Manifesto of a Tenured Radical. Cary Nelson
professional organizations devoted to traditional idealization. The Modern Language Association found itself under attack for the only good thing it had done in thirty years—opening its closed shop to a whole range of new interests and constituencies. Rather than throw out the old and bring in the new, the MLA simply multiplied the sessions at its annual conference and gave everyone programs matching their commitments. But that was not enough to keep the literary Right in the fold. Simply having Spenser and Amiri Baraka sessions in adjoining rooms made them furious. They began to resign and form their own organizations where uncomfortable questions would not be asked.
One of the ironies of literary studies in the 1990s is that this conservative fraction of the profession saw no alternative but to revive the aesthetic faith of still earlier generations. That put this group of literary scholars—often liberals according to their self-image—in an implicit alliance with the political Right in the culture wars. English professors and conservative journalists alike could then stand in front of the symbolic schoolhouse to defend the eternal verities of the humanities. One-time English professor liberals were now for all practical purposes in league with William Bennett. Not that these people had any fondness for one another, but a political realignment had taken place in the humanities, and it would begin to have consequences when the university faced challenging questions about its mission and its employment practices.
Now the key question—still unanswered today—could be posed succinctly: would literary studies, and the humanities in general, become more fully reflective, self-critical enterprises? Would they learn to examine their practices and social effects with more than opportunistic self-interest? Meanwhile the potential social costs of an unreflective discipline—housed in unreflective institutions of higher education—began to mount. Theory had successfully opened the problematics of literary meaning, but it had not put the discipline or the institutions of higher education under comparable scrutiny. As a result, as will be clear in the final essays in the book, neither the disciplines nor the institutions were prepared for the new economic pressures higher education faced in the 1990s and beyond.
To begin to theorize the discipline of English studies, I must emphasize, does not mean that the notion of literariness as a separate cultural domain would simply disappear. The notion of literariness has a history that needs to be studied. But it also needs to be studied in relation to other cultural domains and in closer relation to social and political history, things that English departments are presently disinclined and often ill equipped to do. And the social function of English as a discipline needs to be theorized and deeply rethought.
As I suggested above, the black studies movement of the 1960s had the potential to force a radical reexamination of literary history, the hierarchizing opposition between high culture and popular culture, the ideological construction of the notion of literariness, and the social effects of the English curriculum. But the black studies protests did not produce an influential general critique of the field, in part because a whole range of social and institutional forces helped to protect most literature departments from any serious self-criticism. Black studies programs argued for a separate role because freestanding programs gave them their only guarantee of self-determination and because they wanted, in effect, to emphasize black consciousness-raising. At the same time, traditional disciplines were happy to locate the problem of race elsewhere. As a result, nonblack students avoided courses in black culture and literary studies remained largely unchanged. It is now possible to argue that the choice between separation from and integration into the regular discipline and curriculum is a false one. We need both opportunities for concentrated study of coherent individual traditions and pervasive mainstreaming of those traditions into general pedagogy and scholarship.
But the time has come—especially as some elements of the far Right become entrenched in American society through the end of the century, the increasingly conservative federal judiciary being a prime example—to begin to think and theorize about the social meaning of a specialization in literary studies and to extend that reflection to education more generally. Indeed, this kind of reference to contemporary American society, which some may feel is irrelevant to literary history, is itself therefore necessarily informed by theory. For I do not believe that one writes or teaches or interprets or theorizes in relation only to the eternal verities of the imagination, as literature departments have chosen to believe. We work in our own time; the students we train will live in this historical moment.
Questions like this led me, in the mid-1980s, to begin reviewing anthologies of American literature and course offerings in English departments to see how well writings by women and minorities were represented. By then women’s poetry and fiction were being given broader representation in some anthologies, but African American writing was present with but a few token texts. We could ask, as I did, what kind of message the English curriculum of the previous decades sent to students? When a curriculum requires a course in Shakespeare, as virtually every English department did, but not a course in Afro-American literature, as virtually no departments did, what message does it give students about black people, what message about the cultural traditions that are valuable and those that are expendable? Are the students we graduate from such programs as likely to see racial justice in their own country as important? The confidence that such values will be dependably if obliquely encouraged by the eternal truths of the literature we do require is an evasive fiction. The point is that the way we construct and communicate any academic discipline, including the study of literature, has interpretable social meaning and possible real social consequences; to pretend otherwise is merely to lie to ourselves.
There is no disputing that the United States is a substantially racist society. In this historical context, therefore, it is potentially a powerful and dangerous seduction to offer students literariness as something they can identify with, as a subject position they can occupy, while constructing it as an ideology that transcends such passing material trivialities as racial justice. In a fundamentally racist society, choosing to marginalize or ignore the study of minority literature, as English departments did throughout their history until the 1990s, articulates literary study to racism.
To entice students into making a significant commitment to the study of literature, we often display its place in our own lives, telling them, in effect, that literature is one of the finer things on earth, that it exhibits at once a powerful realism about the human condition and a visionary synthesis of its highest ambitions. But what does it mean to attach this whole program for transcendence to the experience of only one race, one sex, a restricted set of class fractions within a few national cultures? What does it mean that the experiences of most of the world’s peoples are obliterated in the “humanism” of the English curriculum? As the authors of Rewriting English put it: “Beneath the disinterested procedures of literary judgment and discrimination can be discerned the outlines of other, harsher words: exclusion, subordination, dispossession” (Batsleer et al., 30). These are not issues of coverage—this term, which apparently encapsulates the whole thoughtfulness of our model of the English major, suggests a comparison between the depth of our disciplinary model and the claims of a brand of paint—but rather issues of the social effects of disciplinary specialization.
By the mid-1990s anthologies had changed radically, with wide representation of women and minority writers. Here and there around the country a few instructors refuse to teach these texts. But it is now very difficult for an undergraduate to take survey courses in literature and not encounter a far more diverse canon than we have taught throughout our history. Yet the depth of thoughtfulness attending this new pedagogy remains doubtful. Faculty members are certainly persuaded that our meaningful literary history was far more diverse than we believed for decades, but narrow issues of coverage and representation still dominate discussions of the curriculum. As I will argue in the next chapter, the work of conceptualizing and teaching anthologies involves wider political and social issues and responsibilities than many in the discipline are comfortable in acknowledging.
Just as students now encounter works by women and minorities regularly, many of them also take courses in interpretive theory. But neither the students nor the faculty who teach them feel much inclined to challenge the social meaning of the discipline as a result. We need, for example, to recognize that literary idealization is necessarily in dialogue with, and embedded in, all the other idealizations by which our culture sustains and justifies itself. Studying literature in a self-reflexive