Professing Literature: An Institutional History (Graff)

Introduction: The Humanist Myth

But the idea that literature could or should be taught--rather than simply enjoyed or absorbed as part of the normal upbringing of gentlefolk--was a novel one, and no precedents existed for organizing such an enterprise. To "organize literature" is difficult under any circumstances, but particularly when it means reconstituting as a curriculum under more or less democratic conditions something that had previously been part of the socialization of a particular class. My account suggests that this project was never thought through in all its ramifications. (1-2)

I deal only in passing with the teaching of composition, though the pioneer work of William Riley Parker, Wallace Douglas, and Richard Ohmann has shown that without that enterprise the teaching of literature could never have achieved its central status, and none of the issues i discuss would matter very much. (2)

...there is a sense in which a literature department (and curriculum) is itself a theory, though it has been largely an incoherent theory, and this incoherence strengthens the impression that the department has no theory. (3)

In calling this book an institutional history, I mean to underscore that its concern is not only with particularly scholarly and critical practices, but also with what has happened to those practices once they have become institutionalized in modern universities--in ways that are not the only possible ones. My emphasis, in other words, is not only on what "goes in" in the shape of individual scholarly accomplishments and trends, but on what "comes out" as an operational totality and how that totality is perceived , misperceived, or not perceived at all by outsiders. (5)

In large degree Arnoldian humanism has been the outlook of singular individuals, individuals who have exerted a powerful and still-present influence on students and followers, but who have repeatedly failed to make their values visibly characteristic of the totality. (5-6)

Hence there arose a curriculum that expressed the faith that exposure to a more or less balanced array of periods, genres, and themes would add up in the mind of the student to an appreciation of humanism and the cultural tradition. (9)

But the basic form of the "literature itself" argument remains the same, bespeaking the perennial wish to believe that if the quality of individual instruction is good and the right words are taught, the effect of the whole will take care of itself. (10)

As I have told it, then, the story of academic literary studies in America is a tale not of triumphant humanism, nationalism, or any single professional model, but of a series of conflicts that have tended to be masked by their very failure to find visible institutional expression. This emphasis on conflicts is seen in the successive oppositions that organize my narrative: classicists versus modern language scholars; research investigators versus generalists; historical scholars versus critics; New Humanists versus New Critics; academic critics versus literary journalists and culture critics; critics and scholars versus theorists. (14)

If one conflict subsumes the others in my story, however, it is the one which has pitted scholars against critics. We tend to forget that until recently the terms were considered antithetical: scholars did research and dealt with verifiable facts, whereas critics presided over interpretations and values, which supposedly had no objective basis and therefore did not qualify for serious academic study. (14)

Chapter 4: The Investigators (1): The New University

Competing model was defended buy a party of "generalists," as I shall call them, who were also committed to the idea of department of English and modern languages, but who upheld the old college ideal of liberal or general culture against that of narrowly specialized research. (55)

This generalist group formed a "dissenting tradition," in Applebee's term, which defended appreciation over investigation and values over facts. (55)

With these changes there arose between 1875 and 1915 a new type of secularized educational professional. The outlook of this type was tied not to maintaining the traditional ideal of liberal culture but to facilitating the advancement of knowledge wherever it might lead (59-60).

The scholar's of business was the search for impersonal truth, and the formulation of values and ideals was theoretically left to others. (61)

The secular tendency of the new academic type... (61)

The new academic professional thought of himself as an"investigator" devoted to advancing the frontiers of knowledge through research, and his loyalties went to his "field" rather than to the classroom dedication that had made the older type of college teacher seem a mere schoolmaster. The prototype of the new professional was the German university professor in his lecture room or seminar, a man who supposedly transcended morality and ideology in his this interested search for truth. (62)

Reconciling professional secularism with the traditionalism of Liberal culture proved to be a problem.(64)

Chapter 5: The Investigators (2): The Origins of Literature Departments

At John's Hopkins [Gilman] dramatically reversed traditional priorities, taking the sciences as the central model of knowledge and letting humanistic subjects adapt themselves as best they could. Departments were themselves an expression of the scientific view of knowledge, being efficient instruments for facilitating research breakthroughs rather than custodial agencies for conserving tradition. In the literary studies, however, departmental identity from the start reflected conflicting conceptions of the department's mission, which resolved themselves in varying degrees of compromise, stalemate, and peaceful but distrustful coexistence. (65)

Statements like these can be amassed in order to make a case for the argument that the professionalization of literary studies in the university was a means by which"the old elite and their allies" sought "to impose middle-class American 'likemindedness'on a heterogeneous, urban, working-class population." Calling it "professionalization," Paul Lauter says, the old elite "re-organized literary scholarship and teaching in ways that not only asserted a male centered culture and values for the college educated leadership, but also enhanced their own authority and status as well." In other words, the interests of professionalism and of cultural nationalism coincided–--as indeed to the official humanist view assumed. (71)

Certainly many among"The old elite" did hope that academic literary studies would help impose a unified, "male-centered" American culture and values on an increasingly heterogeneous population. But this hope was at least to some degree frustrated by the dynamics of professionalization itself, which the old elite did not fully control. (71)

English would culminate in"the study of the great forms of poetry, of the principles of poetic art, of the leading canons of style as illustrated in English classics, of the life and Times of an author as related to his literary productions, of the influence of other literatures upon English." Here, at last, was a conception of "English" that was liberated from linguistic restrictions without sacrificing anything in mental discipline. (78)

Chapter 6: The Generalist Opposition

The entire first half of this chapter is useful...

Ch. 7: Crisis at the Outset: 1890-1915

he calls this "the heroic period of the literature department" (99)

Sum-Up: "...the outlook of literary studies in the early professional era was marked by a curious mixture of overconfidence and defeatism" (99)

One event that did much to consolidate the study of literature, and particularly "English," as a discipline was the debate over college entrance requirements that developed in the 1890s. As the university grew and became administratively standardized, educators set out to reduce the variations in college entrance policies. (99)

By the turn of the century it was a commonplace among educators that English courses were boring or baffling students rather than successfully acculturating or indoctrinating them. And it was another commonplace that even English professors did not seem able to agree on the core values of English, despite their agreement on the core texts. In 1911 William T. Foster, a shrewd surveyor of American education, was saying that "even the general prescription of English is an agreement in name only; what actually goes on under this name is so diverse as to show that we have not yet discovered an 'essential' course in English." (100)

The literature department offered a series of periods and movements and left the student to provide the context for them. (108-109)

Like the scholar's accumulation of research facts, the student's gathering of period courses was of itself expected to add up to a significant whole, but nothing made this very likely. (109)

the "field-coverage" principle of organization: "by granting each professor sovereignty over his assigned terrain, the coverage principle left no one responsible for the totality, which was trusted to compose itself for the student on its own" (111)

...the field coverage principle enabled the department to evade the issue of its own intellectual coherence (112)

Ch. 8: Scholars vs Critics: 1915-1930

Between 1915 and 1930, neither the overall configuration of the literature department nor its basic methods changed fundamentally. Linguistic philology ceded further prominence to literary history, the new fields of comparative literature and the history of ideas emerged, and American literature achieved respectability in the wake of wartime patriotism. But the research model of literary studies became in some way more entrenched than it had been before the war. In 1902, PMLA had discontinued the "Pedagogical Section" of the journal, giving indication that, in William Riley Parker's words, "the MLA had become so absorbed in the advancement of research in its field that it was ready to leave to others all talk about teaching and enrollment." In 1916 a clause in the MLA constitution describing the object of the Association as "the advancement of the study of the Modern Languages and their literatures" was amended to read, "the advancement of research in the Modern languages and their literatures. In 1929, the president of the association declared with finality that "henceforth, our domain is research." (121)

It is in this period that scholar and critic emerge as antithetical terms, and the gulf further widens between fact and value, investigation and appreciation, scientific specialization and general culture. (122)

We should not ignore the fact that checking "experimental lawlessness" and promoting "training for citizenship" were central motives shaping the conception of literary studies in this period. (131)

...the great books course could be the model for a general education curriculum which would counteract the entrenched forces of scientific positivism and vocationalism. (134)

Foerster on scholars and critics:

"the task of rendering our knowledge more and more exact and thorough," and that of the critics, "of rendering our standards of worth more and more authoritative and serviceable." (139)

On the role of critics:

"we shall always need the literary criticism which tries the masterpiece by comparing it with other masterpieces" and determines "its relation to fundamental conceptions of the meaning of tragedy, or of epic, of of any other great literary form, and which defines its author's genius and his outlook on life in such terms." (140)

Ch. 9: Groping for a Principle of Order: 1930-1950

For a confluence of reasons, then, after the mid-1930s, the more aggressive partisans of criticism in the university began to dissociate themselves from the motley of "generalist" groups with which they had previously co-existed. (146)

By the mid-1930s, the ranks of the generalists were thinning out... (146)

This chapter discusses the rise of new criticism, how it was an attempt to formulate a "rigorous" methodology in response to the philologists who established "rigor" as a key criterion of academic work and an attempt to distance from the humanists of old whose method was...non-existent. Also, a lot of what new criticism is, essentially, explicating texts in a vacuum and a rejection of the supposedly dehumanizing elements of modernism or modern industrial life...

Eventually, the very term "New Critical" would become synonymous with the practice of explicating texts in a vacuum. This is what it became in institutional practice... (146)

..."criticism is the attempt to define and enjoy the aesthetic or characteristic values of literature." Once it was assumed that there were "aesthetic or characteristic values of literature" that could be isolated from other values, it had to follow--as it might not under one other definition of criticism--that an autonomous literature department was naturally more desirable than one which would see literature as inseparable from history, philosophy, psychology, and social thought. The autonomy of poetic language demanded the autonomy of departments to teach it as a matter of territorial rights. (148)

It is possible to fix 1937-41 as the turning point for the consolidation of criticism in the university. (152)

Though the great explosion in graduate programs would not come till the fifties and sixties, figures indicate the beginning of an upswing a decade earlier. (155)

Ch: 10: General Education the Pedagogy of Criticism

No development had more influence in securing the fortunes of criticism in universities and secondary schools than the movement for general education revived and restated by Robert Maynard Hutchins of Chicago in the 1930s and institutionalized after World War II. The general education movement was a response to two kinds of fears: that because of increasing disciplinary specialization and emphasis on vocational training, knowledge was becoming fragmented, and that because of deepening conflicts of ideology, the unity of Western culture was disintegrating into chaotic relativism. General education expressed a desire to restore common beliefs and values, and the humanities were seen as central to this goal by endowing the student with the sense of a common cultural heritage (162)

Through the new pedagogy of explication, it was felt, tradition and cultural unity could thus be inculcated without providing elaborate historical contexts. (163)

Adler persuaded Hutchins that the Western intellectual tradition constituted "a Great Conversation among Great Thinkers on universal themes" and that by putting this Great Conversation at the center of education, in the form of courses in the great books, educators could stem the demoralizing tides of modern materialism, vocationalism, specialism, departmentalism, empiricism, and relativism. (163)--thsi sounds like Freshman English, post-war years, at UNH

The aim of the basic general education course was a restatement of the old vision of disencumbering the great works from the excrescences in order to allow them to speak for themselves. (169)

But what it hoped would give the books a "bearing one on another" was not historical continuity or context but what it called "a common body of tradition," something very different from history, as it turned out. The implication was that the great works themselves formed a coherent and unified order by being a repository of "the greatest, most universal human preoccupations." (169)

Ch. 11: History vs. Criticism: 1940-1960

...as long as courses in explication supplemented survey courses, a decent balance would inform the experience of students. (193)

The field-coverage principle remained unquestioned and continued to determine the curriculum, keeping the department self-regulating and relieving old scholars and new critics alike of the need to discuss their differences and agreements and to see how these might be infused into the literature program. (193)

Ch. 12: Modern Literature in the University: 1940-1960

My impression, based on limited evidence, is that though courses in the literature of the recent past became frequent in colleges as early as the 1890s, it was not till well after World War II that it became possible for any large proportion of study to be devoted to modern literature. (196)

It is not till the early sixties that a new pattern begins to emerge whereby, though the number of twentieth-century courses increases only moderately, the enrollment in them goes up disproportionately. (196)

Ch. 13: The Promise of American Literature Studies

Because the New Criticism has been the most discussed of the postwar academic methodologies and the one that has had the most influence on pedagogy, we are prone to forget that it was never more than one among many. The direction of postwar academic literary studies was interdisciplinary as much as it was intrinsic. (209)

...the postwar theorists' fusion of history and explication... (224)

...New Criticism of explication for explication's sake. (225)

Ch. 14: Rags to Riches to Routine

"Routinization" in the sphere of pedagogy and criticism has hardly begun to be analyzed, and this chapter and the next can be seen as a preliminary effort. (227)

This tendency of academic interpretation to become a kind of self-validatiing promotion operation... (233)

mid-century/post war... "a time when academic literary studies had finally won their institutional autonomy and achieved that 'technique and methodology teachable and transmissible and applicable to any and all works of literature' that Wellek had called for... Having established unprecedented levels of scholarly and critical productivity, departments did not want to hear that there might be no one uniquely literary mode of language, susceptible to infinite reexaminations in text after text. An industry on the move, generating "fruitful new approaches," does not want to be told that its major successes may have been rigged. (237)

By the early sixties the feeling was in the air that the heroic age of criticism, in effect the second heroic period of academic literary studies, was over. (140)

...the routinization of criticism (240)