Daniel A. Shore on why literary studies abandoned linguistics

I've been reading some interesting remarks by Daniel A. Shore on why literary studies (at least in much of the Anglophone world) abandoned linguistics, though clinging to remnants of Saussure, Jakobson and the like. His remarks are an interesting complement to, counterpoint to, or, as the case may be, antidote my own observations in Transition! The 1970s in Literary Criticism.

Consider his post, Making books, Making Language (August 3, 2018), which opens:

This post is about an asymmetry in the current disciplinary configuration of literary studies: scholars of my generation often possess detailed professional knowledge of how the books of their period of study, as physical objects, were made. Yet very few of them have an account of how the utterances in those books were made, apart from the patently inadequate notion of word choice (“words in their sites,” as Ian Hacking once put it) and, perhaps, familiarity with classical rhetorical tropes and figures. In the 60’s and 70s Linguistics provided the primary technical resource the discipline literary criticism; now that role is filled by descriptive bibliography.

And so:

How come current Shakespeareans study in great detail how a leather binding is stitched, embossed, and stamped, without having more than a rudimentary account of how the sentences written by Shakespeare were produced?

I think the most crucial part of the answer has to do with the current disciplinary organization of knowledge. Because there are whole departments of Linguistics devoted to studying language, with a faculty, major requirements, grad programs, and course offerings, and so on, the burden of studying and understanding language has been effectively offloaded. Book history, by contrast, has nowhere else to live, no disciplinary home of its own, outside of departments of Literature, History, and scattered programs in Media Studies, communications, etc. (That it also lives in libraries, archives, and rare book shops is another thing altogether.) Grad students who want to understand recent theories of how language works – how we produce and understand utterances we’ve never witnessed before, how the meaning of those utterances is composed of the meaning their parts, etc. – can take courses in Linguistics… in their spare time, with spare credits, which is to say rarely if at all. What gets offloaded gets forgotten or left out.

This disciplinary division tracked onto one of the biggest intellectual divides of the second half of the 20th century. By the latter 1960s, language took on entirely opposed functions for the opposing camps. For Foucault and the humanities work he inspired, language was the “mankiller,” the premier “positivity external to Man” that constituted human being historically, producing it as a contingent “figure,” and the goal of studying language was to detranscendentalize the claims of the human sciences. Around the same time, by contrast, the study of language in the Chomskyan paradigm became the most prestigious domain for the production of truths about universal human nature. It purported to establish the biological transcendentals and species-specific endowment of human beings abstracted away from cultural and historical difference. Once it was clear, circa 1980, that literary studies would embrace the detranscendentalizing project, claims about language beyond the cultural specificity and contingency of the lexicon became suspect.

Language itself became a divided terrain: to the linguists went grammar, generality, and universality; to humanists went words, arbitrariness, and cultural specificity. Book history lent itself rather easily to the historicizing project, or at least travelled alongside it without conflict, since the material supports for communication, publication, and distribution vary quite dramatically across periods and cultures; better still, book history compensated for the tendency to idealism of various linguistic, social, and cultural constructivisms precisely because of its hard-nosed and workmanlike empiricism (see “the new boredom”). In this sense, book history didn’t come “after theory” at all but was theory’s easy companion and (depending on what one supposes is the current status of “theory”) survivor.