Once more, a history of American Lit Crit, this time with politics, Part 2

Back in July I took notice of a review of  Joseph North, Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History (Harvard 2017) by Bruce Robbins in the LA Review of books. Now Marco Roth does an essay-review in   n+1.  In Roth's recounting North is trying to figure out:

How did literary studies come to turn away from an “institutional program of aesthetic education” and embrace what he terms the “historicist/contextualist paradigm”?

Those recently acquainted with university literature courses will grasp this distinction intuitively, even if most people under 40 have only a dim idea of what “an institutional program of aesthetic education” might mean in real life. For those outside the high paywalls of the academy, a brief version of the historicist/contextualist paradigm runs something like this: The vagaries of genre, style, and narrative make literature a special record of resistant, oppressed, and marginal subjectivities. This is literature’s value. Sometimes the literary text excludes or hides these voices; sometimes, inadvertently or programmatically, it amplifies them. Research into the text’s period can disclose its latent or overt political meaning. The work of scholarship, or criticism (the conflation of the two is part of the problem North diagnoses), is therefore to show the encoding of specifically and exclusively political desires within and through literature.

Now, skipping over a whole bunch of stuff having mostly to do with I. A. Richards, Leavis, Cambridge (the British university), and the New Critics, Roth arrives at:

Gone is the task of providing “equipment for living,” in the words of Kenneth Burke, one of Richards’s American contemporaries and soul mates. Instead, the discipline or profession of literary studies aims to produce knowledge about the literature or societies of the past, with no overt purpose beyond the circulation and transmission of this knowledge to a group of similarly trained specialists, whose qualifications are assessed based on their ability to reproduce accepted “knowledge forms.” Even though the knowledge produced is rich in political content — and is often deliberately political — the use value of that political content must be denied or covered up by vague Enlightenment equivalencies between knowledge and progress at the very moment it appears as professional work.

The model here is the sciences, but without the empirical, reality-testing element. The validity of the knowledge produced from literary studies is determined by no other agency (in the sense of power) than the people who are reproducing it, and who, through means both fair and foul, have risen to the top of their profession. This explains why, after the creative ferment of the Sixties, the most easily replicable and legible form of knowledge, historico-contextualism, has come to dominate, even if it was never the most literary. It also means that there is no god but the boss, be they department chair, dean, provost, trustee, or external government bureau. And the boss judges value based on productivity above all.

ALTHOUGH NORTH signals his wariness of pendular or cyclic historiography, it’s difficult for his readers not to feel that academic literary study has returned to BC — “before criticism.” There is still supposed to be an object out there in the world called “literature” with inherent properties, this time of a political rather than aesthetic nature. One studies literature not for oneself but for the sake of these objects. As before, there is a canon or canons, even if the old canon is now more of an index — dangerous books to be read under proper supervision with neutralizing doses of the anticanonical, itself now a canon of its own. As in the past, the free play of textual interpretation and analysis is often foreclosed by extra- and intracurricular power relations and by the economic and status anxieties attendant on them. Regardless of content, the principles and practices of literary criticism in our time are only superficially different from the principles and practices of other aspects of society governed by neoliberal attitudes.

At this point I'm suspecting that "neoliberal" is doing rather too much work, certainly for Roth, but perhaps for North as well. Skipping over more stuff, we get to Roth's penultimate paragraph:

What this shows is that a change in institutional emphasis is of greater urgency than yet another revolutionary turn in method or paradigm. Not only must undergraduate education be prioritized, but the aim of a professional degree needs to be reconfigured to include commitments to secondary education. The split between “education” as a professional field that trains teachers for public schools and “literature,” which trains specialists, must be bridged. To enter a graduate program in literature and emerge as a teacher of adolescents, or even children, should be imbued with as much prestige, status, and respect as landing a tenure-track post or prized fellowship, and the methods of selection for these programs changed to include those temperamentally and intellectually suited to general education. On the flip side, this would also require elevating the status of the work secondary school teachers already do, taking the skills of a teacher who specializes in literacy as seriously as the work of a professor of literature.

Hmmmm...Why not!