Gravestone of Elizabeth Pain, departed this life on November 26, 1704. Many have long been crafting literature’s epitaph. The report of its death is an exaggeration. http://bit.ly/1QyruHM
“[W]e face a dilemma simply characterizing “English”: literature? composition and literature? literature in English only? theory? cultural studies? creative writing? literacy and linguistics? And should it be the Department of English Studies or the Department of English?” (McDonald 150)
Characterizing English
In reading Marcia A. McDonald’s litany of literacy initiatives within English studies, I’m struck by the movement–even within her laundry list–away from the domain of my adolescent dreams: literature. McDonald admits a much in a second telling passage, echoed from Berube’s critiques and Graff’s Professing Literature: “Once the core of the teaching of Western humanities in required courses, now literature is often found as an option on a humanities menu within a distributive general education program” (151). This, then, is the abandoned vocation I follow, and in this quest I cut a figure a little like that of John of Stephen Vincent Benet’s “By the Waters of Babylon” or perhaps another wilderness John, the “Savage” from Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, a holdover from another era who remains committed to seeking truth even if truth has left the building. I suppose when dancing with Wordsworth among daffodils and Coleridge (and Hawthorne and Melville) on the seas of untranquility for the first time in high school, I became a romantic in more ways than one: I tend to stubbornly drag a foot through a trough of past tenses even as I crave a brave new world. In short, I am an
archetypal
New Historicist-turned-
medievalist,
postcolonial
ecocritic.
For me, the question regarding epistemology has become ever more complex as I have alternately sought legitimacy in empiricism, comfort in the tastes of the past, and a critical calling as an agent of change.
Brave New World
Yet, I, too, have been changed. The brave new world of raising a family these past twenty years has led me down paths of critical compromise. Of course, I am seeking a PhD because I believe it’s necessary for my professional growth…and for my financial health. It’s clear that there is a market for certain disciplines and certain stamps of critical thought (Pifer 181). While I have long resisted the Mephistophelian strains of worldly gain, I can’t deny that Downing’s “market pressures” have the power to redirect the course of the raging river of my critical identity (91). At the end of the rainbow, literary studies simply must produce some institutional alchemical magic, a la Faust and Prospero, in order to survive. Yet this pragmatic concern has also had a chilling effect on my creative energies. I hate viewing literature as a mere tool. After a dance with Deleuze and Derrida, I’m left dizzily to question both thought and language, wondering what is worth studying and, by extension, what is worth teaching.
Streams in the Wilderness
This existential dilemma leads circuitously to my chosen object of study–an exploration of the causes and effects of writer’s block on the professional trajectory of Modern novelist Richard A. W. Hughes. My intention is to explore both the heart and the mind while seeking to alter the course of the trickling stream that remains literary studies. The subtext(s) for my choice(s) is my personal pursuit of difference (and perhaps even a little différance) from the rest of the field. Let me share my rationale(s):
1. Hughes is a neglected writer; I seek to rehabilitate (reinscribe?) him. Whether we acknowledge it or not, a canon exists, and it is the job of literary scholars to “address” it (without endorsing…an impressive maneuver, that). It is also fluid, whether or not Harold or Allan Bloom wants it to be (and I would venture to say that at least one Bloom is game for change, despite his reputation as a bard who insists on singing the Bard’s praises).
2. Hughes’s own fascination with history (he wrote one of the first novelistic attempts to depict the rise of Hitler) leads me to the archives. I want to read what he read, and I believe that a New Historicist approach to understanding why his writer’s block may have derailed his account of World War II is just what the doctor ordered. I was greatly influenced by Stephen Greenblatt’s work during my own undergraduate work in the early 1990s and believe that profound truths are waiting to be assembled from personal papers. As Louis Montrose writes,
“The recent revival of interest in historical, social, and political questions in literary and cultural studies is […] no doubt, a response to the acceleration in the forgetting of history that seems to characterize an increasingly technocratic and commodified American academy and society” (394).
3. Writer’s block affects more than just the novelists who don’t achieve their perceived potential; I seek to extend knowledge in this field through some empirical study that can benefit all-night blockers everywhere.
4. Literature and composition have been at odds for far too long; I seek to establish scholarship that unites the two based on common interests. There is simply too much cross-over for the two fields to be kept separate indefinitely. My quixotic quest is personal: My father, a lifelong literature teacher, completed his dissertation in composition studies when that field was still fledgling.
5. Hughes clearly certainly qualifies as a dead white male; as such he is perhaps seen as persona non grata in an already crowded field. In an era in which difference has almost uniformly been declared to be everything BUT Hughes, I seek to show that his work is important in exploring uncharted colonialist perspectives as well as atypical gendered constructs. It is through the unique work of this typically British writer that I hope to shine light on the periphery.
A Wo/Man of Letters
And finally, I present a pedagogical example that best reveals my epistemological bent. I recently re-booted for the tenth time a study of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter in my high school classrooms. As a sophomore in high school, I was forever changed (while also bedeviled) by this book, an American “classic” force-fed to millions of American youth everywhere (including overseas). As a senior in college, I was trained in literary criticism through a Bedford-St. Martin’s edition of Hawthorne’s text that demonstrated various modes of literary criticism, including feminism and deconstructionism. To be frank, it left my creative river dry (yet strangely, it also fertilized my interest in critical study). I had always believed (during my then six-year literary career) that a reader could find “truth” in the work’s rich yet straightforward symbolism, its mimetic depictions of complex psychology (and pathology), and the author’s dynamic dissection of human nature. How could I have been so wrong?
In the twenty-five years since (ten of them spent teaching high school upperclassmen “how” to “read” this book), I’ve veered subtly away from Frye but even further from Fish to serve my annual Hawthorne Thanksgiving feast. I’ve begun to hear the “indians” in the woods that Dimmesdale preaches to. I’ve begun to feel the forest instead of merely the trees, understanding that Hawthorne was far ahead of his time (yet perhaps in sync with Blake, Wordsworth, Melville, Poe, Thoreau, and Whitman on this) in seeing the pervasive “black flowers of civilization” planted as people extend their influence. Roger Chillingworth, himself a Faustian figure, is reaping the black weeds in order to sow revenge. He is also the medicinal, parasitical “leech” (as are all colonials), seeking to administer a kind of bad medicine to right personal (or perhaps social) wrongs. In other words, I have come to find medieval, postcolonial, and ecocritical fertilizer for my classroom forays. Yet Greg Garrard reminds me that fodder is not enough to make things grow.
[T]he nature that Wordsworth valorises is not the nature that contemporary environmentalists seek to protect. Romantic nature is never seriously endangered, and may in its normal state be poor in biological diversity; rather it is loved for its vastness, beauty and endurance” (48).
As I pursue new leads in the labyrinth that is Hawthorne’s text, I must also be careful not to repeat the Romanticizing sins of the past.
Critical Fish Frye
Please let me explain. It’s not that I’m so Faustian that I see literature now as a mere means to a professional or political end. I believe that I have a role to resist some aspects of critical pedagogy as it relates to a study of literature that is easily consumed to the skeleton by cultural critics who derisively spit out the flesh. I maintain that literature–every word of it–has much to offer us, whether linguistically, politically, or spiritually. It continues to inspire, and whether such inspiration is simply a derivative of socio-epistemic ideologies to which Western readers, assenting to hegemonic cultural harmony, have been programmed…I know not.
The fact of the matter is this: while literature may not be a mirror in the sense that M. H. Abrams (and centuries of critics before him) sought to establish, I believe it reflects me. I see myself in Dimmesdale, in Chillingworth, in Hester. Perhaps it is because I share an ethnic and linguistic background with these fictional characters. Yet I feel that today’s Anglo students feel much farther removed from that Puritan motley crew than from contemporary characters of color. I believe there is something universal (as essentialist as this sounds) that might be lost if we jettison Shakespeare and all his cronies. Literature is not a treasure: it is a treasure box, even as it also contains “trash” destined for history’s dustbin. May this “truth” never be lost in Deconstructivist dismissal.
Works Cited
Downing, David B. “Beside Disciplinary English.” Transforming English Studies: New Voices in an Emerging Genre. Ed. Lori Ostergaard, Jeff Ludwig, and Jim Nugent. West Lafayette, IN: Parlor, 2009. Print.
Gaillet, Lynee Lewis. “A Socially Constructed View of Reading and Writing: Historical Alternatives to Bridging the Gap.” Transforming English Studies: New Voices in an Emerging Genre. Ed. Lori Ostergaard, Jeff Ludwig, and Jim Nugent. West Lafayette, IN: Parlor, 2009. Print.
Garrard, Greg. Ecocriticism. Abingdon: Routledge, 2012. Print.
McDonald, Marcia A. “The Purpose of the University and the Definition of English Studies.” Transforming English Studies: New Voices in an Emerging Genre. Ed. Lori Ostergaard, Jeff Ludwig, and Jim Nugent. West Lafayette, IN: Parlor, 2009. Print.
Montrose, Louis. “New Historicisms.” Redrawing the Boundaries. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt and Giles Gunn. New York: MLA, 1992. Print.
Pifer, Matthew T. “On the Border.” Transforming English Studies: New Voices in an Emerging Genre. Ed. Lori Ostergaard, Jeff Ludwig, and Jim Nugent. West Lafayette, IN: Parlor, 2009. Print.
KEY TERMS:
New Historicism: Developed as an outgrowth of Foucault’s work, this literary and cultural lens focuses on concrete textual and archival evidence in order to amplify voices and currents that have not historically registered in the greater consciousness because of a lack of access to the material means of production.
Medievalism: Akin to New Historicism, this literary emphasis seeks to (re)discover the medieval in the modern and to interrogate strategic and hegemonic uses of the medieval to elevate or to demean.
KEY QUESTIONS:
- Is it reasonable to imagine market forces will not increasingly drive institutions to fund high-profile, high-profit disciplines at the expense of those who are unable to pay the bills? With public discourse increasingly focused on debts and deficits, is there any way to protect the non-producing humanities?
- Is it sustainable for the various sub-disciplines to continue to jockey for pole position and to remain in competition with one another? It is clear that literature has suffered from elevating itself at the expense of its peer fields.
KEY DISCOVERY:
It has long been conventional wisdom that literature’s day expired long ago. Yet denial has been the main defense by literature professors within English studies. Both McDonald and Gaillet show how far literature has fallen within the Academy. It is difficult to imagine that things will improve without radical change. Change hurts–it especially hurts graduate students and teachers who have functioned within a broken system and now face the reality of an end time.
KEY PERSONAL CONNECTION:
My object of study, the author Richard Hughes, has created works that are ripe for postcolonial critique and that echo medievalist tendencies. He actually lived in a castle in Wales and sailed with neighbor and friend Dylan Thomas.
The Battle of Baden Hill 
How fascinating that you are a second-generation literary scholar. That type of historiography regarding English Studies would make for a really interesting article, dissertation, or digital project; that is, one could assay the literary environment for familial connections (and the connections their works make to each other). I think, for instance, of The Bronte Sisters (of course), Mary and Percy Shelley (Mary’s father Wm. Godwin was also an author. I remember reading something on his belief in perfectibility in my early graduate work), or Jack and Jan Kerouac. Anyway, I know that was only a small piece of your work, but I did want to comment on that uniqueness.
Regarding the dark romantics, I similarly have been moved by authors like Poe and Hawthorne. Hawthorne’s “The Birth-mark” is one of my favorite short stories, and similarly Prynne’s plight offers irony and warning about human nature’s quest for purity and perfection. I find it comforting that folks are still interested in teaching literature. In my undergrad, I was enthralled by literature, and took a number of courses in it, but I always felt at a deficit because I did not really read any of the classics when I was in middle or high school, as it seemed so many English majors had. Therefore, I felt inept–and still do to some degree–to discuss (and teach) literary studies at too much depth. I find the works meaningful, however, and I often wonder if I had an early immersion in literature if I would not have been more exploratory of it in my own studies. That said, your students are very lucky to be exposed to such reading and criticism and to someone so passionate about it. I hope many, after graduating college, return to thank you for your foundational work with them.