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Article Excerpt
Just over ten years ago, the mood of a large section of the North American academic world was caught in the title of a volume published by Princeton University Press with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The volume asked, What's Happened to the Humanities?-not, what are the humanities doing these days? or even, what are they doing to themselves? Instead, the pure passive dilemma: what has happened to them? (1) The volume contains wonderful essays full of intelligent commentary and ideas, but the effect of the work as a whole is a scent of sophisticated disarray. Prestige, centrality, tradition, students, a public, and financial support: all gone. And for no reason that we could see--except for a more than slight tendency to blame a few of our own colleagues and their softness on "postmodernism" for doing us in. But even this sort of supposed appeasement couldn't single-handedly have caused such a collapse: history, or something, had happened to us, the humanities, with the study of English literature often at our stated or implied core. After all, literary study is where "elaborate exercises in various kinds of reading and writing" have long been most immediately visible, according to the volume's editor, Alvin Kernan. (2)
Of course, all had not gone, and has not gone yet. But the bewilderment of the profession was real, only partly reduced by a series of very good books that set out to explore the logic, history, and sociology of our condition. I am thinking especially of John Guillory's Cultural Capital (1993), David Simpson's The Academic Postmodern and the Rule of Literature (1995), and Marjorie Garber's Academic Instincts (2001), among quite a few others. There was a real crisis, and even those of us who believed the crisis might be an opportunity rather than a doom had to do some hard thinking. It wasn't a matter merely of offering sunniness instead of sorrow, for as Simpson bitingly puts it, we cannot "afford the mere celebrations of the literary as a new lease of cultural political hope." (3)
We have, in the last ten years or so, entered a phase of self-exploration and self-explanation based mainly on the assumption that others--our university colleagues in other disciplines, politicians, journalists, the public--do not understand what we do or why it matters, although they would like to. There is every reason to revoke the old paradigm (one of the old paradigms), by which all we do is doubt, seek to unravel, and destroy every piece of apparent knowledge that comes our way--as if literary criticism is a paradise for skeptics and no one else. Literary study produces various kinds of knowledge, as Guillory suggests, and the Humanities Indicators Prototype of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences eloquently names "the great and varied archive of the human record" as the database of the humanities in general. (4) How to study, use, and add to this archive is a grand exercise in knowing; and the beauty of exercise, the grandness of it, is that the smallest addition counts, just as every beach is made of grains of sand.
This knowledge includes all of the gains of literary history and formalism, easily construed according to cumulative models of knowledge. But literary criticism is rather different, and we may wonder whether we wish to claim knowledge as its chief result. Since criticism always involves rereading, returning to old knowledge rather than encountering new, literary criticism often (significantly) rearranges understanding rather than increases it. Guillory says we should nevertheless see this understanding, in its developed and skillfully practiced form, as a strong contribution to knowledge, and asserts that in recent times we have failed "to define and defend the knowledge claims of criticism." (5)
In this context, we need to explain our ways of reading to those who have not been trained in them, to delineate the modern equivalent of what Nietzsche called the unnatural sciences: the exploration, in many cases, of what is familiar, and therefore in some senses the most difficult to grasp. In Nietzsche's intricate and only roughly translatable play on words--"Das Bekannte ... ist am schwersten zu 'erkennen'"--the known is what is hardest to know. Nietzsche writes:
The familiar is what we are used to, and what we are used to is the most difficult to "know"--that is, to view as a problem, to see as strange, as distant, as "outside us." ... The great certainty of the natural sciences in comparison with psychology and the critique of the elements of consciousness-with the unnatural sciences, one might almost say-rests precisely on the fact that they take the strange as their object, while it is nearly contradictory and absurd even to want to take the not-strange as one's object. (6)
By "psychology and the critique of the elements of consciousness" (Psychologie and Kritik der Bewu[beta]tseins-Elemente) Nietzsche doesn't mean what we now call the humanities, but he doesn't mean just what...
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