I think it’s great that this article on how the discipline of literary studies has killed student interest in literature is by a professor at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, MD.
Annapolis, [my students] tell me, is the place dreams come to die in the daily grind of shining shoes and passing inspections. And the verdict of society is as strong here as on poor Emma [Bovary]: There’s only one way to do things here at Annapolis — those who think differently have to give in.
He laments:
Literary studies split off from reading in the early-to-mid-20th century as the result of science envy on the part of literature professors. Talking about books somehow didn’t seem substantial enough. Instead of reading literature, now we study “texts.” We’ve developed a discipline, with its jargon and its methodology, its insiders and its body of knowledge. What we analyze nowadays is seen neither as the mirror of nature nor the lamp of authorial inspiration. It just is — apparently produced in an airless room by machines working through permutations of keys on the computer.
The thing is, there are as many Annapolises as there are, um, Annapolitans. A hundred feet away from where Prof. Fleming works is St. John’s College, where the theoretical claptrap of literary studies will get you laughed out of the room and students must read The Books Themselves, not critical theory about the books.
Or, as I quoted a few months ago from Lawrence Berns’ article on developing St. John’s graduate institute’s syllabus:
As soon as we were seated for lunch [Mr. Ossorgin, another St. John’s tutor] turned to me and said, “Larry, I think all of human life can be understood in terms of the Iliad and the Odyssey.†And then for about two hours he led me in a wonderful discussion about how the Iliad and the Odyssey clarified the foundations of human life, at the end of which I asked him if he would redraw the literature sequence to extend the time for the Iliad and the Odyssey.
How odd! I think the Annapolis professor is dead on. I dropped out of a Ph.D. program for precisely this reason: we were studying criticism, not the literature itself. We were talking about critics far more than authors, schools of criticism rather than literary movments. Our discussions got so far away from the characters in the story, we needed to unwind thread behind us to find our way back–and sometimes, it didn’t work. I got so angry one session while talking about Gatsby (this is the odd part, the overlap with my earlier comment), I launched a verbal attack that began with deconstructing a fellow student’s statement and ended with indicting the whole program. The experience, however, did not sour me on literature; it soured me on graduate studies in literature. At least at Columbia. Thanks for spotlighting this … I’m going to try to track this article down.
” What we analyze nowadays is seen neither as the mirror of nature nor the lamp of authorial inspiration. It just is — apparently produced in an airless room by machines working through permutations of keys on the computer.”
This particular statement, by the way, reminds me of Roland Barthes’s essay, “Death of the Author.” The only real difference is Barthes is celebrating and this guy is mourning. (Barthes was roundly rebuffed, I believe, by William Gass’s own essay of the same title. They should be read together.)