Deconstruction Zone

A recent article in Huffington Post gave a shout-out to “the 17 most innovative university presses,” and I’m proud to have had long-standing ties to two of them. Huzzah!! But I have to give a smack-down to the author for in one breath extolling books “of the moment” in subject areas like politics and border studies, and in the next praising four presses for their publications in literary criticism.

To my mind, if there’s one field of scholarship that’s totally useless, it’s literary criticism. According to a not-too-old joke, the college science major goes out into the world to ask, “Why is this happening?”; the engineering major asks, “How can I make this work?”; the English major asks, “You want fries with that?” Unless you can find something socially useful to do with an English degree, producing lit crit seems to be the alternative to ending up in the service sector. Only it’s not half as useful.

I can’t remember why I became an English major; back then, it was simply the mark of a general liberal education – nobody told me it would seriously limit my job prospects. But in all my literature courses, I was never really aware of criticism; we just read the damn stuff and then the prof lectured about it. Turns out that my time in academia, the late ’60s, coincided with the end of book-centered study before “literary theory” took over, so for me it was a narrow escape.

I know that my advisor was disappointed that I didn’t go to grad school – that I wasn’t propagating the species – but I just couldn’t bear the thought of doing useless research on topics like the impact of Shakespeare’s hangnail on the writing of Coriolanus. I spent a few years in the textbook biz thinking I was helping to disseminate knowledge until I realized it was just repackaging information. It wasn’t until I embarked upon my career in university press publishing (our collective motto: “Keeping the world safe for pedantry”) that I found my niche – and became aware of lit crit. My own press did mercifully little of it, but enough to let me know it wasn’t natural. When I started a freelance business writing catalog copy for other presses, I discovered just how insidious it is.

The problem with lit crit is that it’s such an insiders’ game. Political theory, e.g., can have real-world applications (for better or worse) when it percolates in think tanks and seeps its way into government bureaucracy. Books about the U.S.-Mexico border can help us confront one of America’s most pressing issues. Revisionism in history can show thoughtful people how to consider the past from new perspectives (yes, there’s more to it than Holocaust denial). But literary criticism and theory are pretty much scholarly circle jerks: Faulkner and Love: The Women Who Shaped His Art  (“how the themes of race, tormented love, and addiction that permeated his fiction had their origins in his three defining relationships”); The Spread of Novels: Translation and Prose Fiction in the Eighteenth Century (“recasts the genre’s rise as part of a burgeoning vernacular cosmopolitanism”); A New Theory for American Poetry (“how today’s consumerist and conformist culture subverts the imagination of a free people”); Working Women, Literary Ladies: The Industrial Revolution and Female Aspiration (“the first book to examine the fascinating exchange between the work and literary spheres for laboring women in the rapidly industrializing America of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries”). And these examples from the four presses cited in HuffPo don’t even scratch the surface.

My own theory of literature is simply that it should be enjoyed, not over-analyzed. Classroom discussions and reading groups are all well and good, but books in lit crit aren’t intended for outsiders despite the claims of the HuffPo author (or of descriptive copy – take it from someone who’s written it); their only purpose is to help the authors get tenure. Not that there’s anything wrong with that – but it’s a helluva way to make a living.

And it begs a more serious question: “Cheese on that burger?”