John Guillory
In his illuminating account of the period before the introduction of the Ph.D. into the American university, Don Cameron Allen remarks on the puzzling absence of “literature” as a nominal subject of study: “Rhetoric and Oratory were taught everywhere, but literature, even classical literature, seems not to have been an important subject” (Allen 1968: 3). Works by such exemplary vernacular authors as Shakespeare and Milton entered the curriculum mainly by way of the course on “rhetoric and belles lettres,” which disappeared by the end of nineteenth century. Thereafter literature found shelter in the newly formed modern language departments, but as a collateral subject, subordinated to the study of language. This history has been recounted many times, and it always confirms how difficult it has been to posit a definition of literature adequate for the institution of a discipline. But Allen’s observation reminds us that the problem of literature’s definition is also the problem of its location. Wherever else it was to be found, literature played only a minor role in the disciplinary system of the nineteenth century.
The fact that literature occupied an uncertain position in the university before the twentieth century belies its ever more important role in the sphere of print culture, comprehending a much larger and more diverse world of writing and reading than the one occupied by the professors. In that domain, the concept of literature passed through phases of what I call delimitation, a progressive accumulation and disaccumulation of meanings, the effect of which was steadily to magnify literature’s social importance. This sequence of delimitations charts a great excursus of literature, from its widespread dissemination in the sphere of a massified print culture to its assimilation in the twentieth century to the universities with the institution of “literary criticism” as a discipline. From the vantage of the terminal phase of that discipline’s formation, we can summarize the progressive delimitation of literature as the following sequence of historically determined predicates.
In pre‐modern usage, literature is equated with all forms of writing (according to its etymology, litterae), and with the possession of learning or letters, a notion ubiquitous in European culture, and circulating as antecedent to the later conception of “literacy,” but indicating a higher level of educational achievement than merely the ability to read and write.1 In the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries literature was increasingly identified with vernacular writing and thus implicitly opposed to writing in Greek or Latin, which only became “Greek literature” or “Latin literature” after the fact of vernacular delimitation, and largely as a result of ancient literature’s translation into modern languages. In the eighteenth century, literature was associated with the development of new generic forms—the periodical essay, the familiar letter, the novel—and with growing awareness of the transformative social effects of print media in both the controversial public sphere and the private sphere of consumption.
During the same period, literature was assimilated into the vernacular educational system as a repository of grammatical and stylistic norms, and deployed from the curricular base of the “rhetoric and belles lettres” course in a campaign (conducted simultaneously in print media) to establish a standard of taste in reading and writing and a standard English dialect for speaking, the latter enabling and eliciting corollary politico‐ethnic projections of a “national literature” back onto the field of writing.2 By the later nineteenth century, literature was restricted to the imaginative genres of poetry, novels, and plays, thus permanently retiring from usage the precedent generalized sense of “poetry,” a term that formerly included fictional genres in both verse and prose, but after the Renaissance could no longer be extended to include non‐verse writing. Discursive space was thereby cleared for new conceptualizations of scientific and informational genres of writing as “non‐literary,” ultimately relegating essayistic genres to a zone of uncertain overlap between imaginative and informational or “non‐fictional” prose.3 In the twentieth century, literature was restricted further as a result of increasingly sharp distinctions between the epistemic claims of scientific, informational, or literary genres of writing, claims which in turn lay the conceptual groundwork for the linguistic delimitation of literature as literary language, or the expression of literariness, instances of which might even, paradoxically, be identified in “non‐literary” specimens of writing.4 By the mid‐twentieth century, literature is sequestered from the poetic or narrative productions of mass or popular literacy, which were demoted thereafter to the status of sub‐literary or “genre” writing, thus excluding the very possibility of “bad literature,” at the same time elevating the rarefied works of High Modernism to exemplary status as literature.
The serial delimitation of literature is correlated to its systemically eccentric location, its absence from the disciplinary structure of the most prestigious institutions, such as Oxford and Cambridge, its presence for the most part in marginal niches of the curriculum of other institutions, in lower level institutions, in non‐conformist schools, or in provincial or colonial colleges and universities. Indeed, the systemic eccentricity of vernacular literature to the central or most official sites of the educational system is an enabling condition for its peculiar semantic plasticity, its susceptibility to redefinition or delimitation. Literature lacked fixed definition until very late in its career, after it had become the exclusive object of the discipline we know as literary criticism.
The multiple phases of delimitation argue against identifying any one moment or event in which literature came to mean what it does to us today, in which, as is often said, literature was “invented.”5 It is better to understand the category of literature as the result of a historical process rather than an event or moment. The appeal of narratives that posit a singular origin is not difficult to see: historical determinations are reduced in such narratives to a bracing contingency and local specificity. Trevor Ross, for example, writes, not atypically, that “On 22 February 1774 literature in its modern sense began” (Ross 1998: 297). The dramatically precise date refers to the legislative revocation of perpetual copyright by the House of Lords, which resulted in the vastly wider availability of English literary works than ever before. But Ross’s scrupulous reconstruction of canon formation over several centuries calls into question his rhetorical assertion of an inaugural moment and testifies rather to a process. Is the literature that “began” in 1774 the same literature that circulates in 1874?
Other scholars have argued that literature began earlier or later, or elsewhere, even very far elsewhere, in Scotland or India. But the argument for a colonial origin makes no better a case for the originating moment. A notion such as the “Scottish invention of English literature,” advanced by Robert Crawford (1998), locates a singular time and place of origin onto the colonized globe. To be sure, there is a rich historical irony in the discovery that English literature was invented by those who were not English. But our enjoyment of this irony must yield to the humbler recognition that the English are themselves very hard to locate, that many of them inhabit various elsewheres, diverse cultural suburbs. Was it not the case, for example, that their metropolis itself was an elsewhere from the perspective of the educational center, that the first study of English literature by the English themselves at University College London was a response to its exclusion from Oxford and Cambridge?6 London was eccentric too. If Scotland, Wales, and Ireland are eccentric to England, as also India and Africa, the Caribbean and the American colonies, these spatial peripheries have to be systemically related to the eccentricity of education for women, of adult education or “extension” programs, of the schools for Dissenters excluded from Anglican schools and from Oxford and Cambridge—all of the sites of eccentricity where vernacular literary study first found a home.
The relegation of literature to the lower levels of the school system and to its marginal institutions—socially, geographically, politically, religiously—is so manifestly a systemic feature of the educational system before the twentieth century as to defeat any attempt to explain this eccentricity by taking any one of its sites as representative of all. Indeed, the process of literature’s delimitation is pan‐European. To the French we owe the concept of belles lettres and the notion of criticism (by way of Charles Rollin and René Rapin). Germany gave us aesthetics, and arguably, the delimitation of literature as “imaginative” writing. Can literature have so many places and times of origin? It may be less exciting to think of literature as a concept “in process,” with diverse locations and moments, but the multiplicity of sites compels us to attend to the systemic features of literature.
Literature is for us today essentially what it came to mean during the interwar period. If literary critics are now restless with that delimited object, it will be difficult to redefine that object for the very reason that the delimitation of literature was a condition for the constitution of literary criticism as a discipline. That university discipline entered late but not entirely post festum into the process of delimitation. Literary criticism inherited a concept of literature both freighted with significations accumulated over its long history but also considerably lightened by the divestment of its oldest, most general sense. The works of Newton and Blackstone, it need hardly be said, are by definition no longer “literature” for us, as they were for their contemporaries—unless we undertake to read such texts for aspects of “literariness,” a strategic construction that immediately betrays the sedimentation of the literature concept. The object called literature is perceived at the endpoint of a process, embedded in a disciplinary matrix.
Yet the possibility of literature as object of a discipline was still uncertain as late as 1894, when William Morton Payne collected a number of statements by chairs of English departments for a special issue of The Dial magazine entitled English in American Universities. The testimony of the chairs confirms the fact of literature’s eccentricity to the existing disciplinary structure, provoking Payne to comment, “The question may be raised whether it would not be well to set an official seal upon the separation of literature from its allied subjects by making of it a separate department of university work, just as some of our more progressive institutions have erected sociology into a distinct department, thus definitely marking it off from the allied departments of political and economic science” (Payne 1895: 28). Departments of English, Payne concedes, were still likely to study literature as “material for minute philological and historical analysis” rather than for itself, however that essence might be defined (1895: 19).7 Few departments offered something recognizably like the English major of our day, organized as a sequence of literature courses. Composition and philological study were larger parts of the curriculum, and philology, of course, still claimed the major position in graduate study. The principle relegating literature to the handmaiden of philology was memorably (though perhaps belatedly) asserted by Kemp Malone: “Literature is indeed not in any proper sense a science (or branch of learning). It is rather the material with which the science of philology deals, much as the vegetable kingdom is the material with which the science of botany deals, and at bottom it is as absurd to speak of a professor of literature as it would be to speak of a professor of vegetables” (Malone 1927: 28). The problem of disciplining literature was already well understood by Payne in 1894: “It is doubtless much easier to treat literature by the method of science than by the method of aesthetics; but does not literature, thus treated, cease to assert its peculiar and indispensable function?” (1894: 26).
This “aesthetic function” was supposed to be the province of belles lettres, the very field of study that was displaced at the century’s end by versions of philology and correlated literary history alarmingly bound to the mere fact. The question of judgment or taste that energized the founders of belles lettres was banished, as departments of modern languages veered toward a thorough‐going positivism. The triumph of this tendency was expressed widely and prosaically in the assertion of scholars that there can be no examination in taste, an opinion that curtly discloses the non‐negotiable condition of disciplinarity—that it produce a testable knowledge.8
The successful establishment of scientific disciplines in the university of the later nineteenth century throws into relief the resistance of literature to disciplinarization, which I understand as an expression of its systemic eccentricity to the official curriculum, both the classical curriculum of the earlier nineteenth century and the scientific disciplines of the later. However, if literature suffered a kind of internal exile in the new language departments dominated by philology, where it lingered on as the subject of the increasingly moribund pedagogy of belles lettres, it would be easy to demonstrate that its social importance outside the university was at this moment no less than immense. In this wider world, literature circulated as the major form of mass entertainment, as a means of self‐improvement and self‐information, and as a vehicle for the expression of opinion, for public debate on all subjects political and social. Print publication was virtually the only medium of the public sphere, apart from speech itself. The social importance of vernacular publication, situated in a vast and busy world of reading and writing, a world in which print media demanded a response almost as intense and preoccupying as that demanded by the presence of real persons—this world of immediate mediation was seldom acknowledged in the official curriculum of the nineteenth‐century university, which remained anchored for much of the century in the study of Greek and Latin, and which, when it did yield finally to the social forces opposed to the classical curriculum, yielded more easily to science than to vernacular literature.
I propose to name this eccentric and largely extracurricular world of reading and writing the literary system; in this system, literature performed multiple communicative functions. At base, it was a manifold of systemic relations constituting the institutions and practices of reading, writing, and speaking. The literary system emerged in the eighteenth century, became dominant in the nineteenth, and began to wane in the twentieth. The system was founded on much more than the mere possibility of vernacular literacy; its enabling condition was the massification of literacy, the extension of reading practices to large numbers of the populace (see Vincent 2000). I posit three major abstractions—an extracurricular trivium—constituting literary culture as a system of vernacular reading, writing, and speaking practices. These abstractions are grammar, literature, and criticism.
Grammar: the prescriptive principles of pronunciation, diction, syntax, spelling, and usage comprising the linguistic norm of Standard English.9 The normative function of grammar, which was early expressed by the concept of “correctness,” was rapidly enlarged by the nineteenth century to include numerous and complex canons of “usage” quite remote from the “accidence” of early modernity. These canons could be elaborated into super‐subtle refinements designed to bring language into an imagined conformity with the rationality of Latin, but in truth relying on quite arbitrary determinations of syntax and orthography. Grammar was supported in the lower schools by an extensive vernacular pedagogy, and in the print media by a proliferation of guides to every aspect of pronunciation, diction, syntax, spelling, and usage. The prominence in nineteenth‐century periodical venues of self‐styled “grammarians” continually excited linguistic anxiety in the populace, often correlated with other anxieties about upward mobility, gender inequality, or ethnic assimilation (Cmiel 1990: 123ff: Barron 1982). The command of correct speech thus constituted the first and most important form of cultural capital circulating in modern society.10 As a prescriptive practice, grammar must be distinguished from the descriptive science of the nineteenth‐century philologists, who often dismissed the grammarians for lacking a scientific understanding of language. Grammar belongs to the literary system, then, not to the sciences of language in the university. In the contention between grammar and philology, two versions of modernization clashed, and remained permanently unreconciled.
Literature: in the second through the seventh delimited senses of vernacular publication, the chief source of mass entertainment in the nineteenth century, an instrument for self‐improvement and self‐instruction, and the curricular basis for the teaching of Standard English in the lower schools. Because literature, especially in the delimited sense of poetic and narrative forms, was disseminated on a mass scale through print media, these narrative forms could also become the screen for myth‐like projections of a “national culture.” The development of the nation‐state as a cultural formation was always intimately related to the development of a literary culture, and a national literature. If the linguistic substratum of Standard English was a condition for recognizing a canon of national literature, it also permitted the vernacular canon to assume supplemental ideological functions as the carrier of traditions and values, often projected as expressions of Englishness or Americanness.
At the same time, the concept of literature came to possess a density and complexity that persisted through its later delimitations as the super‐generic category comprehending the “imaginative” forms of poetry, novel, and drama. It may seem to us now that literature in this later sense belongs to the literary system as its most central (because canonical) feature; but literature so delimited always circulated in a crowded universe of periodical writing—reviews, journals, magazines, newspapers—which must be understood as the ambient medium of what we now call, in the delimited sense, literature. Works of literature were mediated by the vast apparatus of reviewing that supported and sustained the literary system beyond the school. The functionality of this system began to falter in the earlier twentieth century, when journalism and literature began to diverge, and reviewers and “creative” writers ceased to be the same persons.
Criticism: the discourse of judgment or taste supporting the practice of reviewing and sustaining the literary system as a multifunctional medium. The purpose of criticism at its inception in the seventeenth century was to discriminate between good and bad writing, between the “beauties” and “faults” in works. The critic appeared as a new kind of expert—the organic intellectual of a new literate population much larger than the scholars of Latin and Greek—but an expert very close to vernacular readers, only removed from that group far enough to develop the normative principles of its reading practice. This ancien regime of the critic lasted a surprisingly long time, all the while driving the delimitation of literature in concert with the poets, playwrights, novelists, and essayists themselves—from whom, during this period, the critics were seldom wholly distinct. Finally, in the twentieth century, the function of the critic was subtly but consequentially altered. The purpose of criticism was now, first, to discriminate literature in its delimited sense from mere generic or entertainment writing; and having excluded the literary from the non‐literary, second, to make further discriminations among works of “serious” literature. In between these two points lies the “Age of Criticism,” as Kant dubbed it, and which I name here more narrowly by the concept of the literary system (Kant 1781: 100).
If criticism in its twentieth‐century incarnation aimed to restrict the name of literature to those imaginative works of a quality high enough to constitute an elite literary culture (whole genres such as detective fiction or science fiction would henceforth be excluded as mere “genre” work, in contradistinction to the super‐genre of literature), the paradoxical effect of this final delimitation was to demote criticism itself in relation to the super‐genre of literature (Williams 1976: 186). For belles lettres, critical prose belonged equally with poetry to the field of literature, and was even in some ways more exemplary for the early phases of the literary system, and more useful in conveying its norms of grammar and style. We can recall here the key function of Addison’s Spectator essays in the belletristic pedagogy of Hugh Blair and his successors. Criticism between Dryden and Eliot still belonged in some necessary way to the category of literature, as it was usually the work of littérateurs or “men of letters,” but thereafter criticism would stand over against literature in a new relation. The status of criticism as literature was exchanged for the power to determine which texts belonged to the category of literature. Literature ceased once and for all to refer to writing, and its delimitations were locked into place. This fixing of the category of literature culminated in the redefinition of criticism itself as a professional discourse, and the institutionalization of literary criticism as an academic discipline. The determination of the category of literature from within the university marks the waning of the literary system, and the rise of new systemic relations of reading and writing determined increasingly by a new media system taking over many functions of the old literary system. This does not mean, as so many believe, that the media are displacing literature; rather, the media system is assuming many functions of the antecedent literary system.11
In retrospect, we can see that the relation between the literary system and the university in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was characterized above all by the exteriority of literature to the university, or the fact that the university curriculum overlapped so little with the activity of the literary system. This condition paradoxically encouraged the rapid development of the system, because that system responded not immediately to the aims of the school, which were by definition conservative, but rather to the market, to readers as consumers.12 Nonetheless, we cannot describe literature as exterior in the sense of being wholly absent from the university; as we know, some space was cleared for literature in the belles lettres course. The popularity of this course testified to the demand for vernacular writing even within the university. But the internal exile of belles lettres at the time of the institution of modern language departments in the 1870s suggests that what I am calling the eccentricity of literary culture must indeed be understood as a systemic effect.
In the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the demand for literature was confirmed by the emergence of numerous extracurricular student literary societies. Students who toiled grudgingly at their Greek and Latin exercises enthusiastically patronized these societies, which were dedicated primarily to vernacular reading. In one of the few studies of these reading and debating clubs, historian of education James McLachlan observes that they were highly structured organizations, in effect, colleges within colleges. They enrolled students, conducted classes, and granted diplomas; but they were not part of the official university: “The surprising—and, at the moment, inexplicable—thing about the relation of the faculty to the student societies … is that it was almost nonexistent” (McLachlan 1974: 485).13 The existence of these shadow colleges, based on what McLachlan calls an “extracurriculum,” is compelling evidence for the social importance of the literary system, as well as for its systemically eccentric location. The course in rhetoric and belles lettres was perhaps a weaker echo of this system than historians of our discipline believe. The more robust student societies were closer to the thing itself, to the literary system speaking in its native tongue.
Although McLachlan’s notion of an “extracurriculum” confirms the exteriority of the literary system to the institutions of official culture, the relation he identifies might just as easily be seen in reverse, as the exteriority of official culture to the cultural center; this relation seems more obviously to obtain by the end of the nineteenth century, when the universities were forced to abandon the classical curriculum. In the meantime, the reading societies were part of a network of communalized reading practices complementing the private reading that, in concert with the reviews, sustained the literary system in its atomized mass. These reading societies evolved later versions, such as the Shakespeare and Browning societies (Veysey 1979: 75–7), and they exist still in our time, as with the “Janeites” (Lynch 2000). The demand for vernacular writing was the gust front of an irresistible social storm. From the perspective of the university, the force of vernacularization seemed to rise up from below and from the margin; but it was destined to constitute a new center. Even the inertia of the old university was powerless to stand against this force. The Greek and Latin classics, like a great store of gold, too heavy to move, could not compete with the currency of periodical writing, or the rapid circulation of books in English.
And yet “classical literature” remained the canonical standard, ensuring the value of vernacular paper. The model of canonicity was simply transferred to the literary system in the later phases of dissemination. By this strategy, works of vernacular literature could be consecrated as “classics” too; the veneration due to age was bestowed upon them, despite their relative youth in relation to antiquity. Further, the vernacular classics were dedicated not just to modeling the standard dialect. On the contrary, the literary system in its later phases instituted a kind of re‐Latinization of the vernacular, the systematic alienation of speakers from their native language as vernacular education was re‐dedicated to the end of social distinction. Standard English was complicated by an accumulation of rules for “usage” more numerous and petty than ever bedeviled the students of Latin and Greek. The literary system held out to those seeking to rise a form of literacy unimpeded by the necessity of learning a dead language, but at the cost of having to acquire a newly Latinized vernacular grammar.14 These systemic relations were policed by what Kenneth Cmiel calls the “verbal critics,” the grammarians of the literary system who were also often the judges of literature.
The question of what remains of that system today is of great importance to scholars, who have no choice but to study literature in the ever‐pressing environment of its successor, the system of the media. Grammar, literature, and criticism are changing again, in response to the evolution of the media system; but the point is that these components are changing together. The literary system coexists with the media system, but its principal components cannot be isolated from the effects of these newly constituted systemic relations. The effects of interaction between the literary and media systems are easy enough to see in the decay of longstanding grammatical norms, despite the enforcement mechanisms of the school. Some of these norms were doubtless unnecessary, and served only in the end to inhibit reading and writing. But others, more crucial to effective communication, are scarcely immune to deterioration. These effects occasion dismay among literary scholars, and among all those who value what the literary system, including grammar, made possible. Yet it may be that the force of the new media system on grammar will prove as irresistible as the force of vernacularization itself. The fortunes of the other two components of the literary system—literature and criticism—are much harder to predict. It is not possible to determine yet, for example, what the transition from reading on the page to reading on the screen will mean for literary composition; or what that transition will mean for criticism. We only know that literature and criticism have begun to change again, which is much the same as saying that they are moving. The question of where they will be found in the future is too soon to answer.