Eric Bennett
John Greenleaf Whittier’s ebbing reputation might seem related only distantly to American foreign policy during the early Cold War, which might seem far removed from Jacques Derrida’s attractiveness to literature departments after 1966, which might seem irrelevant to changing enrollment numbers for English majors since the 1970s, which might seem tangential to professional interest in Madonna and Twilight in recent decades. But the institutionalization of American literature since 1914 entails such disparate phenomena and many others. Four stories intertwine: of the canon, of theory or methods, of ideology, and of professionalization. Each reflects significant revolutionary shifts in how the subject should be conceived. From a period of parochial nationalism (1914–1945) to a period of imperialistic expansion (1945–1966) to a period of revolutionary self‐critique (1966–1989) to a period of fragmentation (or robust ecumenism) and diminished solemnity (c. 1989–present), a history of American literature and the academy must account for changes in collective beliefs about poems, novels, and plays and also for transformations in national self‐conception, norms regarding personal identity, and the prevailing political reality.
From the founding of the Modern Language Association in 1883 until our starting point in 1914, English departments tried to mix two unrelated ingredients into one coherent discipline. The spirit and methods of German‐style research and of universities as bastions of pure knowledge infused institutions like the newly founded Johns Hopkins and the newly modernized Yale. A softer brand of humanism, which framed college as a soul‐enhancing rite of passage for social elites, found a home at Harvard and southern universities, which borrowed the orientation from Great Britain. Matthew Arnold’s highly influential Culture and Anarchy (1869) captured the program. In this dispensation, literature preserved aristocratic distinctions amid the decline of aristocracy. But what the German and the British strains shared, and what the World War I era inherited across the board, was a commitment to nation and race as the organizing principle and animating force behind literary study. Nation and race, in the United States of the 1910s, meant white Anglo‐Saxon Protestant supremacy.
Since nations and race emerge from history, and since literature at the time was regarded as a vessel of tradition, the United States also inherited from Europe a conception of literary study as a mode of looking backward. The philologists studied changes in language from Chaucer to Milton; the impressionistic humanists, more preoccupied with racial pride, virtue, and notions of character classically conceived, beheld in the past a timeless canon rife with universal verities. But in both cases, scholarship meant retrospection. If contemporary writing reached campus, then it reached it largely via courses in rhetoric and composition or through the idiosyncratic nationalism of humanists such as Brander Matthews at Columbia, Bliss Perry at Williams, Princeton, and Harvard, and Henry Van Dyke at Princeton.
So, the first debate in English departments was whether scholars should handle literature as humanists or as scientists. A related debate, which gathered intensity during and after World War I, was whether American literature could and should play a role in English departments. At the time – as had been the case for over a century – texts by Americans suffered a stigma of belatedness and bastardy, of second‐rate derivativeness, of inferiority to the English tradition. Since the founding of English departments, homegrown verse and prose had not featured widely in the undergraduate classroom and played almost no role in doctoral training. For the philologists, it was practically useless: too young, linguistically, to provide glimpses of epochal shifts in meaning. The United States was only modern. But the rival humanists could and did argue against their colleagues that three centuries of colonial and national writing represented a vital part of the national life. This meant, strangely, that the scholars least committed to a scientific paradigm were the ones most forgiving of American literature’s relative newness.
Our period properly starts with a vast project undertaken by men enamored of the American tradition along soft humanistic lines, the Cambridge History of American Literature. This was a sprawling compendium that provided the academy with its first substantial account of national letters, one that centered overwhelmingly on white male writers.1 William Peterfield Trent, John Erskine, Stuart Pratt Sherman, and Carl Van Doren commenced editorial work in 1913 and oversaw the publication of three volumes between 1917 and 1921, coordinating the 60 scholars and writers who contributed articles that charted American literary history back to the early seventeenth century. Conceived at the margins of standard English department curricula, the Cambridge History provided quantitative as much as qualitative proof that the United States had a meaningful tradition.
The publishers launched the project in a pro‐British spirit, and the Cambridge History appeared as US nationalism was gathering strength from the industrial prosperity of its oligarchs, from the idealism of Woodrow Wilson, and from the American participation in World War I. The Treaty of Versailles that concluded the war explicitly underscored the sacredness of ethnic self‐determination for European nation‐states, and that attitude resonated at home. Scholars of American literature, believing in the American spirit, searched the textual records for its essence. In 1925, Norman Foerster announced four factors that had shaped US letters: the Puritan tradition, frontier consciousness, romanticism, and realism. These endlessly interpretable themes replaced dry chronology and haphazard litany, and Foerster’s schema proved influential for decades of additional scholarship.
Even as the Cambridge History was changing the field by freeing American literature from stigma, the long‐standing conflict between humanists and philologists was being eclipsed by a latter‐day battle of the books. The socialistic currents of the Gilded Age, the radicalism of Greenwich Village before World War I, the example of the Russian Revolution, the triumph of progressivism, and changes in popular mores during and after the war spawned a ferment of anti‐academic sentiment in the 1910s and 1920s. Elite colleges and universities looked, to writers on the outside, like reactionary bastions inextricable from northeastern oligarchy, that is, the alliance between college dons and captains of industry. If the professors responsible for the Cambridge History stood accused by their more conservative colleagues of consecrating inferior texts, they were also disparaged by the literary left for hoarding treasures in the cloisters of pedantry. Waldo Frank, John Macy, H.L. Mencken, Randolph Bourne, and Van Wyck Brooks all denounced the professoriate on behalf of a populist view of American literature.
In “On Creating a Usable Past” (1918), Brooks argued that the problem wasn’t that the United States did not have a usable past. The problem was that its professors too often said that it didn’t: “there is a vendetta between the two generations, and the older generation seems to delight in cutting off the supplies of the younger.” Doctrinaire grumps held the riches of Emerson and Hawthorne hostage. American letters, Brooks and others argued, could be sprung from Harvard Yard and shaped to affirm the vitality of the fledgling nation. Brooks called for “the revolt of the younger generation against the professorial mind” (Brooks 1918: 337, 339). His own recasting of American writing – in The Wine of the Puritans (1908), America’s Coming of Age (1915), The Ordeal of Mark Twain (1920), and The Pilgrimage of Henry James (1925) – greatly shaped the literary mood of the 1920s.
“On Creating a Usable Past” did not argue for the importance of young and living writers; it argued for the freedom of young and living critics to make their own sense of the venerable past. But this defense of the contemporary – if only in criticism – was a crucial ingredient in the revolutionary agitations of the interwar period. These agitations only increased as American expatriates such as Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, T.S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound influenced the course of European modernism; as Random House, through the Modern Library, gave a high legal profile (and new commercial viability) to the idea of the “modern classic” through the Ulysses censorship trials; and as writers on the far left, especially after the onset of the Great Depression, insisted that literature must address current events. The revolutionary drift of the 1920s was toward the elevation of the contemporary. New stuff mattered as much as old, or even more.
Modernist literature, American or otherwise, would not become part of the academy in any significant way until after World War II. But the Cambridge History, by validating American literature, had advanced the cause of the now or at least the recent.2 Even conservatives were on board. Both Norman Foerster and his mentor at Harvard, Irving Babbitt, belonged to the loose group of nationalistic humanists who channeled the Arnoldian spirit, and Foerster offers an especially interesting case of a traditionalist at peace with literary progress. In the 1920s he edited one of the first anthologies that made contemporary American writing available for the college classroom. In polemical essays and in papers delivered to the Modern Language Association (MLA), he insisted that the creation of American literature must return to the academy (where it had thrived in the nineteenth century), lest it be lost forever to journalists and vagabonds, communists and down‐and‐outers.
In 1930, Foerster assumed the directorship of the newly formed School of Letters at the University of Iowa and instituted curricular reforms that led to the emergence of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the first graduate‐degree‐granting creative writing program in the United States. After World War II, the creative writing boom that began at Iowa would destroy once and for all the academic notion that literature could not be judged until years after the death of its author. At the time, between 1918 and 1939, the major development would have seemed to be the positivistic accumulation of research about American literature – the Cambridge History and the professional groups and journals that sprang up in its wake. But just as important, in the long run, was this slide toward the present.
In an alternative universe, in a United States whose history entailed a swifter and fuller redress of its racial crimes, this paragraph would describe the role the literature of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s and of African American communists and fellow travelers during the Great Depression and World War II played in the constitution of American literature as an academic discipline. But the inclusion of black (or any other minority) writing into the institutional mainstream would not begin in any serious way for another half century. Notably, black scholars as much as white ones conceived of literature as a thing of essence and nation. W.E.B. Du Bois, too, was an intellectual scion of Herder.
However emboldened professors, journalists, writers, and critics were by the American role in world events during and after World War I, it was nothing compared to the wave of nationalism and patriotism that broke during and after World War II. This wave washed minds from across the political spectrum into a single, powerful current of pro‐American consensus. News from Europe from the mid‐1930s onward deeply chastened the most radical left‐wing and right‐wing factions in domestic intellectual life. Those factions, until 1936 or so, had thrived in an atmosphere of lively acrimony. But as Stalin’s policies, especially in the Moscow purge trials and the Spanish Civil War, tarnished American perceptions of the Soviet utopia, and as authoritarian leadership under Hitler, Stalin, and Franco showed its true colors, former rivals found common ground. Groups like Foerster’s New Humanists, who had blithely urged a creed of individual responsibility throughout the 1920s, and like the Southern Agrarians, whose I’ll Take My Stand (1930) had offered a vindication of the antebellum American South, hastened toward the center from the right. Meanwhile, American leftists of every stripe, from staunch communists to tepid fellow travelers, distanced themselves from the Soviet atrocities – which, by 1939, included making peace with Hitler.
If ever world events influenced American higher education, it was in these years. Congressional changes to the tax code, passed in response to the Depression and sustained during wartime, tacitly encouraged the creation of philanthropic foundations of historically unprecedented wealth and influence. Large corporations, disinclined to cede to Washington control of their profits, diverted huge amounts of tax‐deductible capital to recipients of their choosing. Of especial importance in this context were Standard Oil (via the Rockefeller Foundation) and Ford Motors (via the Ford Foundation). The foundations, allied with the federal government through informal networks of personnel, undertook to redirect the humanities away from arcane specialization and elite distinction and toward approaches considered healthier for postwar society – liberal, democratic, and capitalistic.
The Rockefeller Foundation strove to center graduate study on morality and democratic participation, to raise the national level of literacy, and to mitigate what they perceived to be the propagandistic dangers of mass communication. Their underwriting supported many still familiar people and groups: the Gauss seminars at Princeton, the Kenyon School of English at Kenyon College, the literary journals that were publishing formally rigorous humanistic criticism (Sewanee, Kenyon, Hudson, and Partisan reviews), the Program in Creative Writing at the University of Iowa, Wallace Stegner’s postwar lectures in Japan, René Wellek and Austin Warren’s Theory of Literature, the short fiction of Flannery O’Connor, and much else.
Neither David H. Stevens, the influential director of the Humanities Division of the Rockefeller Foundation, nor his office invented the ideas they chose to underwrite. Yet they powerfully championed the approaches to literature developed by Lionel Trilling, John Crowe Ransom, Paul Engle, Norman Foerster, R.P. Blackmur, Malcolm Cowley, Robert Penn Warren, and their many colleagues – so much so, that the history of the period cannot be told without mentioning the Rockefeller Foundation and its friends in Washington. The Cold War establishment provided a loose band of intellectuals with the support they needed to effect an academic revolution along imperial American lines (Barnhisel 2015).
For whereas, a generation earlier, the patriotism and nationalism of American literature in the academy took mostly parochial form, professors, writers, scholars, and critics after 1945 conceived of their discipline not only as suitable for export but also as world‐historically urgent. In 1918 Melville (for instance) might have mattered to the editors of the Cambridge History of American Literature as a part of the American tradition. But in 1947, he mattered as a prophet whose spiritual vision could guide the reconstruction of a smoldering Europe. That year, F.O. Matthiessen, the author of the field‐defining American Renaissance (1941), along with Alfred Kazin, the author of On Native Grounds (1942), delivered lectures on American literature and civilization at the Salzburg Seminar as part of a concerted government effort to export American values – a humanistic Marshall Plan. A wide network of propagandistic libraries, staged cultural events, and various forms of soft diplomacy soon followed, often – like the Salzburg Seminar itself – supported by the CIA.
The more familiar story – the insurgency of the New Criticism in domestic English departments – makes most sense in this geopolitical context. Criticism (interpretation, hermeneutics) replaced historical and philological approaches: not everywhere and not all at once but widely enough and quickly enough to later become a trope in histories of the discipline. By 1945, T.S. Eliot, I.A. Richards, William Empson, John Crowe Ransom, and a few others had fully elaborated the rules and norms of the New Criticism, and undergraduates encountered them as gospel in such influential anthologies as Robert Penn Warren’s and Cleanth Brooks’s Understanding Poetry (1938) and Understanding Fiction (1943) as well as the essays of William K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley. The New Critical methodology bid students and scholars to read closely and discover within carefully rendered literary texts patterns of ambiguity, paradox, and internal tension, and to do so in service of the loftiest conceptions of human dignity. David H. Richter, who received his undergraduate training at the tail end of this period in the 1960s, recounts:
It was generally assumed that literary works at their best were supreme and universal expression of the human spirit and that students were to read these profound works to broaden and deepen their own humanity. The works to be studied had been sifted by time: only the greatest and the most universal had survived. Students reading these texts were connected with the truest and most permanent criterion of taste, the collective applause of humanity. The works were to be read closely and scrutinized carefully. It was presumed that literary meaning was more complicated than the meaning of everyday language, that literary texts were ambiguous or bore layers of meaning, each needing to be explored.
(Richter 2000: 2)
As many have observed, the methodology was well suited to postwar conditions on American campuses. The Serviceman’s Readjustment Act of 1944 (or G. I. Bill), with its generous provisions for higher education, bankrolled a vast expansion in student enrollments across the country. The boom included many first‐generation students who needed homework they could actually do. Observing verbal patterns in poems was easier for beginners than reading widely in order to trace the deep origins and long traditions of literary texts. And veterans, shaken by firsthand experiences with combat, accepted without question both the lofty tenor and the unapologetic masculinity of literary studies under this dispensation, which let them ponder humanity’s cosmic plight in terms they understood.
In historical accounts, the New Criticism’s hermetic exclusion of worldly concerns has often been overstated or stated in the wrong way. Its early proponents presided over the age as critics not only of poetry but also of culture and society. Precisely because the reigning figures envisioned literature as mattering to global reality, they framed reading and interpretation in grand terms, insulated from the transient deprivations of history. Performing close analysis did not entail espousing overt politic positions. Yet the high esteem for literature was political. Poems and novels became consecrated vessels of human value. If the phrase “human value” sounds insipid or tractionless in the twenty‐first century, it nevertheless resonated thunderously in the period. The Nazi death camps, the Soviet gulags, and the atomic bomb revealed the epic dangers of modernity. Technology and bureaucracy had in common an abstract and instrumental logic, the rational manipulation of matter and bodies for ends that could turn out to be apocalyptic. Professors, scholars, critics, and writers reached for “value” or “values” in response, as the most plausible antidote to fearsome equations and cunning propaganda.
Mark Greif (2015) has recently defined the period by its commitment to a reigning maieutic, a chronic posing of the question of what threatened humanity. He calls it the Age of the Crisis of Man. If people kept asking what the nature of “Man” was, then the nature of “Man” – the victim of Auschwitz and Nagasaki – would never again be neglected. The answers mattered less than the asking. The little, the local, the particular, the irrational, the distinct were elevated, through this ongoing interrogation, to the grand and the universal. Man was that manifold creature that survived bombs and death camps and totalitarian reduction. (Not until the 1970s would Woman begin successfully to call attention to her absence from the very terms of the conversation.)
The New Criticism partook of the maieutic, treating works of literature as loci of irreducible value – as ends in themselves, like souls. And unlike the “American spirit,” which scholars a generation earlier had been searching for, and which even yet remained the subject of those most influenced by Matthiessen’s American Renaissance, the postwar humanism suited agendas that went far beyond English departments. It purported to be a philosophical orientation, not an avowal of American nationalism. Yet in truth it was the philosophical orientation of American nationalism. To those wielding it, it seemed transcendent. To those having it wielded on them, it probably seemed less transcendent.
Richter recounts, above, the importance to the postwar classroom of literature that has stood the test of time. But the battle to enshrine American literature in the academy, as was already clear in the 1920s, inevitably tilted preferences toward the present. In the Cold War paradigm, living writers like Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, T.S. Eliot, and even a young Flannery O’Connor could and did share space in the canon with American and European forebears. (Eliot, Faulkner, and Hemingway won the Nobel Prize in Literature, which helped.) Greif observes that, by the 1950s, many professors of American literature conceived their field in terms of a double canon. Nineteenth‐century American writers had created a secular Old Testament to whose logic the works of American modernism (especially the masculinist white male works) provided the tragic fulfillment. Writers who did not fit into this typology had trouble attracting scholarly attention.
There is no doubt that the New Criticism was an enabling ideology in an age that protested too much that it wasn’t ideological. In the 1930s, in the face of the failure of capitalism, literature had meant social protest; by the 1950s, every trace of such protest was swept away by the paranoid broom of the House Un‐American Activities Committee, Joseph McCarthy, and a chronic Red Scare. As Mark Walhout has argued, the New Criticism served “to educate liberal consciousness regarding ambiguity and irony, to teach Americans what they needed to know and what attitude they required in order to act effectively in a Cold War world” (Walhout 1987: 868). The New Criticism partook of the logic of Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.’s “vital center” – the idea, proposed in his 1949 bestselling book of that title, that the United States must lead humanity on the uncertain path between the horrors of fascism and the horrors of communism – to refuse the dual attractions of truculent ideologies. The text becomes a site of contained complexity, agnostic but loyal, self‐sufficient in its isolation, devoted to a conception of human reality too replete with specificity to conform to ideology’s pernicious abstractions.
The central role played by fiction and poetry in the Cold War campaign to elevate the United States as a world bastion of anti‐ideological values can look astonishing today. The campaign mingled true idealism with mercenary political calculations that are glaringly conspicuous in retrospect. The philanthropic foundations, the conservative press, the State Department, and many self‐fashioned private‐sector cold warriors aimed to check the effect of political movements whose recent European permutations had destabilized global markets, to say the least.3 In this, colleges and universities played a decisive role. “The academy swallowed up almost everything in American intellectual and cultural life between 1940 and 1980,” Louis Menand writes, “and spit out very little” (Richter 2000: 108). Under New Critical high seriousness, the expansion of American universities served to annihilate polemical insurgencies against the establishment. For three decades or so, the campus was where radical politics went to die. This changed abruptly in the mid‐1960s.
Hence the prophetic brilliance of Thomas Pynchon’s short novel, The Crying of Lot 49 (1965), whose protagonist, Oedipa Maas, has been trained in the quiescent classrooms of the New Criticism but whose quest through a countercultural California reveals to her that, no doubt, “excluded middles” were “bad shit” (Pynchon 1965: 181). The novel, with its shaggy plots and ambiguous symbols, both invited the kind of byzantine internal analysis that a New Critic believed in and deconstructed such analysis, suggesting that ferreting out subtle interconnections, in a world as diffuse as this one, was likely to lead to insanity. Pynchon offered an early dispatch from a dissenting camp that would soon subsume much more than the trippy pages of experimental fiction.
In October 1966, the French philosopher Jacques Derrida famously lectured at Johns Hopkins University on “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.” Derrida argued that oppositions within signification (words next to other words) were what produced meaning rather than words touching down, in true reference, on an immutable and objective reality. Such a model of language had for a long time already been undergirding French structuralism as it had developed from the turn‐of‐the‐century linguistic work of Ferdinand de Saussure. But Derrida took structuralism to a point at which no further steps appeared to exist. He argued that the anchors of meaningful language use – the bucks at which meaning stops – such as “God” or “Man” represented structural effects rather than ontological essences.
Derrida’s freeing of language from transcendental elements attracted great interest from scholars trained in New Critical methods of close reading. In short order, in influential quarters, the logic of Derrida overwrote the logic of Ransom et al. Instead of observing and describing the complex interrelationships of words within a carefully made poem, affirming structure through scrutiny, a critic could sift text for signs of specious coherence, bogus completeness, false integrity, or fake strength – could tease out the way a work of literature unmade meaning as much as made it. Derrida’s single conference paper has gained legendary status but should be taken to represent more generally the anti‐foundationalist incursion of French theory into American literature departments. The incursions included writings by Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan, and, though less immediately of a piece, Michel Foucault. By the 1970s, Yale, Cornell, and Johns Hopkins were hotbeds of theory, and the approach spread nationally.
Four months after Derrida’s seminal intervention, the Catholic magazine Ramparts took out a full‐page ad in the New York Times, announcing a forthcoming exposé of CIA infiltration of student groups and academic organizations on college campuses. Even before Ramparts ran the exposé itself – and within hours of the notice of its impending release – President Johnson announced the cessation of all such CIA aid. Congress soon after launched an investigation and ostensibly shut down covert cultural operations.4
As unrelated as a conference about structuralism at Johns Hopkins and the congressional investigation of covert funding of academe might seem, they belonged to one and the same moment. For Derrida’s philosophical writing laid bare the coerciveness of meaning constituted through hierarchical binaries in language use. Western metaphysics, he demonstrated, had constituted a tradition in the violent and spurious preference for one term over another in a privileged set of binarisms. Derrida was not talking politics, yet he wrote as an Algerian Jew – as somebody, in other words, with firsthand knowledge of the false binary of French colonialism, in which the colonial subject constituted the falsely superior identity of the colonizer through his, the colonial subject’s, subordination.
The worldwide liberation movements that brought hope and violence to so many former European colonies between the 1940s and the 1970s promulgated the political equivalent of what both Derrida and Pynchon, in very different ways, made note of: that “either/or,” as a grammatical form constituting meaning, was far less adequate and far more oppressive than “and,” which could add to, without passing judgment on. From 1945, the United States replicated the either/or spirit of European colonial policies, dividing the world into an us and them that the globe bore the harrowing and often bloody consequences of. There were the Soviets (and the postcolonial peoples who sided with them) and the Americans (and the postcolonial peoples who sided with them); one must choose.
To the war‐chastened liberals of the 1940s, who still viewed the United States as the shining savior of world civilization, replacing totalitarian creeds, right or left, with something more humane – something liberal, democratic, and devoted to the personal and the free – the choice was easy. To their children, now flooding the expanded universities (and facing the draft to support the war in Vietnam), things looked different. The shining savior of world civilization, with its New Critical appreciation of universal human values, had tolerated if not condoned Jim Crow in the South, assassinated foreign leaders, and was terrorizing peasant armies in Southeast Asia. Excluded middles were quite obviously bad shit. And the Age of the Crisis of Man (to borrow Greif’s formulation) looked exactly like that: like the crisis of militaristic white men who constituted an elite and oppressive minority.
The solemnity of the older generation was not only politically suspect but risible in its unselfconsciousness – humorless, pompous, and silly. Lennard J. Davis associated “the word literature with Lionel Trilling’s pronunciation of it. In his courses at Columbia University, he would rise up on the tips of his toes and articulate the word as Laurence Olivier or Lionel Barrymore might have, the staccato trumpet of the consonants giving way to the languorous, anglicized diphthong” (Nelson et al. 1997: 258). Such sanctimoniousness was laughable in itself but horrific in the cover it ran for a Cold War establishment blind to its complicity in atrocities.
So, at one and the same moment, theory, within the classroom, destabilized poems, and student protests, just outside the classroom, upset the patriotic consensus that covert cultural operations – and everything else about American foreign policy – depended on for success. Yet even as new theories besieged the sanctities of the New Critical classroom, they depended on both the New Critical orthodoxies of close reading and the New Critical seriousness about literature. And for a while poststructuralism could look as elite, white, and male as what it was replacing. It was in the campus movements themselves that a politically radical spirit was most easily discerned. The victories of the Civil Rights movement, the ongoing frustrations of the urban poor, the rising tide of second‐wave feminism, the horrific spectacle of the Vietnam War – these ingredients combined explosively on campuses that were as crowded as ever. In unreformed lecture halls, dissatisfied students offered intense resistance to their parents’ prejudices, policies, and pedagogies. The great shame of English departments, which extolled the value of literature, was that the extollers and the extolled represented but a sliver of the races, classes, and genders that the United States comprised.
Unlike the creation of a Cold War consensus, undertaken by a group of men who could have fit into a single large auditorium, the dismantling of that consensus, by definition, involved tens of thousands of minds and hundreds of platforms. The democratization of both university curricula and student enrollments, which came about through a long series of protests and interventions, was a process so vast and intricate, stretching over at least two decades, that I can offer only a few concrete examples of the seeds and the fruits of the change.
Amid the countercultural ferment, Arna Bontemps, a still‐living, former participant in the Harlem Renaissance, made writings from the African American experience newly available to university audiences hungry for them. In 1969, he selected material for a collection of Great Slave Narratives and introduced a new generation of readers to Jean Toomer’s novel Cane (1923); later Bontemps edited The Harlem Renaissance Remembered (1972), a collection of essays combined with a memoir of his own. In 1975 in Ms. magazine, the novelist Alice Walker published “Looking for Zora,” which rescued Zora Neale Hurston from three decades of obscurity. Hurston’s fiction and literary anthropology from the 1930s and 1940s, swept from public consciousness by the critical consensus of the 1950s, became required reading. White women authors who fell by the wayside in the Eisenhower years became dissertation material for the first sizable generation of female doctoral candidates. Rather as the Cambridge History had provided the foundation for a first instantiation of American literature as an academic discipline, the rediscovery of neglected texts by minority and women writers in the late 1960s and early 1970s prepared the way for a revolution at the highest level of the discipline.
In the wake of countercultural protest, the canon got expanded, but it also got critiqued. In 1975, Annette Kolodny published The Lay of the Land, which revisited landmark texts from American literature between 1584 and 1860 and traced in them the relentless metaphor of nature as mother or woman. Kolodny made clear the deleterious significance of these linguistic patterns for both gender politics and ecology. In 1978, Judith Fetterley’s The Resisting Reader offered feminist readings of Henry James, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and other male readers from the post‐Civil War decades, transforming this canon from a site of nationalism to one of dissent. Toni Morrison was perhaps the most famous but by no means the only one to suggest that the white male canon, rather than simply excluding the experience of African Americans, was constituted in its very essence by that gesture of exclusion. “I have begun to wonder whether the major, much celebrated themes of American literature – individualism, masculinity, the conflict between social engagement and historical isolation, an acute and ambiguous moral problematic, the juxtaposition of innocence with figures representing death and hell – are not in fact responses to a dark, abiding, signing Africanistic presence” (Richter 2000: 310). In the 1970s and 1980s, many scholars representing many new points of view authored similar attacks on the complacencies and repressed dynamics of the American canon.
My pairing of Derrida’s attack on metaphysics with the Ramparts investigation of the CIA should make clear what strange bedfellows, at first, critical theory and campus politics appeared to be. But by the 1980s, the disparate ingredients were increasingly being combined in intellectually fruitful ways. In The Signifying Monkey (1988), Henry Louis Gates, Jr. used techniques of deconstruction to interpret black folkloric traditions in the work of Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and Ishmael Reed. In Gender Trouble (1990), Judith Butler introduced American literary critics to French feminist phenomenology, equipping them with high philosophical tools that could be used to scrutinize gender norms in texts both old and new. And what was to emerge as the new center of gravity for literary studies by the end of the twentieth century, as critical theory mixed with radical American democratic practice, was cultural studies – methodological pluralism and the abandonment of the privileging distinction between “literature” and other cultural codes and systems of meaning. Both the signifier and the political subject were set newly free.
Cultural studies claimed multiple origins, emerging not only from the ingredients I have named but also from the influence of the Frankfurt School; the writings of Michel Foucault; the anti‐foundationalist anthropology of Clifford Geertz; and the mid‐century British Marxism of Raymond Williams, Richard Hoggart, E.P. Thompson, and the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, founded in the United Kingdom in 1964. With such a diverse set of methods and aims, everything was not easily reconciled. Throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s, the perseverance of pure theory and the last gasp of the New Criticism meant that many English departments witnessed multifarious volatility. Scholars committed to Derrida attacked scholars nostalgic for Trilling. Both tended to look askance at the proliferation of creative writing programs that appeared complicit in the mass production of domestic realism. Professors who favored an expanded canon argued with those who disavowed canonical thinking all together. And the political right, in the climate of Reagan and Thatcher, lambasted the disappearance of the humanities of the good old days, the anti‐Stalinist belief (for instance) that T.S. Eliot mattered cosmically.
In 1990, Roger Kimball published Tenured Radicals, which lamented the changes in content and method in the humanities since the 1960s. Kimball argued that those who had been undergraduates during the first years of cultural turmoil now regrettably set the academic agenda. A different kind of attack came in 1996 from Alan Sokal, a physicist who snuck bogus science past the editors of Lingua Franca, a journal of cultural studies, in an article titled “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity.” Sokal believed (and postured to prove) that humanistic scholarship had so lost its moorings that anything went. Setting aside such attacks, one can observe that even professors loyal to the discipline and uninterested in valorizing the 1950s often scratched their heads at the state of the field. As part of an exchange of opinions about cultural studies in PMLA in March 1997, Cary Nelson, a committed critic of class‐based fantasies of high culture, remarked: “The sheer number of potential objects and practices available to cultural studies makes the field inherently uncontainable and only temporarily representable” (Nelson et al. 1997: 276).
Whether one embraced or repudiated the emerging order, it was clear that the 1960s had ushered in lasting changes. “For the contemporary radical,” David H. Richter wrote – meaning the radical of the 1990s – “the university itself is not an independent community of scholars, as my generation had been taught, but (in Louis Althusser’s term) an ideological state apparatus – an institution that serves the centralized state by indoctrinating its citizens in the reigning versions of false consciousness and certifying potentially useful members of the ruling cadre” (Richter 2000: 5–6). If this were the case – and the center of gravity for the MLA throughout the 1990s suggested it was so – then it meant that professors within this state apparatus assumed a perennial posture of immanent critique: making the grounds of their discipline the dissolution of the grounds of their discipline. Gerald Graff famously proposed “teaching the conflicts”: introducing students to literary studies by immersing themselves in the chronic crisis of literary studies. As intellectually fruitful as this could appear from the inside, to those on the outside (parents, administrators, state legislatures, right‐wing Secretaries of Education), it was a hard sell. “If opinion is always contingent,” Menand wrote, imagining the perspectives of the incredulous, “why should we subsidize professionals to produce it?” (Richter 2000: 109).
Both the high theoretical attack on stable authorship, starting in 1966, and the attack by cultural studies on an elite canon, starting later, gathered righteous strength through parasitism. With considerable help from an oil company, a car company, and American taxpayers, an earlier generation had fostered an atmosphere of mortal seriousness, in which professors believed they brandished literature as a weapon to stave off war and totalitarianism. The next generation rejected that explicit creed but retained the creed’s seductive weightiness. Countless professors in the last quarter of the twentieth century took the revaluation of the canon as seriously as their mentors had taken the canon itself. Scholarly text after scholarly text heralded visions of literature‐borne emancipation that seldom corresponded to life as lived or to politics as practiced by non‐specialists. The conviction that there could be an essential American canon of literature (taken for granted by scholars in the 1920s) or a right way to read it (taken for granted in the 1950s) seemed unimaginable – as passé as the racialism and nationalism that undergirded those earlier paradigms.
To the latest generation of professors – and certainly to their students – the politically emancipatory claims of theory and cultural studies can sound as inflated as the Cold War claims for morally edifying, politically salvific, poetically expressed eternal verities. Outside all questions of methodology (though related to them), the pervasive twenty‐first‐century feeling has been one of collective diminishment. This, even as the stakes for professional self‐replication could not be higher. Literature doesn’t matter as it used to, but job security matters as much as it ever has to those with and without increasingly scarce tenure‐track positions.
The affect of professional diminishment blends in fascinating ways with the rigors of scholarship in a tight job market. Franco Moretti, an Italian scholar of the novel, founded the Literary Lab at Stanford in late 2010, creating a hub for those interested in using computers to analyze literature more widely and quickly than a human being ever could alone in the library carrel. “Distant reading” allows scholars to survey vast tracts of text and to draw conclusions about historical shifts in literary form by tallying grammatical and semantic elements and their patterns of recurrence. This is a long way from John Crowe Ransom’s finding religious grit in an imagist poem read closely.
Other recent approaches combine theoretical insight with archival research to show just how inflated older views about literature were, even while familiar canonical works are retained. Often borrowing from Pierre Bourdieu, whose theories cast art as a set of cunning responses made within a socially constituted field of power, these scholars shine a far dimmer light on the heroes of modernism than the modernist critics did. Laurence Rainey’s Institutions of Modernism (1998) argues that the preoccupation with the internal details of modernist poetry long distracted scholars from questions of patronage and publishing house, which, as much as any formal integrity or Romantic efflorescence of soul, shaped the composition and reception of works by such writers as H.D., Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and James Joyce. Loren Glass’s Authors Inc. (2004) similarly demystifies authorship through a study of the institutions that supported it. And Mark McGurl’s The Program Era (2009) reads the whole of postwar American fiction through the lens of the creative writing programs that have changed the national literary landscape. McGurl writes admiringly of such programs but not of the grand conception of authorship that such programs depend on to exist. The Program Era paints a cheerful picture of ubiquitous and innocuous industriousness.
To the extent that English professors have relinquished the dream that poems will save souls and edify lives (as per the Cold War modernists) or that criticism will offer viable political resistance to oppressive societal structures (as per the cultural studies diehards of the 1990s), they have ceased to make large claims for texts at all. Meanwhile, aspiring poets and novelists drawn to the vast network of creative writing programs often still attach big hopes to the written word. This credulousness reflects in many quarters the unreconstructed legacy of the 1950s, for institutionalized creative writing as we know it emerged amid the high seriousness of the early Cold War and, for the most part, has escaped the anti‐humanistic intervention of critical theory from the 1970s on.5 For a time, especially in the 1980s, the culture clash between theorists and creative writers looked as though it could end only in a deathmatch. But in the despairing ecumenism of the twenty‐first century – and the shrinking enrollment numbers for any kind of English major – factions wrangle much more gently than they used to. And, the great pluralism of method and content that has been ushered in by cultural studies pertains even to those people trying to make literature from scratch.
Creative writers most often write about themselves, which means that by 2019 they had from the inside explored in vast numbers the myriad possibilities for personal identity in the United States. And personal identity, meanwhile, had constituted a defining concern of cultural studies. Lily Phillips esteems this radically democratic approach to literature because “the interpreter is not automatically placed above either producers of texts or participants in events but is acknowledged as another subject involved in a cultural practice, with just as much or as little agency. Cultural studies has emerged forcefully because the awareness of positionality, context, and difference is endemic to this historical period” (Nelson et al. 1997: 274). Phillips’s account, from two decades ago, still describes those segments of American literature in the academy that have not been ingested by Moretti’s algorithms and the gathering interest in digital humanities, but which have been left above all with the personal as the source of value.
“Cultural practice,” “agency,” “positionality,” “context,” and “difference” comprise the bulk of the legacy of three distinct earlier periods, so different from our own: the parochial nationalism between the world wars, the imperialistic expansionism from 1945 to the mid‐1960s, and the revolutionary self‐critique from the 1960s to the early 1990s. Whether in the leveled hierarchies of cultural studies or in the tenacious faith in authorship of creative writing programs, the common term in literary studies these days is the atomistic individual – and the neoliberal academy, which above all trains students in free‐market ideology, knows exactly what to do with such types.