This isn’t going to be another one of those long-form posts where I delve into the history of academic literary criticism in the United States since World War II. I’ve done enough of that, at least for awhile [1]. I’m going to assume that account.
Rather, I want to start with the individual scholar, even before they become a scholar. Why would someone want to become a professional literary scholar? Because they like to read, no? So, you take literature courses and you do the work you’re taught how to do. If you really don’t like that work, then you won’t pursue a professional degree [2]. You’ll continue to read in your spare time and you’ll study something else.
If those courses teach you how to search for hidden meanings in texts, whether in the manner of so-called close reading or, more recently, the various forms of ideological critique, that’s what you’ll do. If those courses don’t teach you how to analyze and describe form, then you won’t do that. The fact is, beyond versification (which is, or at least once was, taught in secondary school), form is hard to see.
Some years ago Mark Liberman had a post at Language Log which speaks to that [3]. He observes that it’s difficult for students to analyze sentences into component strings:
But when I first started teaching undergraduate linguistics, I learned that just explaining the idea in a lecture is not nearly enough. Without practice and feedback, a third to a half of the class will miss a generously-graded exam question requiring them to use parentheses, brackets, or trees to indicate the structure of a simple phrase like "State Department Public Relations Director".
In that example Liberman is looking for something like this: [(State Department) ((Public Relations) Director)].
Well, such analysis, which is central to the analysis of literary form (as I conceive and practice it), is difficult above the sentence level as well. If you aren’t taught how to do it, chances are you won’t try to figure it out yourself. Moreover, you may not even suspect that there’s something there to be described.
What we’ve got so far, then, is this: 1) Once you decide to study literary criticism professionally, you learn what you’re told. 2) It’s difficult to learn anything outside the prescribed path. There’s nothing surprising here, is there? Every discipline is like that.
Let’s go back to the history of the discipline, to a time when critics didn’t automatically learn to search out hidden meanings in texts, to interpret them. Without that pre-existing bias wouldn’t it have been at least possible that critics would have decided to focus on the description of form? And some did, in a limited way – I’m thinking of the Russian Formalists and their successors.
Still, formal analysis is difficult, and what’s it get you? Formal analysis, that’s what. The possibility of formal analysis is likely not what attracts anyone to literature, not now, not back then. You’re attracted to literary study because you like to read, and your reading is about love, war, beauty, pain, joy, suffering, life, the world, and the cosmos! THAT’s what you want to write about, not form.
And, sitting right there, off to the side, we’ve got a long history of Biblical hermeneutics stretching back to the time before Christianity differentiated from Judaism. Why not refit that for the study of meaning in literary texts? Now, I don’t think that’s quite what happened – the refitting of Biblical exegesis to secular ends – but that tradition was there exerting its general influence on the humanistic landscape. Between that and the ‘natural’ focus of one’s interest in literature, the search for literary meaning was a natural.
So that’s what the discipline did. And now it’s stuck and doesn’t know what to do.
More later.
References
[1] See, for example, the following working papers: Transition! The 1970s in Literary Criticism, https://www.academia.edu/31012802/Transition_The_1970s_in_Literary_Criticism
An Open Letter to Dan Everett about Literary Criticism, June 2017, 24 pp. https://www.academia.edu/33589497/An_Open_Letter_to_Dan_Everett_about_Literary_Criticism
[2] I figure we’ve all got our preferred intellectual styles. Some of us like math, some don’t and so forth. Take a look at this post: Style Matters: Intellectual Style, March 18, 2017, Style Matters: Intellectual Style, https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2012/06/style-matters-intellectual-style.html
I make the following assertions:
1.) In anyone’s intellectual ecology, style preferences are deeper and have more inertia than explicit epistemological beliefs.
2.) Some of the pigheadedness that often crops up in discussions about humanities vs. science is grounded in stylistic preference that gets rationalized as epistemological belief.
[3] Mark Liberman, Two brews, Language Log, February 6, 2010, http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2100
See also my blog post quoting Liberman’s post,
Form is Hard to See, Even in Sentences*, November 29, 2015, http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2015/11/form-is-hard-to-see-even-in-sentences.html
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