The Continuing “Americanization of Literary Studies” Leonard Cassuto Only connect! … Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. - E.M. Forster,-Howards End Reading Winfried Fluck’s “The Americanization of Literary Studies” in 2023 was a resonant experience. Writing more than thirty years earlier, Fluck demonstrated a prescience rarely seen in any form of inquiry. Taking stock of the enterprise during somewhat better times for the humanities, Fluck identified the dominance in literary studies not so much of American ideas as American practice. He called the practice “professionalization,” and he located it in what he called “ever increasing specialization” (“Americanization,” in this volume 10). That charge is all too familiar today, and that’s one of the reasons that Fluck’s analysis deserves our attention still. Another reason is because of the ethical implications of what he describes, and their continuing relevance not just to our own times but to the whole academic enterprise in the United States. Fluck points to “the inner logic of a growing professionalization under market conditions” that leaves scholars “very little choice” but to fall in line and deliver increasingly specialized analysis (9). Fluck doesn’t oppose specialization as such. Instead, he’s concerned about certain uses he saw it being put to. “As a result of specialization,” Fluck says, “we are flooded by observations and interpretations that no longer can be meaningfully related to each other.” As a consequence, we face “an increasing fragmentation of knowledge” whose “quantity minimizes [its] meaningfulness” (11). In other words, everyone does their own particular and specific things without considering how their things relate to other people’s particular and specific things. It’s like a music room full of soloists all playing, fortissimo, at the same time. I want first to spotlight the terms that Fluck uses. He doesn’t say that “the marketplace” or “the professional arena” has been flooded by unconnected observations. Instead, he says that “we” are vexed by this problem. In Fluck’s eyes, overspecialization is a problem that a community - a “we” - inflicts on itself through the questionable professional practice of its members. At the center of Fluck’s interpretation are the people - ourselves - who do the professional work. I will return to this observation later on. Since Fluck wrote “Americanization,” the internet has become a permanent amplifier of this cacophony of disjointed interpretation. It has exponentially increased the amount of information that pours out, and it has simultaneously decreased the power and influence of gatekeepers. John Guillory - to whose more recent work I will presently turn - made the absurd but painfully true observation some years ago that scholars these days are writing so fast that they don’t have a chance to read (Guillory 9-13). Everybody is writing, but for whom? If everyone else is also busy writing, who is the reading audience that tries to keep up? One of Fluck’s most trenchant points is that the design of the system actually discourages keeping up at all. Because it cuts the scholar off from other scholars and their ideas, professionalized specialization readily enables “new and ‘original’ readings” that don’t have to do with anyone else’s readings. This specialization, Fluck says, produces new knowledge of a lower quality because it lacks outward reach to broaden its community. Instead, this knowledge inhabits “a culture of overstatement” in which “scholars increasingly take note of each other only as comrade or adversary and not as a predecessor who contributed some important insights which ought to be linked to one’s own” (13). Fluck saw in this behavior “a breathtaking balkanization of the field,” a specialization that opposes what he calls “linkage,” an important keyword (17). But wait, there’s more. Fluck connects unlinked specialization to a “political and cultural radicalism.” This radicalism displaces “the long-dominant liberal paradigm” in American academia. Fluck suggests that this academic radicalism isn’t just “a legacy of the Reagan years,” as it may reasonably be viewed, “but it also makes sense to regard it as an effect of professionalization” (14). The reason is expediency: “A radical stance can provide a welcome short-cut for gaining scholastic visibility” because “It allows and encourages strong statements” (14). In other words, this radicalism isn’t very radical at all. Nor is it especially political, at least not in relation to government or public affairs. Within the economy of the marketplace of ideas, we could even call it conservative: everyone jockeys for position in the prestige game without questioning the 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0002 26 Leonard Cassuto 1 Another important side effect of professionalized specialization that Fluck noticed was the increasing importance of literary theory. In retrospect, Fluck was writing near theory’s high-water mark, at the same moment when “literary theory” briefly emerged as a specialty that became a hiring category within American English departments. “In the context of increasing specialization,” writes Fluck, “theory is turned into another possibility for specialized knowledge and thus for professional distinction” (15). In the name of linkage, Fluck suggests that “A new theoretical perspective should point out how such perspectives are related to one another” (17). These many years later, the opportunity for distinction through theory has come and gone: as any graduate student will tell you, we are all theorists now, more or less. 2 For example, “Boycott of Israeli Academic Institutions.” rules of that game. 1 And those rules construe academic achievement narrowly, exclusively in terms of certain types of publication. The connection between literary study and politics has increased in salience since Fluck published his essay. Literary critics in the United States have sought to interject their voices into all manner of political arenas. The well-chronicled effort of the American Studies Association to have its say about the Middle East is one example among many. 2 In his important new book, Professing Criticism, Guillory also critiques the rise of specialization in the practice of modern criticism, and his argument similarly points to the vexed relation of literary study with political engagement. Guillory’s choice of terms conveys his view starkly. He describes specialization as a disability. His name of that disability, which arises from “the specialization of cognitive labor,” is “deformation” (5). For Guillory, “professional deformation” leads to an “overestimation of aim” by literary scholars. As the enterprise of literary study has diminished in size and visibility, Guillory observes, its practitioners have made increasingly strenuous claims for it (79). Fluck’s radicalism and Guillory’s overstated claims are two names for the same thing, viewed from different perspectives at an interval of more than thirty years. Where Fluck sees antisocial careerism, Guillory sees errant professional practice on a long-term, global scale. To Guillory, literary studies has veered out of its lane. To get back on course, he suggests, we should “begin with the recognition that literary critics can enter the realm of publicity only as experts on literature.” But this affirmation has a rub: “If literature is the basis of our entitlement to enter the public sphere, what does this imply for our public-facing representation of what we do? ” For Guillory, it boils down to legitimacy (which he calls “justification”) - he thinks that literary critics claim more of it than they’re entitled to (80). Guillory’s book has received a remarkable reception, and much engagement with it has centered on the proper place of politics in the critical enterprise. 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0002 The Continuing “Americanization of Literary Studies” 27 3 Guillory’s argument that criticism should describe its separation from politics has already proved a lightning rod for reviewers of Professing Criticism. See, for example, the exchange between Bruce Robbins and Guillory in The Chronicle of Higher Education that begins with Robbins’s “John Guillory’s Non-Alignment Pact.” Guillory says that literary critics may certainly encompass politics, but criticism should not be political (or activist) as such. Parsing these distinctions may lead one’s eyes to cross. 3 Jonathan Arac cuts meaningfully through the blur when he says, pace Guillory, that “judgments made about literature and its study connect directly to the national culture and carry real political implication” (Arac, in this volume 91). Guillory is wary of any such connection. Any hope for solutions to the structural problems that vex literary study lie, for Guillory, in critical practice itself: we should “resist overestimation” and just keep engaging in the study of “literary artifacts” in an open and generous way, and hope for the best. He ends with the idea that we should value this “cultural transmission” for itself, because “society would be the poorer without it” (386). Faith in the long-term value of cultural transmission is pretty thin gruel for a humanities professor whose department is in danger of being eliminated, or for a young Ph.D. who’s teaching four classes a term as a contingent academic laborer, or a graduate student agitated about what the future may hold. But from Guillory’s high-altitude perspective, it’s the sensible course. From Guillory’s historical-sociological vantage point, the problems may be imagined as tectonic plates rubbing against each other slowly, with seismic changes resulting only from major events like wars or - though this remains to be seen - pandemics. This detached and disembodied overview, however rational it may be, does not effect reform where reform needs effecting. Movement from a dismal status quo can begin with point of view - and here we may turn back to Fluck for inspiration. Unlike Guillory’s, Fluck’s perspective remains gratifyingly earthbound. He looks at the activity of people doing professional work, for when we talk about professions, professionalism, or professionalization, we are necessarily talking about people doing work. There’s no such thing as a profession without workers. Fluck does not call for literary critics to refrain from politics. Instead, he suggests that the stridency with which they engage with politics has a venial and antisocial aspect. If people behave badly, we might look for ways to persuade them to behave differently and change their workplace. The laborers in that workplace demand the attention of anyone who looks at the academic profession. The academic job market had already tightened at the time that Fluck wrote “The Americanization of Literary Studies,” and the 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0002 28 Leonard Cassuto 4 A statistic that reveals just how unrepresentative the 1960s were in terms of academic economics and employment: During the 1960s alone, more faculty positions were created than in the entire 300+ year history of American higher ed leading up to that decade (Menand 452). 5 As Robbins points out in his recent review of Guillory’s opus, this logic is right out of the work of Pierre Bourdieu: “For Bourdieu, righteous politics talk was merely a jockeying for position, a competition for dominance within a given institution, the pursuit of personal and disciplinary self-interest. Crying politics is never anything more than a move in a game” (Robbins).- contingent academic labor market (that is, the adjunct labor pool) had swelled correspondingly. The situation has worsened since “Americanization” appeared, and it’s dramatically worse now, unrecovered from a collapse in tenured and tenure-track jobs resulting from the financial crisis of 2008. But in truth, American academics - including literary studies professionals - have been misunderstanding our own economics since the 1970s. After a decade of full employment amid widespread expansion of the higher-education sector in the 1960s, the industry contracted beginning in the 1970s. Instead of understanding that the 1960s were an anomaly, U.S. educators responded by waiting out what they believed would be a temporary lull before a presumed return to abundance. Fifty years later, we’re still waiting - but at least now there’s a growing understanding that we must address the reality faced by our students and not their grandparents. 4 Guillory says that the problem is not with the market but with the organ‐ ization of the enterprise. Practicing his own form of historical sociology in which people turn into dots moving pathetically to and fro when viewed from thousands of feet above, Guillory talks himself into an elegiac quietism. Fluck wants to save the enterprise - and I want to believe with him that we can. We should start with his observation that critical radicalism - political or otherwise - can bring you notice in what even then was a blighted academic job market. 5 Fluck describes a contest between two metaphors for humanistic practice. First there is the conversational circle, which features a search for common ground: this leads to linkage, that keyword of Fluck’s essay - and, I realize, my own. Second, there is the courtroom, where one view engages in a contest for survival against another, with the loser sentenced to banishment and exile. From where Fluck was sitting in 1990, the courtroom was winning. Its winning streak extends to the present. This victory leads to a tragedy of the critical commons that Fluck describes this way: “If I make a strong case in my own work for a particular group without considering the claims of others, I may appear to be selfish; if, however, I am assured that this is exactly what everybody else is doing out of a kind of epistemological inevitability, then I can do so with 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0002 The Continuing “Americanization of Literary Studies” 29 6 For more detailed discussion of these social trends, see, for example, Newfield, The Great Mistake. good conscience” (19). Thus does bad practice become enshrined, when wellintentioned actors see no alternative. For Fluck, scholarship should instead rely on “community and linkage” (20). We need “to know each other, to interact, and to link our concerns with others” (20). This view is sentimental, in the sense that Joanne Dobson described sentimentalism as life “in-relation” (267). It’s also moral in its generosity. “Even in conflict and dissent,” Fluck says, “one of the important cultural tools is to establish communication between the members of a community” (20). That’s Fluck’s humanistic creed. It’s a rational and emotional protest against a professionalization that erodes the bonds between people with common purpose. Today’s academic culture in the humanities does not address that common purpose very well. The status of the academic humanities in American public discourse has sunk, and philanthropic support has diminished with it (Cassuto and Weisbuch). Reaganism brought with it a widespread tendency to view higher education as a personal investment, not a public good, and this argument - which has persisted - made it easier to cut support to public colleges and universities. 6 The intramural response of humanists to these challenges has not been encouraging. Partly because of staffing cuts and partly because of old habits of being that die hard, departments have mostly failed to come together behind coherent missions to save themselves. The academic job market is both withered and stuck, and is adapting to changed realities only with difficulty. Even now, graduate students still get encouragement to prepare as microspecialists in an educational world that increasingly requires generalist expertise - a particularly cruel irony in the present context. Those who seek one of the tiny number of research faculty jobs encounter the same perceived need to stand out that Fluck identified decades ago. Here is a social media post written by a full professor with a lot of publications who is serving on their university’s tenure and promotion committee. I quote it not because it’s exceptional but because it’s such a typical observation of the brutal socialization of young scholars into the ranks: I see all the extraordinary things these junior faculty are doing. They make me realize that when I went up for tenure and promotion (just 9 years ago), by comparison, I had accomplished hardly anything and was just a nobody. It’s so humbling to be in the presence of this next generation. (Anonymous) 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0002 30 Leonard Cassuto 7 The same thing has been happening to the Colorado River. Years after Fluck described the lack of linkage between scholars at their work, one of the meliorative measures taken by the Modern Language Association has been the creation of a literal (though virtual) “MLA Commons” to promote sharing. It’s a salutary development and I trust it’s doing well, but its recent establishment serves to acknowledge the persistence of the problem that Fluck identified decades ago. In American studies, for example, the readerships of the flagship journals American Literary History and American Quarterly scarcely recognize each other now. And if you’re a graduate student, “American literature” and American studies” are paths that now diverge early. Put simply, professionalization and specialization drive the field now more than they ever did - at a time when humanists can least afford the divisions that they produce. So what should we do now? I’ve long believed that the only way we may successfully confront our present problems is to understand where they came from - that is, how we got here. In his still-indispensable 1965 book, The Emergence of the American University, Laurence R. Veysey describes the development of the American university through the continuing jockeying for power and influence of three missions, or points of view: research, utility, and what he calls “liberal culture” (roughly speaking, the liberal arts ideal). Writing at a time of unprecedented prosperity for academia, Veysey - who was a stubborn utopian at heart - was dismayed to see that instead of engaging with each other, the three points of view tended to retreat and separate from each other. Given sufficient acreage and rainfall, each camp retreated to its own corner and tended its own garden. As long as there were enough resources, the university could promote research, utility, and liberal arts education at the same time - and that’s still the model for the typical American research university. But this isn’t the 1960s, and acreage and rainfall are surely not plentiful. Climate change-related drought is surfacing long-ago sunk shipwrecks in the Mississippi River (Rojas). 7 The situation in academia is figuratively similar: there isn’t enough rain, and the academic resource base has turned sere. Without enough money to go around, the different sectors of the university compete for fundamental resources. In Veysey’s terms, we may say unequivocally that utility is winning the competition right now. Underperforming humanities departments are the biggest losers - and such a situation only encourages the sort of competitive “professionalization” in literary studies that Fluck rightly deplores. 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0002 The Continuing “Americanization of Literary Studies” 31 I want to extend this environmental metaphor in search of a way out of this, but first I turn to a proposal by Kathleen Fitzpatrick. In a formulation that recalls for me Fluck’s ideal of linkage, Fitzpatrick calls for a university that is centered on community and collaboration. “The university,” she says, “has the potential to model a more generous public sphere” (235). Fitzpatrick acknowledges that this change won’t be easy. The “inner logic” of professionalized specialization, Fluck says, lies in “market conditions,” and the neoliberal beast is a many-headed hydra. All of our higher-minded values are baked into a system that prizes individual achievement centered in published research. I often remember that I get more credit for writing an article about teaching or institutional service than I do for actually doing these things. Fitzpatrick knows that academics are unlikely to engage in “generous thinking” unless something changes - she says it will take a revolution, or in Thomas Kuhn’s terminology, a paradigm shift (194). But where would we find one? How can the public recover an active sense of higher education - especially the humanities, along with the liberal arts generally - as a public good? Nor is this simply a matter of persuading everyone else to believe that. We’re have the same problem ourselves. We inhabit a system of values in which we get more credit for publishing our research in than we do for teaching it to students. In the spirit of Fitzpatrick’s vision, how might we begin to think more collectively and communally about our own enterprise? Education centers on caretaking - that’s the real business we’re in. But as Fitzpatrick wisely points out, “focusing an institution or community around principles of care” is risky (209). I’m aware that I’ve expanded the field here. Fluck (and also Guillory) scrutinize the field of literary study, as practiced in the United States. I’m now taking in the larger territory of American higher education generally. That’s because the problem of fractured, unlinked community that Fluck identified in American literary study extends to higher education as a whole. Like Fluck - and Fitzpatrick - I believe in the power of committed community. And as a humanist, I believe in the power of rhetoric to enable change. I’m looking for a rhetoric that can dislodge the market-driven message that leads incoming freshman to believe that a humanities major will lead them to the unemployment line (even though there’s solid and easy-to-find data that suggests otherwise). More and more people think that literary study, and the rest of the humanities, are useless. This problem of perception was extant, though not as serious, when I first started thinking about the culture of higher education years ago. I noticed that in all of United States public policy, there was a single 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0002 32 Leonard Cassuto 8 Leopold elsewhere speaks of the importance of measures besides economic ones (247), a view which might reasonably be viewed as a hard sell in the United States, but perhaps less so to academics. example in which a rhetoric of caretaking overturned one of business. The field where that happened was environmentalism. Until relatively recently, the American environment was seen almost entirely in financial terms. Today, most people would agree that we are stewards of the land, and even the opponents of environmental measures are obliged to argue in terms of the dominant governing metaphor of caretaking. The environmental movement faces many obstacles at the moment, and I don’t want to be accused of unfounded optimism in the face of riverbed shipwrecks, but my point is that environmental rhetoric retains the power to guide the narrative. The rhetorical victory of environmentalism involved the imposition of a modern caretaking metaphor over a business one. That’s exactly what academia needs. The key concept for environmentalists was ecology, the idea that organisms live together in an interlocking equilibrium. Clearly, higher education would benefit from the same sort of awareness - because higher education exists in an ecosystem with the government, the tuition-paying middle class, and the businesses that hire our credentialed graduates. So how might we impose an ecological consciousness on higher education policy? I think that useful answers lie in the recent history of the American environmental movement. From the utilitarian thinking that prevailed at first, a rhetorical change took place during the first half of the twentieth century. That change signals the evolution of a philosophy of collective responsibility to the planet - it’s an ethic, which is simply a community-based way of thinking. Aldo Leopold articulated the environmental ethic in a classic book in 1949. “We abuse land,” he said, “because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect” (4). The breakthrough of ecology into policy came in the 1970s, fueled by the public debate catalyzed by Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, but that debate was made possible by Leopold - who was in turn responding to the arguments of an earlier generation. 8 Much of the landmark environmental legislation in the U.S. of the past three generations has been passed and renewed during Republican administrations, with a great initial burst during the Nixon administration (Wilderness Act, Endangered Species Preservation Act, Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act, National Environ‐ mental Preservation Act). The Environmental Protection Agency was also formed during the Nixon administration. Obviously this was a synergistic moment, but it didn’t arise out of nowhere. These were victories for ecological 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0002 The Continuing “Americanization of Literary Studies” 33 9 I first advanced this argument in The Graduate School Mess (226-228). 10 The first one was “We Gotta Get Out of this Place: Literary Criticism in the Academic Workplace.” consciousness, a sense that we live within a system that we need to take care of together. 9 The land ethic led to a triumph of the caretaking metaphor - followed by the assumption of collective responsibility for that caretaking. A higher education ethic needs to do the same. In particular, we should pay attention to the most important feature of an ethic: collective obligation. Leopold calls for “responsibility for the health of the land” (258). Reformers of American literary study, and of higher education writ large, have to build a similar collective responsibility. A higher education ethic would define a relation between the university and the community - and also within the university itself, from graduate students through faculty and administrators. There’s no consensus on that in the United States today, either outside universities or within them. Winfried Fluck seeks that community within American literary studies. Accordingly, he advises that we consider specialization as “an institutionalized mode of dealing with knowledge” rather than “a temporary research strategy” ( 11) so that we might avoid its anti-communal effects. Fluck’s call for a reformed professionalism ought to be an ethical imperative in a profession whose ideals (rooted more than a century ago in German ‘Wissenschaft’) are balanced by the practical need to do right by the young professionals we train. American literary studies is already “as a city on a hill,” visible to all. So let’s try to set a good example. Winny Fluck himself offers a model for how American literary studies might proceed. In Europe, Fluck points out, “a professor is expected to represent his or her field more broadly” than in the specialized world of American literary studies in the United States (12). Fluck’s amazing career demonstrates the rich rewards that come from doing that - and those rewards come from - and produce! - the linkage he values. For Fluck, linkage is the textual equivalent of community, where scholars talk to each other, as they talk to Fluck in this volume. This is my second response to Winny’s work. 10 For my own part, I can scarcely imagine a more educational or enjoyable form of intellectual community. 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0002 34 Leonard Cassuto Works Cited Anonymous, November, 2022. “Boycott of Israeli Academic Institutions.” American Studies Association. ASA. 4 Dec. 2014. 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Guillory, John. “How Scholars Read.” ADE Bulletin 146 (2008): 8-17. ---. Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organization of Literary Study. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022. Leopold, Aldo. “A Sand County Almanac.” A Sand County Almanac & Other Writings on Ecology and Conservation. New York: Library of America, 2013. Menand, Louis. The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021. Newfield, Christopher. The Great Mistake: How We Wrecked Public Universities and How We Can Fix Them. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016. Robbins, Bruce. “John Guillory’s Non-Alignment Pact: Is the Prominent Critic Stuck in the ‘90s - or the ‘60s? ” Chronicle of Higher Education. The Chronicle of Higher Education. 3 Feb. 2023. Web. 5 Mar. 2023. <https: / / www.chronicle.com/ article/ john-g uillorys-nonalignment-pact? cid2=gen_login_refresh&cid=gen_sign_in>. Rojas, Rick. “As Drought Drops Water Level in the Mississippi, Shipwrecks Surface and Worries Rise.” The New York Times. NYT. 3 Nov. 2022. Web. 5 Mar. 2023. <https: / / ww w.nytimes.com/ 2022/ 11/ 03/ us/ mississippi-river-drought.html>. Veysey, Laurence R. The Emergence of the American University. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1965. 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0002 The Continuing “Americanization of Literary Studies” 35