Curricular Trauma

A number of years ago — sometime in the decade between the financial crash and the advent of Covid — I found myself at the hotel bar of the Modern Language Association’s annual conference (in Vancouver? Boston? Chicago?) arguing with a professor about modernism. Or rather, about modernism as a field of current scholarship in literary studies. I wondered why the distinguished English department in which this professor taught, having failed for several years to replace a retired modernist, did not have a single senior scholar of modernism on its faculty. “Well,” he said, “it’s hard. It doesn’t help that modernism has a problem with antisemitism, racism, and fascism.”

What could he mean, I wish I’d asked him, by characterizing the first literary period in the West in which Jews were absolutely central to the literary establishment as having a “problem with antisemitism”? Or the movement that included the Harlem Renaissance and, elsewhere, négritude and affiliated developments as “racist”? The period in which modernism flourished was, of course, one of world-historical ideological mobilization; fascism, racism, eugenics, and so on carved out their vicious territories across the face of the world and the world of the mind. But it was also the period of suffragettism, of varieties of national determination both liberatory and murderous, of Bolshevism. Did the professor just mean that some of the most important modernists were themselves fascists and antisemites? That is true, of course. Did he mean that in some cases modernist aesthetics and fascism drew on common idioms, made use of common sources? That is true, too, but so did modernism and anarchism; and so did modernism and socialism; so did modernism and a certain species of secular liberalism.

I didn’t raise those obvious objections because I was so surprised. My interlocutor was an intelligent and sensitive scholar and normally not susceptible to this sort of faddish moralizing. Had I quarreled, I am sure he would have withdrawn the sloppy charge. But the fact that this judgment, in a moment of thoughtlessness, emerged so easily is testament to its status as a piece of common sense in the field. Thoughtless remarks can be very revealing. The professor was guilty of a reflex, a sort of professional hiccup — a regurgitation symptomatic of the extent to which the study of literature has become the terrain of a certain brand of vaporous politics.

“Politics.” Or pseudo-politics. There are of course serious ways of approaching modernism’s fascism problem. One of the greatest scholars of modernism, the Marxist critic Fredric Jameson, wrote a book, Wyndham Lewis: The Modernist as Fascist, exploring with unrivaled rigor the modernism of fascism and the fascism of modernity, including aesthetic modernity. Even if every modernist were a Wyndham Lewis or an Ezra Pound — and every modernist was not — the movement would demand scholarly attention. Totalitarian warts and all, it made us into who we are. Modernism remains, as T.J. Clark, another brilliant Marxist critic, wrote, “our antiquity … the only one we have.” To have abandoned it as a hiring field will, in the not-too-distant future, deprive college students of access to one of the keys to any understanding of the present.

Modernism’s curtailment on pseudo-political grounds is an aspect of a much larger phenomenon: the precipitous decline in the prestige of the humanities in general, a decline which has seen precincts of study that seemed vital a mere 15 years ago reduced to husks of their former selves. The situation is too well-known to need detailed rehearsing here. Christopher Newfield, in his presidential address to the Modern Language Association in 2023, summed things up neatly, at least as far as literary studies is concerned. “Our profession is in trouble. We all know this. We can all instantly name the troubles that we must fix: a shrinking academic job base, in which tenurable faculty with academic freedom are replaced by a reserve army of precarious workers; declining numbers of majors in literature and language fields; program closures and consolidations; and very small quantities of research funding for literature and language scholarship and for the humanities more broadly.” The fundamental question bedeviling all analyses of this grim situation can be posed simply: Are the causes of the crisis external to the humanities, or do they reflect something gone awry in humanistic study itself?

No satisfying answer should insist that either the external or the internal side of the problem is decisive. Plainly the catastrophe is, as they say, overdetermined. Declining state-level funding is obviously a problem from the outside. Administrative failures to limit adjunctification reflect problems both external (declining funding) and, to a degree, internal (a symptom of the collapse of faculty self-governance within the university). Declining major rates are more confusing. Do they reflect a sudden incapacity to feel the relevance of inherited cultural and interpretive traditions, a large-scale societal shift that the critic Simon During has called a “second secularization”? Or have students simply been warned — by parents, teachers, the broader culture — on financial grounds against taking classes in things that otherwise interest them? Or has the nature of the humanistic enterprise itself, at least as institutionalized in our colleges, changed in ways that have rendered it no longer appealing to students?

No one can be certain, and the question has polarized the academy’s diagnosticians. Many observers — conservatives especially, but also some disenchanted liberals and leftists — point to what they see as disciplinary moral orthodoxies run amok, while others — including most academics themselves, at least when speaking publicly — emphasize a combination of state-level defunding and our society’s philistinism, its larger hostility to humanistic inquiry on both political and instrumental grounds. The fact is that no one knows exactly how to distribute blame; anyone who pretends the crisis is univariate is propagandizing. The current intellectual culture of the humanities cannot be responsible, all on its own, for the material crisis that academic humanists face.

Yet that is hardly a reason to exempt humanists and the contemporary practice of the humanities from scrutiny. One place to begin might be the departmental statements, posted usually to a department’s official website, that became common after the police murder of George Floyd in 2020. Princeton University’s English department, for instance, announced the following: “We confront literary study’s long history as a prop to the worst forces of imperialism and nationalism, and its role in underwriting crimes of slavery and discrimination. Such a history compels us to continually reflect on how we read and teach literature and to actively dissociate literary studies from their colonial and racist uses.” Its classics department declared simply that “the history of our own department bears witness to the place of classics in the long arc of systemic racism.” The University of Chicago’s English department, in a since-removed statement, asserted that “we believe that undoing persistent, recalcitrant anti-Blackness in our discipline and in our institutions must be the collective responsibility of all faculty, here and elsewhere.” Harvard University’s English department explained that “we, as a department, as scholars, teachers, students, and staff are committed to holding up our community, past and present, to the light of recent events, specifically the movement for racial justice. We will take what immediate actions we can, as we also consider the courses, colloquia, and public talks and reading the department is running now or planning for the future.”

Departmental statements of political commitment are not in themselves expressions of academic activity, of research and teaching (although the Harvard one comes close). But they nevertheless crystallize something about the state of scholarship itself, which, although rarely as nakedly programmatic, has indeed embraced a portfolio of activist commitments not in any obvious way entailed by humanistic objects of study. In the immediate aftermath of the murder of George Floyd, those commitments were expressed primarily with respect to the struggle against racism, although that was more incidental than essential; racial injustice is by no means the only area of political concern in the humanities.

Such disciplinary activism might seem to suffer from what John Guillory, of the English department at New York University, calls literary criticism’s endemic “overestimation of aim.” (There is no reason to restrict the diagnosis of overestimation to literary criticism; other fields in the humanities are similarly afflicted.) Guillory’s distaste for what he sees as a species of moralistic grandiosity compels him to uncharacteristic polemic: “The absurdity of the situation should be evident to all of us: As literary studies wanes in public importance, as literature departments shrink in size, as majors in literature decline in numbers, the claims for the criticism of society are ever more overstated.” These delusions of grandeur are themselves compensatory — consoling fantasies of relevance hallucinated defensively against an encompassing political economy in which the humanities simply do not count. Stefan Collini puts it this way: “As academic scholars in the humanities feel increasingly vulnerable in societies governed by the imperatives of global capital, so they seek to ratchet up their ‘relevance.’”

For the defense of relevance, we might look to Caroline Levine, professor of humanities at Cornell University. Originally a scholar of narrative and author of a brilliant study of suspense in the Victorian novel, Levine has in recent years turned her talents toward literary scholarship’s potential to produce political change. Her career is something like an allegory for the trajectory of the larger field. In her most recent book, The Activist Humanist: Form and Method in the Climate Crisis, as well as in a series of articles over the last several years, Levine has attempted to make the case for what she calls the humanities’ “affirmative instrumentality,” an activist orientation meant to counter humanistic study’s bias toward “anti-instrumentality,” the for-its-own-sakeness of the study of literature, music, art history, and so on. The practical payoffs of such affirmative instrumentality remain uncashed; perhaps they will be worth the trouble.

But the interpretive payoffs are here, and they are not always encouraging. Consider “In Praise of Happy Endings: Precarity, Sustainability, and the Novel,” a recent essay in which Levine sets out to “help to guide political action in the climate crisis” by offering close readings of a series of novels. Levine begins by asserting, no doubt correctly, that critics of literary fiction from Flaubert to the postmodernists have tended to promote “indeterminacy” over what she calls “happy endings.” With this rather minimal account of the status quo in hand, she states her thesis:

There is a sociohistorical claim embedded in this call to dogmatism that would go something like this: In the heyday of long modernism, from the 1850s through the 1970s, indeterminacy was valued because the world was so stable that privileged littérateurs, just to feel alive, titillated themselves with fantasies of collapse and dispersal. Stated that way, the thesis is obviously untrue. The most iconic works of modernism — The Waste Land, say — were responses to an “acute precarity” at least as extreme as anything experienced today. In any event, the moral and political norms proposed here are all the more bathetic because they are so absurdly impotent in the face of the political threats that Levine enumerates almost lovingly. She goes on:

Again, the historical thesis collapses on inspection. Hitler also broke with legal norms and rules — is that an argument against Kafka’s open-endedness? A worrying confusion of realms has occurred here. The result is a criticism that cannot tell us much either about the urgent political questions it adopts as a kind of camouflage or about the aesthetic objects it purports to explain.

Levine’s bottom line is political prescription, which she awkwardly hitches to her interest in narrative form. “Rather than reserving praise for those fictions that deliberately leave us hanging,” Levine says, we should admire novels, “which conclude by combining the pleasures of material predictability and plenty with workable models of social relations that might help guide political action in the climate crisis.” The kind of novel we need to read, study, and teach now, in other words, will both foster the right sentiments toward climate change and offer imitable tactics for activism.

Does Levine really believe that her interest in novelistic happy endings — on its own, a fine topic for a course or a book — can help inculcate activist dispositions that will mitigate climate emergencies? How could she? What would that even mean? “In Praise of Happy Endings” ends not with literary-critical analysis at all, but with an exhortation to the reader, presumed to be a professional scholar of literature, to get involved in climate politics. “As a literary-studies scholar, you might claim that this kind of political action is not your real business, fine for your spare time but outside of the sphere of your professional responsibilities.” Not to worry — there’s a place for you in the movement. “Maybe you would consider participating in the struggle to stop the financing of fossil fuels and agribusiness. There are probably groups already working to divest your campus or alma mater. There is also a growing movement to push banks and retirement funds to divest from fossil fuels — perhaps including your own.” And so on. Levine suggests community projects; reading about carbon offsets; protesting fracking; partnering with Indigenous people; campaigning against deforestation in the Amazon. All of her suggestions are reasonable. None has anything at all to do with the professional identity of her addressee, the skeptical “literary-studies scholar” who might feel that after all environmental activism is one thing and literary studies another. The disappearance of any literary-critical vocabulary from her hortatory peroration gives the lie to the whole project. Levine has many good, if rather obvious, ideas about how citizens might fight for the environment. But none involves novels, and none is specific to scholars.

Although she was trained as a scholar of the Victorian novel, Levine’s recent work falls under the banner of “ecocriticism,” which is now a field in its own right. Indeed, young scholars are more likely to get hired doing something ecocritical than working on Victorian poetry. Along with a range of other subfields — disability studies, queer studies, critical race studies of various kinds — ecocriticism (or “environmental studies” or, sometimes, “the environmental humanities”) has emerged as one of the heavy hitters among what John Guillory calls the “subfields” that paradoxically “dominate over the fields.” Fields in literary study, as Guillory explained in a conversation with Matt Seybold on the podcast American Vandal, have traditionally been defined by “periods — and definitely connected with the category of literature, with literature as object.” But then something happened. An “exhaustion with the basic organization of the discipline into literary periods” set in, and in response, in quest of new energy, literary studies turned to “ecocriticism, postcolonial studies, critical race studies, various kinds of queer studies.” In sum: “a discipline that doesn’t appear to have any core mission, anything that holds it together.”

This centrifugal propensity is exacerbated by the fact that the subfields, as Guillory says, “have an inherently interdisciplinary tendency, so you have a discipline in which the field concepts seem to be exhausted, and the subfield concepts have taken over, but the subfield concepts have actually depended on interdisciplinary enterprises.” The excitement of the subfields comes at a cost: the overall coherence of the larger field of literary studies. That cost is multiplied when the subfields themselves entail strong normative political commitments, as they often do. An essay such as “In Praise of Happy Endings” betrays its own desperate awareness of what has been lost.

Political conservatives, of course, have long charged that the activist entailments of the subfields threatened to degrade the fields into sites of political agitation, shorn of scholarship. In 1992, dismissing the still-young subfield of queer theory, an unsigned dispatch in The New Criterion from a meeting of the Modern Language Association gave that concern bigoted point: “This year’s convention took the obsession with bizarre sexual subjects to new depths.” For the author of this dispatch — Hilton Kramer? Roger Kimball? — the focus on what he calls “‘alternative’ sexual behavior” was a facet of the larger politicization of the humanities, the importation of the language of the “political rally” into “the offices and classrooms of our most prestigious educational institutions.” Queer theory eventually won out against such attacks; it is now not so much a subdiscipline as simply part of the field. The species of literary and cultural criticism that the formidable Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick called “anti-homophobic inquiry” wore its politics openly, and a sense of political mission was surely an element in the force and the energy that its early proponents brought to their work. But it did not reduce the fields it influenced into nothing other than politics. Sedgwick was a committed activist, but you cannot imagine her ending an academic article the way Levine ends “In Praise of Happy Endings,” with a few hundred words of practical advice about, say, which organizations to make charitable gifts to.

Queer theory won out, too, because it attracted a large number of extraordinarily talented practitioners who, like Sedgwick, were the beneficiaries of a highly conventional literary-critical training. Sedgwick herself noted her “strong grounding in New Critical close-reading skills.” This classical and untransgressive training they turned to good account in pursuing new scholarly directions. And finally — perhaps most importantly — queer theory won out for another reason: Because it was never difficult to see its connection to literature, whose traditional objects offered a ripe field for its concerns. I suspect that today even Hilton Kramer and Roger Kimball could not read Henry James, or Proust, or for that matter Shakespeare, without, in spite of themselves, being influenced in what they notice by the tenured sexual radicals they loved to hate.

Will the same ever be true of the ecocritical turn? “It seems like a little bit of a falling off,” Guillory said on American Vandal. “It’s very hard to say what literary study is doing on behalf of the climate crisis by talking about a particular poem by Wordsworth. Not that there’s not a relation between Wordsworth and the environment, because we rediscovered the whole subject of nature in Romantic literature by way of the climate crisis. But what is it doing? What is that criticism doing for the climate crisis?” Here we must admit that the concerns of Kramer and Co. had a certain prescience. Questions like Guillory’s can be asked of almost all of the currently fashionable subfields claiming some version of Levine’s “affirmative instrumentality.” Either the theoretical frame is inadequate to the political mission — as in ecocriticism — or else an achievable mission is bathetically disproportionate to the theoretical armature in which it is cloaked. My favorite recent instance of the latter is the professor of geography at a State University of New York college who offered a lecture on “Decolonizing Your Garden.” Attendees would “learn to enjoy the benefits of a chemical-free garden using local hardy native species.” The Home Depot near me offers the same service, although they don’t call it decolonization.

As Guillory’s comments suggest, the local concerns of much ecocriticism are perfectly valid. But that does not mean they are valid as subfields. They would be better described as topics. As topics rather than subfields, they might flexibly inform curricula and research without deforming it. As a topic, ecocriticism might use current ecological theory to bolster a focus on the mediation of the natural world by poetic or literary genres. But as a subfield, Guillory implies, ecocriticism risks subordinating literary study to an intrinsically less coherent category. And it does so in the name of activist instrumentality, even though it plainly lacks the capacity to achieve its pragmatic goals. That is probably not a recipe for disciplinary longevity, let alone for healing the planet.

Traditionally, English literary studies have been organized in two principal ways: by period (“Elizabethan,” “19th century”) and by genre (“poetry,” “the novel”). Often, but not always, a faculty position consisted of some combination of period and genre (“We seek a scholar of the English literature of the 18th century with particular expertise in its poetry”). There are a few murkier designations, too, such as “modernism” and “Romanticism,” which name both periods and aesthetic tendencies. Finally, there are, or there used to be, a handful of single authors considered so important that they constitute fields in themselves: in English, Shakespeare first of all; then Chaucer, Milton, and, distantly, Spenser. (Of these, only Shakespeare still survives as a hiring category.) While other major figures — Dickens or Wordsworth or George Eliot or T.S. Eliot, say, and more recently Thomas Pynchon or Toni Morrison or John Ashbery — have long enjoyed robust scholarly communities, there have almost never been faculty positions devoted exclusively to them. Finally, there were the small number of subfields proper, which tended to demarcate the literatures of minority groups in a particular period (like “20th-century African American literature”).

This was a broadly if never entirely coherent system, with rough parallels in other humanistic fields. But in the last decade, it broke down almost completely. The rudiments of the old categories persisted — or at least some of them did; others, like “modernism,” flickered out of existence entirely — but the real energy was in the subfields, like “ecocriticism.” The proliferation of subfields can look bewildering and baroque to an outsider, both weirdly random and oddly specific. A perusal of some recent job advertisements gives the flavor. Skidmore College seeks a medievalist “with research and teaching experience in the field of premodern critical race studies,” especially one who might bring “an intersectional approach.” The University of Saint Joseph, in Connecticut, wants to hire a scholar of Renaissance literature who can also teach “gender studies, postcolonial studies, and/or social-media writing.” Colby College needs a scholar of pre-1800 British literature (a capacious swath!) and is “especially interested in candidates whose work engages the environmental humanities or premodern critical race studies.” (Perusing these ads, one notices how common is the “or” linking two utterly disparate subfields, as though the hiring committee couldn’t help but admit to the arbitrariness of the whole business.) Santa Clara University would like to hire a medievalist or early modernist with expertise in “culture, race, social justice, and digital humanities.” Vanderbilt University is looking for an English professor “whose research engages the study of race, colonization and decolonization, diaspora, and/or empire”; period is unspecified, but “substantive investments in periods prior to 1900” are welcome.

The Vanderbilt posting represents the completion of the takeover of the field by the subfields. Period is left vague; genre goes completely unmentioned. Both are replaced by a list of linked historical topics. The uninitiated might wonder: Why is this a job in literature? The answer has to do with the political commitments, implicit in some cases and explicit in others, of the subfields, commitments that are much less obviously entailed by the older period or generic categories. This is not to imply that “race, colonization and decolonization, diaspora, and/or empire” are somehow invalid fields of academic inquiry. They are urgent topics for political, sociological, and historical analysis. But they are also, in the context of a literary-studies department, frank political signals. Less sophisticated than Vanderbilt, Santa Clara gives the game away by including “social justice” in its litany of subfields.

This is the ground — Levine’s “affirmative instrumentality” is as good a name as any for it — on which the logic of solidarity and activism behind the statements urgently posted to departmental websites after the murder of George Floyd meets up with the internal concerns of the subfields. But the activist energy of the subfields has also received reinforcement from another source: the fiscal motivations of administrations. Not infrequently, the subfields take a set of priorities geared toward industry and retrofit them for the left political commitments of humanities professors. (One sees this in the funny wobble between “gender studies, postcolonial studies, and/or social-media writing” in the Saint Joseph ad.) As Tyler Austin Harper not long ago observed, “If the humanities have become more political over the past decade, it is largely in response to coercion from administrators and market forces that prompt disciplines to prove that they are ‘useful.’” “Largely” is an overstatement, but such misguided utilitarianism is certainly a factor at play. One reason “environmental literature” became, seemingly overnight, a ubiquitous hiring field in literary studies and other humanities disciplines is because it seemed to mesh with the top-down mission of many colleges. In 2021, for instance, the University of Oklahoma released a “Strategic Research Framework” naming four areas of concentration: aerospace, defense, and global security; environment, energy, and sustainability; the future of health; society and community transformation. Faculty were told to align their departmental missions with these areas. Scanning such a list and finding no obvious perch for poetry, drama, or the history of the novel, how is a literature department to justify asking for a new hiring line? A thousand environmental-literature searches bloomed.

The ascension of the subfields occurred just as the overall field shrank radically. Some older hiring categories — Chaucer or modernism, for instance — simply disappeared. Others, such as Shakespeare, became so reliably attached to one or another subfield, such as premodern critical race studies, that graduate research in the field was effectively directed into one channel by fiat. Or, put another way, Shakespeare became a subfield of premodern critical race studies. The result is that many graduate students determine their research agendas in narrow conformity with a very specific and rather arbitrary set of concerns. The point is not that the study of race in premodern England has no valid approaches to offer the study of Shakespeare. The point is that a combination of overall scarcity and the monopoly of the subfields has elevated one or two areas of research into the entire field, practically overnight.

When, 30 years ago, conservatives such as Hilton Kramer lamented queer theory and other subfields that they considered politically suspect, they laid a trap for the present. They ensured that any concern about subfield-proliferation, especially when the subfields were politically committed in one way or another, would appear politically regressive. But the risk that literature itself would disappear in the sea of subfields was apparent even to one of the most successful subfield-innovators in the discipline, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, whose famous turn from “paranoid” to “reparative” reading can be read in part as an attempt to preempt the foreseeable damage, to redirect the energy of the subfield at the point at which it begins to corrode the legitimacy of the object — literature — on which it is founded.

Consider the case of Shakespeare and premodern or early modern race studies. When Ayanna Thompson, who teaches Shakespeare at Arizona State University, appeared on the NPR podcast Code Switch to discuss antisemitism, misogyny, and racism in Shakespeare, she named “three toxic plays that resist rehabilitation”: The Taming of the Shrew, The Merchant of Venice, and Othello. Othello, Thompson says, suffers from “deep racism”; The Taming of the Shrew from “deep misogyny”; The Merchant of Venice from “deep antisemitism.” These judgments are of course debatable (the charge against The Taming of the Shrew strikes me as more plausible than either of the others), though it would certainly be irresponsible to suggest that, say, The Merchant of Venice can be taught without any attention to the history of European antisemitism. But Thompson doesn’t stop at the uncontroversial insistence that the evocation of historical context is one of the jobs of the English teacher. She argues that The Merchant of Venice is in fact a kind of dangerous text, so dangerous that it should not be read by high-school students at all. “You feel,” Thompson claims, “more secure in your antisemitism after seeing this play.” Thompson’s larger polemical point is that Shakespeare might actually be ideologically toxic, a kind of poison. “We have a narrative in the West that Shakespeare’s like spinach, right? He’s universally good for you. When, in fact, he’s writing from the vantage point of the 16th and 17th century.” Not like spinach; like arsenic.

The reduction of The Merchant of Venice to something like The Jew Süss reflects a deformation of judgment that might be suspected to follow from the eclipse of the field by the subfield, an eclipse that in Thompson’s case is formally announced on her department website, in which she offers this self-description: “Although she is frequently labeled a ‘Shakespeare scholar,’ a more adequate label for Ayanna Thompson is something closer to a ‘performance race scholar.’” And the insistence that literary texts are dangerous, and that students must be protected from their harmful effects, is consonant with a prominent strain of activism among students, which insists that exposure to some literature and art is so wounding that certain works should be either optional or removed from the curriculum entirely. In 2015, an opinion essay in Columbia University’s student paper, titled “Our identities matter in Core classrooms,” warned about the “impacts that the Western canon has had and continues to have on marginalized groups”: “Ovid’s Metamorphoses is a fixture of Lit Hum, but like so many texts in the Western canon, it contains triggering and offensive material that marginalizes student identities in the classroom. These texts, wrought with histories and narratives of exclusion and oppression, can be difficult to read and discuss as a survivor, a person of color, or a student from a low-income background.” In 2020, a group of University of Michigan students, unhappy about the artist Phoebe Gloeckner’s class on the graphic artist Robert Crumb, summed up their complaints thus: “Prof. Gloeckner should know better than to embed racism and misogyny in her curriculum for the class. This results in curriculum-based trauma.” Nor are such complaints confined to the activist left. Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel Fun Home, for instance, was rejected by a group of Christian students at Duke because, as one of them said, “it was insensitive to people with more conservative beliefs.”

When students and faculty converge on a conviction that large swaths of literature and art are too poisonous to approach, the disciplines undergirding the various subfields will become anemic indeed. How can you persuade people about the essential importance of art if you make yourself complicit in their fear of it? Skepticism is one of the habits of mind that the humanities classroom is designed to inculcate. But horror, revulsion, the easy and self-congratulatory condemnation of the aesthetic artifacts of the past? The discovery of “trauma” in the contents of the syllabus? The transformation of the representational concerns of the project of canon-revision into therapeutic concerns about safety and harm is not the only face of the crisis of the humanities, but surely it is one of them.

This essay first appeared in the quarterly journal Liberties.