August 29, 2006
Why the study of English lit needs to become a tough subject again
From The Guardian:
Great (British) literary critics are like heavyweight boxing champions. No one bothers to know their names any more. Lit-crit used to be big time; Henry Cooper big. No longer. Our very greatest living GBLC is Frank Kermode, now in his ninth decade. Sir Frank (like 'Enery in his field of combat) was ennobled for services to literary criticism. Something makes him a rather lone figure among the sovereign's doughty band of knights.
Looking back over the field he has dominated for half a century, Kermode's words are unminced. Universities, he says, "are being driven by madmen". And education in general "is being run by lunatics".
More here.
Posted by Azra Raza at 08:34 AM | Permalink
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Kermode's right of course - English in universities is a mess - but he doesn't expand on what he means by the 'collapse' of his subject. Surely the collapse has a lot to do with mediocre academics leaping onto the band wagon of some of the theorists he himself introduced? Putting text after text through the Foucault machine, for instance, and failing to differentiate between good and bad writing (yes, these are two seperate categories) is a huge part of what is wrong with literary criticism. A lot of critics get so caught up in this mindless methodology that they forget to have opinions.
As for the fading of big names in criticism, I can think of a few who are famous for being good: James Wood, Christopher Ricks, John Kerrigan spring to mind. I'm confident there will always be good critics, even if they do have to climb over crowds of English students who don't have two A-levels to rub together.
And yes, English admissions requirements should be far higher than they are. I survived three years in an institution whose students could not identify a verb in a sentence and didn't know what the words 'urbane', 'anti-semitism' or 'reasoning' even meant, let alone how to spell them. And they all had a least BBB at A-level.
Posted by: Aisling | Aug 29, 2006 1:58:32 PM
I presume that the general fall in standards in humanities and social science departments has something to do with it. In fact, I'm not entirely sure that this is a special phenomenon of English departments; it could be that it's a general trend but the article only looked at one department.
But if this trend really is just about English, it could be a consequence of the decline of the novel. It appears that in the US, reading is increasingly considered a hobby that only effeminate academics and women engage in; real men read nonfiction, or don't read at all. If this trend also exists in the UK, then it could explain why English as an academic field is being deemphasized.
Posted by: Alon Levy | Aug 29, 2006 5:39:25 PM
All things change in academia, and not more so than in lit studies. How many years ago was it that no school would have considered reading anything after Milton as worth the doing? AndAmerican Lit? No such thing. the real issue though is that lit crit has in somne places replaced literature as central, with the notion that theory is more important than the thing being looked at. And this coupled with bad writing has been shunted aside by the sciences, which now deal with what is considered objective reality rather than the relativistic chaos of the humanistic perspective.
Critical visions reflect fashionable views, and isms and ologies alter over a short span of time, it seems.
There are still good critics but they often are to be found outside of academia as well as (sometimes) in side the tower.
Posted by: fred lapides | Aug 29, 2006 6:42:06 PM
Far be it for me to disabuse Aisling and fred of what I suspect is a favorite whipping boy, but “theory” isn’t what it once was in the humanities. Just ask a grad student or junior faculty member of your choice and they’ll tell you that the wind in the groves of academe has shifted from grandly synthetic work in the mode of Derrida/Foucault to smaller, more historically focused projects; which is to say, you’re more likely to find today’s scholars digging through the debris of, say, early 19th century newspapers in order to get a sense of a minor Romantic poet’s critical reception than writing up a manuscript on Lacan. (Of course, I don’t mean to suggest that the latter doesn’t happen anymore, only that it doesn’t happen as frequently as it once did.)
That said, as the linked article rightly notes, this move towards increased specialization probably has more to do with a lack of “big names” in the profession than anything else. Getting your hands dusty in archives just isn’t that sexy unfortunately. Anyway, theory is certainly not to blame for this lack. In fact, when it was in the ascendant, theory tended to produce these big names quite frequently—so-called “academostars” like Gayatri Spivak and Judith Butler.
Posted by: Archie Debunker | Aug 29, 2006 8:10:02 PM
On the one hand, even if the rise of theory has now been mitigated by specialization, universities change fairly slowly, and it could be that the decline of English is a result of that, and will reverse itself as theory fades into more traditional subjects.
On the other, since Kermode opposes teaching theory to undergrads, and at least the way I understand it, that's where the main reduction in quality occurs, it's likely that theory has nothing to do with it at all.
Posted by: Alon Levy | Aug 29, 2006 9:42:23 PM
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