Employment of English. Michael Berube
The extent to which English departments incorporate the concerns of cultural studies will be the extent to which English departments institutionalize a mode of reading that asks after the production, reception, and social effectivity of texts; but the extent to which cultural studies becomes a mode of reading in literary study (as opposed to, say, a mode of reading in mass media and communications) will, conversely, be the extent to which cultural studies foregrounds the rhetorical operations of literature. It is entirely possible, in other words, to have your literature and your cultural studies too, if your literary study is cultural enough and your cultural studies is literary enough.
Those of my colleagues who fear that cultural studies will replace rather than enrich literary study, by contrast, are skeptical about precisely this point. As William Cain has recently charged, the arrival of new methodologies inevitably entails intellectual trade-offs, such that what we gain in the study of “culture” we must lose in the study of “literature”:
The Modern Language Association keeps insisting that the swerve toward cultural studies has not led to the displacement of this kind of close reading. But if you talk to teachers, it becomes evident that, in order to keep up with trends in cultural studies, they are cutting back on the time given to writers and books that students should be discovering and learning how to read. (B4)
Cain’s formulation contains its conclusions, of course: on the one hand, we have writers and books students should learn to read, and on the other hand we have “trends” in cultural studies. To the first we must do justice; with the second we are merely “keeping up.” This pretty much closes out the possibility that Stuart Hall, Eric Lott, or Janice Radway might qualify under both headings, as theorists in cultural studies whom students should discover and learn how to read. But as we shall see, Cain is far from alone in understanding the field in this way; and because our field is made up, in part, precisely by understandings of our field, we cannot chart the present and future of literary study unless we attend to why it is that cultural studies names both a desire and a fear.
Disciplines in the modern languages, in my view, should always be home to a variety of methodologies that ask what texts mean as well as how texts mean.1 I am happiest, as a critic and as a reader, when I am learning how these two concerns are mutually illuminating—how the formal properties of a text are part of the work that text does in the world, and how its work in the world is enabled or conditioned by our understanding of its properties. But I am not narrowly prescriptive when it comes to asking what kindof work English departments themselves might do in the world. I believe there are any number of ways to introduce students to the demands and delights of close textual study, and it is of little concern to me whether our students start by reading Wordsworth and work their way to deconstructions of contemporary representations of race, or start by analyzing Madonna videos and work their way to an understanding of the Romantic crisis lyric. Accordingly, I do not lose much sleep worrying about whether my students (graduate or undergraduate) will carry on the work of literary study in the way I like most to see that work done. Nonetheless, it is clear to me that our disciplinary desires and fears are driven as much by our projections of the future as by our assessments of the present. The controversy over cultural studies is thus part of a more general crisis of reproduction in the modern languages—a crisis whose occasion is the question of whether there is any useful social purpose served either by literary study, narrowly conceived, or by cultural studies, broadly conceived.
A crisis of reproduction? Doesn’t that sound awfully melodramatic? Perhaps things are at bottom much simpler than that; perhaps it’s merely that many of our field’s major theorists, from Frank Lentricchia to Wendy Steiner to Edward Said, have rightly dissociated themselves from the excesses of “politicized” literary study and turned our attention once again to art, to beauty, to the purposive purposelessness of the play of forms. Is there really any reason to call this the occasion of yet another “crisis,” particularly in a field that always thinks of itself in terms of crises?
I believe there is; I think there’s more going on here than just a return to art, and I think we can begin to understand what it is if we attend to a certain generational anxiety that defines contemporary fears of cultural studies. The figure to which I want tocall attention (and on whom I hope to keep your attention for the remainder of this book) is the figure of the graduate student: here, the figure of the graduate student who no longer knows—or, worse, no longer desires to know—what might be “literary” about literary study.
William Cain’s account of the field depends heavily on just this figure:
Part of the problem is that the graduate students who become our faculty members are not prepared to teach close reading. They have not learned the skills as undergraduates and, unfortunately, no one in graduate school has encouraged them to make up for their lack. I scan hundreds of transcripts when we make faculty appointments, and they reveal a numbing non-literary sameness—a compilation of graduate literature courses that are really courses in sociology, media, postcolonial politics, and the like. Courses on sexuality are everywhere. But I rarely detect courses on the literary subjects that graduate students might eventually teach in classes of their own. (B4)
And his conclusion is as sweeping as it is stark: “When a graduate student leaves the university with a Ph.D., he or she has little idea of what it means to read a text carefully or how to convey to students the skills needed to perform this activity. Nor is he or she prepared to make the choices required when designing courses and curricula for undergraduates” (B4–B5).
It is tempting to surmise that Cain’s department of English at Wellesley College must have done some truly unfortunate hiring in the past few years, but similar reports up and down both coasts convince me that the phenomenon is not confined to Wellesley. From one prestigious, public eastern university comes the report that graduate students now study queer theory more than any other department “specialization” from another prestigious, public western university comes the report of a department riven between people who want to jettison literature from the curriculum and people who want to jettison everything but literature. And from the University of Washington comes the following report from Ross Posnock:
My work and teaching blend literary criticism and intellectual history in an English department where the ideology of cultural studies, as described by Jameson, clearly has enthralled the majority of graduate students. In English departments the embarrassed, defensive status of the intellectual is matched by the low repute of literature (indeed of the aesthetic itself) and of those who dare construe their job as primarily devoted to its internal explication and external contextualization.
In the postmodern regime of English studies the intellectual, literature, the aesthetic, intellectual history are all held under suspicion on grounds of complicity with the enemy, which includes various instruments of white male power—universalism, cosmopolitanism, elitism. (18–19)
It would seem, then, that the students invoked by Posnock are precisely the graduate students who apply for tenure-track jobs at Wellesley: disdaining literature and those who teach it, they nonetheless seek jobs in departments of English precisely in order to liberate English from literature, and to offer ill-conceived and poorly designed courses on cross-dressing, Chicana/o graffiti, Disney World, and the politics of postcolonial poststructuralism.
I do not deny that literary studies are in need of defense, and I do not deny that there are some departments of English that house and foster all the sins Posnock and Cain enumerate. But I do want to look more closely at what these defenses of literary study are in fact defending; as I will show when I discuss the introduction to George Levine’s important edited collection, Aesthetics and Ideology, there remains a profound ambivalence, even among defenders of the literary and the aesthetic, as to whether “the aesthetic” is important because of the uses it serves in legitimating a domain for literary criticism, or because it serves no use whatsoever. Before I discuss Levine’s introduction to Aesthetics and Ideology, though, I’d first like to file a contrary local report on the state of the discipline, just for the record.
At the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, we have done a