Concentrating on and in Literature

Extract

Language rustles. its particularity can be heard and even described. When Roland Barthes first suggested this metaphor for the ways in which language is detectable per se, he offered a structuralist rejection of the mimetic and hermeneutic models of literature. Nearly forty years later, his insistence on the detectability of language suggests a defense of literary study that is profoundly humanistic. Barthes's literature, with its special discursive density, answers the claim that literature programs, which perhaps were never seen as fully practical, have betrayed the public trust through aloof hermeticism since the advent of poststructuralism in the 1970s. The case for majoring in literature either has too fine a historical pedigree or goes too much against the grain of the current institutional and political emphasis on utility and accountability in education. Thus, the imperial Roman rhetorician Plutarch felt the need to write a defense of literary education in “How a Young Man Should Hear Lectures on Poetry.” Indeed, despite the successful closing of the commercial theaters in 1642 by the Puritan London City Council, new plays continued to be encouraged, written, and performed in the universities of Oxford and Cambridge without interruption. Even Glavrepertkom, instead of silencing Soviet literature, policed it and honed it into a distinctively effective system of ideological dissemination, albeit with the censorship of such luminaries as Vsevolod Meyerhold and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. My essay, with its claim that our students should continue to concentrate in literature, has thus already been written and enacted, even under strict surveillance of extremist governments. In the face of so many arguments for applied literary studies as one of “the basics,” for the integration of the literary into the pedagogical, there is in the academy a sense that a literary education is at best supplemental. It is a pleasing option to consider, budgets permitting, after writing and analytic reasoning have been addressed. A case for majoring in literature can and must be made, and it can avoid the cultural globalism of E. D. Hirsch's arguments for an exclusionary “cultural literacy.” It can also avoid taking refuge in Harold Bloom's justifications for a canon, which are centered on an Emersonian view of Shakespeare's necessity, lest “we cease to think” (41).