Literary Studies, Then and Now.

It is a very great honor to receive an award in the name of Peter Shaw. Peter was a giant among the few in literary studies who stood against the destructive trends that have now overwhelmed the field. Nobody stated the situation better than Peter when he wrote in his wonderful book The War Against the Intellect (University of Iowa Press, 1989, xi):

 
   The intellectual climate of our time has undergone a subtle alteration in 
   the past twenty years. Starting in the 1960s a change came over the rules 
   of discourse whereby the marshaling of logic and evidence gradually lost 
   its prestige. In its place right feeling and good intentions came to reign 
   as the highest intellectual values and the most persuasive earnests of high 
   seriousness .... The spirit of the 1960s, which favored the heart over the 
   head, was making itself felt across the spectrum of argumentative writing 
   and scholarship. This was the war against the intellect. 

In our field, Peter was a comrade-in-arms without compare. His War Against the Intellect appeared at almost the same moment as my book Against Deconstruction. He sent me a copy signed "fraternally." That was an encouraging thought.

At long last there is widespread talk of a crisis in literary studies, and yet in a kind of displacement the hand-wringing is directed not to the real problem, but to one of its side effects--that there are almost no college teaching jobs available for new Ph.D.s. When supply dwarfs demand, the question arises, is the problem mainly one of demand, or of supply? Everyone talks only about supply--that is, too many people in graduate school--and nobody ever faces the dreaded possibility that the crisis is really one of reduced demand. Yet, it should be obvious that demand is the problem. If undergraduates were majoring in English at the rate of thirty years ago, their numbers would be about 60 percent greater than they actually are today. The supply of Ph.D.s would then be hopelessly inadequate to meet the demand for new professors of English. The real source of the crisis must therefore lie in the fact that undergraduates are not attracted to what college literature programs now offer them. The college literature establishment professes sympathy for its hapless graduate students, but is not prepared to do the one thing that might help them--and that is, to think again about the mix of identity politics and postmodern dogma that has made English and related departments intellectually uncompetitive.

Comparisons with the past are nowadays routinely brushed aside as nostalgia for a golden age that never existed, and as failure to keep up with "cutting edge" ideas. Perhaps there were never any golden ages, but there certainly are fluctuations in the health of any enterprise, and rhetorical manipulation alone will not decide the question whether the present moment is a trough following a crest, or the reverse. For that you need facts, and the facts of enrollment strongly suggest that much of the humanities is now in a trough, one that has followed a rather unusual crest in the decades immediately following World War II. My hunch is that this crest happened in large part because of the presence of the exservicemen, first as students, and then as junior faculty. These were not high-school kids moving on from one classroom to another in a different building; they had seen something of life, and as a consequence they brought a greater seriousness to the campus. All students make compromises between their interest in ideas and their need for grades. With the exservicemen, that compromise tilted a little more than usual to ideas.

A recent event on my campus reminded me of the difference between that era and the present. A former colleague who had left the campus many years ago to join the Dartmouth faculty returned to give a visiting lecture on Albert Camus. He began his' talk by explaining how he first came to read Camus. During the closing months of World War II he had been on guard one very dark night when he heard someone moving in front of him. He challenged the unseen person to show himself, but there was no answer. He thought of his responsibility for the safety of his fellow soldiers asleep in the building at his back, and fired his rifle in the direction of the noise. With the morning light he found the body of a sixteen-year-old German boy in uniform. Though the boy was equipped with grenades that could have killed his comrades, he was anguished. He began to read Camus as part of an attempt to come to terms with what he had done, and the result was the subject of the rest of his talk. This was the kind of criticism I remembered from those years, one based in a sense that no matter what area of human experience you focused on, a powerful mind had been there before you, and had left behind in a classic literary work some reflections on it that had an extraordinary depth to them.

The speaker finished, and immediately a young woman--a tenured member of the literature department's teaching faculty--began an angry tirade. Why should she care about a story of male bonding? she said. How did all of this speak to the trauma she had experienced as a female growing up in Palo Alto? He had said nothing about the pain, the hazards of her life as a young woman in suburban America. And how could he be so naive as to speak of Camus's Truth--didn't he know that nobody talked about Truth anymore?