8 - Speech Acts and Social Action

Summary

During the past decade or more, the field of literary studies has been a notoriously embattled one. The battles within and around it, sometimes referred to as “the culture wars ” or “the canon wars, ” have expressed in various ways the deepening identity conflict not only of this academic discipline but of the contemporary American society and culture of which it is a part. In literary studies, the conflict has centered around an issue that may be broadly characterized as the politics of literary performance. This issue has arisen out of powerful challenges - often posed by women and ethnic minorities, who have only lately entered the professoriate in significant numbers - to the dominant view among academic critics since the Second World War that literary works, their authors, and the activity of evaluating and interpreting them transcend, or at least are separable from, matters of partisan politics and considerations of the marketplace. With increasing influence, the challengers of this view have insisted on the political and economic determinants, values, and consequences of “literary performance,” a term I mean to encompass both what literary works express and, more generally, what their authors and their interpreters do. The practices of literary authorship and literary instruction and criticism, that is, are themselves kinds of literary performance. And according to the discipline's recent insurgents (now, arguably, its elite), literary studies must interrogate the political conditions and capacities not only of literary objects but of these practices as well.