What is happening in literary studies?

What is happening to literary studies? And what should be happening? How nice it would be if these questions had the same answer – and one of the things I shall be considering is whether they do. Certainly, there is no simple answer to either one of them. But the answer or answers depend to a great extent on one’s understanding of where literary studies have been. So I will start there and then attempt to answer the questions as directly as I can. Literary studies, as we have known them, emerged as a consequence of the rise of literary modernism. We can see this emergence as early as 1800, when Wordsworth felt it necessary to write a preface for the second edition of Lyrical Ballads. This preface was a kind of manifesto, justifying Wordsworth’s own practice and situating it against a lower order of texts that included everything from German drama to the sensational reporting of historical events. A century or so after this, various kinds of modernists in literature and the other arts found it necessary to make similar gestures, turning the early twentieth century into the era of manifestos. This is well known, but what has not been so clearly noticed is that the new and often difficult works of the modernists also elevated the function of critics to a new level of importance. In a sense, we got the New Criticism because the works of literary modernism required it. Henry James wrote prefaces for the New York Edition of his fiction, and these prefaces led directly to the critical writings of people like Percy Lubbock, F. R. Leavis and R. P. Blackmur. At the same time, Yeats, Pound and Eliot produced a considerable amount of critical writing, which led directly to the more academic criticism of Richards, Ransom, Tate, Brooks and Wimsatt. In this process, criticism written by creative writers gradually was replaced by the critical writings of professors. In the field of literary studies, this meant that philology was displaced by criticism as the disciplinary core of the field – and criticism, in this case, meant explication. A journal called The Explicator was founded in 1942, and older academic journals with the word ‘philology’ in their titles began publishing critical explications at about the same time, thus, in a sense, betraying their names. And all this was sustained by the modernist concept of literature as those texts that required explication. The Explicator is still being published, sustained, I am sure, by library subscriptions and academic inertia, but explication is no longer at the centre of the field of literary studies. This is so for a number of reasons. First of all, much of post-modern literature is deliberately more colloquial, more accessible than the texts of high modernism. Many poets of the New York School, for example, wrote in a manner that was meant to be readable without academic assistance. Others, of course, like John Ashbury, continued to write difficult poetry, but very good poets like Gary Snyder, Robert Creely and Philip Levine wrote to be read by people who were not professors. So literature itself moved to a place where explication was less frequently required, but that is only a part of what happened to displace explication from its central role. Another thing that happened was the rise of new media to a position of cultural prominence and power. These media drew audiences away from traditional modes of literature to some extent, and they seemed to require an approach that was less a matter of reverential explication than of ideological critique. What we now call ‘cultural studies’ were developed mainly as a way of incorporating the newer media into academic curricula and critical discourse. But this development has challenged the centrality of literature in English and other language departments, and it seems to threaten the field of literary studies itself. Personal View 311