Not many professors of literature lead what you would consider a glamorous life. Except for the few who get to teach whatever courses they want to, it’s pretty repetitive. They get locked into a rhythm where they teach the same classes over and over again, each time to a new group of students who ask generally bad questions and write generally bad papers. Even worse, the modern professor of literature is always on the defensive. He has to justify the study of literature to a skeptical student base and a skeptical administration as well. That is, both groups want to know just why, for instance, people should read Shakespeare anyway. You and I would have some choice words for anyone who would ask that question, but the professor’s answer might surprise: Shakespeare needs to be read with a professor because reading Shakespeare can be very, very dangerous for someone reading him without the proper supervision.
Before explaining this further though, here’s a brief, simplified history of the study of literature in the last few hundred years. Before the rise of formalist criticism in the 1930s, the most common way to approach literature was to use everything we knew about the work’s historical context to figure out what the author was trying to say. For example, when Milton says in Paradise Lost that Satan’s shield “hung on his shoulders like the moon,” we would claim that the full significance of this simile could only be understood in light of Galileo, who had been putting the recently-invented telescope to great use. The text required outside knowledge to interpret. In the 1930s, however, so-called New Criticism claimed that we should approach literature by only examining the words themselves. Historical context, the tradition, author’s biography—none of these things mattered. It was from New Criticism that we got the technique of close reading that we still see today in a lot of classrooms. The seminal work for this sort of criticism was Cleanth Brooks’ The Well Wrought Urn.
Eventually, there was a hybridization of the two. This hybrid approach was by any almost measure sophisticated and mature, forcing students to both do ‘background’ reading in addition scrutinizing each text very closely. When reading Keats’ Ode on a Grecian Urn, for example, it would be considered useful to know the contemporary admiration for classical Greek art, the Elgin marbles in particular. It would also be useful, however, to note the paradox in the following lines: “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard/ Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on.” That is, understanding the ‘meaning’ of this poem involves untangling the problem of how a melody can be sweet and how, more importantly, an unheard melody could be sweeter.
In short, the study of literature was, for a considerable amount of time, the process of using all available information to try to figure out what an author was saying. And there were signs that the study was thriving well into the twentieth century. As long as most people believed that the canon had important things to say, the professor of literature had a clear role in helping the student to access this hidden wisdom.
As we all know, however, we currently live in a time where very few people take it as a given that all of these old, dead, white men had something important to say. In fact, people have been conditioned to think the opposite. Because those authors were old and white, they obviously had something very harmful to say, whether you recognize it as such or not.
Thus, literature is no longer something to be studied and learned from. It has become something to be disarmed. And this is where the modern professor of literature comes in. Fortunately, he is here to save us. I’ll give a literally textbook example from a Literary Theory class I endured. (If you’ve ever read Hemingway’s “A Very Short Story,” you know it’s about a soldier who meets a girl, has a relationship with her, and then gets dumped by her because she wants to try Italian men. If you haven’t read this story, it’s about a page long. Read it real quick and then come back here.)
An older scholar argued that Hemingway’s narrative technique leaves readers with no choice but to take the patriarchal male side. His takeaway was that if you just read this story and sided with the narrator, well then you’re sexist just like Hemingway was. It works like a litmus test. A slightly more recent scholar, however, builds cleverly on that proposition. He argues that, because the narrator’s misogyny is so obvious, Hemingway must be creating “such apparent bias against Luz in order to expose it.” Translation: if you sided with the narrator, you’re still sexist, but now Hemingway isn’t. Our scholarly forebears might have understood this short story in the context of Hemingway’s tumultuous personal life, or even in the broader context of human experience. They might have approached it like a work of art, attentive to see something that they hadn’t seen before. But the current crop of scholars has no use for such nonsense. The story, to them, is nothing more than a codification of attitudes that no right thinking person should countenance. Its sole value is determining whether or not you harbor such attitudes in your secret heart of hearts.
This is what I would call bomb squad literary criticism. Professors go into these dangerous scenarios, like reading Hemingway, and make them safe again for students. They cordon off the badthink and go to work. Their classes (in their minds, at least) are theatrical displays of the savviness with which they cut the blue wire, a sort of The Hurt Locker meets Dead Poets Society. And I can tell you, as much as it pains me to do so, that many students love it. After all, in time they’ll get to join the bomb squad, too, and disarm these textual IEDs. And there’s a certain morbid satisfaction in feeling yourself morally superior to the greats of the Western canon. So profs can bask in the approval and share in that satisfaction and feel great about themselves. You can guess, however, what this all tends to do to any love of literature that a student might have had. It’s hard to admire Sir Philip Sidney when you’ve decided that he really needs to be understood as a hetero-fascist and you’re afraid to get any of that on you. You’ll get nothing from Huck Finn if you spend all your time looking for proof of Mark Twain’s racism. And so, as paradoxical as it may sound, if you want your kids to love the classics of Western literature, you need to think twice before sending them to Professor Badass Bomb Technician, who’s living out what fantasies of relevance he can to get through the drudgery of undergraduate lit.
Interesting article.
How long before Hemingway is banned?