The Use and Abuse of Literature - Marjorie Garber [64]
The number of American college students graduating with B.A. degrees in English, which in 1950 was about 17,000, or 4 for every 100 bachelor’s degrees, increased in the next decade, peaking in 1971 (when there were more than 64,000 English graduates nationwide, or 7.66 per hundred total bachelor’s degrees). From that point it began to decline, with a minor uptick in the early nineties. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, the percentages had returned to the level of fifty years previously, 4 in 100.7 (Meantime, other humanities fields were experiencing even more serious declines.) By 2006–7 the number had decreased further, to 3.62 of every 100 bachelor’s degrees.
A variety of reasons for this decline can be offered or guessed at, including the economy, information technology, the lure of lucrative careers in the financial sector, the great expansion of academic fields beyond the basic subject areas of midcentury, the national push for science education, and so on. Many English (and other modern literature) majors always planned to go on to law school or other kinds of professional training after college, but the old truism—that a degree in English made you seem literate and well grounded in general education—was gradually replaced by a new truism, that the English major was useless. It was only a short step to thinking that perhaps this made it somehow self-indulgent, whereas ambitious young students ought to be networking, laying the groundwork for a legitimate career, developing marketable skills—in short, thinking ahead. If they thought far enough ahead, they might envisage themselves enrolling in evening courses or cultural tour groups in an attempt to get back in touch with their interests in literature.
It’s always been difficult to explain to administrators and fund-raisers why criticism and theory are research. Undergraduate education in the literary classics is considered a part of general education, but specialization, while normative for intellectual advancement in the social sciences and the sciences, has often been looked upon with skepticism or suspicion when conducted in the humanities. Epithets like political or ideological (terms that are, incidentally, perfectly acceptable categories of analysis in other areas) have been hurled at literary scholars as if such interests somehow undermine or make less pure their interest in works of poetry, fiction, and drama. Robert Alter’s 1989 book The Pleasures of Reading in an Ideological Age argued that pleasure and love of literature was the proper province of literary study. If literary scholarship were to become too professional, the elusive but crucial element of love might drop out. You can see that this is a kind of double bind: if literary study is centered on love of literature, it is regarded as basic but not advanced, general but not specialized, ancillary and pleasurable but not essential. But when literary study moves into the realm of theory, or editorial practice, or material culture, or any other of its myriad edges, left or right, up or down, it runs the risk of abandoning its main mission to give pleasure, inspire love, and be, in effect, its own reward.
If a scientist were to tell us he or she loved science (as scientists frequently do), we probably would not consider such a remark tantamount to saying that science was not professional, or did not involve research or specialization, or that the speaker was a fan or a dilettante rather than a working scientist. Love of politics does not mean that the lover is not also a potential scholar, or candidate, or bureau chief. But love of literature (or love of art or music) often is taken to indicate a set of recreational interests or a level of social—rather than intellectual—sophistication.
So literary criticism and literary studies, which were once considered the accoutrements of a gentleman