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The “sociology” of literary studies

Brian Leiter

Reader Scott Newstok called my attention to this very interesting LRB review essay of John Guillory's latest attempt to look at the history and organization of literary studies as a field.  A brief excerpt:

For Guillory, the pivotal development in the whole story was the arrival of ‘criticism’ as the dominant approach in the 1920s and 1930s, whether in the form of I.A. Richards’s ‘practical criticism’ in the UK or the New Critics’ ‘close reading’ in the US. This is when, in his view, literary studies became a discipline. But the attempt to turn criticism into a regulated and self-replicating profession generated all kinds of tensions, and Guillory urges that many of the issues agitating the field in recent decades are best seen as a working out of these tensions. For example, ‘criticism’ never quite shook off the aspiration to be in some way the criticism of society, not just literature, saddling the activity with exaggerated ambitions still evident today. At the same time, the logic of professionalism required a form of specialisation, a process carried further in the pressures towards intradisciplinary specialisation, which for the past 150 years has tended to take the form of expertise in the literature of a particular period. Even where the most ambitious conception of the discipline retains some overarching claim to underwrite the criticism of society, the cross-grained pressures of professionalisation demand ever greater subdivision: not to specialise is to risk one’s professional status by reverting to being an ‘amateur’.

A similar story might be told about academic philosophy in America one suspects, with the pivotal moment being the logical positivist invasion and takeover of America after WWII.  Thought on Guillory's analysis (or Collini's review) from those more knowledgeable about literary studies welcome (as well as thoughts about the relevance to philosophy).

 

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7 responses to “The “sociology” of literary studies”

  1. Dean C. Rowan

    I will have to read this new Guillory.

    Collini's account brings to mind Peter Uwe Hohendahl's book published in English in 1982, The Institution of Criticism. It consists primarily of translations of German scholarly articles from the prior century. It, too, is an institutional sociology of German literary studies, which seems to have matured as an academic profession several decades earlier than the first third of the 20th century. It would be interesting to compare the parallel trajectories proffered by Guillory and Hohendahl of their respective literatures.

    The only references in the review to comparative literature are those at the end to Auerbach and Curtius. I am unaware (i.e., ignorant) of influences of comparative literature on Richards or the New Critics, but it is certainly the case that "criticism" became fashionable during the '60s and '70s in English literature departments thanks to work in comp lit. Think the Yale School, for example, which until the post-mortem revelations of Paul de Man's work as a reviewer for Collaborationist news media was hardly interested in criticism of any "hors-texte" society. It's also worth recalling that in his own gratuitously provocative way, Stanley Fish has long lamented the "exaggerated ambitions" of criticism to directly affect society.

    Finally, I am about to finish a book of literary theory of which I had been unaware until very recently. How it escaped my notice, I don't know. It is Justus George Lawler's Celestial Pantomime: Poetic Structures of Transcendence (Yale UP 1979). It was published at a time when the Yale school was riding high, and indeed Lawler dedicates the book to Harold Bloom, an unwilling member of the "school." Lawler reads primarily from English poetry, but also French and a bit of German. I have found his book enormously helpful as a reader and, lately, writer of poetry. (How's that for practical criticism?) Lawler is interested not in illuminating individual poems, but in showing how certain poetic "structures," most of which have no semantic value, have endured throughout the ages of poetry, structures using elements such as enjambment, chiasmus, and what he calls "coda." Of relevance here is that Lawler seems to be the opposite of a specialist. I don't believe he has (or had) an academic affiliation, and most of his writing was on church history. The index reads more like a phone book than a roster of topics; Lawler is a shameless name-dropper, a criticism even leveled by a contemporaneous review. He finds analogies and shared techniques of structure among so many disparate poems and poets. It's easy to imagine that he is making shit up as he goes along, and he even admits that one can easily find counter-examples to his assertions. So be it. Celestial Pantomime invites one to read a poem from multiple angles, none having to do with social, political, or cultural impacts of doing so. (I suppose Lawler's "privilege" afforded him the freedom to write so dismissively of real world problems.) But the breadth of his knowledge, or at least of his memory, and of his capacity to make connections among data points in the various literatures he probes is at least impressive and, for me, inspirational. Is Lawler's book an outlier, a blatantly non-specialist compendium of remarks about pretty lyrics? Perhaps so in some respects, but had I encountered it in 1979 I would have added it to the pile of other literary historical/theoretical works I was then consuming. And yet it also illustrates a kind of intense specialization focused not on the literature of a particular time or genre or person, but on the "words themselves," a New Critical shibboleth.

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  2. Dean C. Rowan

    Correction: Hohendahl's book is a collection of his own German articles from the prior decade, not century.

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  3. Hello Again

    From the essay, by Stefan Collini: "But it is much harder to say what ‘research’ in English should look like and why it is necessary (a similar tension dogs philosophy)."
    And there you have it.

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  4. Dean C. Rowan

    Collini does not mention one avenue of literary research that is inviting increasing traffic: computational literary studies (CLS). I wonder whether Guillory treats it. CLS does at least purport to say what one species of "research" should look like, and its proponents argue that it is necessary as a corrective to traditional literary criticism, which ultimately relies on subjective judgment. For a good starting point, see Nan Z. Da, "The Computational Case Against Computational Literary Studies" in Critical Inquiry, v.45, no.3, spring 2019. Da's article is useful, because it surveys a number of computational techniques deployed by CLS researchers, and also because it spawned an interesting debate about the accuracy of Da's criticisms. CLS springs from increases in computing power and efficiencies, but also from reaction to New Critical prescriptions of "close reading." Franco Moretti's Distant Reading is perhaps the leading text in this respect. So here we have a fork off of the tradition of Anglo-American literary studies whose object is no longer "the" literary text and whose purpose is no longer the achievement of a balance of interpretive factors–intention, history, biography, form, and so forth–to render a meaningful reading of the text. Rather, the object of CLS is expansive bodies of literary texts unreadable as such by any individual scholar. The outcome of a successful CLS study should be to tell us about formerly unacknowledged objective literary characteristics of the aggregate texts. Da has plenty to say about how reliably this model is executed. The relevance of all of this to the OP is that CLS, having the trappings of "objective" study, imports to literary studies a quality of professional discipline evidently wanting in traditional literary criticism.

    I can't imagine philosophy deploying anything like a CLS. To do so would turn the study of philosophy into the study of the literature (or aggregate texts) of philosophy. But I've been blabbing here for a couple days. Thanks to Hello Again for chiming in. Anybody else?

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  5. Nqabutho

    Upon what (upon what criteria) does a critical judgment of seriousness and significant truth in the field of the creation of literary art depend? Since both fiction and poetry are largely about people as social beings and since they pursue questions about how one ought to live the unique trajectory of one's life, under what values and understanding, etc., how can the critique of literary works avoid questions of understanding of social interaction, values, ethics and governance? Of course effectiveness of linguistic expression is important, but the content of what is expressed has to be considered as well, and considered from a humanistic point of view (what exactly that involves has to be clarified), not a clinical one.

    Toward the end of the Scrutiny era (which I agree with Collini was a "pivotal" period for the creation of disciplinary standards), Leavis had a confrontation (in the pages of Scrutiny) with Rene Wellek, who wrote a book (with Austin Warren) called "Theory of Literature" (which was quite different from later travesties called "theory" tout court produced in the literary field), where Leavis opposed what he seemed to consider Wellek's scientistic tendencies. Now I'm not a literary scholar, but I've had a lot of experience hanging out with literary types as a member of English departments, trying to figure out what they're all about, and, as I do regard myself as taking a scientific (or "naturalistic") point of view, where "theory" means an attempt at causal explanation of some problematic empirical phenomenon, I was puzzled by the mania for "theory" that came along with the "postmodernist" fad. What were they trying to explain? As for the other mania, in the English department of an African university in which I was teaching, the students had no problem studying and enjoying 19th century English literature and so forth just in the same way as their British counterparts had done in times previous to the "identity"-sensitive current context; of course they also studied African literature, which, pace Ngugi, had to be in English (in that Anglophone country) in order for them to appreciate not only the cultures of the many languages of their own country, but also those of, e.g., Kenya as well, and of course the reciprocal (raising interesting artistic challenges for African writers). It seems to me English and literature are humanities disciplines, not sciences, including not social sciences. Disciplinary standards should probably arise out of the experience of grappling with the texts that the artists produce out of their own artistic obsessions, and produced in response to some of those texts as well.

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  6. William Peden

    Dean,

    There are some comparable uses of computers in philosophy. For example, metaphysicians can have their personal judgements of which metaphysics is simpler, but I have heard that there are efforts to measure simplicity in metaphysics using information theory.

    In the history of philosophy, it may be possible to avoid some problems through quantitative analysis of texts. For example, while not being an expert in this area (or metaphysics) it seems that there are strong professional incentives to misattribute currently popular ideas to the past. A paper about "Nietzsche really was the first proponent of the ideas that are attributed to Nietzsche" is likely to be pretty boring and hard to publish, but "This 17th century Upper Silesian philosopher whom almost nobody has read anticipated the prominent ideas attribute to Nietzsche" is an exciting paper that is very hard to check (few philosophers will be experts on both Nietzsche and the Upper Silesian) and unfortunately all too likely to be published. Maybe automated quantitative textual analysis could help filter out some of these questionable research practices in the history of philosophy.

    Similarly, in the philosophy of science, one can compare the performance of some reasoning system (like Bayesianism) against another using computer simulations. I co-authored a study of this kind with economists, where we compared Bayesian and frequentist methods in a classic reasoning problem using simulations. More recently, we have been applying it to imprecise vs. precise probability systems. There is also e.g. Kevin Zollman and people using his approach to social epistemology using computer models and simulations.

    A more traditional approach in the philosophy of science is historical studies. Historical case studies can tell us a lot, but there are many inferences that they cannot reliably support, including generalisations about the performances of methodologies. One advantage that simulations have over e.g. historical case studies is that it is easier to control for confounding factors. Is it fair to compare the performances of Bob the Bayesian and Freeda the Frequentist? They are unlikely to have the same data, the same background knowledge, the same historical context, and so on. Are these confounding factors sufficiently similar to make a fair comparison? Like old school literary criticism, there is a lot of room for subjective judgement.

    On the other hand, there are inferences that historical case studies can support that simulations cannot. For example, case studies can be a good way to discover potentially important causal factors that you haven't considered before. Helen Longino's case studies of gender in animal experimentation raised a lot of issues about objectivity that philosophers of science had previously neglected.

    I think that the philosophy of science is entering into an exciting period where we have an unprecedented combination of computational, historical, and formal analysis. As long as we don't throw away any of this expertise due to obsession with the latest methodologies, there is the potential to pursue questions that were totally out of reach for earlier generations.

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  7. Dean C. Rowan

    Thank you, William, for this crash course survey of computing efforts in philosophy, and for the assessment of their relative merits. I suppose I was thinking more along the lines of text data mining for, say, sentiment analysis, as a non-starter in philosophy. Maybe not completely. On the other hand, TDM in the history of philosophy, as you suggest, does seem feasible.

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