I thought it might be informative to present a summary of literary criticism in the American academy and explain how these ideas came to define our current political climate.
One of my favourite passages from Terry Eagleton's "Literary Theory" sums it up for me. "The reason why the vast majority of people read poems, novels and plays is because they find them pleasurable. This fact is so obvious that it is hardly ever mentioned in universities. It is, admittedly, difficult to spend some years studying literature in most universities and still find it pleasurable at the end...."
Agree 💯% regarding the nature and purpose of literature. Yes, we can analyze/criticize any work of art, but the experience of the work should be first and foremost.
What is the function of literary theory? Why does it exist? It seems less relevant or useful than say, video games, skateboarding or science fiction. Whenever I see the decline into irrelevance of the humanities I think that perhaps we are incapable of handling them in our existing institutions. Perhaps our public universities should simply close those departments. Perhaps these subjects need to join the ranks of astrology, alchemy and numerology.
We can continue visual arts programs and the social sciences, but the humanities need to be placed with their related subjects listed above. I wonder how many literary clinics could make a living in the same manner as those who mastered astrology? I suspect not many, if any. Let the free market sort them out.
I was recently reading about post-structuralism in reference to a recent Supreme Court decision. Your brilliant article showed me the bigger picture. Thanks!
I agree. There is a division within jurisprudence analogous to one in literature. Strict constructionists tend to stick to what the words of the law say as written, rejecting any contextual clues to the intent of the law (such as other writings of the founding fathers) as extraneous. At the opposite pole we have interpretations so broad that they leave behind the actual provisions of the law. One side accuses the other of fossilizing the law, the other side in turn accuses the first of legislating from the bench.
The argument then moves away from the law itself and veers into questions of whether the law has any clear interpretation at all and if so, who has the right to say what that interpretation may be. I saw a cartoon many years ago where two parents were arguing over who would push their stroller; meanwhile the stroller rolled off down the hill with the baby and neither noticed. (This is the other way, besides throwing out the bath water, to lose the baby.)
I have to say that I escaped just before modern literary theory took over. I read and still read for pleasure, and to be in a place, a time, a self different than my own. I wonder that one of the many reasons that reading deeply for pleasure seems to be dying is that students are taught to read for modern theory which has no joy in it.
I have noticed that even young students in disciplines like English and Anthropology will take it as obvious that there is no “objective truth.” What do you think they mean by “objective truth”?
Especially when I was younger I assumed they ment that all knowledge depends on the unity of the subject in Kantian fashion. This position is basically non threatening because it preserves knowledge and truth just with a somewhat different explanation. But more recently I feel I don’t know what “objective truth” means to people in these departments.
Great question. In 2022 a grad peer said “I know objectivity is a myth” in class. I’ve spent the last 7 years in 2 English grad programs…and we now live in what my English professors call the post-truth era. They used postmodernism to usher this suspicious post-truth era in their literature (as Liza concisely describes) and first-year writing pedagogy (writing scholars James Berlin and Sharon Crowley depict this).
Social constructivism and subjectivity (not
Objectivity) define truth now as socially created and an incomprehensible personal perspective. No neutral or even honest attempts at neutrality can exist: everything is always partisan and political and Power-driven. Social justice exemplifies this limitedworldview best imo.
So, objective truth is suspect or a ‘myth’ because it originates in what they refer to as the colonialist, capitalist, white, European, male project of Modernism: the Enlightenment. Science (largely male practice) is suspect as a result. There’s a whole academic field dedicated to doubting science (stemming from Nietzsche too) called science studies (Bruno latour). Trump is their post-truth poster child, and my English profs feel responsible for his rise.
I’ve become demoralized, for all I write must bend to the social Justice paradigm, prove it…but I try to document how English departments spread this anti-science ideology, only to insist their partisan views should NOW be treated as THE power-authority-objective-Truth after deconstructing trust in Truth…and how I’ve tried to mentally emerge from the gaslighting and to place RAD scholarship practices in my research.
Huh, what is the tone of voice when they assume the grave and portentous responsibility of having created DJT?
Thanks for this response! I am willing to concede that the process of judging what is true is usually highly social (e.g., the particular scientist has to assume that a lot of things are true on the authority of other researchers before they can interpret their specialized research meaningfully.) I think someone like Micheal Polanyi describes this well. And regarding the judgments that result as justified but also fallible seems reasonable.
I’ve never read Latour, but my (possibly superficial) impression of writers like Foucault is that they can be usefully read as describing this social process of judging truth, even if they lack an account of and do not investigate what makes some judgments of truth better than others.
Do you have a sense of what people find appealing about total constructivism plus perspectivism? I might have thought that this would create cognitive dissonance for an activist who happens to believe that their own political project is good and just.
"Two years later, fellow French postmodern scholar Michel Foucault reinforced Barthes’ ideas with the delivery of his lecture “What Is an Author,” where he argued that the concept of “author” was simply a societally constructed abstraction that had historically served to ascribe meaning to a given autonomous text."
And here I thought an author was the actual person who wrote whatever was being read.
Clearly, I lack Foucault's profound grasp of meaningless gibberish.
I have been enjoying your more recent posts so much that I have decided to go back and read all the ones I missed when you first posted them. This one is a gem; thank you!
To my amusement, I found that one of your observations here almost exactly matches an aside I made in one of my (really unnecessarily long) comments on your article about The Waste Land. There, I observed that the conflation of scholarship with research leads to a necessity to say something "new" in a dissertation, while the application of a standard analytical toolkit to a limited supply of canonical texts leads to running out of new things to say, which drives the movement toward ever newer and less comprehensible theories. If you bothered to read that comment (and I wouldn't blame you if you didn't -- I was writing WAY too much about The Waste Land), you might have thought I was echoing back to you what you wrote here, but honest, it was my own thought!
Having, as I do, one foot in the literary world and the other in mathematics, much of the literary theory of Foucault and Derrida seems obviously fallacious. (I was studying literature in the late 1970s, so I missed Foucault's transmogrification from enfant terrible to eminence grise. That particular naked emperor was still new and exciting.) I would not dismiss cultural relativism out of hand, at least for some things. Dress codes and which side of the street to drive on clearly depend on which society one belongs to. But I defy anyone to show me a theorem in mathematics which is only true for some cultures, or whose truth depends on the privileged discourse of an elite. The real trouble with relativism (it seems to me) is its hubris in setting itself up as foundational to our understanding of the world. The result is an absurd Absolute Relativism.
To give you a view of how post-modernism looks from the science side of the arts and sciences divide, here is a link to a fairly recent article about a literary/scientific spoof that happened in 1994. I was there to see it, and I've never laughed so hard again at an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education. The linked article is a worthwhile read, and the paper itself is hilarious. You can see from this how post-modernism is destroying not only literature but science as well. I will post the link in a separate comment so that it does not get lost at the end of this one.
If 'understanding' and 'truth' are important to your belief system, what are your goals as a literary theorist, Ms Libes? How would you describe your heart/oeuvre at this moment in time? Lord knows things change. I attended a reading of Breath's Burials by Gustav Sobin in 1998 at MIAD. Incredible! Had no idea who or what he was. It took many years to see who/what he was.
One of my favourite passages from Terry Eagleton's "Literary Theory" sums it up for me. "The reason why the vast majority of people read poems, novels and plays is because they find them pleasurable. This fact is so obvious that it is hardly ever mentioned in universities. It is, admittedly, difficult to spend some years studying literature in most universities and still find it pleasurable at the end...."
Agree 💯% regarding the nature and purpose of literature. Yes, we can analyze/criticize any work of art, but the experience of the work should be first and foremost.
What is the function of literary theory? Why does it exist? It seems less relevant or useful than say, video games, skateboarding or science fiction. Whenever I see the decline into irrelevance of the humanities I think that perhaps we are incapable of handling them in our existing institutions. Perhaps our public universities should simply close those departments. Perhaps these subjects need to join the ranks of astrology, alchemy and numerology.
We can continue visual arts programs and the social sciences, but the humanities need to be placed with their related subjects listed above. I wonder how many literary clinics could make a living in the same manner as those who mastered astrology? I suspect not many, if any. Let the free market sort them out.
100% - Literary theory is unfortunately the phrenology of the 21st century.
I was recently reading about post-structuralism in reference to a recent Supreme Court decision. Your brilliant article showed me the bigger picture. Thanks!
Wow, what decision was that?
The decision regarding abortion that was based on textualism, a concept that I think is similar to structuralism.
I agree. There is a division within jurisprudence analogous to one in literature. Strict constructionists tend to stick to what the words of the law say as written, rejecting any contextual clues to the intent of the law (such as other writings of the founding fathers) as extraneous. At the opposite pole we have interpretations so broad that they leave behind the actual provisions of the law. One side accuses the other of fossilizing the law, the other side in turn accuses the first of legislating from the bench.
The argument then moves away from the law itself and veers into questions of whether the law has any clear interpretation at all and if so, who has the right to say what that interpretation may be. I saw a cartoon many years ago where two parents were arguing over who would push their stroller; meanwhile the stroller rolled off down the hill with the baby and neither noticed. (This is the other way, besides throwing out the bath water, to lose the baby.)
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/education/glossary/poststructuralism
I have to say that I escaped just before modern literary theory took over. I read and still read for pleasure, and to be in a place, a time, a self different than my own. I wonder that one of the many reasons that reading deeply for pleasure seems to be dying is that students are taught to read for modern theory which has no joy in it.
I've made this argument elsewhere. It's hard to love reading when you're asked to analyze through arbitrary lenses.
Thank you for pointing me to this! Great article!
I have noticed that even young students in disciplines like English and Anthropology will take it as obvious that there is no “objective truth.” What do you think they mean by “objective truth”?
Especially when I was younger I assumed they ment that all knowledge depends on the unity of the subject in Kantian fashion. This position is basically non threatening because it preserves knowledge and truth just with a somewhat different explanation. But more recently I feel I don’t know what “objective truth” means to people in these departments.
Great question. In 2022 a grad peer said “I know objectivity is a myth” in class. I’ve spent the last 7 years in 2 English grad programs…and we now live in what my English professors call the post-truth era. They used postmodernism to usher this suspicious post-truth era in their literature (as Liza concisely describes) and first-year writing pedagogy (writing scholars James Berlin and Sharon Crowley depict this).
Social constructivism and subjectivity (not
Objectivity) define truth now as socially created and an incomprehensible personal perspective. No neutral or even honest attempts at neutrality can exist: everything is always partisan and political and Power-driven. Social justice exemplifies this limitedworldview best imo.
So, objective truth is suspect or a ‘myth’ because it originates in what they refer to as the colonialist, capitalist, white, European, male project of Modernism: the Enlightenment. Science (largely male practice) is suspect as a result. There’s a whole academic field dedicated to doubting science (stemming from Nietzsche too) called science studies (Bruno latour). Trump is their post-truth poster child, and my English profs feel responsible for his rise.
I’ve become demoralized, for all I write must bend to the social Justice paradigm, prove it…but I try to document how English departments spread this anti-science ideology, only to insist their partisan views should NOW be treated as THE power-authority-objective-Truth after deconstructing trust in Truth…and how I’ve tried to mentally emerge from the gaslighting and to place RAD scholarship practices in my research.
Huh, what is the tone of voice when they assume the grave and portentous responsibility of having created DJT?
Thanks for this response! I am willing to concede that the process of judging what is true is usually highly social (e.g., the particular scientist has to assume that a lot of things are true on the authority of other researchers before they can interpret their specialized research meaningfully.) I think someone like Micheal Polanyi describes this well. And regarding the judgments that result as justified but also fallible seems reasonable.
I’ve never read Latour, but my (possibly superficial) impression of writers like Foucault is that they can be usefully read as describing this social process of judging truth, even if they lack an account of and do not investigate what makes some judgments of truth better than others.
Do you have a sense of what people find appealing about total constructivism plus perspectivism? I might have thought that this would create cognitive dissonance for an activist who happens to believe that their own political project is good and just.
Also, what’s “RAD”?
"Two years later, fellow French postmodern scholar Michel Foucault reinforced Barthes’ ideas with the delivery of his lecture “What Is an Author,” where he argued that the concept of “author” was simply a societally constructed abstraction that had historically served to ascribe meaning to a given autonomous text."
And here I thought an author was the actual person who wrote whatever was being read.
Clearly, I lack Foucault's profound grasp of meaningless gibberish.
Link to an article about a physicist spoofing a critical theory journal:
https://www.commentary.org/articles/james-meigs/alan-sokal-parody-predicts-dreadful-woke-future/
I have been enjoying your more recent posts so much that I have decided to go back and read all the ones I missed when you first posted them. This one is a gem; thank you!
To my amusement, I found that one of your observations here almost exactly matches an aside I made in one of my (really unnecessarily long) comments on your article about The Waste Land. There, I observed that the conflation of scholarship with research leads to a necessity to say something "new" in a dissertation, while the application of a standard analytical toolkit to a limited supply of canonical texts leads to running out of new things to say, which drives the movement toward ever newer and less comprehensible theories. If you bothered to read that comment (and I wouldn't blame you if you didn't -- I was writing WAY too much about The Waste Land), you might have thought I was echoing back to you what you wrote here, but honest, it was my own thought!
Having, as I do, one foot in the literary world and the other in mathematics, much of the literary theory of Foucault and Derrida seems obviously fallacious. (I was studying literature in the late 1970s, so I missed Foucault's transmogrification from enfant terrible to eminence grise. That particular naked emperor was still new and exciting.) I would not dismiss cultural relativism out of hand, at least for some things. Dress codes and which side of the street to drive on clearly depend on which society one belongs to. But I defy anyone to show me a theorem in mathematics which is only true for some cultures, or whose truth depends on the privileged discourse of an elite. The real trouble with relativism (it seems to me) is its hubris in setting itself up as foundational to our understanding of the world. The result is an absurd Absolute Relativism.
To give you a view of how post-modernism looks from the science side of the arts and sciences divide, here is a link to a fairly recent article about a literary/scientific spoof that happened in 1994. I was there to see it, and I've never laughed so hard again at an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education. The linked article is a worthwhile read, and the paper itself is hilarious. You can see from this how post-modernism is destroying not only literature but science as well. I will post the link in a separate comment so that it does not get lost at the end of this one.
If 'understanding' and 'truth' are important to your belief system, what are your goals as a literary theorist, Ms Libes? How would you describe your heart/oeuvre at this moment in time? Lord knows things change. I attended a reading of Breath's Burials by Gustav Sobin in 1998 at MIAD. Incredible! Had no idea who or what he was. It took many years to see who/what he was.