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By Root 867 0

studies, which emerged as a university subject at the height of the British empire) was likewise dismissed as irrelevant political meddling by scholars who would be better off restricting their activities to the library, the archive, the museum, and the (undergraduate) classroom. What was most disturbing about these attacks was their mean-spiritedness and the shoddiness of the “research” that produced them, often consisting of sitting in on a single class by a given professor, or listing and belittling the titles of courses or conference papers, many never read in their entirety by those who mocked them. But there is no doubt that this strategy was effective, and doubly so, since those targeted began to retaliate, providing precisely the kind of partisan evidence their critics had wished into being.

Few who lived through this period would welcome a resumption of such hostilities, which now seem both fevered and distant. But I mention these developments for a reason: to point out that the scholars singled out for particular opprobrium in these books of the late 1980s and early 1990s were, almost all of them, professors of literary studies. Roger Kimball’s grumpy but highly successful diatribe, Tenured Radicals, begins in the spirit of a manifesto: “It is no secret that the academic study of the humanities in this country is in a state of crisis.”64 He then proceeds, in the second paragraph of his book, to name some of the principal culprits, all of them professors of literature: “Princeton University’s Elaine Showalter” (gender), “University of Pennsylvania’s Houston Baker” (race), and “Duke University’s Fredric Jameson” (Marxist politics). Other humanistic disciplines also sustained periodic swipes, especially those that led to a concern with politics (as in the work of University of Virginia philosopher Richard Rorty) or popular culture (Harvard philosopher Stanley Cavell). But the academics these critics loved to hate were more often than not trained as literary critics.

As I’ve noted, this strategy was successful. Not only did the country take notice that the sky was falling, so, too, did the critics and scholars mentioned, and even those scholars watching the debates from the sidelines (not the margins, which were now at the center) began to feel the pressure. Once a suspicion is planted, it is very difficult to uproot it; tenured radicals, spiffy phrase that it was, had changed the way the academy regarded itself. Like the insinuations of Iago (“It speaks against her with the other proofs” [Othello, 3.3.44]), these proofs of nothing multiplied to produce a firm conviction that something had gone wrong. Partially as a result, the place of literary studies in the pantheon of the humanities came under tacit and explicit critique. Younger—and older—scholars of literature shifted their interests, whether consciously or (more likely) unconsciously, away from the play of language, the ambivalent ambiguities of the signifier, and the modes of counterintuitive argument that had marked the most brilliant literary work of the 1970s and 1980s (and, indeed, the 1940s and the 1950s), toward less controversial terrain and more supposedly objective (and even scientific) methodologies like history, the sociology of knowledge, and cognitive theory. Literary study was in the process of disowning itself.

Genteelly, professionally, persuasively, and without an apparent consciousness of what might be lost in the process, departments of literature and literary study have shifted their emphasis. This return to history is in fact a return, not a leap or an evasion. Trends in intellectual work tend to be cyclical, with attention shifting from text to context, from author or artist to historical-cultural surround, from theory to practice and from micro- to macro-analysis (in literary study, close reading versus meta-narratives). A great deal of the most recent work in literary studies is deeply informative, much of it represents what used to be called “a contribution to knowledge,” and almost all of it is professionally honed if not glossy.