However inclined by their training to vacillate, scholars in the humanities are increasingly being asked to take sides. Should they support or oppose their students’ efforts to ban a reactionary speaker from campus? Should they defend the feminist philosopher who affirms the possibility of transracial identity or join those demanding her article be retracted? Should they remove an influential writer from the syllabus because of his fascist sympathies? Should they sign the petition urging their professional organization to join the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions campaign against Israel?
So much of academic life seems colored by high-stakes political struggles, and so many decisions large and small are now treated as gestures of allegiance to particular ideological camps and as betrayals of others. It’s difficult to even list these polarizing campus scenarios without attracting political labels.
Literary scholars will very likely regard this situation as nothing new. Their discipline, after all, has been insisting for decades that everything is political. As far back as 1968, a group of radical scholars sought to take over the Modern Language Association’s annual conference. Louis Kampf was arrested for taping a poster to the wall of the conference hotel announcing that “The Tygers of Wrath are Wiser than the Horses of Instruction,” and Noam Chomsky led a Vietnam War teach-in with 500-plus attendees.
Then, as anyone even glancingly familiar with the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s knows, the emphasis on politics gave birth to an attitude of suspicion toward the canon. While authors like Shakespeare and Woolf were sometimes celebrated for their works’ subversive power, many others, like Conrad, were condemned for reinforcing dominant ideologies.
The urge to dethrone literary heroes on the basis of their bad politics has persisted up to the present moment, gaining strength as the Black Lives Matter and #MeToo movements have emerged. The past year witnessed an especially heated debate about how to treat Junot Diaz’s work in light of allegations that he sexually harassed several women, with many now identifying conspicuous signs of misogyny in his fiction, while other scholars have maintained that he is being scapegoated because of his ethnic background.
One result of this decades-long political turn is that aesthetic appreciation has become almost exclusively the province of nonacademic critics. Recently, however, suspicion toward literature has even migrated into mainstream journalism. GQ, for instance, compiled a list of 21 Great Books, among them Huckleberry Finn and The Ambassadors, that you don’t need to read, since “some are racist and some are sexist, but most are just really, really boring.” Such assaults will come as no shock to academics, who have long accused the canon of ethnocentrism, elitism, and sexism. Indeed, what we are now witnessing is almost certainly the result of how Gen Xers and millennials in a position to shape public opinion were trained to approach literature in college.
A surprising feature of the present conversation, however, is the readiness of its participants to make aesthetic judgments a central part of their arguments. A hilarious Twitter thread in which women imagined how supposedly great male authors might describe them featured entries such as: “I had big honking teeters, just enormous bosoms, and I thought about them constantly as I walked down the street, using my legs (thick, with big shapely calves), but never not thinking about my enormo honkers.” In a piece discussing the tweets, Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett wrote, “The question is, can you really be considered a great novelist when, in writing characters of a gender that makes up 50% of the population, you consistently fail?” David Foster Wallace, quoting a friend, leveled exactly that criticism at John Updike in an essay that dubbed him a “penis with a thesaurus.” Interestingly enough, similar complaints have been directed at Wallace, the most notable instance being the Yale English professor and humanities dean Amy Hungerford’s public refusal to read his magnum opus, Infinite Jest.
An earlier generation of feminist scholars sought to question not merely the greatness of canonical works but the very possibility of objective aesthetic judgment, upon which the notion of literary greatness depends. The expression of privileged white men’s elitism, aesthetic judgment had, they argued, traditionally been the enemy of radical politics. As Annette Kolodny put it in her classic 1980 essay, “Dancing through the Minefield":
Feminist literary critics are essentially seeking to discover how aesthetic value is assigned in the first place, where it resides (in the text or in the reader), and, most importantly, what validity may really be claimed by our aesthetic “judgments.” What ends do those judgments serve, the feminist asks; and what conceptions of the world or ideological stances do they (even if unwittingly) help to perpetuate?”
The current group of politically minded critics makes a different point. Greatness is a possibility, but only if you’re not politically benighted. The misogyny and racism of major authors don’t just make for bad politics; they make for bad writing. In parodying the stupid ways in which Updike, Philip Roth, or Ian McEwan describe women, feminist readers are offering a kind of aesthetic education — seeking to shame authors into no longer producing such horrible prose and less politically conscious readers into no longer appreciating it.
When I started a Ph.D. program in literature in the late 1990s, aesthetic judgment was pretty much taboo. I was at Princeton, not exactly a bastion of tenured radicals, but even there our seminars focused almost exclusively on literature’s ideological function. In applying to graduate school, I had written a statement of purpose declaring that I wanted to pursue a Ph.D. because I believed that “studying literature was fun.” One of my professors crossed out that line with the comment, “STUDYING LITERATURE IS NOT FUN!!”
It is impossible to overstate just how much professional anxiety graduate school can produce.
At the time I took that to mean that I needed to come across as a serious and potentially professional academic critic rather than a wide-eyed enthusiast. After getting to grad school I came to regard the remark as a warning: not only of the myriad ways in which being in a Ph.D. program is no fun at all, but also of the systematic refusal of aesthetic pleasure within academic literary studies. Looking back, I see the two motives as aligned: Disavowing aesthetic pleasure is precisely how academics have sought to signal their professionalism and affirm the joblike nature of the work.
It is impossible to overstate just how much professional anxiety graduate school can produce even at a well-funded program like Princeton’s. Everyone around you seems to have read more and more intelligently, and in more languages, than you. Professors make conspiratorial quips about the naïve responses of their undergraduates (responses that resemble your own since you have, after all, just finished undergrad), and constant mini-trials, some casual, some official, test whether you are successfully evolving from said naïve undergraduate to deserving member of the academy.
Then there is the pressure to master bodies of knowledge of vast but uncertain magnitude and simultaneously to think up some original contribution to that knowledge. A dissertation needs first to be proposed, then researched, then written, then defended, and the ever menacing, impossibly contracting job market is waiting to finish you off in case you manage to get that far through the oversight or careless charity of your busy advisers. Your daily fear is that you will discover that you are doing everything wrong. So, when all your professors advise against seeking aesthetic satisfaction from literature, you comply.
In 1998, the year I started my Ph.D., The Chronicle published an article announcing that several scholars, including Elaine Scarry, Anne K. Mellor, and Emory Elliott, had rediscovered aesthetics. These were the forerunners of what would come to be known as New Formalism, a movement spearheaded by Susan J. Wolfson and Marshall Brown’s 2001 Modern Language Quarterly special issue, “Reading for Form,” and carried on today by critics such as Caroline Levine, Namwali Serpell, David James, Sandra Macpherson, and Joseph North. The enterprise seemed a risky one back in 1998, with Elliott calling beauty “the forbidden subject” and Anne A. Cheng calling aesthetics “the bad child no one wants to talk about.”
But playing hooky is easier when you’ve already got a full-time academic job. As a graduate student I felt that to focus on aesthetic questions would have been not merely to betray those who controlled my professional future, but to fail to adhere to the basic protocols determining what constitutes serious scholarship. It would have been like trying to be an alchemist in a lab full of chemists using the scientific method.
It wasn’t that professors spent much time debunking aesthetic judgment. Those battles had already been fought and won. It was just that certain questions to do with beauty or pleasure almost never arose; you learned not to ask them the same way you learned to stop liking bands like Coldplay. During one seminar, as we struggled to understand a difficult passage, a professor invited us, jocularly, to “make use of those close reading skills.” I couldn’t decide whether she was joking, so disreputable had that New Critical method come to seem.
I might have made lasting peace with the complete eradication of aesthetic criticism from the academy, if only that eradication had been truly complete. But taste lingered, manifesting itself at unexpected moments. A professor delivering a Marxist interpretation of Middlemarch would pause after reading the novel aloud to gaze wistfully at some spot above our heads, and then remark, “It’s just such a beautiful passage, isn’t it?” before proceeding with his analysis of commodity fetishism. To reply, as I desperately wanted, “Wait! What exactly makes it beautiful?” would be to appear unsophisticated.
And though we frequently ventured far outside the canon, certain writers, like Austen or Yeats, and certain theorists, like Walter Benjamin or Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, continued to receive preferential treatment. But since objective aesthetic judgment had apparently been discredited, we were no longer allowed to seek explanations for why particular modes of writing were better, richer, more intellectually satisfying than others. The result, ironically enough, resembled the aristocratic forms of appreciation that predominated before the efforts to democratize higher education in the early 20th century, those elite tastes whose authority depended upon their refusal to justify themselves. You either got it or you didn’t; what made a work great could never be explained.
Still, while aesthetic pleasure ceased to be a subject of explicit analysis, it persisted in covert form. Political criticism, I discovered as I came to know it better, offered the same encounter with paradox, ambiguity, and irony as formalism. My professors and the critics they assigned seemed able to make any text endlessly rewarding to dissect. The possibility that power both produces and contains its own subversion — that ever-versatile Foucauldian premise — became a conundrum no less exhilarating to contemplate than your average metaphysical poem. Indeed, the old-school formalists’ account of irony, as a text’s strategy for inoculating itself against criticism (because that criticism was incorporated into its own structure), bears an uncanny resemblance to New Historical theories of power.
While aesthetic pleasure ceased to be a subject of explicit analysis, it persisted in covert form.
A great deal has changed since I was in graduate school. New Formalism has steadily gained ground. It is no longer embarrassing to raise questions about aesthetics or care about beauty. But it’s also fair to say that New Formalism has not radically rewritten the discipline in the same way New Criticism and New Historicism did. One reason, of course, is that political criticism, in its myriad forms, has taught us many things about literature that we cannot unlearn. It’s significantly harder to appreciate the narrative craft of your typical Victorian marriage plot for its own sake when you know it’s a means of reinforcing heteronormative, bourgeois ideology. Another reason, however, is that on some level aesthetics never fully disappeared — it persisted, in disguised form, in political criticism itself.
And this same dynamic is evident in many of the present-day critiques of the canon now being mobilized by the Black Lives Matter and #MeToo movements. Politics is in the lead, but aesthetic judgment plays its own quiet part.
In a recent article in Electric Literature, Erin Spampinato holds the canon responsible for both the incel movement and the election of Donald Trump, given that so many ostensibly great works seek to make us sympathize with the sexual frustration, anger, and misogyny of white men. The problem with this argument is that while it seems to take literature quite seriously, it actually does the opposite — presupposing that it can be made important only if it is connected to the major headline-grabbing issues of the day. To put it another way, suppose we could determine empirically that canonical literature in no way led to the incel movement, the election of Donald Trump, or any other nefarious consequences. We would still maintain that it matters whether we are reading and teaching racist and misogynistic works. But why exactly?
An aesthetic approach offers another way of thinking about these issues, one that still condemns certain literary works for their racism or misogyny, but with a slightly different rationale. Instead of speculating about the structures of power a book either supports or subverts, an aesthetic assessment might simply hold that the experience of sustained exposure to racist or sexist thinking, however elegantly articulated, is bad in itself.
If the point of view expressed in the work gets sufficiently ironized or contextualized, then we might conclude that it is worth our (and our students’) time, but such a judgment would have to be the result of careful scrutiny. To think this way is to recognize that what literature does is important precisely as it is being read and discussed. The experiences it produces are significant and worthy of either praise or condemnation in their own right — not just insofar as they function as means to some external political end.
But to acknowledge the importance of aesthetic satisfaction is also to admit the validity of standards that are distinct from political values. Contemporary literary scholars often tacitly treat the two as either synonymous or mutually reinforcing, so that good politics necessarily entails good aesthetics and vice versa. We can see this in the many efforts to equate favored avant-garde aesthetic practices with radical political resistance (for instance, Walter Benn Michaels’s dubious claim that the self-referential strategies of contemporary high art photography are uniquely equipped to expose the workings of neoliberal capitalism).
To be sure, politics and aesthetics often overlap, but their fit is not perfect. While misogyny, as Cosslett and Hungerford suggest, is likely to produce bad writing, a more enlightened or feminist stance is obviously not a guarantee of good writing.
Moreover, to struggle against inequity and discrimination, it is important not only to stop celebrating those bad modes of writing that denigrate particular groups, but also to work to spread the opportunity to have good, fulfilling aesthetic experiences as widely as possible — even when those experiences contribute nothing to the improvement of society other than themselves. To affirm literature’s aesthetic value is to argue that it does something more than serve as an instrument for a particular politics, that the experiences it fosters are worth pursuing not only because they reaffirm our political views or further our ideological aims, but because they represent a mode of fulfillment — a quickening of our perceptions, a dilation of our temporal experiences, a revitalization of our thought and feeling — unavailable elsewhere.
Timothy Aubry is a professor of English at Baruch College of the City University of New York. He is the author of Guilty Aesthetic Pleasures, out recently from Harvard University Press.
