From time to time, people who make a living in the company of fine words fall back on the old questions: Is there meaning in the word “literature”? If so, what good does it do in this world of struggle? One hears that literature is beautiful or that it opens a window on other worlds, or that reading this or that sharpens a person’s critical thinking. In thirty years of teaching literature in universities, I have expressed some of these thoughts myself. But lately they have lost their freshness to me, and I find myself thumbing the shelves for something more primal.
For the last nine months, I have written on Substack about literature and enchantment (and other topics). Inspired by a popular nineteenth-century magazine writer named Bret Harte, an early friend of Mark Twain, I’m fascinated with what it means to get “carried away” with art. In the state that Harte called enchantment, ego boundaries fall and ideologies soften.
Anything that weakens ideologies seems welcome in our embattled time, but even enchantment only goes so far in explaining why anyone should pick up a book and ask if it counts as literature.
Two days ago
described successful writing as “a conscious deployment of energy release.” In the public part of a paywalled craft essay, she observed of the essay genre in particular, “The controlled release of energy is why some essays are thrilling even when not much happens in them, and some essays in which a lot of things happen can fail to catch our interest at all” (“The Essays Series #1: The Essay as Energy”).We might say there is an energy about literature, beyond the essay genre, that takes us through a wide range of feelings. Before I speak of that, I want to consider why the usual motives for studying literature are not enough right now.
Why academics say we read literature
The fancy college-word literature, as opposed to words used at earlier stages of education, such as “reading” and “language arts,” implies a class of books and verbal arts distinct from other books, poems, plays, etc. We who teach it either have big egos and like big words or we mean that some verbal expressions possess special power. It’s no secret that the way we talk about that power has fractured academics in literary studies for the last generation.
Some say literary works belong to a class of words defined by their beauty. However, the aesthetic case for “literature” is difficult to argue in the face of cultural diversity and the different things that become beautiful to each of us through association. One literature professor known to me teaches Matthew Arnold to help students understand the nineteenth-century aspiration to collect “the best that has been thought and said in the world.” I know another professor who logs it as an offense when Matthew Arnold’s name gets mentioned, so deeply does the Victorian poet and essayist signify for Professor #2 the prerogatives of empire and white privilege. Teaching literature for beauty, which we once thought could heal at least some of the world’s woes, produces nowadays at best stalemates and cultural silos.1
And so my generation of faculty adopted “critical thinking” as our universal motive. Whether a college student majors in chemistry or philosophy, she will graduate with the mind of a critical chemist, aware of the impact of gold mining and agriculture on drinking water downstream, or a critical philosopher, aware that claiming Cogito! (I think!) is a privilege denied to people whose bodies are treated as disposable in their economic system. There is much to be gained from learning to question hidden motives and far-reaching impacts.
However, as the critical theory professor Rita Felski argued in the bold, tectonic little book, The Limits of Critique (2015), the habit of critique, when overworked, encourages suspicion and assumes that the critical reader is more knowing than the writer. A critical reader looks for flaws, holes, gaps, assumptions, and frailties in others but does not necessarily admit to them in herself.2 Felski recommends teaching critical methods but not falling into a worn groove of full-time “critiquiness.”
Some literature professors emphasize the “cultural” knowledge or “empathy” to be gained from reading well-chosen books. This answer sounds inclusive and nice but still dodges the question. If we are only reading for cultural knowledge and empathy, why not go traveling instead of reading books? Isn’t that a more direct way to meet and know others? Should the literature department become an area of emphasis within anthropology or psychology, whose missions of cultural and interpersonal understanding have primacy? That would be a funny turn, since those disciplines date back about a century, while the study of literature, drama, and oratory is thousands of years old.
What then is this concatenation of words we call literature? Have the social sciences wrested away its most important contributions, so that what’s left is only the taste or distaste for books?3
If the category is still meaningful, and it can be reduced to none of these motives or meanings, why is it so difficult to name how literary study differs from adjacent fields? Why claim so many half-true motives that crumble at first contact with the mighty thing itself?
How literary studies forgot itself
Naturally, I have a theory. I will sketch it here in two claims but not try to “prove” it, and then I will tell you what kind of action follows from it.
According to this theory, the problem for literature began when three fields of knowledge addressing the same questions of who humans are, how we know, and how we fit in the universe — religious studies, literature, and philosophy — grew apart and took jobs on distinctly religious or secular campuses. Some historians will say this happened in the early twentieth century. I would say it goes back to the rise of scientific rationalism in eighteenth-century Europe and Euro-America.
What did happen in the early twentieth century and mid-to-late nineteenth century was the development of social sciences — psychology, anthropology, sociology, modern linguistics4 — which became the adjacent departments to literature and philosophy once religious studies was banished to religious schools to become sectarian. Gradually, in the name of interdisciplinarity, graduate students in literature read the works of social scientists such as Saussure, Durkheim, Weber, and Malinowski (as well as philosophers like Foucault and Derrida) until the concerns and questions of literary studies became indistinguishable in many cases from those of social scientists.
A second narrowing of the purpose of literary studies came with the nationalizing of literary studies. In American literature (a field of study that broke off of classical Greek and Roman, English, and European literature in the early twentieth century), as soon as nationalism entered the conversation, it became a prevailing idea, so that American literature anthologies of the twentieth century were more invested in the question What is American? than in the question What is literature? To provide just a rough sketch, before World War II, the emphasis of anthologies was on national diversity (the 1890s, not the 1990s, invented that approach to American studies). In the 1940s and 1950s, anthologies reduced their authors by half to support the vision of national consensus. At that point, women and non-white authors who had been in earlier anthologies got dropped. The 1990s brought diversity back with a vengeance. Always, discussion of literary purpose got bound up with questions of Americanness.
For generations in the U.S. and Europe, literature has been divided into various language departments (English Lit, American Lit, German Lit, Japanese Lit, the Classics, and so on), so that a general theory of literary value has been nobody’s business.
The need to get behind and under national divisions and aesthetic theories and critical skepticism and cultural differences is both chronic and acute.
Primal Reading, Choral Reading
My solution is to seek out books in a direct line of descent from the Big Bang. Cosmic silence and primal explosion are the formative elements of the works I call literature.
How does one read this sort of thing? What then is literary criticism? I will answer with an analogy.
In a darkened hall, the voice of a single singer starts a recitatif — the low female contralto, let’s say. When the melody begins, the other altos pick it up first, then other voices, then the choir, and then the audience.
Literary criticism has been structured as an argument at a conference table. What if it were practiced like choral singing at evensong? If literature is not a social science with data points but a confrontation with Big Questions, what happens if the responsive reader (not a critic) compounds the energy, adds another voice, spreads the song a little farther?
This is all very abstract and florid. I’ll be exploring it for some time on my Substack after next week. For now, let me close with a brief example.
A Big Bang is brewing in this three-minute father-son scene from August Wilson’s Fences, starring James Earl Jones and Courtney B. Vance. Energy builds in silences just one or two seconds long. Where do you see explosions, or tensions approaching an explosive point, capable of creating a new and indelible world of meaning for the son?
I’m watching silent energy building at :26-:28 and :29-:32. At :46-:48, I feel an explosion to rock the son’s world. This Father-God is such a prolific Creator that he changes his son’s world radically at both 1:00 and 2:43.
In the one-second silence at exactly the 2:43 mark, what habitable universe is created anew for this father and son that did not exist at 2:40? The combination of August Wilson’s script and James Earl Jones’s acting recreates the world between these characters in a silent second.
Literature (n): the translation of primordial explosions, incipient explosions, and cosmic silences into words and spaces between them.
Great writers are priests of a kind. Their words give witness to something the human spirit craves and knows it is made of.
“Some say the world will end in fire, / Some say in ice,” wrote Robert Frost in a poem about the explosive and mysterious universe, not about Americanness or structuralist theory. Scholarly apparatus is all very nice as long as the literature remains primary.
“[R]enewal becomes impossible,” asserted James Baldwin in The Fire Next Time, “if one supposes things to be constant that are not—safety, for example, or money, or power.” Renewal of literary studies is impossible if one supposes our critical methods to be constant when they are not.
To read literature as a minor branch of the social sciences is to read through it to social relations as they are or have been. To read literature as one of the three ancient humanities (with religion and philosophy) is to listen for the catch of breath in the breathless universe when creation renews itself in the marvel of a human breast.
I could teach that for another thirty years. Hallelujah.
— Tara
To read more from Tara at Enchanted in America before she re-launches with a new title next week, you might enjoy this post about the enchantment of illustrated books for grown-ups or this rereading of an early poem by Joy Harjo in light of Harjo’s latest memoir.
Thank you to Josh and the team at Inner Life!
Questions for you:
What am I overlooking in my two-part theory of how literary studies forgot itself (by forgetting our kinship with religious studies and dividing by nationality)? It’s ok to be a critic. ;-)
In a recent post called “How Academics Destroyed Academia,” conservative journalist
celebrated a Marxist humanities professor, Tyler Austin Harper, who tweeted, “How did anyone think we could get away with being nakedly ideological for years without any chickens coming home to roost?” “Well, if that’s how you want it,” wrote Rod Dreher, “don’t be surprised if you lose the people.” Have you had a “nakedly ideological” experience of literature or humanities? Do you think this is why the humanities have lost some people?What have you read lately that was full of cosmic silence and/or primordial fire?
Some philosophers and art theorists have been working on a theory of beauty to transcend cultures, as evidenced by Emory Elliott, Lou Freitas Caton, and and Jeffrey Rhyne’s Aesthetics in a Multicultural Age (Oxford University Press, 2002), and other publications.
Felski moderates her argument toward the end of The Limits of Critique. While she thinks critique has been overdone, she still considers herself a teacher of critical theory. She argues for an education that combines critical questioning with such unschooled responses to literature as enchantment and recognition. She discusses these alternatives in The Uses of Literature (2008).
Some people think Reader Response Criticism amounts to this, taste or distaste.
’s Inner Life essay from earlier this month provides an excellent introduction to that theory.Political science, history, and rhetoric - which is closer today to linguistics and social sciences than to literature - have ancient roots.
paranoid reading and reparative reading, or, you're so paranoid, you probably ... https://www.ias.edu/sites/default/files/sss/pdfs/Critique/sedgwick-paranoid-reading.pdf. 2002 the extraordinary literary theorist and queer studies inspiration Eve Sedgwick wrote about ' paranoid reading ' strategies - and offered us a loving alternative. I'd also want to remind us about Bruno Latour, philisopher, for his plea that, now we've done the necessary work of deconstruction, we give reconstruction a go. Academics give us smart and interesting ideas - and then let 'em into the wild. They move on to give us a few more ideas a bit later. This feels like worthwhile work to me.
Tara, I think this essay as brilliant. AS to what have I read lately that is full of "cosmic silence" --not a novel but an absolutely remarkable book _This Exquisite Loneliness_ by Richard Deming and that I plan to write about soon/