Here is a sensation with which many academics and students will be familiar. You have just written an essay or article. You are proud of it: it has sharp insights, striking turns of phrase, solid scholarship. Perhaps you go back and read over the parts youāre most fond of, purring slightly. Nevertheless, there are some places where your eye slides across the page, almost involuntarily. There are arguments that, if you met them elsewhere, would appear a little tendentious, or that miss a small-yet-necessary step. There are sentences that do some slight injury to grammar or sense. Perhaps, in time, you steel yourself to acknowledge and correct these things, even though it may involve unravelling some of your choicest work; or perhaps you do so only when a friend, colleague, mentor, points them out. Either way, you probably know that slight squirm in the stomach, the half-conscious signal that all is not well.
As with writing, so with professions. I have been a lecturer in Literary Studies1 in United Kingdom universities for almost three decades, at both ex-polytechnics and elite Russell Group institutions. During that time I have, naturally, witnessed and participated in a number of major changes, in the nature of the discipline itself and in its institutional and regulatory environment. Fashions have come and gone, and come again: in the canon, in criticism and in pedagogy. Whether or not such changes are always for the better, the discussions they have provoked provide plentiful evidence of the disciplineās personal and professional importance to many of those involved in it. My colleagues over the years have generally been knowledgeable, enthusiastic and committed scholars.
There is much to praise in the practice of Literary Studies today. Nevertheless, I have become increasingly aware of an uncomfortable mismatch between what I see as being valuable in the study of literature, and what is conventionally accepted as scholarly good practice. I have noticed that there are certain rules, some hard, some soft, some explicit, others implicit, about the scope of Literary Studies, and the form and style in which critical discussion should take place. The rationale for these rules is neither always apparent, nor (where offered) consistent. Some are historical artefacts, justified by arguments no longer relevant or long since discredited. Others are not justified at all but are simply embedded in custom and practice. What they have in common is that they tend to serve the interests of Literary Studies as a professional community rather than as an intellectual discipline, entrenching its structures and power relations and ultimately justifying its existence as a subject suitable for incarnation in a university setting, producing research, awarding degrees, and supporting an ecosphere of researchers, students, administrators and publishers.
That Literary Studies might require more justification than some other disciplines reflects both its heterogeneous roots in classics, philology, philosophy and a number of other related disciplines, and the fact that literature appears, at first glance, to require no special training to be appreciated and understood. While few non-specialists will read a book of mathematical equations, scientific formulae or case law with pleasure, many can and do enjoy novels or go to see plays. Why do they need critics to tell them what theyāre doing, or how they should be doing it? For Literary Studies, to a greater extent than for more obviously technical disciplines, it has been important to establish the necessity of a hieratic class of professional critics, distinguished not only from students but also from lay readers. Much of the disciplineās culture has developed in a form calculated to maintain these distinctions. This development has, however, constrained the kinds of interaction with literature that criticism is able to engage in and the approaches it is able to take.
In this book, I will argue that many of the contradictions, omissions and repressions of literary criticism should be understood in terms of its professional disciplinary contexts.2 These contexts naturally include the regulatory and funding regime imposed on academics āfrom aboveā, by governmental and quasi-governmental bodies such as funding councils, and through initiatives such as the Research Excellence Framework (REF) , which periodically assesses research in the United Kingdom for the purpose of allocating funding. These constitute explicit interventions, intended to influence the direction and methods of academic research, for example through the publication of themed funding calls, the promotion of research with impact outside academia, and the encouragement of large-scale and collaborative projects. They have also affected the ways in which criticism is presented in books and articles: academics writing with the REF in mind will typically be coached on words and topics to include and avoid, and on the rhetorical framing most likely to win the approval of assessors.
In what follows I will make appropriate reference to the REF, as well as to such attempts to set parameters for the discipline as the Quality Assurance Agency ās periodic Benchmarking Statements . However, I am equally interested in the ways that Literary Studies has been shaped āfrom belowāāthat is, by its very constitution as a subject that can be taught and assessed in universities. If the demands imposed from above affect research in manifest, phenotypical ways, those from below are more deeply rooted and less easy to unpick, configuring the discipline at a genetic level. Discussion of them is moreover inhibited by the disciplineās structures and culture, as I will show throughout this book. Here, I will simply note, as one symptom indicative of this inhibition, the erratic attitude of Literary Studies academics to the relationship between research and pedagogy . When advertising courses to prospective students, at Open Days and on university websites, academics frequently stress the ācutting edgeā nature of their teaching by emphasising its intimate and organic connection with their research. In writing material likely to be submitted to the REF , however, the ways in which their thinking has been shaped by pedagogic considerations are far less likely to figure and, if discussed, may even be regarded as diluting rather than strengthening their workās research significance. The faces research culture shows to students, to fellow researchers and to funders and their proxies, are all distinct; and these differences hint at that cultureās tensions and contradictions, many of which I will explore in the chapters that follow.
Such exploration typically has to be performed āagainst the grainā, by asking questions and venturing into areas likely to be regarded as trivial, pedantic, irrelevant or even embarrassing. The culture of Literary Studies represses perceptions likely to encourage the radical questioning of its own professional practice. I have noted and collected instances over a long period, notionally placing them into a dossier entitled āThe LITMUS Papersā, where āLITMUSā stands for āLies I Tell My Undergraduate Studentsā. Here are some of the āliesā that sit in my dossier:
- You shouldnāt bring your personal reactions and emotions into literary criticism.
- Critics are representative readers, whose experience of reading can be taken as typical.
- Critics are a special class of expert reader, providing a model to which others should aspire.
- You canāt visit Hardyās Wessex by going to Dorset, or Elsinore by going to HelsingĆør in Denmark.
- Reading is a mental rather than a physical activity.
- Plagiarism is a form of theft.
- Critical and creative writing are distinct activities.
- Unlike critics, authors of fiction are too biased to be reliable commentators on their own texts.
- The conventions of the academic essay allow the skills and insights involved in Literary Studies to be shown most fully to advantage.
By no means all these positions are taken by all literary critics. Some enshrine a view of the relationships of texts, authors and readers that last enjoyed intellectual ascendancy in the middle decades of the twentieth century, but that have survived in fossilised form as āgood practiceā, āscholarly conventionā, āacademic registerā and so on. Nevertheless, all, including those that contradict each other, form part of the diet of ideas and conventions through which students are typically inducted into the culture and praxis of Literary Studies. They combine to support an ideology of scholarship that maintains and naturalises certain power relationships between critics, authors, students and lay readers, and that defines the discipline in such a way as to channel critical attention away from areas likely to threaten those relationships. The analysis of that ideology shapes the chapters that follow.
Chapter 2 (āNot Iā) illustrates one of the ways in which Literary Studies can be deconstructed, and its contradictions exposed, āfrom belowā. I will take as an apparently trivial example the appearance of the first-person singular pronoun in critical writing. Students are often urged to refrain from its use, but equally often told to ignore such admonitions. Either way, this is generally framed as a stylistic choice rather than as one with profound consequences for the nature and scope of critical discourse. I argue that, on the contrary, the lack of consensus on this point represents what deconstructive critics would call an aporia , a thread that, once pulled, unravels the model of knowledge creation that has allowed Literary Studies to establish and maintain itself as a professional discipline over the last century. That model has required critics to adopt the roles both of exceptional readers, able to speak with the authority of acknowledged experts, and of representative readers, able to report on common literary experience, roles that militate for and against the use of the first-person pronoun respectively. Rather than resolve this tension, critics have made heavy use of evasive phrases such as āthe readerā, with its nebula of referents. Although there have of course been attempts to define the identity, role, status and nature of āthe readerā, notably within the broad critical area known as reader-response criticism, I will suggest that none has been more than partially successful, and that this is not surprising, since the possibility of Literary Studies as a professional discipline depends upon holding its various contradictory functions in suspension.
Chapter 3 (āThe Uses of Embarrassmentā) extends the discussion of āNot Iā, moving the focus away from what critics do to what they refrain from doing, and to questions of scope rather than of methodology. Literature has been recognised since Aristotle as having a close connection with emotion and affect, and with readersā feelings about literary characters in particular; but while this fact has received some attention from modern critics (I will discuss the contributions of William Flesch [2007], Suzanne Keen [2007] and Blakey Vermeule [2010] to its theorisation) it has remained surprisingly marginal to literary criticism. Critics have been especially reticent about their own affective involvement with texts, at least in the formal contexts of peer-reviewed articles and books, preferring to analyse the emotional lives of fictional characters and of lay readers, or to perform the kind of more generalised introspective enquiry undertaken by scholars such as Philip Davis , who has noted of more specifically personal reactions and associations that āwe seldom tell these tales and perhaps least of all in conventional professional settingsā (Davis 2013, p. 35). This critical reticence is in part a consequence of the epistemological ambiguity explored in āNot Iā: what status would such a āconfessionalā discussion have as knowledge, and how could it be generalised in the way that a quasi-scientific model of scholarly method demands? However, I suggest that the reluctance to be personal also has a personal cause, reflecting criticsā unwillingness to cede control to the text or expose areas of vulnerability to their own readers. Finally, I will consider the operation of affect in other areas, such as the ways that experience of real places mediates and shapes literary reading. While the role of place in literature has hardly been neglected, as with affective relations with fictional characters (and for similar reasons) critical discussion has generally avoided the experiences of critics themselves. I will argue that restricting the potential for non-literary experience to inform criticism needlessly diminishes the scope of the discipline.
While āNot Iā and āThe Uses of Embarrassmentā scrutinise the relationship between criticism and reading, in Chapter 4 (āAttack of the Zombie Authorsā) the focus shifts to that between criticism and writing. I reassess some of the traditional reasons for excluding or devaluing the statements of authors in critical discussion of their work (self-interest, irrelevance, lack of critical competence), and suggest that the discipline of Literary Studies has a conflicted and confused attitude to creative writers and writing. This is demonstrated eloquently in the shifting positions to be found in successive QAA Benchmarking Statements for English, which have swung between exclusion, enthusiastic acceptance and armās-length toleration. I suggest that the reason for this ambivalence is partly that Literary Studies has become wedded to a narrowly observational and propositional mode of discourse difficult to integrate with the kind of experiential knowledge creative writing has to offer, despite the latterās obvious relevance to an understanding of literature. Authorial insights are something of an embarrassment to conventional literary criticism, and the rhetorical positioning of literary authors as biased and emotive (in implicit contrast to critics) only serves to entrench this state of affairs. Importantly, it also mask...