Employment of English

Theory, Jobs, and the Future of Literary Studies

Michael Bérubé

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 1997
• ISBN:
  9780814786147
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Astronomy & Astrophysics

What sorts of cultural criticism are teachers and scholars to produce, and how can that criticism be "employed" in the culture at large?

In recent years, debates about the role and direction of English departments have mushroomed into a broader controversy over the public legitimacy of literary criticism. At first glance this might seem odd: few taxpayers and legislators care whether the nation's English professors are doing justice to the project of identifying the beautiful and the sublime. But in the context of the legitimation crisis in American higher education, the image of English departments has in fact played a major role in determining public attitudes toward colleges and college faculty. Similarly, the changing economic conditions of universities have prompted many English professors to rethink their relations to their "clients," asking how literary study can serve the American public.

What sorts of cultural criticism are teachers and scholars to produce, and how can that criticism be "employed" in the culture at large? In The Employment of English, Michael Bérubé, one of our most eloquent and gifted critics, examines the cultural legitimacy of literary study. In witty, engaging prose, Bérubé asserts that we must situate these questions in a context in which nearly half of all college professors are part-time labor and in which English departments are torn between their traditional mission of defining movements of literary history and protocols of textual interpretation, and their newer tasks of interrogating wider systems of signification under rubrics like "gender," "hegemony," "rhetoric," "textuality" (including film and video), and "culture."

Are these new roles a betrayal of the field's founding principles, in effect a short-sighted sell-out of the discipline? Do they represent little more that an attempt to shore up the status of--and student enrollments in--English? Or are they legitimate objects of literary study, in need of public support? Simultaneously investigating the economic and the intellectual ramifications of current debates, The Employment of English provides the clearest and most condensed account of this controversy to date.

I

EMPLOYMENT IN ENGLISH

1
CULTURAL STUDIES AND CULTURAL CAPITAL

The desire called Cultural Studies is perhaps best approached politically and socially, as the project to constitute a “historic bloc,” rather than theoretically, as the floor plan for a new discipline.

—Fredric Jameson, “On Cultural Studies”

In the past decade, cultural studies has named a desire, a desire Fredric Jameson rightly links to the aspirations of populist intellectuals and the Utopian hopes of the Left. Yet cultural studies has also been presented more “theoretically” (or prosaically) precisely as the floor plan for a new discipline—a transdisciplinary or antidisciplinary discipline that promises to remake the humanities and redraw or erase the traditional boundaries between academic fields. What is arguably the most striking feature of cultural studies in the contemporary landscape, however, is the role it has played in the collective disciplinary imaginary of literary studies: in the latter half of the 1990s, the project called cultural studies has come to name not only a desire but also, and to the same extent, a pervasive fear.

The fear is a fear of dissolution, dissolution of the boundaries, the identity, the quidditas of literary study. After all, cultural studies, according to its own most common self-representations, has neither a methodology nor an object to call its own. It is quite possible, then, to understand the advent of cultural studies in literary studies as the amorphous outcome of three decades of intellectual debate in the field: as the discipline’s notion of “text” expanded to cover a variety of materials formerly considered nonliterary or extraliterary, and as the discipline’s methodologies increased in the number and variety of what once were called “extrinsic” approaches to literature, English departments have become places where a great variety of cultural texts are studied with a host of intellectual tools borrowed and modified from neighboring disciplines like history, philosophy, and anthropology. Its borders permeable on all sides, English has become an intellectual locus where people can study the text of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight from a Christian perspective, the text of the O. J. trial from a Foucauldian perspective, and the text of the Treaty of Versailles from a Marxist perspective. Appropriately enough, while cultural studies is hailed in some quarters as the means by which literary study can intervene in the social world of power, hegemony, and human affairs, cultural studies is decried in other quarters as the means by which a new generation of scholars will eventually eradicate whatever remains distinctive and “literary” about literary study.

In the pages that follow, I will not try to determine, once and for all, the correct formula by which English departments can blend the intrinsic with the extrinsic, the literary with the nonliterary, to greatest advantage. But I think it is a mistake to treat the prospect of cultural studies as a zerosum game, as if scholars and students cannot spend their time and energy analyzing the social ramifications of a text unless they agree to neglect the text’s formal and generic properties. The extent to which English departments incorporate the concerns of cultural studies will be the extent to which English departments institutionalize a mode of reading that asks after the production, reception, and social effectivity of texts; but the extent to which cultural studies becomes a mode of reading in literary study (as opposed to, say, a mode of reading in mass media and communications) will, conversely, be the extent to which cultural studies foregrounds the rhetorical operations of literature. It is entirely possible, in other words, to have your literature and your cultural studies too, if your literary study is cultural enough and your cultural studies is literary enough.

Those of my colleagues who fear that cultural studies will replace rather than enrich literary study, by contrast, are skeptical about precisely this point. As William Cain has recently charged, the arrival of new methodologies inevitably entails intellectual trade-offs, such that what we gain in the study of “culture” we must lose in the study of “literature”:

The Modern Language Association keeps insisting that the swerve toward cultural studies has not led to the displacement of this kind of close reading. But if you talk to teachers, it becomes evident that, in order to keep up with trends in cultural studies, they are cutting back on the time given to writers and books that students should be discovering and learning how to read. (B4)

Cain’s formulation contains its conclusions, of course: on the one hand, we have writers and books students should learn to read, and on the other hand we have “trends” in cultural studies. To the first we must do justice; with the second we are merely “keeping up.” This pretty much closes out the possibility that Stuart Hall, Eric Lott, or Janice Radway might qualify under both headings, as theorists in cultural studies whom students should discover and learn how to read. But as we shall see, Cain is far from alone in understanding the field in this way; and because our field is made up, in part, precisely by understandings of our field, we cannot chart the present and future of literary study unless we attend to why it is that cultural studies names both a desire and a fear.

Disciplines in the modern languages, in my view, should always be home to a variety of methodologies that ask what texts mean as well as how texts mean.¹ I am happiest, as a critic and as a reader, when I am learning how these two concerns are mutually illuminating—how the formal properties of a text are part of the work that text does in the world, and how its work in the world is enabled or conditioned by our understanding of its properties. But I am not narrowly prescriptive when it comes to asking what kindof work English departments themselves might do in the world. I believe there are any number of ways to introduce students to the demands and delights of close textual study, and it is of little concern to me whether our students start by reading Wordsworth and work their way to deconstructions of contemporary representations of race, or start by analyzing Madonna videos and work their way to an understanding of the Romantic crisis lyric. Accordingly, I do not lose much sleep worrying about whether my students (graduate or undergraduate) will carry on the work of literary study in the way I like most to see that work done. Nonetheless, it is clear to me that our disciplinary desires and fears are driven as much by our projections of the future as by our assessments of the present. The controversy over cultural studies is thus part of a more general crisis of reproduction in the modern languages—a crisis whose occasion is the question of whether there is any useful social purpose served either by literary study, narrowly conceived, or by cultural studies, broadly conceived.

A crisis of reproduction? Doesn’t that sound awfully melodramatic? Perhaps things are at bottom much simpler than that; perhaps it’s merely that many of our field’s major theorists, from Frank Lentricchia to Wendy Steiner to Edward Said, have rightly dissociated themselves from the excesses of “politicized” literary study and turned our attention once again to art, to beauty, to the purposive purposelessness of the play of forms. Is there really any reason to call this the occasion of yet another “crisis,” particularly in a field that always thinks of itself in terms of crises?

I believe there is; I think there’s more going on here than just a return to art, and I think we can begin to understand what it is if we attend to a certain generational anxiety that defines contemporary fears of cultural studies. The figure to which I want tocall attention (and on whom I hope to keep your attention for the remainder of this book) is the figure of the graduate student: here, the figure of the graduate student who no longer knows—or, worse, no longer desires to know—what might be “literary” about literary study.

William Cain’s account of the field depends heavily on just this figure:

Part of the problem is that the graduate students who become our faculty members are not prepared to teach close reading. They have not learned the skills as undergraduates and, unfortunately, no one in graduate school has encouraged them to make up for their lack. I scan hundreds of transcripts when we make faculty appointments, and they reveal a numbing non-literary sameness—a compilation of graduate literature courses that are really courses in sociology, media, postcolonial politics, and the like. Courses on sexuality are everywhere. But I rarely detect courses on the literary subjects that graduate students might eventually teach in classes of their own. (B4)

And his conclusion is as sweeping as it is stark: “When a graduate student leaves the university with a Ph.D., he or she has little idea of what it means to read a text carefully or how to convey to students the skills needed to perform this activity. Nor is he or she prepared to make the choices required when designing courses and curricula for undergraduates” (B4–B5).

It is tempting to surmise that Cain’s department of English at Wellesley College must have done some truly unfortunate hiring in the past few years, but similar reports up and down both coasts convince me that the phenomenon is not confined to Wellesley. From one prestigious, public eastern university comes the report that graduate students now study queer theory more than any other department “specialization” from another prestigious, public western university comes the report of a department riven between people who want to jettison literature from the curriculum and people who want to jettison everything but literature. And from the University of Washington comes the following report from Ross Posnock:

My work and teaching blend literary criticism and intellectual history in an English department where the ideology of cultural studies, as described by Jameson, clearly has enthralled the majority of graduate students. In English departments the embarrassed, defensive status of the intellectual is matched by the low repute of literature (indeed of the aesthetic itself) and of those who dare construe their job as primarily devoted to its internal explication and external contextualization.

In the postmodern regime of English studies the intellectual, literature, the aesthetic, intellectual history are all held under suspicion on grounds of complicity with the enemy, which includes various instruments of white male power—universalism, cosmopolitanism, elitism. (18–19)

It would seem, then, that the students invoked by Posnock are precisely the graduate students who apply for tenure-track jobs at Wellesley: disdaining literature and those who teach it, they nonetheless seek jobs in departments of English precisely in order to liberate English from literature, and to offer ill-conceived and poorly designed courses on cross-dressing, Chicana/o graffiti, Disney World, and the politics of postcolonial poststructuralism.

I do not deny that literary studies are in need of defense, and I do not deny that there are some departments of English that house and foster all the sins Posnock and Cain enumerate. But I do want to look more closely at what these defenses of literary study are in fact defending; as I will show when I discuss the introduction to George Levine’s important edited collection, Aesthetics and Ideology, there remains a profound ambivalence, even among defenders of the literary and the aesthetic, as to whether “the aesthetic” is important because of the uses it serves in legitimating a domain for literary criticism, or because it serves no use whatsoever. Before I discuss Levine’s introduction to Aesthetics and Ideology, though, I’d first like to file a contrary local report on the state of the discipline, just for the record.

At the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, we have done a fair amount of hiring after a few years of severe budgetary constraints; we have hired Ph.D.s from a wide variety of institutions, in a wide variety of fields from medieval literature to queer theory. I hope I will not flatter my junior colleagues unduly if I insist, contra Cain, that every single one of our recent hires knows how to read a text carefully, and almost every single one of those hires has been extremely successful in the classroom; every semester, the Illinois student newspaper publishes the names of faculty and graduate students who receive particularly strong course evaluations, and since 1990 the list from English has included almost every junior faculty member we’ve hired. They must be doing something right, surely—and because our junior faculty are reviewed by their senior peers every year, I happen to know that they’re quite capable of designing courses and curricula on their own. I mention this not to brag about our good fortune, however; I mention it because even though our department has fared very well in hiring smart theorists who are also good teachers, some of my senior colleagues nevertheless perceive a disjunction between theory and pedagogy, and worry accordingly that the recent “drift” of the department has not been good for undergraduate education. If William Cain’s department is haunted by fears that it is no longer possible to hire a Ph.D. in English who’s a good reader, then, in a much milder manner, so is mine—even though we have no younger faculty who would actually justify this fear.

In my department, in other words, this fear cannot be gauged by measuring the level of happiness or discontent with regard to actually existing junior faculty; it is too nebulous to be focused on any individual person—until we come across that one job candidatewho reads poetry for the “cultural text” but doesn’t know much about prosody, that one post-something theorist whose campus-visit presentation was difficult to understand. Then the discussion begins, and people wonder what other Ph.D. programs must be thinking these days, and how will our undergraduates ever be able to learn from these incomprehensible young turks, and what will become of literary study once we titans no longer roam the earth . . . And after a while I begin to wonder, how long have people harbored these fears, waiting for them to find an object? For ten years the department hires one good undergraduate teacher after another, and most of them compose syllabi full of works of literature (as opposed to, say, videos of the O. J. trial), which they train undergraduates to read closely, and now we have an anti-theory backlash? Apparently a very few of my colleagues had been waiting a long time to vent their fears about the horrible things that are happening to the profession, but hadn’t yet found the chance.

Usually these fears circulate around hiring and tenure, and they are tied as well to the question of whether new hires, in a research university, should be driven by the needs of the undergraduate curriculum (a Miltonist hired for a Miltonist retired) or by the research developments in theory and criticism (a queer theorist hired for an Augustan scholar retired). But on one occasion in the spring of 1994, when the department was charged with rewriting its bylaws (a job I regarded, at the time, as the intellectual equivalent of cleaning out the basement), we suddenly found ourselves in the midst of a substantive discussion over the content of our self-description: was it fair, we wondered, to describe ourselves as offering instruction in English and American literature, or should we say “literature in English,” even though we offer so few courses outside the Anglo-American specsrum? Should we say “literature and criticism” or “literature, criticism, and interpretive theory”? How should we describe our offerings in film? And last but first, should we amend “literary studies” to “literary and cultural studies,” and if so, how shouldwe recognize cultural studies in the curriculum?

These questions become all the more urgent when we turn to graduate study, where, indeed, Illinois has seen a good deal of variety in recent dissertations, and a great deal of speculation about the relation between dissertation topics and jobs. As I’ll explain in more detail in chapter 4, the job market is such that graduate students feel compelled to write extremely specialized dissertations even as they will likely be asked, if and when they get a job, to teach fairly general, unspecialized courses. But even among our graduate students whose work is most specialized and/or most inflected by critical theory, Illinois dissertations have been (like the popular T-shirts) largely literary. One of our most talented students did write a dissertation on British music halls and the emergent discourses of professionalism and propriety at the turn of the century, and got a job only after a number of frustrating years of searching; two of our other students whose work might fall under the cultural studies heading wound up writing on contemporary gay and lesbian literature, in one case, and contemporary anthologies of erotica marketed to women of various ethnic groups, in the other case. The vast majority of the rest of our students have been writing more or less traditional dissertations on novels, poetry, and drama of various periods; some are influenced by new historicism, some by feminism, some by Marxism, some by reception theory. None, so far as I know, are inclined to suspect literature of complicity with the enemy. And as for our new departmental self-description, it now reads like this: “The Department of English is organized to provide instruction in literatures in English, literary theory and criticism, the English language, expository and creative writing, writing studies, English Education, film, cultural studies, and closely related fields.” Those last four words represent all the minor compromises left over after the department had hashed out (in many committee sessions and then in a full faculty meeting) the relative place of linguistics, teacher training, theory, creative writing, business and technical writing, film, and (oh yes) literary and cultural studies; but the most controversial items, which not coincidentally are the focus of my attention here, were “literatures in English” and “cultural studies.”

So much for my contrary local report. For what it’s worth, it may serve as evidence that many departments of English may be troubled in one way or another, but are not quite as absurd as Cain or Posnock suggest. And yet it cannot be denied that the disciplinehas been indelibly changed by the past ten years alone, ever since deconstruction moved from the avant-garde of the field to the lingua franca of the culture, ever since Foucault and Gramsci (via new historicism, queer theory, and cultural studies) became the major discursive options for theoretically inflected cultural analysis. The discipline’s critics are not entirely wrong to suggest that in the present regime, one’s theoretical allegiances can determine one’s critical conclusions: either you believe in the forces of containment and recuperation, in which case it becomes your job to show how the seemingly “liberatory” or “progressive” aspects of the culture ultimately serve the conservative purpose of perpetuating a political order in which “freedom” is but a name for a particularly deceptive form of self-policing, or you believe in hegemony and resistance, in which case it becomes your job to show how the seemingly “repressive” or “reactionary” aspects of the culture ultimately can be made to serve surprisingly (yet reassuringly) liberatory or progressive ends.

In this dispensation it should come as no surprise that literary texts are commonly treated as pieces of cultural evidence rather than as artifacts to be explicated on their own terms (however their “own terms” may be construed). In and of itself, there is nothing wrong with treating literary texts in this way: they undoubtedly are, among other things, important pieces of evidence about the culture(s) from and to which they speak, and any reasonable historicist, feminist, reader-response, or psychoanalytic critic will say so. (Even myth critics, if there are any left on the planet, will agree.) On the other hand, there may indeed be something wrong with forms of cultural analysis that seem to dictate their conclusions in advance of their evidence, and there may indeed be something wrong with analytical procedures that fail to attend to the specific details of what kind of evidence is placed on the table. It may be folly to claim that English departments are places where graduate students hold literature under suspicion, and where jejune junior faculty are incapable of constructing a literature syllabus. Nevertheless, it is possible to ask a skeptical question about English in a different register: is the discipline dominated by reading practices that so determinedly overlook the specificity of textual genres (be they novels,...