This Is A Remedy?

Something is rotten in the state of "Lit Crit":

IT'S NOT SUCH a good time to be a literary scholar.

For generations, the study of literature has been a pillar of liberal education, a prime forum for cultural self-examination, and a favorite major for students seeking deeper understanding of the human experience.

But over the last decade or so, more and more literary scholars have agreed that the field has become moribund, aimless, and increasingly irrelevant to the concerns not only of the "outside world," but also to the world inside the ivory tower. Class enrollments and funding are down, morale is sagging, huge numbers of PhDs can't find jobs, and books languish unpublished or unpurchased because almost no one, not even other literary scholars, wants to read them.

The latest author to take the flagging pulse of the field is Yale's William Deresiewicz. Writing recently in The Nation, he described a discipline suffering "an epochal loss of confidence" and "losing its will to live."

I read this and my initial response was "No duh."

However, I'm not sure the author of this piece, Jonathan Gottschall, really understands why this is happening any better than the unemployable PhDs.

We literary scholars have mostly failed to generate surer and firmer knowledge about the things we study. While most other fields gradually accumulate new and durable understanding about the world, the great minds of literary studies have, over the past few decades, chiefly produced theories and speculation with little relevance to anyone but the scholars themselves. So instead of steadily building a body of solid knowledge about literature, culture, and the human condition, the field wanders in continuous circles, bending with fashions and the pronouncements of its charismatic leaders.

I think there is a clear solution to this problem. Literary studies should become more like the sciences. Literature professors should apply science's research methods, its theories, its statistical tools, and its insistence on hypothesis and proof.

Oh, for chrissakes. What nonsense.

The problem with "Lit Crit" is not that it didn't evolve to resemble the "normal science/scientific revolutions" formula postulated by Thomas Kuhn. The problem is its evolution into a discipline with an appalling lack of standards. The various post-modern solipsisms of "deconstructionism" and "Marxian Literary Criticism" (among others) were not the symptoms of another disease...they were the disease. Anything that moves you further away from your object of inquiry has to result in obfuscation and a pervasive lack of clarity. Sometimes scientific methods move you closer, sometimes they do not. Astrophysicists, for example, use complex mathematical models to stand in for something they have difficulty getting close to, as the universe is rather a big place. The methods of mathematical abstraction are thus a tool to get these scientists closer to their chosen subject.

There simply is no need for such methods when one is dealing with the written word. The important thing is not to analyze an overwhelming mass of undifferentiated writing in order to categorize and systematize it. Novels or poems are interesting because of their existing logic and meaning, which were fashioned by individual intelligences. (you know...people.) The idea that we can reduce the experience of reading to a limited number of archetypal psychological responses mixing with a limited number of learned cultural responses - where any such reductionist scheme would inevitably lead - would be to, once again, miss the point of literature.

The biggest problem English Lit has had over the past couple of decades, is the almost systematical exclusion of people with a genuine love of literature from the ranks of the English Professoriate. In that vein, Gottschall's "solution" seems more like a continuation of the problem in a different form. Its the equivalent of saying, "You know what's better than incurable heart disease? Incurable cancer!"