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Is Literary Study Un-American?
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13100 |
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BOOK WORLD
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11 / 1987 |
4,282 Words |
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John Braeman
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AMERICAN LITERATURE AND THE ACADEMY:
The Roots, Growth, and Maturity of a Profession
Kermit Vanderbilt
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986
609 pp., $34.95
PROFESSING LITERATURE:
An Institutional History
Gerald Graff
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987
315 pp., $24.95
A deep sense of malaise runs through the contemporary university scene. There is no question that a major source is the inevitable deflation of expectations in the face of relative financial stringency after the boom years of the 1960s. But faculty demoralization is as much intellectual as economic. There exists among the nation's professors a strong feeling of loss of direction - a self-questioning not simply of the worth of what they are doing but even its validity. Perhaps nowhere is this mood more strikingly apparent than in literary studies. In different ways, these two new accounts of literary studies' academic institutionalization are responses to this crisis of confidence. Kermit Vanderbilt's American Literature and the Academy: The Roots, Growth, and Maturity of a Profession deals with a single subfield - the attainment of an accepted place in the curriculum for the study of American literature. Gerald Graff's Professing Literature: An Institutional Study is broader in scope if thinner on details. "Professing Literature," Graff announces, "is a history of academic literary studies in the United States, roughly from the Yale Report of 1828, which assured the primacy of the classical over the vernacular languages in American colleges for another half-century, to the waning of the New Criticism in the 1960s and subsequent controversies over literary theory."
To outward appearance, the authors are dealing with a tremendous success story. English departments are gargantuan enterprises in which American literature has become a fully accepted part. But a feeling that things have gone wrong suffuses these works. "What seems a renewed assault on the integrity and usefulness of humanistic learning," Vanderbilt laments in his introduction, "has generally reduced the morale of professors old and young, in all literature fields." Although later social and cultural forces have played a role by fostering a "materialistic" cast of mind among the nation's college students, he does not exonerate his colleagues from a major share of the responsibility: "In dread today lest they seem to America's youth stodgy and irrelevant by teaching their discipline with a conscious pride in its historical tradition, they have stampeded en masse, entire departments at a time, to satisfy the trends and tastes, the whims and 'evaluations' of the inexperienced young." And his hope is that supplying via his book "a renewed appreciation of what has been achieved in the past" will return the profession "to our reason for being." Graff's appraisal is even more somber. While acknowledging that "the humanities have become disablingly incoherent," Graff blames that intellectual disarray not upon any recent breakdown of consensus but rather upon its never having existed. "Although the transmission of humanism and cultural tradition in the Matthew Arnold sense was indeed the official goal of the literature department," he concludes, "there were from the outset
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