The most basic questions for any educator are: Why should students listen to me? What claim do I have on the public? When these questions can no longer be answered clearly and convincingly, a discipline risks extinction. This fate looms for literary studies. The crisis long manifest at every level of the profession — from the decline in majors to the collapse of the job market — has complex causes, but is surely exacerbated by the profession’s incapacity to answer the basic questions.
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The most basic questions for any educator are: Why should students listen to me? What claim do I have on the public? When these questions can no longer be answered clearly and convincingly, a discipline risks extinction. This fate looms for literary studies. The crisis long manifest at every level of the profession — from the decline in majors to the collapse of the job market — has complex causes, but is surely exacerbated by the profession’s incapacity to answer the basic questions.
Literary studies is paralyzed not because it has no compelling rationale, but because it is divided by two incompatible visions of its work: as artistic education and as moral education. For different reasons, each shrinks from the light. These two visions have remained half-articulate. But their subterranean struggle is dimly visible in the characteristic incoherence of pronouncements about the value of the study of literature issuing spasmodically from our professional organizations, our syllabi, and our department websites. It is time to make these rationales explicit, and to choose between them.
Answers to the basic questions must take a certain form. The professor must claim a kind of knowledge and a kind of skill that bring a benefit to society. She must be able to describe institutions and processes of training — repeatable and regular — that endow her with such knowledge and skill to a degree that qualifies her as an authority, whose courses and research merit a significant expenditure of families’ and governments’ scarce resources.
Students should study biology, for example, because it provides knowledge of living organisms; knowledge valuable in itself, with the additional capacity to enhance human and animal health. The biology professor, by virtue of graduate training, is an expert in biology, in the general sense of knowing a lot about biology, and in the special sense that her personal views of biological matters are shaped by an understanding of the discipline’s consensus on the means of evaluating biological claims.
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Why then should students study literature? We note first that the object of study — like that of biology — is all around us. There is perhaps a little less literature in the world than leaves, bugs, or viruses, but there’s no shortage of it, and students are as free to read a novel on their own as they are to study a tree.
“Literature,” as typically taught in colleges and universities, refers neither to the total mass of printed matter nor to a representative, periodic, or random sample, but to a selection informed by expert judgment. Thus the first claim of literature professors is to give students access to a very small selection of valuable literary works that will endow them with particular skills and improve their lives and their minds in particular ways. The nature of that value, and the identity of those skills, depends on how the selection of valuable literature is made.
This is where we reach the hidden divide. One way of making the selection is to use artistic judgment; the other is to use moral judgment. Literary study is either an education in works of art or an education in morality. There are no other options, and the options are not compatible. But the shrinking of artistic education from charges of elitism, and the shrinking of moral education from the fear that literature professors might not be moral authorities, means that most people — and most literature professors — are aware of neither these options nor their incompatibility. But literary studies must choose.
One rationale for the study of literature is that it acquaints students with great works of art, and endows students with the capacity to interpret and appreciate them. Artistic education transforms our relation to culture. It makes us better judges. It reveals values, perceptions, and insights we couldn’t previously imagine. Literature illuminates history, power, sexuality, nature, race, science, money, furniture, cars, and death.
Literature professors are experts in literary judgment. “Judgment” refers not to the brute assignment of value, but to a process by which we disclose and test the particular values and capacities of a literary work. The work as seen before and after the process of artistic education is not the same work. The student sees it with new eyes.
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Professors’ judgments are not private opinions, but are shaped by a sense of the profession’s ethics of interpretation and tested by exposure to the evaluation of other experts. Professors are trained in judgment by a graduate education that endows them with a variety of skills and knowledges — from an understanding of genre, to a deep study of a historical period, to the capacity to identify aesthetic concepts.
But the ultimate ground of literature professors’ judgments is a capacity John Keats called “negative capability”: the ability to perceive a work while minimizing our projections. This capacity is developed through training in the set of tacit and formal practices referred to by the famously vague term “close reading.”
Nothing is more common, in my experience, than for a student to find an idea or value or even sentence in a work of literature that isn’t there. As psychologists like Lisa Feldman Barrett have shown, it is simply human nature to see in life and art what we expect. Barrett’s work explores the phenomenon of “affective realism,” the way our perception of the world is created by “predictions … based on past experience.” The peculiar kinds of close attention professors bring to literary works enable us to discover thoughts, images, and even criteria we didn’t and couldn’t expect. To discern and judge artistic values is a skill, one you can be better or worse at, and this skill is what we teach our students.
This rationale for the academic study of literature has become embarrassed in recent decades. The most basic reason for this embarrassment is a historical transformation: the gradual extension of the principle of the equality of persons to the equality of consumer choices has made the idea of expert judgment in matters of art taboo. Artistic education, which claims that one’s current preferences might be informed and transformed, is decried as “elitist,” while the works that dominate the marketplace are held to be the people’s choice. Such is the strength of this taboo that professors who attack the market’s supposed democracy in every other sphere tamely submit to it here.
Our era is witness to the bizarre and unprecedented idea that there is no public standard for cultural works. The culmination of this movement is the situation — documented by writers like Christian Lorentzen — in which journalistic critics have come to think of themselves as embodied algorithms. Critics don’t show us works that might challenge or inform our existing preferences; they merely show us the kinds of things, based on our existing tastes, we might also like.
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Among the intellectual roots of this change is the victory of neoclassical economists’ vision of the equality of consumer preferences over J.S. Mill’s theory of greater and lesser pleasures. Throughout the early and middle of the 20th century, thinkers from I.A. Richards to Theodor Adorno became aware of the threat commercial culture poses to the prospect of artistic education. By the end of the 20th century, their fears had been realized: The profession of literary studies no longer understood itself in terms of judgment.
This public disavowal of judgment mandated that literature professors describe their discipline as endowing students with different kinds of knowledge (of history, of race, of nature) without pretending to tell students that some literary works were better — more worth their time — than others. Yet these claims about knowledge are untenable without a commitment to artistic judgment. If you think a work of literature can show students something new or interesting about history, race, or nature, you are making an artistic judgment about the capacity of the work. And if you don’t — if you think that literature simply provides examples of truths that students can get from history, sociology, or biology classes — then students have no reason to waste their precious time and money on your courses.
The taboo on judgment involves professors in hypocrisy. A commitment to the equality of consumer preferences actually militates against the equality of persons by paralyzing educational efforts to transform lives. This presents an example of a familiar dynamic — first analyzed a century and a half ago by Karl Marx — whereby dogmatic adherence to a liberatory principle undercuts the aims of liberation.
The idea that literary study is agnostic about artistic value, and simply aims to transmit knowledge without value judgments, is incoherent. Yet there is another rationale for the discipline that rejects artistic value without incoherence. This rationale is equally powerful, and perhaps more venerable, than that of artistic education. For millennia, teachers and critics have applied literature to the task of moral education.
There are of course many ways in which one can discover moral values in works of art, or gain moral insights. But when I speak here of moral education I refer to the practice of taking works of literature as means of inculcating good moral attitudes in students. The content of those attitudes changes over time — think of the differences, for example, between the appropriate attitudes toward sexual behavior urged in a 19th- and a 21st-century literature classroom — and the right attitudes are today as often described as “political,” “social,” or “ethical” as “moral.” But institutional literary study has functioned as moral training just as often as, if not more often than, artistic education.
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Like artistic education, moral education has also become embarrassed in recent years. This embarrassment arose with the development of the 20th-century research university, and its commitment to the core value of expertise. It became difficult for literature professors to say exactly how our training gives us special competence to inculcate correct moral attitudes in our students. In part this is due to competition from other disciplines — like history or ethics — that seem to have a better case for moral expertise. In part it derives from questions about the compatibility of moral education with the idea of expertise itself.
Therefore, as with artistic education, moral literary education finds itself forced to speak in code. We often hear, for example, that the study of literature enhances students’ capacity for empathy. Yet empathy is a morally ambivalent capacity. If I have an enemy, nothing serves me so well as the empathetic capacity to enter into my enemy’s thoughts and feelings, to understand how he sees the world, to know how certain situations will appear to him. Empathy helps me to defeat, humiliate, and kill him. Poe’s Montresor is as good — and bad — a literary example of empathy as Austen’s Fanny Price.
But when literature professors claim that we teach students empathy, we really mean that we show students how to empathize in morally right ways with persons we consider morally deserving. A prior decision about correct moral attitudes governs our claim to endow students with a cognitive or emotional capacity. Yet we hesitate to tell our students this is what we are doing. This concealment renders our whole practice questionable. The literature professor who claims he can teach the student about history while remaining agnostic on the value of literature cuts as ridiculous a figure as the literature professor who claims he makes students better people because literature involves empathy.
Sometimes, it is true, literature professors understand their work in terms of politics, and see themselves engaging in political action, actually transforming the lives of oppressed people in accordance with our moral values. Yet, in Benjamin Fong’s words, “teaching racial justice isn’t racial justice.” The syllabi of literature departments do not constitute transformative political action but a program of education. And this education, which involves inculcating certain moral attitudes and beliefs, is part of the long tradition of moral education through literature.
Professors make artistic or moral judgments. We fear admitting the first because we don’t want to offend our culture’s faith in the sacred equality of consumer preferences. We shrink from admitting the second because we doubt that the public will recognize our particular claim to moral expertise.
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Our fuzziness about what we do raises in the minds of our publics the not unreasonable assumption that we don’t know what we’re doing. The crisis in the humanities requires that we be open and honest about our discipline’s rationales.
There is a compelling case to be made for literary studies as artistic education. There might be a good case to be made for literary studies as moral education. But it is impossible for the same discipline to do both. Plato was right. The aims and methods of artistic education undermine moral education. And the converse is also true. The aims and methods of moral education undermine artistic education. If the moral educator already knows what’s good and what’s evil before opening the work, the artistic educator surrenders what she knows to the possibility of discovery and transformation.
The way artistic education undermines moral education is perhaps more familiar today. The idea that good art sometimes refuses to confirm our moral outlook, already forcefully articulated in the Renaissance, became common in the 19th century, and was strengthened by victories in the censorship battles that raged over works from Les Fleurs de Mal to Ulysses to Lolita. These victories led to hubris. From the reasonable idea that artistic values sometimes differ from moral values arose the idea that artistic values triumph over moral values — or at least over the reigning Christian-derived morality of the United States.
When moral education began again to gain the upper hand in the 1980s and ’90s, advocates of artistic education from Harold Bloom to John Guillory responded with the idea that moral judgment itself is problematic. Guillory argued that those who shrink from aesthetic judgments but confidently make moral judgments are “brought up short before Nietzsche’s critique of morality.” Bloom, adopting Nietzsche’s terminology, labeled the new moral critics “the school of resentment.” Both writers referred to the German philosopher’s broadly influential idea that the West’s Christian morality expresses the revenge of the weak on the strong, through the veneration of suffering and victimhood.
This proved an infelicitous way of defending the values of art. In the first place, the assault on Christian morality might be the most spectacular failure in the history of the humanities. The core tenets of Christian morality have not weakened with the movement of increasing numbers of intellectuals away from Christian ritual practice. As far as I can tell, Nietzsche’s critique of morality has left almost no mark on the practices of the contemporary humanities, let alone on society in general. A society’s moral values will always exert a far stronger force than its artistic values when the two differ. In seeking to defend artistic education by attacking morality itself, Bloom and Guillory brought a toothpick to a gunfight.
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If the case for artistic education can be made only by discrediting the reigning moral system of the United States, its future is dark. Fortunately, there are better ways of proceeding. One can embrace a moral outlook that eschews injustice and oppression, and discovers a special dignity in the experience of suffering, without thinking that college literature courses are the right means to inculcate these beliefs in students. For example, one might — like Nan Da in an extraordinary recent essay — argue that “moral prescriptivism” actually undermines the basis of morality by sanitizing the hard work of encountering the other. Or — as Sumana Roy has argued — one might adopt a postcolonial perspective that sees the intense moralism of the U.S. literary classroom as the expression of a colonizing (and very American) suspicion “of pleasure and delight.” Perhaps the education Da and Roy describe is less moral than moralistic.
There is an even more basic conflict. The professional ethics associated with literary education are incompatible with moral education. These ethics are expressed through the negative capability embodied in close reading, the belief that great literature can show us something we don’t expect. Literature professors seek, in the phrase of the poet Li Young Li, to “defeat our projections,” to look past our existing concepts and values to discern the concepts and values of the work.
But this professional commitment to surprise, to challenging our existing notions, to suspending our judgments in order to become receptive to new perceptions and thoughts, new grounds for judgment, is the last thing one wants in moral education. In moral education, we do not want students to suspend their beliefs about the moral rightness of slavery or homophobia. Moral education, in contrast to artistic education, already knows what it believes. Its entire practice might be defined as the intentional projection of our moral commitments onto various examples and situations.
Consider, for instance, this excerpt from a recent workshop on “Antiracist Pedagogies in Literary Studies” hosted by Columbia University’s English department. Anti-racism is one of the leading programs of moral education in contemporary literary studies, and Brigitte Fielder gives us the following concrete suggestions:
If antiracism is an active opposition to racism, it is more effective when it is visible and transparent to students. Using words like “racist” and “racism” is key, and should not be so easily interchangeable with “racial” or “race.” Attention to language can serve as a form of corrective! Be accurate and clear about the problem — refuse to use vague or neutral terms about harmful things.
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As is entirely appropriate in moral education, the emphasis here lies on correctly identifying moral wrongs and strongly expressing appropriate moral attitudes — in this case regarding racial injustice. This approach, which finds itself in confident possession of its key concepts, criteria, values, and terms before the encounter with any given work, is the very opposite of the ethics associated with close reading in the context of artistic education.
When my classes in artistic education examine Octavia Butler’s “Bloodchild,” for instance, we attend to some elements that a moral educational approach to literature also discovers in the work — such as its evocation of the horrors of slavery. But we also spend time with other elements — such as its celebration of the freedom to own guns, and its idea that the foundation of agency is the ability to commit suicide — that from the perspective of the university’s dominant program of moral education appear perverse, but that constitute part of its peculiar power as an artwork. The story engages morally charged subjects — slavery, suicide — yet its treatment of them doesn’t yield the kind of moral clarity useful in reinforcing correct attitudes. Colleagues I know who pursue a program of moral education simply elide those aspects of “Bloodchild” that don’t exemplify the moral values they wish to affirm. Each of these approaches makes sense on its own terms. But these terms are different, and they conflict.
There is another, subtler way that the practices of artistic education undermine the aims of moral education. The inchoate fusion of artistic and moral education in current departments of literature — our unwillingness or incapacity to make crucial distinctions in our practices — sometimes creates monsters. Several years back, I was giving a series of readings, and at each stop I’d discuss a recent book I admired — Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts — with my faculty hosts. At first faculty members praised the book for its moral qualities, but eventually I encountered a professor who had developed a sophisticated way of describing Nelson’s story of raising a child with a trans man as horrifically transphobic. The emphasis on originality, novelty, and surprise — professional values associated with artistic education — mix with the commitment to moral clarity and consistency. This creates a pressure to innovate in moral language and concepts to individualize moral outlooks — such that one can speak of a particular critic’s or author’s special approach to matters of justice, for example.
Literature professors have a hard time convincing even ourselves that we are moral experts.
This hybrid of moral and artistic professional values is bad for two reasons. On the one hand, it creates the impression that moral competence is something that can only be gained through an expensive education that acquaints one with the latest moral terms. This renders the project of moral education vulnerable to the charge of hypocrisy, and to the accusations of skeptics who see in it simply a new form of cultural capital, concentrated in the hands of elites.
On the other hand, the innovation is often simply superficial. Morality is ultimately, in its core values, not susceptible to the kind of innovation associated with the arts. Morality’s irresistible force is of a different kind. Students can be taught to apply moral principles to new cases, or to use language that is less offensive than old language. But basic moral innovation or transformation, if it happens at all, happens beyond the academy. In fact, moral educators in literature departments rarely if ever attempt such transformation. I have rarely encountered a practice or work or assertion of moral education that could not be predicted by someone in possession of the basic moral view of the educated classes. This is entirely appropriate, given the nature of moral education. But it conflicts with the values — shaped by the project of artistic education — that drive promotion, publication, tenure, and distinction.
I have found that the vast majority of the students in my classes are already fully competent to perform readings of literary works in accordance with the aims of moral education. Perhaps in the ’80s or ’90s, literature departments could claim a certain priority over other disciplines in certain spheres of moral education. But that time has passed. Today, those who advocate making anti-racism, for example, central to the study of literature face a legitimation crisis. The problem doesn’t concern the content of humanists’ moral beliefs, but whether professors of literature are justified in making a claim on the public as moral educators.
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All departments are currently incorporating anti-racist practices into their professional ethics. Literary study as artistic education is doing the same — we intensify our efforts to be inclusive as teachers, and to encourage diversity of both students and faculty. But those who see the humanities — and literary study in particular — as a vehicle of moral education must go farther. They must say anti-racism, and related programs of moral education, does not represent a set of ethical principles to guide us in teaching our discipline — rather, moral education is our discipline.
It is possible that some administrators — searching for a clear rationale for humanities departments in the face of our historical fuzziness — might find this program compelling, at least at first. Yet literature professors have a hard time convincing even ourselves that we are moral experts. Last summer, in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, the Association of Departments of English sent department chairs an email suggesting faculty members undertake a course of moral education in anti-racism. The two works they suggested to guide this education were not by English professors but by a historian and a corporate consultant: How to Be Anti-Racist, by Ibram X. Kendi, and White Fragility, by Robin d’Angelo.
While these books have received various kinds of criticism, most readers — and I number myself among them — don’t question why authors from these fields consider themselves experts in the morality of race. A historian who has devoted his career to the history of racism and a consultant with an education degree who has devoted her career to understanding how race affects workplace interactions would seem to have the right qualifications. How scholars who have devoted their career to the study of literary works might qualify is a more difficult question.
But perhaps something about literature grants people who study it a kind of moral enhancement, so that training in literature itself confers moral authority? I can only say that 20 years’ experience in the profession of literary studies — as student and faculty member — has failed to convince me that literature professors or students are particularly moral, when compared with other jobs I’ve had or other groups of people I’ve interacted with. The denizens of the profession seem to me neither more nor less racist, self-centered, sexist, acquisitive, manipulative, compassionate, or hypocritical than the people I’ve worked with in construction, fast food, or riding-mower repossession. Nor do they seem morally better or worse than the people I’ve met in other academic disciplines, when on vacation, or while I’ve been incarcerated. They do, however, know a lot more about literature.
Perhaps the identities of literature professors confer moral authority? My own identity has facets relevant to some programs of moral education. But speaking entirely personally, my experience as a disabled person, first-generation college student, ex-convict, and immigrant with undocumented family members has given me only a limited capacity to speak with moral authority about the general experiences of those groups of which I’m a member. In part this is because the capacity to apply moral principles correctly in these cases sometimes requires knowledge that those in other disciplines — from medicine to sociology — possess to a greater extent than do I. In part this is because many people in these groups have different moral priorities than I do — at least in my current tenured, upper-middle-class incarnation.
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I have tried to describe how literary scholars are experts in the judgment of works of literary art. As to what qualifies a literature professor to be a moral judge, I cannot say. My hope is that these reflections will inspire someone to make the case for literature professors as moral experts, to describe the skills and knowledges that underlie this expertise, to show what the moral expertise of literature professors can teach us that we don’t already know, and to exemplify moral approaches to literary works. Then, faced with these alternative models of expertise, perhaps literature professors will finally be in a position to decide what we are. Our students, states, and colleagues are curious to know.
Correction (May 4, 2021, 11:46 a.m.): This essay originally provided an erroneous title for a Columbia University workshop. It was “Antiracist Pedagogies in Literary Studies,” not "Literary Studies and Anti-Racism." The text has been corrected accordingly, and a link added to a Columbia blog describing the proceedings.
Michael Clune is a professor of English at Case Western Reserve University. His most recent book, A Defense of Judgment, was published by the University of Chicago Press.