2016 Presidential Address: Literature and Its Publics: Past, Present, and Future
The Presidential Address was delivered at the 2016 MLA Annual Convention in Austin by Roland Greene, then president of the association. An audio recording and the text of his speech, which was introduced by Executive Director Rosemary G. Feal, appear here. The full address will be published in the May 2016 issue of PMLA.
Some things don’t change much. One hundred and fourteen years ago, at an MLA conference in Champaign, Illinois, the president of the Central Division, the Germanist James Taft Hatfield of Northwestern University, delivered an address on “the relation of scholarship to the commonwealth,” which I recognize as a version of this year’s theme, Literature and Its Publics.1 When the address was published later in PMLA, the account of it went as follows: “the remarks of the President were clear, incisive, sparkling, and proved an excellent introduction to one of the most interesting meetings” of the association. (The minutes go on to share the secretary’s concern that the conference has too many papers, which run too long, and to record the balance in the Central Division’s funds: $1.33 [“Proceedings” lxxv].)
The early records of MLA business, especially presidential addresses, remind us that many of the conditions of our profession have long histories. In his address of 1914, titled “The American Professor,” Felix Schelling complains of onerous teaching loads, low pay, and precarious social status (lvii, lxiv). In 1915 Jefferson B. Fletcher lamented that, in contrast to previous generations of professors whose stern pedagogy ran the risk of turning into pedantry, “in this day and land of equality, when youth will be served, we pedagogues placate. We become entertainers” (xxxix). And in 1919, Edward C. Armstrong made this self-criticism:
We deplore our having so little say [in institutional matters], and yet how uncommon it is that we unite to voice a common will. Have you ever participated in the efforts of a faculty, on its own initiative, to formulate and maintain an opinion on a measure of any complexity? Have you ever wrestled with the problem of persuading a faculty group who agree on a general proposition to accommodate their differences of view on its details? (xxviii)
Some things change utterly, however. Historians of our profession, notably the former MLA president Gerald Graff, have rightly observed the currents of elitism and nostalgic humanism that run through the presidential addresses of a hundred or so years ago, in which “elegiac recollections of the lost serenities of the old college alternated with bitter denunciations of the spiritual degradation of democratic times” (114–15). While we encounter in these addresses the bare facts of today’s professional life, most of us now would recoil from the deeper implications of the attitudes the presidents held toward the general public. Many of these scholars felt an identity with the writers whom their philological activities served and a remoteness from their own public world, seen as populated by those whom Hatfield called “the hosts of Philistia” (408). The objects of scorn could include not only young people, the working class, immigrants, and anyone else whose linguistic and rhetorical sophistication fell below the academic standard but the avant-gardes that now define the era in literary and cultural history. In his address of 1912, Charles Hall Grandgent, bitterly denouncing his contemporaries the futurists and the cubists (“and Neo’s of every description”), argues that scholars like himself are caught between avant-garde and mass culture (lvii). He concludes with an attack on the present as a “Dark Age” “induced by the gradual triumph of democracy, [which] will last until the masses, now become arbiters of taste and science, shall have been raised to the level formerly occupied by the privileged classes” (lvii–lviii).
No doubt these intellectual and professional reflections tell us a great deal about the history of our profession in relation to the public. For the moment I am interested in one aspect of that historical relation, namely the enduring question of to whom our work speaks and the long-standing contrivance of universalism in answering that question. I want to recite in brief a story of how our field emerged out of a universalist past into the present and provoke reflection on the future.
As Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak observed about ten years ago in her book Death of a Discipline, literary studies (including comparative literature, the discipline with which Spivak was concerned) depends on a working doctrine of collectivity, or the answer to the question, “who are ‘we’?” (26). In teaching, collectivity may seem to be a given—the population of students in a certain classroom in conversation with the historically constituted “we” of a certain work—but in fact many of us strive to broaden that group over time by improving access to college and graduate study and to assemble new collectivities in the received population, such as research groups for undergraduates and PhD students. In scholarship, thinking about collectivity is really a way of invoking the interlocutors to whom our work speaks transhistorically and in the present. If I write about Shakespeare and Cervantes, or Allen Ginsberg and Haroldo de Campos, how does my project assemble a public? Who are my, or our, imagined readers? How does the project create the readership it wants? Perhaps the most fundamental question is, If the assumed collectivity were stated directly (“this primary work spoke to that public in the past and speaks to this one in the present”), would it align with the practices of the critic? In some sense, I will suggest, the recent history of literary studies recapitulates the changes in how these publics have been conceived.
For many years, the study of literature was haunted by the problem of universalism. Universalism in our discipline shares a name with doctrines in philosophy, theology, and jurisprudence but is a distinct problem that entails its own challenges. Unlike these other disciplines, where universalism is typically an article of active belief—for instance, the jurist Francisco de Vitoria’s position in his relectio De Indis of 1537 that the colonized peoples of the Americas belonged to a world population subject to natural law and the rights that attend it, or the promulgation in 1948 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights—literary studies in the past enabled and even encouraged a universalism that operated as an unexamined premise rather than an object of debate. This tacit doctrine understood collectivity as a given: “literature is by and for everyone,” where “everyone” is left undefined and unelaborated. Of course this gesture was not as inclusive as it claimed to be. Often the public in question was really a small population of professional and initiated readers whose interests were aggrandized to speak generally and universally; the doctrine granted an indeterminate power to the pronouns we and us. In the national literatures this universalism often gave cover to nationalism and parochialism, while in comparative literature it tended to produce a kind of criticism that acknowledged no location and therefore spoke to everyone and no one.
From the nineteenth century to World War II, literary studies relied on a set of universalist assumptions to carry out much of its business: its ventures in philology, biography, generic classification and definition, and thematic analysis were typically undertaken in the name of a common reader who was better understood by implication than in substance, whose name was often “we.” For example, in 1914 the former MLA president George Lyman Kittredge, one of the most distinguished philologists of his time, delivered a lecture on Geoffrey Chaucer in which he leaped from one universalist premise, that Chaucer’s poetry speaks to all ages in the voice of a contemporary, to another, that we in the present all experience the same Chaucer, and for that matter the same present:
Chaucer is the most modern of English poets, and one of the most popular. . . . For he knew life and loved it, and his specialty was mankind as it was, and is. Besides, his age was vastly like our own, in everything but costume and “the outward habit of encounter.” . . . It was an age of intense activity,—a singularly “modern” time. (Chaucer 1–2)
When two years later he addresses Shakespeare, of whose plays he was the most admired early-twentieth-century editor, Kittredge allows more scope for difference:
There will be as many Hamlets or Macbeths or Othellos as there are readers or spectators. For the impressions are not made, or meant to be made, on one uniformly registering and mechanically accurate instrument, but on an infinite variety of capriciously sensitive and unaccountable individualities—on “us,” in short, who see as we can, and understand as we are. Your Hamlet is not my Hamlet, for your ego is not my ego.
But when we are done trying to explain our discrete and personal Shakespeares to one another, Kittredge observes, “[T]here must still remain, in the last analysis, a difference that is beyond reconciliation, except in the universal solvent of our common humanity” (Shakspere 12–13). And then there comes this “corrective and restraining proviso”:
[S]omewhere there exists, and must be discoverable, the solid fact—and that fact is Shakespeare’s Hamlet or Macbeth or Othello. And this actual being is not to be confused, in your apprehension or in mine, with any of the figures that we have constructed, each for himself, by the instinctive reaction of our several personalities under the stimulus of the poet’s art. (13)
In holding up Kittredge as an example, I do not mean to suggest that his views went uncontested in his time. On the contrary, he was vividly challenged on his philological methods by contemporaries, notably the New Humanists such as Irving Babbitt.2 But with a few exceptions, universalism was not at issue. The patchwork of universals postulated by Kittredge—according to which literature, the humanities, and the scholarship about them advance mutually reinforcing claims to timelessness, presentness, and importance—had become an indispensable convenience in what is always on the agenda in our fields, making the case for what we do.
World War II is commonly held as the threshold between a founding model of comparative literature and what the discipline is today, for several reasons but mostly because the war drove a number of European scholars into American universities, where they articulated a fresh sense of disciplinary possibilities and a new cosmopolitanism. I think this account is true as far as it goes, but what should be remembered—and what several recent historians of the field have reminded us—is that the war dealt a more decisive blow to universalist assumptions about literature than did any theory. The scholars who relocated to America during and after the war found themselves working in a redrawn disciplinary horizon. The world as they had regarded it, namely, the Europe that had formed the ground of comparative literary studies, had been slashed into opposed, sometimes unintelligible cultural zones; the existence of a common cultural heritage had been thrown into question; and little could be assumed in the theory or practice of a comparative literature across these problems and divisions.
It has become a cliché to treat Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis, published in 1946, as the exemplar of this historical moment, but where twenty or more years ago the book was seen as the expression of a comparative literature closed to non-European perspectives (which to a limited view, it is), it ought to be understood instead as an attempt to rethink the nature of collectivity for comparative literature—and for literary studies generally—in a broken world. Auerbach’s study does not assume a universalist stance for the discipline but returns to first principles in an attempt to figure out what constitutes the realist tradition in the West. And the historical importance of Mimesis, I think, is not its coherent method but its struggle to uphold a discipline that, since it can no longer rely on an unspoken universalism, must speak to literary studies’ version of collectivity at every turn. The first words of the book posit no “we” but run thus: “Readers of the Odyssey will remember …,” as though the project here will be to assemble those readers, propose interpretations to them, and then gather communities from work to work, chapter to chapter, into a new collectivity (3). For literary studies, some variety of universalism is always near and available; none of us is immune from the blandishments of a position that can arise out of convenience or self-absorption as much as conviction. But from Auerbach on, if we take Mimesis as marking a threshold in our common fields, the most intriguing and moving examples of literary studies have often been those in which the absence of a universalist credo is noted and addressed. What I mean to suggest is that the history of the larger discipline of literary studies in the twentieth century can be divided into the universalist and postuniversalist periods, roughly before and after World War II, symbolically before and after Mimesis, and that much of what is interesting about the latter era comes from the struggle against an unspoken universalism—a resistance that must be enacted afresh with every turn of method and articulated again in nearly every piece of scholarship. Universalism haunts the study of literature, as the founding article whose repudiation, once unthinkable, came to be necessary for the field to maintain its connection to history and lived experience.
Consider the work of a European scholar who came to the United States not during World War II but a generation earlier, in 1926: the Czech comparatist René Wellek, whose book Theory of Literature (1949), written with Austin Warren, is, like Auerbach’s Mimesis, one of the primers of postwar literary studies. From the first pages of the first edition of Theory of Literature, it is clear that the difficulty of imagining a collectivity troubles Wellek’s project in ways that we should recognize even if the problem was still indistinct to him and his contemporaries. Wellek’s purpose in this book is to advance a theoretical framework for identifying “the concrete object of the work of art.” In that connection, the first chapter proposes that formalist description and interpretation obviate the need for a reliable alternative to the unspoken universal:
Literary criticism and literary history both attempt to characterize the individuality of a work, of an author, of a period, or of a national literature. But this characterization can be accomplished only in universal terms, on the basis of a literary theory. Literary theory, an organon of methods, is the great need of literary scholarship today. (19)
Not only does Wellek subsume the question of literary studies’ collectivity—the “who are we?” of literature and criticism—into a continuing debate about the ontology of works of art, but he dismisses the prospect, which shows itself fleetingly, of incommensurability between populations of writers and readers—and more threatening, between particular writers and readers:
[L]ike every human being, each work of literature has its individual characteristics; but it also shares common properties with other works of art, just as every man shares traits with humanity, with all members of his sex, nation, class, profession, etc. We can thus generalize concerning works of art, Elizabethan drama, all drama, all literature, all art. (19)
What Wellek will not ponder unswervingly, here or elsewhere in Theory of Literature, is that even as history has fractured literatures and intellectual traditions and rendered certain concepts (the universal, the great, the natural) suspect or even useless, it has likewise rendered the undifferentiated readership of literature into a multiplicity of readerships divided by language, historical experience, sex, and other factors.
This lack of commonality among readers is the specter that Wellek, Auerbach, and their generation confront, as the first literary scholars to do business without a universalist credo in the background. In Mimesis, Theory of Literature, and elsewhere in the work of this cohort, these figures witness the arrival of a postuniversalist order, consider its fuller implications, and develop provisional strategies to contain these possibilities. In Wellek’s case, the containment takes the form of reducing a looming incommensurability to differences among individuals rather than the ruptures brought about by conquest, slavery, colonialism, diaspora, subjugation, and so forth—conditions that could scarcely be far from the mind of the Czech Wellek, who began Theory of Literature only one year after the Munich agreement began the process of turning his native country over to Nazi Germany partly under the pressure of internal ethnic tensions. The potential zones of difference among readers and critics make an almost unbearable subtext in these scholarly books, glanced at but not explored, while Wellek, Auerbach, and the rest struggle with the problem of reframing the discipline after universalism’s demise. The theory of literature becomes the basis of a new universalism, not metaphysical or ethical, as in so much scholarship of the early twentieth century, but formal, structural, and thematic.
At the same time, Wellek and his contemporaries realize that such an attenuated universalism still demands some concession to history, to the incommensurabilities that remain in the collective dimension of literary study. This fact conditions the appearance of what I take to be the main theoretical venture of Theory of Literature, the definition of perspectivism. As Wellek explains,
The answer to historical relativism is not a doctrinaire absolutism which appeals to “unchanging human nature” or the “universality of art.” We must rather adopt a view for which the term “Perspectivism” seems suitable. We must be able to refer a work of art to the values of its own time and of all the periods subsequent to its own. A work of art is both “eternal” (i.e. preserves a certain identity) and “historical” (i.e. passes through a process of traceable development). . . . “Perspectivism” means that we recognize that there is one poetry, one literature, comparable in all ages, developing, changing, full of possibilities. (43)
What is Wellek doing here? One is tempted to see his gesture toward perspectivism as the rehabilitation of a universalist notion of literature under the protective coloration of a high-modernist concession to multiple perspectives. And yet in his attempt to offer a safety valve to let off the pressures of a gathering sense of incommensurability and, at the same time, to qualify the limited reinvestment in universalism made earlier in Theory of Literature, Wellek, with whatever degree of awareness, fashions an opening that will in turn lead to a version of literary studies more thoroughly disengaged from universalism—a largely decentered discipline of multiple locales and few absolutes, many perspectives but few doctrines. Wellek’s perspectivism is one of the earliest conceptual renderings of what would replace an unquestioned universalism: a cultivation of difference among readers, writers, and critics over what literature is, how and what works mean, and to whom criticism speaks. An intellectual back formation that names a practice for a world stripped of universals, perspectivism is perhaps the first critical implement to be adapted to postwar reality, ratified in effect though not in name for several succeeding generations into the present.
This striking change in the field’s intellectual landscape reflects the historical conditions of the late 1930s and early 1940s and dispatches promises to be redeemed in the following generations. Many examples would show the implications of a postuniversalist literary scholarship, but since I began by citing some presidents of the association as representative of their time, let me acknowledge the appearance of Edward Said’s Orientalism in 1978, a book by a more recent president that opened an episode in the life of the humanities in which we are still living and also—its earliest readers were surprised to learn—owed a great deal to Auerbach’s Mimesis. Both books reset the dials of the discipline as they found it to account for a world, and a world of literature, starkly different from the one that had formed their disciplinary assumptions (Lindenberger). My view is that Said’s project takes something from Wellek as well, notably the accommodation of perspectivism in Theory of Literature, where the epistemological and ethical conditions of the field go quietly under revision. Regarding collectivities, Auerbach, Wellek, and Said pose questions about the past that encroach powerfully on the present. This is who they were, say these critics; who are we? Are we connected to one another? And might literature be understood not as the sign of a connection determined elsewhere—say, in nationality, language, or education—but as the fabric of that connection itself? How can literary works (and, we would add, film, video, rhetoric, and so on) not merely assume but establish collectivity? How can teachers, scholars, editors, and all the rest of us be agents for the making of a public?
Since Auerbach’s and Said’s eras, we have discovered new answers to these kinds of questions. Said’s project portended the counteruniversalist conversation of the past three and a half decades. A theme such as Literature and Its Publics evokes the reality that the most dynamic teaching and scholarship now involve assembling new collectivities around shared topics, questions, and occasions. There is no longer a “we” that can bear the weight of argument regardless of context; in its place are ad hoc communities around common projects. There is no philistine public against whom we set our scholarly efforts; instead there are potential audiences and allies everywhere whom we reach through criticism, editing, the digital humanities, blogging, and more. Intellectual work in our field, we have learned from Mimesis, Orientalism, and many later landmarks, is most compelling when it strikes out dramatically to enlarge its received community and renew its lingua franca.
I retell this history not to celebrate or embarrass the memories of certain scholars and presidents but to reflect on our shared past, evoking what the Indologist Sheldon Pollock calls “the humbling force of genealogy” through which we confront our own “historicity, constructedness, and changeability” as a discipline (948). I have dwelt on early alternatives to universalism because I believe that doctrine, though no one endorses it openly like a Kittredge now, retains a latent charisma in our fields: the power of the unexamined “we.” There are ethical and pedagogical reasons to continue resisting universalism. Ethically, we owe it to our discipline to acknowledge that literature often speaks in a remote, cryptic register to an ambiguous collectivity. The work of philology, editing, and interpretation is to maintain that strangeness in an expanded collectivity, assembling rather than assuming a public. I admire scholarship and teaching that offer the communitarian gesture of bringing a public together—like the first six words of Mimesis—even while acknowledging their own limited vantage in history and culture. To mention a recent book, Sianne Ngai’s Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (2012), which was awarded the James Russell Lowell Prize at the 2014 convention, in Chicago, demonstrates the conceptual power that can be unleashed from modest claims about marginal cultural phenomena and from a likewise unassuming, even motley collectivity that grows over the run of the argument. Three unpromising categories in which few readers can be invested become the basis of a kind of parable that implicates no less than “the hypercommodified, information-saturated, performance-driven conditions” of present-day capitalist society (1). Over the course of the book the terms deepen, the audience grows, and before long we are looking at ourselves as contemporary North American consumers, but from an angle.
Pedagogically, we owe it to our students to cultivate conscious alternatives to universalism that confront the spectral power in that doctrine: after all, they must live in a world where unexamined collectivities find diminishing license across the range of cultures. Most of us at this convention room live the counteruniversalist struggle in the classroom every day. Teaching tends to unsettle overly general assumptions; many of us at some time have probably anticipated that we, our students and ourselves, will share some perception or feeling only to discover that I, myself, am unconsciously deducing from private experience. I believe that the classroom should be not only the locus of this encounter with difference but its laboratory. Each group of students that comes to us is composed of multiple collectivities, sometimes to remain many and occasionally to become one: in that sense the classroom is one of the elemental sites in which publics are fashioned, and all of us who teach are public intellectuals. We should accept this role consciously and creatively. We intervene between writers, and among writers and their publics; we deliver works to their audiences, and above all we interpret, saying about a work of culture—a poem, a film, or a student’s paper—what it cannot say about itself. Interpretation is always indispensable to culture making, but interpretation that builds collectivities while casting universalism in a critical light is urgent now. Our numbers matter too: my friend George Andreou, an editor at Alfred A. Knopf, likes to say that in his business the readership for serious literature in this country is believed to be 50,000 people. While our work as agents of culture unfolds over time in unquantifiable ways, I feel obliged to note that over the next week the 27,000 members of the MLA will speak to ten or even a hundred times that readership in our classrooms. When we profess interpretation to our students, and especially when we enact the office of reading observantly and reflectively, we make a public for our field.
The MLA confronts its own existential question of collectivity: who is the “we” of a scholarly association distinguished by its journals, its convention, and its bibliography when as many as three of four college teachers work off the tenure track? Does the association, in its evolution away from the cloistered collectivity of the early twentieth century, answer the multifarious needs of the populations it serves? Over the past ten years or so, the MLA has reconceived itself not only to serve its distinctive cohorts of members but to make the assembling of new collectivities central to its mission—and the project continues. Under the leadership of recent presidents and Executive Councils and the guidance of Executive Director Rosemary Feal, and through the efforts of the one-hundred-member staff at 85 Broad Street, we conceive and build the resources that make it possible for members to carry out their roles collectively, whether that means identifying a community of interest around an author or a topic through the book series Approaches to Teaching or brokering information for isolated, disenfranchised contingent faculty members about salaries or teaching loads in the Advocacy section of the Web site or providing a venue on MLA Commons for discussion of issues as they emerge. The new forum structure devised by the former MLA presidents Marianne Hirsch and Margaret W. Ferguson, which takes effect for the first time here in Austin, demonstrates collectivities in action: for example, a forum or an allied organization can obtain an extra session at the convention in collaboration with another group or, in other words, by assembling a new community. The launch of Action for Allies and Connected Academics, the appointment of senior staff members with new portfolios for outreach and information systems, the provision of the MLA’s first overseas conference in Düsseldorf next summer, and the survey of members that informed a new strategic plan for the next five years mean that 2015 was a productive year of collective action; I know the presidencies of K. Anthony Appiah, Diana Taylor, and Anne Ruggles Gere will improve on our beginnings. I thank my fellow officers past and present, my colleagues on the Executive Council, Rosemary Feal, the staff, and of course the members for their collaboration. And I acknowledge the ghosts of Presidents Hatfield, Kittredge, and Said and the other scholars with whom I have conversed tonight—a transgenerational company that should encourage us to keep asking the most basic of questions, Who are we, and to whom are we speaking and writing?
Notes
1. According to Carol Zuses, coordinator of governance, the Central Division was a splinter group that separated from the MLA to hold meetings away from the East Coast. It existed from 1895 to 1923. Hatfield served as president of the MLA in 1934.
2. Babbitt’s Literature and the American College includes several criticisms of Kittredge and his fellow philologists, always unnamed; see especially “Literature and the Doctor’s Degree” 118–49.
Works Cited
Armstrong, Edward C. “Taking Counsel with Candide.” PMLA 34, app. (1919): xxiv–xliii. Print.
Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Trans. Willard R. Trask. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1953. Print.
Babbitt, Irving. Literature and the American College: Essays in Defense of the Humanities. Boston: Houghton, 1908. Print.
Fletcher, Jefferson B. “The President’s Address: Our Opportunity.” PMLA 30, app. (1915): xxxiv–lvi. Print.
Graff, Gerald. Professing Literature: An Institutional History. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987. Print.
Grandgent, Charles Hall. “The Dark Ages.” PMLA 27, app. (1912): xlii–lxx. Print.
Hatfield, James Taft. “Scholarship and the Commonwealth.” PMLA 17.3 (1902): 391–409. Print.
Kittredge, George Lyman. Chaucer and His Poetry. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1914. Print.
---. Shakspere. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1916. Print.
Lindenberger, Herbert. “Appropriating Auerbach: From Said to Postcolonialism.” Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies 11.2 (2004): 45–55. Print.
Ngai, Sianne. Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2012. Print.
Pollock, Sheldon. “Future Philology? The Fate of a Soft Science in a Hard World.” Critical Inquiry 35.4 (2009): 931–61. Print.
“Proceedings of the Seventh Annual Meeting of the Central Division of the Modern Language Association of America.” PMLA 17, app. 2 (1902): lxxvi–lxxvii. Print.
Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon, 1978. Print.
Schelling, Felix. “The American Professor.” PMLA 29, app. (1914): liv–lxxiii. Print.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. Death of a Discipline. New York: Columbia UP, 2003. Print.
Wellek, René, and Austin Warren. Theory of Literature. 3rd ed. New York: Harcourt, 1970. Print.