By: BMC

BMC — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 15:12:02 +0000

It is lovely to hear Phillip Davis arguing bravely about the problems that are plaguing today’s literary studies. But these problems are not to be located in the rise of general theory that seems so distressing to many literary scholars – all those social, sexual and racial readings of literature. Theory has, if anything, simply proliferated the number of readings and sympathies that are available in literary studies. If this is perverse, it is the perversity of numbers and of viewpoints. So Davis’ subscribes to Brigid Lowe’s definition of Victorian sympathy as the way in which a reader “will have a prejudice, a theory, a plan or a principle—and then suddenly, when confronted by a particular person in a specific human situation and moved or pained, will give it all up.” What a wonderfully intimate, almost phenomenological account of reading. But this reading cannot be denied to a new generation of literary scholars in academia, and to readers who discuss racism or gender problems in Victorian novels not merely because of the pressure of tenure, the job market or funding. For there is also the pressure of racism and sexism that is never anything other than “a particular person in a specific human situation”. Mrs. Dalloway experienced the specific human situation of an upper-middle-class lady growing old, and being provided for in such a comfortable existence so as to have time within a day to remember her life and to be troubled by lost chances and existential crises. Not everyone can identify in the same way, can experience the same sympathy, for such a specific situation, just as no theory can encompass all the possibilities of Mrs. Dalloway’s life – a lack of encompassing which makes Woolf’s novel so terribly haunting and evocative on each and every reading. Of course the abstraction and the false encompassing that often passes for theory these days does point to a lack of penetrating analyses of the particular situations that are generated by literary works. This may have something to do with the way in which literary theory has become interdisciplinary and, in the process, often lost its most intimate object in literature. But the transfer away from literature to other mediums in cultural and communication departments in universities also marks a mournful loss of funding for literary studies and, in addition, to the victory of the combined financial and ideological pressures that are seeing the destruction of the old-style, imperial and colonial universities that used to pride themselves on their popular, New Criticism-style literary readings. It is true, however, as Davis implies, that there is something deeply wrong with academic life generally. A nice, sympathetic academic I met the other day, who was going out of his way so unusually to help a lowly graduate thesis student, told me it is the chicken coop syndrome: too many chickens and not enough grain. So, academic chickens are tearing themselves to shreds over the little grain (funding) left in a small space. But they forget that the best grain, the one you want space and time to sit with in order to be in the green fields, is the food of literature itself. Everything else is just a passing fashion that supports the games played in a horrid factory of intellectual production. The problem is not really located in the literary theorists out there, like Hillis Miller et all, but in the mediocre and mediating academics out there who lack any real sympathy for anything except their own factory-farmed chicken-like existence. In relation to this particular situation, we all fear for the worst. One may well dare to hope that the luxuries and green fields of the Blogs out there would house some better readers and feeders in the world of literature.

Comments on: A Curse on Mean-Spirited Intellectuals: And Literary Scholars Above All

By: BMC