The Use and Abuse of Literature - Marjorie Garber [62]
FOUR
What’s Love Got to Do with It?
To say you love literature would seem to be a prerequisite for life as a teacher and critic. But it’s also the case that when students, buffs, and fans profess that they love Shakespeare or they love Jane Austen—the two most frequently mentioned love objects, in my experience—the teacher often worries as much as she rejoices. Love is not a critical stance; it does not necessarily welcome interpretations, especially multiple interpretations. What Freud accurately called “the overestimation of the object”—the idea that the loved one is imbued with extra value, with superlatives, even with perfection, as a way of ensuring that the lover stays in love—is sometimes a way of avoiding analysis and critique rather than pursuing them.
Like many other people who teach and write about literature for a living (the biographer R. W. B. Lewis once memorably said to me that “teaching Shakespeare was taking money for jam”), I’ve often encountered undergraduate and graduate students who were concerned that literary criticism, literary analysis, and literary theory would take away their pleasure in reading rather than making it richer and fuller. Happily, that tends to be a brief moment rather than a lasting one, since the delights of literary immersion, whether through an examination of imagery, symbolism, prosody, rhetoric and syntax, historical context, and/or performance, tend almost always to produce new ways of loving familiar texts as well as encounters with new texts to love. Still, there are moments of evasion, avoidance, disavowal: “I don’t want to spoil it for myself.” But there is no cause for concern. Poems, plays, novels, critical essays, aphorisms—these are all vivid, vigorous, healthy, tough, resistant: they will survive. Dismembering them through analysis and interpretation is one of many ways of engaging with and remembering them. Works of literature are not soap bubbles or daylilies or meteors or mirages: they will last, indeed much longer than any reader or critic.
Before “English”
The idea of an “English major” is a fairly recent development, as institutional histories go, dating from the last decades of the nineteenth century. When he was an undergraduate at Yale in the 1850s, wrote Andrew Dickson White, later the cofounder and first president of Cornell University, “there was never a single lecture on any subject in literature, either ancient or modern … As regards the great field of modern literature, nothing whatever was done. In the English literature and language, every man was left to his own devices.”1 Frederick Barnard, who would later become president of Columbia College, reported that he gained what literary training he could, not in Yale’s courses, but in the literary societies.2 The novelist Henry James, who spent a brief time at Harvard Law School (but took no degree), said, “A student might read the literature of our own language privately, but it was not a subject of instruction … Professor [Francis James] Child provided an introduction to the reading of Anglo-Saxon and Chaucer. There, so far as English literature was to be considered, the College stopped.”3 Child was then the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory; it was not until 1876 that he was appointed the first, and at that time the only, professor of English at Harvard. From 1834 to 1854, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was the Smith Professor of Modern Languages and of Belles Lettres, where, in addition to teaching English, he supervised students in Italian, Spanish, French, and German, as well as offering, or being prepared to offer, Swedish, Danish,