicion".

This is only looking at one element of post-criticism that I particularly dislike, and of course their perspective has some value. I just wanted to push back on the idea that these people are the vanguard of intellectual freedom.

When I was in grade school, I had an exam question regarding "The Outsiders" and why Dally told Ponyboy and Johnny to hide "in an abandoned church".

My response was that it was abandoned. I got marked off because "it represented a chance for salvation".

I was raised an atheist. Go figure.