Literary Criticism

WHAT ARE WE DOING IN LITERATURE CLASSES? AND WHY?

Those of us who teach literature courses find it easy to look upon our work and see that it is good. Unfortunately, that divine vision is not always shared by those who come, often reluctantly, to our chapels; it is not always shared by those who underwrite the cost of operating and maintaining those chapels; and it is rarely shared and often profaned by those who are not of our persuasion.

In order that we might better spread the good news of literary studies, I would like to attempt a definition of such studies in a way that at once makes sense to my fellow priests and to those who have not been brought to an a priori acceptance of our faith, thus filling our chapels once more with the devout.

This attempt to explore the study of literature, as well as the learning it induces, is unavoidable complex: I cannot ignore the historical development of the study of English literature as a discipline because much of our theology is shaped through that history; I cannot ignore crucial developments in the history of philosophy, for they promise to provide the best definition to date of the relationship between the mind and the external world, a relationship which is the primary focus of much of our theology; and I cannot ignore developments within modern psychology, for certain such developments appear to offer us a new revelation which enhances our understanding of the processes we call "study" and "learning."

Thus I will be discussing the history of the rise of English studies, with special attention to the arguments of those who pressed for such studies; I will explore philosophical insights which may contribute to a better understanding of the power and place of words, ideas, and perceptions; and, above all, I will make use of contemporary psychological descriptions to explain the function and the benefits of literature studies in the college classroom.

Some will argue that the study of literature is 2500 years old, and I will not quarrel with them here. However, the history that concerns us begins in the eighteenth century when literature written in English was first introduced into the college curriculum. This history--discussed elsewhere at length, and especially well in Arthur Applebee's Tradition and Reform in the Teaching of English (1974)--can be characterized by five prominent plateaus.

Rising up out of the sea of classical studies (and for a long time repressed by those studies) is the study of vernacular literature as part of the course in rhetoric, first at Edinburgh in the mid-eighteenth century and shortly thereafter in the budding American colleges. This is followed by the study of literature in those colleges as a moral and aesthetic immersion into the good and the beautiful, the Romantic movement of the mid-nineteenth century, which saw in the study of literature a potent antidote to the crassness, the soullessnessness, and the approachingcollapse of society apparent to them in the Industrial Age.

More prominent on this historical landscape is the rise of philology at the turn of the century, which gave students of literature the grounds upon which to claim parity with the more well established sciences within the university. Less prominent (but ultimately more tenacious) is the simultaneous development of the thought of John Dewey (Schools and Society, 1899) into the practices of Progressive educators which dominated the schools of education and the secondary schools, but which also made significant intrusions into college curricula as well.

Finally, we find the New Critics who, supported by the tradition of literary studies established over the preceding two centuries, were heard to argue that "if poetry is worth studying as poetry," and who appeared to receive, through the passage of the National Defense Act of 1964, confirmation of the validity of their bald assertion that the study of literature was a good in itself.

Prior to the passage of that Act, however, those committed to the study of English literature could not merely make the assertion that such study was good and stop at that point; rather, the growth of this discipline has been marked by evolving and conflicting justifications for the study of literature as a subject befitting a free man. Because the New Critic's assertion of inherent and sufficient goodness in the study of literature is simply an assertion, we have, when called upon to justify that assertion, tended to resuscitate those arguments developed by the predecessors of the New Critics, arguments which, unfortunately, have not proved to be convincing to our interrogators.

I suggest that the ineffectiveness of such arguments today stems from the fact that each such argument arose within a specific context wherein they were appropriate and effective; today, however, there is a new context, and should we think that such arguments are effective within today's context, a quick review of the major arguments, the context which gave them that force, and the minute measure of their impact today will rapidly disabuse us of that notion.

Although the humanists of the Renaissance had seen in the study of classical literature a worth far transcending the sheer mental discipline instilled by such study, it was that discipline--the training of the mental faculties, especially "reason" and "memory"--which came to be used to justify the claims of preeminence for the classics within the college curriculum, a preeminence which they enjoyed until near the end of the nineteenth century. Those who defended such classical studies for their discipline argued, in Applebee's words, that "the value of any given subject was directly proportional to the degree of internal structure which the subject exhibited, the apparatus of rules and 'knowledge' which a student could be required to master."

The classical curriculum, with its voluminous grammatical and rhetorical schemata, exhibited far more internal structure than any other subject then available for inclusion in the curriculum, including the rudimentary science or the elementary English grammars and rhetorics. In the early eighteenth century, then, the classical curriculum was, for lack of anything better, the best vehicle for instilling that desirable mental discipline. Today, while we have developed whole libraries of grammars, rhetorics, and critical tomes on English language and literature with far more complex internal structures than those 18the century schemata, few people look to the study of English literature primarily for the inculcation of mental discipline: if such discipline deemed desirable, it is sought through the study of physical sciences which offer such discipline inextricably linked with information of immediate and practical value.

The most telling demonstration of how this argument fails, perhaps, is the fact that when we English teachers wish to enhance the mental discipline of our postulants, the English majors, we send them off to the College of Science for such training, while rarely if ever recommending our own courses.

Those who first proposed to teach English literature within the college walls wisely begged the question of mental discipline and presented their subject matter as anything but an alternative to the classical curriculum. As Grandgent describes the introduction of such studies at Harvard, "As to English, its advance has been due . . . to a failure to see in it anything more than a minor element in the preparation for the ministry." The first (and dominant) studies, such as Blair's Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1783) did nothing more than critically examine a text to insure that it conformed to all the classical rules taught by grammarians and rhetoricians with the intent to hone the student's own speaking and writing skills. Needless to say, this pedantic and utilitarian justification for the inclusion of English literature still has some force among a minority of today's freshman composition teachers, but few literary critics rely on it, save in a desperate attempt to teach "literature" when faced with the reality of four composition courses. More to the point, perhaps, is the fact that modern rhetoricians--those reputedly most knowledgeable about writing and the teaching of writing--have generally eschewed the teaching of writing through literary models, preferring instead to provide "how-to" handbooks or complex theories thought to be more effective in training the would-be writer. In short, the eighteenth century argument, which brought the study of English literature within the walls of the university--the belief that such study was the best way to prepare a student to speak and write--and which persisted through the middle of that century, has fallen by the wayside, replaced by what were thought to be more cogent reasons for that study.

One such cogent reason was soon to appear with the publication of Matthew Arnold's Culture and Anarchy (1867). Arnold, articulating what might be called the Romantic argument, saw in the study of good literature a means for imparting "a sense of what is indeed beautiful, graceful and becoming" which would then serve to "stem the common tide of men's thought in a wealthy and industrial community and which saves the future, as one may hope, from being vulgarized even if it cannot save the present." According to Applebee,

In response to the threat of such upheaval, Scudder voiced a faith in the ability of great literature to engender spiritual grace and thus to stem the erosion of traditional values. Scudder and Arnold had a great appeal in the last two decades of the nineteenth century: they gave those who studied and taught English literature a grand mission that was no less than the salvation of society, a sense of cosmic purpose hitherto lacking in such studies.

Nonetheless, this mission was soon to be rejected out of hand by the progressive educators of the early twentieth century, and any of our contemporaries who attempt to revive Scudder's's crusade today run the risk of being hung in effigy by the knotted hands of those who toil endlessly. At best, any claim to such a vocation is given a token nod by members of a society that values progress while dreading a return to the primitive past. Instead, they have acceded responsibility for the problems of "a wealthy and industrial society" to the Congress, the courts, the lawyers, and social scientists with enough chutzpah to get themselves on the evening news.

During the brief period of its success, however, the Romantic argument for literary studies came to dominate both the secondary schools and the extracurricular but extremely influential collegiate literary and debating societies; and, when the new science of philology was perceived to offer a methodology equal in rigor and academic respect to the classical curriculum, the way was clear for literary studies, married for convenience to philology, to enter the university as a peer of the other more well established disciplines, for the study of literature could now be viewed as scientific as well as useful (or moral, or patriotic). Since that time, however, that marriage has been annulled and philology has gone its own way to bigger and better things as the virgin science of linguistics, taking with it its bride-price of rigor and discipline, but leaving, as the remnants of that marriage, some remarkable advances in textual studies scattered here and there.

The conservatism and the retrospection of the Romantic movement itself was soon displaced by a progressive vision stemming from the works of John Dewey. The study of literature had been seen to have a certain redeeming social value by the Romantics; that sense of social purpose was retained but redefined by the progressives, who believed that the evolution of society could be controlled and reformed through education. As progressive English teachers saw it, the study of literature contributed to the controlled evolution of society by supplying its students with a wide range of vicarious experiences which, together with an analysis of that experience and the reactions it engendered, would teach the student, in Louise Rosenblatt's's words, "the superstructure of ideas, emotions, modes of behavior, moral values (and) relationships" present in a pluralistic society such as ours; this would cause the student to "become more aware of potentials for thought and feeling within himself, acquire a clearer perspective (and) develop a sense of direction," all of which were seen by the progressives as "a very real, even central" set of accomplishments in the "the social and cultural life of a democracy."

This type of reasoning gained added acceptance as a result of the social upheavals brought upon by the Depression, and it persisted as the dominant justification for the study of literature well in into the 1950's. Its influence waned, however, when our society began to wonder if societal evolution could in fact be controlled, and to question the efficacy of education in general and literature in particular as agents of change. Then, when it began to be bruited about that Johnny couldn't read and that his inability to do so was the consequence of a communist plot, the progressive movement came to a virtual standstill. Nonetheless, there are faculty members today who will defend our discipline as a means of significant change for society--Richard Ohman and Louis Kamph come immediately to mind--but society's desire for such change has waned, and their arguments thus fall upon ears that are more often hostile (if not deaf) and only rarely sympathetic.

During the 1940's there was, as a response to the ideas of the progressives, a brief resurgence of the Romantic argument coming first from Robert Hutchins, president of the University of Chicago, then popularized by critics such as Mortimer Adler and Mark van Doren, and finally made manifest in the "great books" curricula adopted in a number of liberal arts colleges. These thinkers incorporated both the Romantic argument and the argument from rigor in the formulation of their counterposition to the progressives: according to Adler, reading was a basic tool of good living, "intimately related to the art of thinking well--clearly, critically, freely" and thus a means toward living a decent human life. But, he complained, "in their false liberalism, the progressive educators confused discipline with regimentation, and forgot that true freedom is impossible without minds made free by discipline." This argument persisted insofar as there was a little something for everyone in it--mental discipline, culture, the promise of progress--but each of those appeals lacked even then the force they once had, for reasons I have already outlined. Nonetheless, as the deficiencies of the progressive's methods became more apparent, this synthetic argument with its appeal to tradition and, above all, its claims for discipline, reasserted itself within the universities.

The arguments of Adler and Van Doren, however, were eventually eclipsed by the rise of the New Critics, who were concerned with how a poem means, rather than with what it means. A seminal work in this tradition was the anthology Understanding Poetry (1938) compiled by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren. In their opening "Letter to a Teacher" these critics write: "This book has been conceived on the assumption that if poetry is worth teaching at all, it is worth teaching as poetry," decrying the fact that "the temptation to make a substitute for the poem as the object is usually overpowering." For the New Critics, these substitutes included mental discipline, enculturation, experience, history, and everything else save the work of literature as a work of literature. More importantly, what Brooks and Warren called an assumption remained and remains just that, an assumption, which despite its lack of proof gained greater and greater acceptance within the university.

When literary studies were excluded from the National Defense Act of 1958, a series of conferences were held which resulted in the publication of a variety of statements accepting the New Critics' assumption and successfully argued for its validity; as a result, the NDEA of 1964 confirmed the parity of English studies in the curriculum through the pattern of its funding.

The problem which I see currently facing those of us teaching literature courses, however, was initially masked by the prevalent description of "English studies" developed in the course of these events, for they were defined as language, literature, and composition. This "tripod" (which became the major metaphor for English studies) grew out of a series of conferences on the teaching of English at Yale in 1955, where New Critics such a Brooks dominated. The approach of the New Critics was solidified when the Basic Issues Conference of 1958 insisted that English studies must be regarded as "a fundamental liberal discipline, a body of specific knowledge to be preserved and transmitted, rather than a set of skills, or an opportunity for guidance and individual adjustment." The single most influential document, however, was a report prepared by the National Council of Teachers of English through its Committee on the National Interest in response to the NDEA of 1958. Entitled "The National Interest and the Teaching of English" (1961), this document attempted to stress the importance of the "tripod" of English studies, but scored many more points with its demonstration of instructional inadequacies. It did not attempt to discuss the issues I am raising here, but merely defined English studies on the tripartite models and then hammered away on the twin issues of articulation and teacher preparation as "so important and so large that they can be undertaken only by a nationally supported program."

A second report, "The National Interest and the Continuing Education of Teachers of English," was to follow in 1964; strategically brief overviews of both reports were distributed to Congress and, after extensive lobbying, the 1964 Act was passed, and interpreted by teachers of literature as a validation of their assumption that poetry was indeed worth studying as poetry.

I suggest, however, that if such a confirmation was indeed given, it was given through an oversight encouraged by the strategically brief arguments presented to Congress and the public and by the definition of English studies (which were, after all, the activities sanctioned) as "language, literature, and composition." I suggest that the arguments of the NCTE and the profession carried solely on the strength of the obvious need for writing skills and the obvious promise of "useful" scientific discoveries from the rigorous, almost mathematical, studies of language represented by linguistic research. As I see it, no one strenuously objected to the literature component of English studies because there was, after all, a two hundred year tradition of such studies in this country and because no one can object to a non-existent argument. The strength of the arguments for the study of language and the processes of composition, I suggest, carried he undefended study of literature along under the umbrella of English studies, and as long as all three were going in the same direction, everything was fine.

Some decades later, however, the assumption of the New Critics has come under constant under attack and stands defenseless against the much more solid claims of rhetoricians and linguists for larger and larger slices of the shrinking resources available to support those studies. Administrators (and taxpayers), hard-pressed to find enough funding for the demonstrable needs of society, have become increasingly unwilling to fund the study of literature because its necessity has not been demonstrated, while our students, unswayed by the mental discipline, the enculturation, the moral instruction, or the intrinsic but undemonstrable worth of literary studies, look elsewhere for that which is demonstrably of value to them.

I see no indication that these trends will reverse themselves unless we restore an understanding of the demonstrable value of such studies. (And if you think that I am pessimistic,, please read Peter Shaw's "Degenerate Criticism," Harpers, October 1979, as well as a host of attacks upon the even more arcane gamesplaying poststructuralists whose efforts have had the intellectual impact of Nintendo without its economic benefits).

Discouraged as I might be by the patterns I have uncovered in the history of literature studies, I remain convinced that the study of literature within a college curriculum induces intrinsically vital learning, and as such, is integral if not essential to the college curriculum. To define such learning, I must first return briefly to the eighteenth century, a period marked not only by the introduction of vernacular literature into the colleges, but also by the beginnings of the empiricist movement which has profoundly influenced the intellectual models upon which our world operates.

I maintain that such a return is essential: we live in a world that is overtly empiricist in its operations, yet the arguments in defense of literary studies (and the humanities in general) which we are still using are those developed when the empiricist movement was still in its troubled infancy. Thus the majority of those arguments are dependent upon philosophical assumptions--especially the concept of innate ideas and the epistemology engendered by such a concept--which came to be discarded as the empiricists gained acceptance for their ideas. More to the point, perhaps, is the fact that we have never attempted to explicate the liturgies of literary studies in a way that is purposefully sympathetic to the empirical movement and thus have, albeit with the best of intentions, begged the question of their worth in the eyes of our contemporaries who are, implicitly if not explicitly, empirical in their day-to-day operations.

I continue to insist that we can and must provide such an empirically-oriented explanation of literary studies; but in order to do that we must first take a close look at the empiricist epistemology and its elaboration in the cognitive models currently being developed by modern psychologists.

The empiricists offered experience in lieu of innate ideas as the basis of all knowledge, and when we understand the relationship between their epistemology and contemporary cognitive theory we well may have the basis for a new and more valid argument for literary studies. The view of knowledge set forth in Locke's Essay on Human Understanding is today a commonplace:

Despite their many points of difference, Hume does accept Locke's assertion that all the contents of the mind are derived from experience, using a terminology which may begin to suggest the line of my defense: he employs the term "perceptions" to cover all the contents of the mind, and then subdivides those perceptions into "impressions" which for him are the immediate data of experience, and "ideas" which are copies or faint images of such impressions as they manifest themselves in simple or complex forms through thinking and reasoning.

What is important for our purposes is the fact that both Hume and Locke base all knowledge upon experience, and then go on to describe that experience as either direct sensory experience or else experience of the mind's own operations. These contentions were to be attacked by later philosophers, but they have nonetheless become almost axiomatic in the operations of our society: we demonstrate an increasing reluctance to accept any proposition demanding an act of faith, while we rapidly assent to that which is shown to be grounded firmly in experience.

The most formal mark of empiricism's persistence, however, is the fact that this epistemology has been incorporated into the theories being put forward today to describe the processes of cognition and the development of cognitive abilities. Ultimately, it is such theories, seeded by the empiricists of the eighteenth century and compatible with our contemporary empirical bent, which can offer us a sound understanding of the place of literary studies within the college curriculum.

Contemporary theorists, like their predecessors Locke and Hume, attempt to describe how the mind works, and while the resultant theories are much more complex, they share a common premise with Locke and Hume: all knowledge informing our acts is acquired either through the "perception" of direct sensory data or the "perception" of the contents of our mind.

Modern psychologists have explored the nature and operations of those stimuli Hume called "impressions" but their real advances have been made in describing the mind's processes for perceiving itself and its contents, a process which Locke called "reflection" and Hume called "the perception of ideas."

Piaget, for example, appears to have identified two distinct processes which the mind employs to organize data arising from either sensory experience or reflection: the first of these is assimilation, wherein the experience or perception is adapted and organized within existing mental structures or schemata; and the second is accommodation, wherein the sense experience or perception cannot be assimilated into existing schemata, creating a conflict between the experience and the existing mental structures such than more complex schemata are forced to arise out of extant ones in order that assimilation might take place. According to Piaget (whose terminology and models I will be attempting to use henceforward), the mind is most adaptive--that is, best able to organize data--when the mind is equally amenable to both assimilative and accommodative processes, when an experience or perception can either be assimilated into an existed schema or else incited the processes of accommodation resulting in new schemata, which in turn become available for the assimilation of subsequent experiences or perceptions.

This, then, is the basic pattern described by most cognitive theorists: building upon a set of reflexes present at birth, each individual develops in his mind schemata of increasingly more complexity and dimensionality as a response to both the mind's perception of sensory experience and its perception of itself. The evolution of such schemata results from the accommodation of old schemata in order to assimilate new data; that accommodation in turn depends for its initiation upon an experience or perception which cannot be assimilated into existing schemata. In this way, the cognitively complex individual develops, becoming progressively more able to deal effectively with complex experiences of the senses and of the mind itself.

I am not sophisticated enough to prefer one detailed model over another, and I am well aware that all such models have flaws, but I am struck by the fact that most if not all such theories view the mind as not only receiving and recording data, but as also acting to modify itself as a result of receiving such data. I am thus willing to argue that the study of literature in colleges makes a distinct and important contribution to this process, a contribution so important that I might argue (at a later date) for the primacy of literary studies within the college curriculum.

For the moment, however, I must first describe the distinctive role of literary studies in the development of a cognitively complex individual. It goes without saying that the study of literature in college supplies data that very well might otherwise not be available to the student--this was obviously implicit in the progressives' stress on "vicarious experience." What has not been said, however, is that literary studies also perform the far more significant act of forcing the process of accommodation, contributing to the creation of cognitive structures whose complexity and dimensionality would not be likely to evolve otherwise. One set of inherently complex cognitive schemata are developed as the experience of reading the literature supplies data which cannot all be assimilated into existing schemata and demand (or force) the construction of more complex schemata which are able to assimilate the data. Then another set of experiences or perceptions, this time about the work of literature, is presented by the instructor; these data may again be assimilated into existing schemata, including those recently created by the reading experience, but some of those data, if supplied by a cognitively complex instructor, will again demand the evolution of yet another set of schemata. The end product then, of instruction in literature is a new and unique set of extremely complex and finely articulated cognitive structures capable of organizing subsequent experiences congruent with those structures.

I would further suggest these complex structures do more than prepare the student to assimilate future experiences of a literary nature. I maintain that those structures are essential for the assimilation of any experience which, while originating in the external world, is mediated through the mind and then the words of another. Today, more than even before, we are increasingly reliant on the experiences of others to provide a basis for our acts and judgments; as we find ourselves in progressively more complex environments, more and more of the experience underlying our knowledge is received through verbal symbolization and less and less through actual sensory experience. Literary studies best prepare us for that predicament.

We may conduct, so to speak, one experiment, but we read about one hundred others; we will be the first to organize for ourselves the sense perceptions arising from our experiment, but the sense perceptions of the other hundred experimenters have, by the time we see them in print, already been organized by their own perceptions of their work and again through their verbalizations. Only a simpleton would treat both classes of experience equally; only an utter solipsist would reject any perception other than his own direct sensory impressions. Therefore, those of us who are neither fools nor solipsists must have, well developed within our cognitive faculties, structures capable of assimilating those perceptions arising from the experiences of those other hundred experimenters and structured first by their minds and then by their words.

I would argue that the study of literature, more than any other discipline, affords an explicit opportunity for the mind to develop those progressively more complex and finely articulated schemata necessary for the satisfactory assimilation of all mediated experiences presented through verbal symbols, even as it also engenders more and more sophisticated experiences not otherwise available through direct sensory experience.

In effect, I am suggesting that on this model all writing cannot help but be treated as intrinsically fictive and that literary studies should be defended on the strength of their central role in the forced evolution of increasingly sophisticated schemata sufficient for the assimilation of all verbal representations of experience. This strength is made more apparent through several unique features of this discipline. First, the literature which we study and thus the verbal symbolizations and the perceptions they represent are overtly and unabashedly fictive, yet the mark of good literature is that it is, in some significant way, perceived as real, a perception which persists despite constant reassertions to the contrary. The accommodations resulting from this obvious and persistent contradiction are essential for dealing with verbal symbolization which claim to reflect reality but are consistently perceived as, in some equally valid sense, unreal. The study of literature, because it forces the mind to accommodate this type of cognition virtually at all times, is far more effective than the study of any other type of verbal representation in the development of schemata capable of promoting effective judgments between the true and the false.

Secondly, imaginative literature is, in a very real sense, easier to assimilate: the artistry of the author--his command of words, rhetoric, and ideas--insures that his verbal structures most closely represent his mental structures and the organization of his experiences therein. My lack of such artistry, on the other hand, results in just the opposite: my verbal structures at best only unevenly represent my mental structures, making it even more difficult for you to perceive, much less assimilate, the experiences organized within those structures. Literature is also easier to assimilate in the sense that it is, by virtue of its overt and intrinsic fictiveness, more nearly a closed and self-contained universe of experiences; this paper, on the other hand, is open-ended in its dependence upon thirty odd years of personal experiences, most of which will never be made known to you even through they may form an important part of the experience represented by this paper.

Finally, the cultural, social, moral and aesthetic components of literature add yet another unique dimension to the complex cognitive structures evoked by the study of literature. While such dimensions may not be required for the assimilation of every perception, we are all very much aware of the consequences of information assimilated within structures lacking such finely articulated dimensions, and I would be the last to minimize their importance for the truly free human being. But such dimensions can be evoked by all disciplines within the liberal arts--and that is a part of their charge--and so I am not able argue for either the uniqueness or the centrality of literary studies on these grounds; instead, I can only argue that they too participate in such an operation.

What then is the role of the study of literature in the college curriculum? I have attempted to suggest that such studies are central, even essential, for the cognitive development of the student who must go on to function in an increasingly complex universe dominated by mediated perceptions organized in verbal symbols. Such a suggestion is grounded on the unique abilities of such studies to promote the development of cognitive structures capable of accommodating and assimilating those extremely complex perceptions which shape our acts and our judgments from day to day, perceptions mediated through the minds and words of others. I ask that you give serious consideration to this suggestion.