How to Save Literary Studies

Tim Cook for The Chronicle Review

Looking at the dust and cobwebs in the library stacks, one might be tempted to say that we live in a post-literary world. Yet, as Richard Utz recently pointed out in The Chronicle Review, there is still a popular fascination with the subjects we literary scholars study. But amateurs don’t buy our books. They may buy Paul Strohm’s Chaucer’s Tale (a history of how Chaucer spent the year 1386), but they will not buy his Theory and the Premodern Text.

Even I didn’t buy it, and I am a medievalist.

How can literary scholarship make a claim for its value when its product reaches only the other members of its own narrow field? Utz calls upon us to “lower the drawbridge from the ivory tower and reconnect with the public,” to be what the March 2015 issue of the PMLA dubs “semipublic intellectuals.” In response, I suggest that the gap between a scholar’s popular blog and the peer-reviewed book she publishes through a university press might be usefully — perhaps critically — narrowed by a shift in how we do traditional scholarship. One way we can justify our continued existence in a science-obsessed world is to write even our scholarly work for a popular audience.

Part of the reason that books like Theory and the Premodern Text are less popular than Chaucer’s Tale is a function of genre: In the popular mind, works of history have always been more approachable than works of criticism. The divide between these fields stems partly from the differences in our sources: Historical texts (church registries, royal archives, court records) are themselves rather opaque, giving minutiae without an overarching direction — events without a plot. They benefit from the intervention of a historian who imposes a structure to the data and makes it interpretable to the audience. The raw material for literary scholars is literature itself, which a mentor of mine once defined as “that which is inherently more interesting than anything we could ever say about it.”

By nature, then, literature is self-contained, engaging in and of itself; most of what we say about it is only interesting to the dozen or so people who also work in our little corner of the field — and sometimes not even to them.

Does that mean that literary scholarship has no value outside of the academy? No, but we have work to do before our spouses, neighbors, and STEM-field colleagues will grant that we’re doing anything other than navel-gazing — and at someone else’s navel, no less.

Some nonacademic readers will simply say that literary criticism is uninteresting as a subject, but I suspect their response is less the fault of the discipline than it is of the way we communicate within it. Sometime in the last decade or so, we have declared literary theory to be dead, but Derrida, Foucault, and Benjamin have left their mark on academic style. Let us consider a passage from William Spanos’s The End of Education: Toward Posthumanism, published in 1993 in the throes of theoretical discourse:

“Analogous to the traditional interpretation of a text, entering the pedagogical circle with the end (télos) already inscribed generates a derivative, calculating, and erosive thinking, a thinking of colonized and docile bodies in the service of the dominant sociopolitical order whether conceived as disciplinary society or imperial state. Entering it wholly and primordially enables a dialogic thinking simultaneously theoria and praxis (ek-sistent in-sistence).”

Dressing up a simple concept in several layers (and languages) of obscurity actually masks how important a claim Spanos is making. Written for a popular audience, it would probably look something like this: “If a teacher comes into class with a predetermined interpretation to ‘hand down’ to the students, that teacher stifles all other voices in the room.” Does the quality of thought suffer for being stripped of its trappings? Spanos would surely say it does, but I am not convinced.

It is useful here to compare our situation with that of our science colleagues. The opacity of high-level scientific writing is largely unavoidable; there are only so many ways to make genetics or astrophysics user-friendly. We might be tempted to say the same thing about the work we do, but the difference is that very few people today question the inherent value of scientific endeavors they don’t understand. They do question the value of our bookish flights of fancy, and if we want to defend them as being anything more than that, it is salutary for us to recognize that much of what we write comes off not just as esoteric but as obnoxious to people outside of the discipline.

An effort at clear expression, then, might go a long way at repairing the intellectual bridges between us and our neighbors. What of the subject matter, though? In this hypothetical future, will we as scholars be condemned to writing mere textbooks and close-reading essays? Of course not — though I would like to play devil’s advocate and ask, would it be so bad if we were? Didn’t most of us become students of literature because we liked interpreting literature, and didn’t most of us become teachers because we liked sharing that literature with others? Nevertheless, writing for a popular audience does not have to limit our modes of analysis: It only limits the way we package them.

Let me take my own subfield as an example, lest I be accused of attacking others and exempting myself. When I talk to fellow scholars, I might frame my work as “the study of paratextual material in late medieval vernacular scribal culture.” Even I hate the sound of that sentence. Let me offer, instead, the version I gave my Aunt Bea, who once ventured to ask me what I work on. I told her, “I study the things that people wrote in the margins of books in medieval Iceland.” When I said that, Aunt Bea wasn’t exactly impressed, but she did understand exactly what I meant.

Actually, what she said was, “They give Ph.D.s for that sort of thing, huh?” A familiar response from anyone who, like my aunt, works in a nice, practical field like nursing. And yet I get excited by a reaction like hers, because that is a teaching moment.

I always launch into a litany of the wonderful things one finds in the margins of Icelandic manuscripts: poetry, proverbs, complaints (my pen is dull, I didn’t get enough fish to eat, my wife is mad at me and it’s not my fault — all real examples). Part of the value of my work as I see it, then, is simple translation: “nu kolnar mér á fingrunum” means nothing to most people. But “my fingers are getting cold” is both transparent and so delightfully human that people often comment on how un-foreign these complaints sound. I don’t think you should have to get an advanced degree to enjoy these little glimpses into long-forgotten lives.

Of course I have an interpretive argument about the marginalia I study, and I do not wish to abandon that side of the field either. I am reasonably capable of dressing up my theories about material culture, genre, and self-writing in fancy vocabulary, but I maintain that they are no smarter for being decked out in academic regalia. And when it comes down to it, I don’t want to write scholarship that my friends and nonacademic peers cannot understand. If my audience is only the two other people in the world (and I know literally two) who are interested in late medieval Icelandic marginalia, then I cannot justify to my cash-strapped department why they should fund my research trip to Reykjavik. However, if my audience is anybody with enough intellectual curiosity to wonder what it was like to be a medieval scribe, then I am making a contribution not just to “the field” but to the greater community. That I can justify to anybody who asks.

I recognize that what I suggest here may feel like a cheapening of our profession. When I suggest changing our target audience, what I’m really talking about is marketing, and we are rightly suspicious of treating intellectual pursuit as a commodity. But it is also true that we would not bother to have this conversation if traditional views of the aims of scholarship remained unshaken.

So I raise one question in response: What is literary scholarship for if not to aid readers in appreciating, understanding, interpreting, and questioning the literature that they encounter? In writing for a tiny coterie of specialists, we may achieve great heights of intellectual pursuit, but we are generally preaching to the choir. If we are not content with our society turning into a post-literary world, then we have some proselytizing to do, to people like my Aunt Bea. That is not marketing, that is teaching.

Christine Schott is an assistant professor of English at Erskine College.

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