P hiliPP l öffler Introduction: Reading in the Age of Academic Literary Studies I. The History of Reading and the History of Literature The institutionality of literature has been at the center of literary-historical scholarship for a number of years now. 1 It still seems, however, that this interest has not produced full-fledged alternatives to the dominant practice of literary historiography. Standard works, such as the Norton and Heath anthologies, invite us to see the history of art and literature as a series of mediated responses to world history at large, unfolding in more or less linear time (from the Early Republic, say, to Postmodernism and beyond). The tradition invoked by these works goes back to early Romantic identity models following the “expressivist turn” and has been dominant in a variety of cultural and literary histories since the early nineteenth century. 2 While the expressive response model of literary history has been crucial to an important political turn in literary criticism (significant not least because it triggered 1 This interest is reflected in broad institutional histories, such as Richard Ohman’s English in America (1976), Gerald Graff’s Professing Literature (1987), John Guillory’s Cultural Capital (1993), and, most recently, Ted Underwood’s When Literary Periods Mattered (2013). But there are also a number of influential studies dedicated to particular historical periods and contexts of writings. Prominent examples would be Cathy Davidson’s Revolution and the Word (1986), Michael Warner’s The Letters of the Republic (1990), Janice Radway’s A Feeling for Books (1997), Nancy Glazener’s Reading for Realism (1997), James English’s The Economy of Prestige (2005), Mark McGurl’s The Program Era (2009), and Amy Hungerford’s Postmodern Belief (2010). 2 The “expressivist turn” describes a number of simultaneous efforts in late eighteenthcentury literary-historical discourse to define the value of art as a manifestation of distinct cultures rather than by the artwork’s proximity to a universal aesthetic or moral ideal. This tradition can be traced in a number of works in European intellectual culture, beginning with Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s sentimentalist conception of nature as a voice within, Johann Gottfried Herder’s notion of a folk culture, the literary nationalism of the Schlegel brothers, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s history of aesthetics. The transatlantic dimension of this debate is reflected prominently in a number of early nineteenth-century literary-philosophical movements in the US, among them the New England Transcendentalists around Ralph Waldo Emerson and the more conservative ‘School Room’ poets around Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and William Cullen Bryant. For a comprehensive discussion of the “expressivist turn” see Taylor, 368-390. For a more specifically American perspective on this debate and its intellectual contexts see Buell, 3-102. 2 P hiliPP l öffler important interventions into the literary canon debates), 3 it tends to obscure important questions about the different modes and values of literary production and the phenomenology of reading: What, for instance, do authors have to accomplish to become artistically relevant within the community of writers and readers they work in? How, for instance, is the economic success or failure of their books connected to their retroactive consecration as culturally significant objects? Where do such moments of consecration take place and how are they authorized? How important is the relationship between academic and non-academic gate-keeping institutions (e.g. book clubs, The New York Times Book Review, the Pulitzer Prize, Oprah Winfrey) for our understanding of what counts as valuable? In what ways have academic reading practices contributed to the emergence of artistic/ literary avant-gardes? How have they influenced debates about the proper uses of literature (for example, reading for hermeneutic meaning or a “politics” of form rather than for “enchantment,” cathartic pleasure, or therapeutic self-culture)? Finally, how can literary studies still legitimize its own professional practices in light of the revisionist shifts the field has undergone since the 1960s? A socio-institutional history of literature complements the linear time lines of traditional literary historiography with a spatial dimension of a literary field and its institutions. It thus allows for inquiries into the specific loci of literary production and its various scales of value (for example, avantgarde poetry vs. mass-marketable crime fiction, serious middle-brow fiction vs. academically consecrated standards of excellence). The present volume of essays is based on a broad understanding of literary institutionality and seeks to address in particular the impact of academic reading on twentiethcentury literary history. Central to all essays is the observation that the twentieth-century academicization of literary criticism in the US has solidified a hierarchy of higher and lower forms of readerly practice that effectively define the values and functions of the literary as such - both within and without the confines of the university. In other words: this collection of essays explores how US research universities were able to become central in classifying literatures and readerships according to a socially binding system of literary taste-sensibilities. The age of academic literary studies - alluded to by this volume’s title - may thus be considered to be shaped by the “culture of the school” (Guillory 1993, 37), a semi-autonomous taste-making formation whose tacit rules explain why some uses of literature and some types of literature come to seem right or wrong - or better or worse - than others. 4 In this sense, the present 3 For comprehensive accounts of these political turns see, for example, Radway 2002; Lauter; Fluck 2009, and Fluck’s contribution to this volume. 4 Guillory’s terminology combines Marxist materialist categories with a Bourdieuderived sociology of art, and it is useful in particular to differentiate historically and institutionally the fields in which particular literary texts become valuable while others fade into oblivion. As all of the contributions to this volume maintain, however, such value hierarchies reflect varying degrees of institutional prestige and historically specific conceptions of literary craft, rather than universalist ideals of literary greatness or truth. Introduction 3 volume investigates the proliferation of different reading and writing practices in the US not primarily as direct results of key events and transitions in world history (for example, the Cold War, the Civil Rights movement, Vietnam) but in conjunction with twentieth-century shifts in third-level education and literary institutions - the spread of academic literary studies, the growing influence of literary theory and criticism since the 1960s, the growth of college-educated readerships, and the institutionalization of universitybased networks of patronage. 5 Such institutionalized spaces and practices may of course also reflect broader cultural movements and historical shifts. The “humanities revolution” (Menand 2010, 59-92) of the postwar decades was in fact enabled in large parts by the rapidly expanding university system and corresponding structural and political changes in the US educational system between the 1940s and 1960s (for example, the G.I. Bill in 1944, Brown vs. Board of Education in 1954, the Higher Education Act in 1965). Yet, as Guillory cautions, what “is transmitted by the school, is, to be sure, a kind of culture; but it is the culture of the school.” The school projects “an imaginary cultural unity never actually coincident with the culture of the nation-state” (38). The essays in this volume take seriously this notion of institutional semi-autonomy in order to show how the manifest differences between reading cultures today relate to specific fields of practices or social locations, and how claims about the constituents of legitimate reading translate into claims about cultural authority, that is, about what sort of embodied practice, affective economy, or taste is associated with society’s cultural center. II. Professional Reading and the Rise of Academic Literary Criticism The extension of the university and the emergence of a school culture in the postwar period have redefined the value of reading as a social practice; the growing influence of academic reading communities has raised questions not only about the purpose of reading, but also about how we read, and what we should or should not read. These distinctions of course did not emerge for the first time in the twentieth century. Literary competence has been talked about in the terms of taste acquisition for centuries. In the US, debates about the most appropriate uses of literature arose in the late eighteenth century as the result of two entwined developments: the professionalization of literature and the rise of literary nationalism. 6 Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries literary value was then “largely defined within the high-cultural networks of a public sphere (connecting 5 Mark McGurl’s account of the rise of creative writing in the postwar university (“Planet MFA”) presents one of the most nuanced discussions of how academy-based networks of patronage have shaped the literary landscapes of the postwar decades in the US and beyond. See in particular Part I of McGurl’s The Program Era, 127-181. 6 For very useful accounts of early literary professionalism see Charvat 3-48; Lanzendörfer 9-32; Evelev 1-21; Leypoldt “Aesthetic Specialists”. 4 P hiliPP l öffler academies, museums, art and music associations, and learned societies with various literary establishments).” 7 The rise of academic English Studies in the twentieth century shifted the currencies of literary value from a high-cultural public sphere towards university-based scholarly criticism, without, however, abandoning the value-based stratification of different reading practices. The first larger set of questions this special issue aims to address concerns institutional shifts and practices within the university itself: How do literary scholars differ from other people when they read? What exactly qualifies as scholarly reading? Why is reading in a classroom different from reading at the beach? How does reading the late work of James Joyce compare to reading the final Harry Potter novel? Underlying these questions is the central distinction between professional readers, on the one hand, and lay readers, on the other, that is, between those who are paid for reading and do so in a more serious fashion, and those who might have a number of non-professional uses for texts: reading for therapy, for pleasure, for entertainment, for instruction, or for edification. Historically, academic literary criticism gained authority in the wake of controversies between so-called scholars and critics in the first half of the twentieth century. 8 As Timothy Aubry proposes in his essay “The Discipline of Feeling,” the rise of the New Critics in the 1920s and 1930s must be viewed as a first serious attempt to disentangle literature as an autonomous field from the hegemony of science, and to establish criticism as a standardized language to approach the literary artwork. Aubry shows how the New Critics “devised a series of systematic principles and critical procedures aimed at lending rigor to the practice of criticism,” and thus countering the historical and biographical studies of nineteenth-century literary scholars. Merve Emre expands on Aubry’s historical perspective by discussing F.O. Matthiessen’s memoir From the Heart of Europe to trace the transatlantic outreach of American literary criticism. Her essay “Fulbright Love” discusses how English Departments and study abroad programs, such as Fulbright, helped to institutionalize a mostly Whitman-based notion of literary Americanness designed “to rescue Eastern European civilization from the damage done to it by World War II.” Emre emphasizes the transnational dimension of academic literary criticism at mid-century, contextualizing the ideological uses of critical discourse at the dawn of the Cold War period. 7 Leypoldt, “Shifting Meridians” 769. The most influential study on the rise of an autonomous public sphere, emerging in the early eighteenth century and then significantly shaping nineteenth-century intellectual culture in the West, has been Jürgen Habermas’ The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962). For the connection between the rising public sphere, early professionalized print cultures, and reading in the US see Warner 1-33; Dowling 1-16. 8 For the historical context of this debate see Graff, 121-144, and Timothy Aubry’s contribution to this volume. Introduction 5 III. The Impact of Literary Theory Even though debates about the functions of academic literary criticism began in the early twentieth century, the real breakthrough of academic reading occurred with the rise of literary theory in the 1960s and 1970s and the subsequent ‘Americanization’ of continental critical theory at Yale and Berkeley. 9 Journals, such as New Literary History (1969), Diacritics (1971), Critical Inquiry (1974), Semiotexte (1974), Glyph (1978), and Representations (1983), promoted this shift in exemplary fashion. The “theory journal” itself became a distinct instrument for structuring an expanding Humanities market on the basis of verifiable, quality-based standards of academic practice. 10 The vision of objectified academic excellence reflected by the rise of the “theory journal” generated a variety of different reading postures, each of which endowed with higher and lower values in the academic reading world - suspicious reading vs. naïve reading, reading for form in contrast to reading for content, reading with a critical distance as opposed to reading with affective interest. The corresponding uses of literature could in turn be judged on the basis of the consequent distinction between professional and lay readers. In other words: the twentieth-century university enabled the production of literary sense-making categories designed to translate the mere intuition that some reading practices are more valuable than others as the objectified expression of a particular professional identity: that of the academic literary critic. And in as much as academic literary criticism has become an increasingly influential cultural practice throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the act of reading itself, that is, the question of what happens when we read has been examined from a growing number of different theoretical and historical perspectives (from book history and sociology to phenomenology and reader-response studies to the more recent neuro-scientific models and digital technologies). The contributions of Dustin Breitenwischer, Paul Armstrong, and Amy Hungerford offer three in-depth studies that all attest to the gradual diversification of literary theory since the 1970s. Breitenwischer argues for the particularity of aesthetic experiences in a discussion of what he calls “reading in-between.” Following the literary anthropology of Wolfgang Iser, Breitenwischer 9 We may think here of the 1966 Humanities conference (“Critical Languages and the Science of Man”) at Johns Hopkins as a crucial watershed in the history of academic reading. The 1966 conference brought leading European intellectuals, such as Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, and Tzvetan Todorov, to the US, and thus helped to introduce central paradigms of the Structuralist movement into US academic literary and cultural theory. The emergence of the Yale critics and, later, the New Historicists at Berkeley may be read as institutionally mediated responses to the event. The papers of the Johns Hopkins event in addition with prefatory remarks about the significance of the event were published by Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato in 1971 under the title The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man. See especially the opening chapter “In-between - 1971.” 10 For a discussion of this shift in the publication system see Jeffrey J. Williams’ “The Rise of the Theory Journal.” 6 P hiliPP l öffler defines the aesthetic as an infinitely open space that emerges between and in fact incorporates readers and texts. Reading, for Breitenwischer, is the “raison d’ être of perception as such. It is a general mode of sense-making that treats the aesthetic as a paradigmatic play space.” Armstrong’s “How Historical is Reading” discusses a broad array of neuro-scientific approaches to reading that he contrasts with contextualist models used by book historians and literary sociologists and phenomenological models in the wake of Husserl. Unlike Breitenwischer, Armstrong questions the singularity of the aesthetic, proposing that scholars will have to take seriously and combine a number of traditionally distinct theoretical perspectives to provide a full account of what reading really means. Aesthetic experiences “may feel ‘special,’” as he claims, while also insisting that “we read Shakespeare with the same cortical functions and anatomy that supported hunting and gathering on the African savannah.” Amy Hungerford’s essay “GPS Historicism,” finally, offers a foray into the world of digital literatures, exploring what it means when a (digital) “novel knows where you are standing while you read it” and what the consequences of that type of knowledge could be for the act of reading literature. Using the digital novel The Silent History as her case study, Hungerford claims that the new reading practices generated by the new medium will have a dramatic effect on the ways we conceive of literary history, and she also ponders the question what it means when writing a novel requires not only artistic talent but also technical skill. An obvious if often disregarded consequence of academic reading concerns the business of organizing literary history according to genres and periods. Academically sanctioned reading practices go hand in hand with relatively specific expectations about literature. When we read we expect novels, poems, dramatic texts, or essays to function in particular ways. Teaching and studying literature in the university class-room standardizes these expectations in the sense of establishing formalized genre conventions and corresponding literary periods or movements. Classes on the ‘Postmodernist Novel,’ for example, ‘The Elizabethan Sonnet,’ or ‘The Nineteenth-Century Short Story’ provide assumptions about what these texts should entail, what they are supposed to look like, and what their message should be. Such labels, in short, reflect how scholars read as they organize literary history according to periods, genres, styles, and movements. This point is taken up in Philipp Löffler’s essay “Identity Fiction and the Rise of Literary Theory.” His essay shows that the political underpinnings of much minority writing in the wake of the Civil Rights movement gained momentum during the 1970s and 1980s primarily in conjunction with university-based debates about the function of literary theory, particularly reader-response models and deconstruction. The nomenclatures of literary periodization do not simply reflect a natural historical system of artistic forms. Rather, they are acquired and rehearsed within the institutional structures of modern English Departments, devised to authorize the requirements of curricula and standardized exam procedures. Introduction 7 IV. Readerships and Canons These intra-systemic mechanisms are of course not completely detached from the world at large. As academic reading has defined professional literary study it has at the same time also influenced other forms of reading that are located beyond the frameworks of the academy (e.g. reading crime fiction on your daily commute to work, reading the latest John Irving on the beach in your summer vacation, reading holocaust memoirs as a form of moral education). Amy Blair’s essay “Tasting and Testing Books” provides a case in point, discussing how early-twentieth-century women’s magazines in the US, such as Good Housekeeping, became central institutions for establishing a middle-class literary canon in contrast or in opposition to the academic elitism practiced by the New Critics at around the same time. As Blair’s essay underlines, the value of particular reading practices are defined by their perceived proximity to or distance from centers of cultural authority, such as the university - regardless of how trivial or melodramatic the purposes of reading are. And in that sense, the professional/ lay distinction has become crucial for creating group coherence among readers not just within but also outside of the university. Christa Buschendorf’s essay “Reading Matters” continues Blair’s discussion by examining how Afro-Americans appropriated a white literary canon in order to gain cultural recognition and to fight the constraints of a racially segregated intellectual field. In five case studies (Richard Wright, Maya Angelou, Ishmael Reed, Edgar Wideman, and Gloria Naylor), Buschendorf explores the uses of William Shakespeare as a politically and culturally significant object of reading, examining how the “acquisition of literary taste in the black writer’s intellectual socialization as well as the subsequent canon debates are part of a necessarily relational process that is always already referring to the white dominant culture.” The question here is of course not only whether there can be a canon of books that everyone or only a few should read. Even more importantly, the question of what people read has to do with the cultural authority that comes with some readers’ memberships of specific groups. Some people like to be caught reading high theory; others do not care about their public appearance as readers. Some find it intellectually ‘unhealthy’ to read genre fiction, even if they sometimes like it, and then some do not read at all, while yet others - the “reading class” - spend most of their free time reading. 11 What we read and how we read indicates our audience membership, and each audience requires different readerly commitments. The mechanisms that produce different reading audiences and their membership requirements are informed directly by the transmission of values by central cultural and social institutions. The ways in which these mechanisms work are the subject of Wendy Griswold and Hannah Wohl’s contribution “Evangelists of Culture.” The authors illustrate the “outreach efforts” of the reading class in order to convert people to reading. Based on broad sociological data of US readerships, the 11 Cf. Griswold 36-69. 8 P hiliPP l öffler essay shows that while the university has been central within the “front line of culture,” it is also correlated with a network of other socially influential taste-making institutions (for example, schools, book clubs, public libraries) that determine how and what people read. V. Gate-Keeping Institutions, Charisma, Conversion One way of approaching the problem of distinguishing reader groups, their readerly commitments, and their social locations is to look at the relationship between academic and non-academic gate-keeping institutions. The reading lists of English Departments tend to feature consecrated, prizewinning fiction (the Booker Prize or the Nobel prize would be important indicators), which makes for a different list of books than we would find on, for example, the New York Times Book Review. How can we account for these differences? At first sight, these differences seem to indicate different uses of literature and corresponding practices of reading that are simply not compatible. Therapeutic reading à la Oprah Winfrey may be far away from advanced theory seminars in graduate schools, and yet there are popular examples - we may think of Toni Morrison, Philip Roth, or Jonathan Franzen - where such distinctions become conspicuously blurry and several audiences or disciplines seem to overlap. Novels such as Paradise and The Corrections (and obviously many more) conjoin several reading worlds and their incorporated practices despite their more obvious institutional and social disparity. 12 Günter Leypoldt’s discussion of the “Oprah Effect” - based on the Princeton-Episode of Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club - presents a conspicuous example. Leypoldt reveals how one and the same novel (or in fact any art work) can attain “higher” and “lower” bodies depending on the social location of its audience and the relevant institutions for promoting the novel’s or artwork’s use. His essay thus illustrates where and under what circumstances oppositions between distinct audiences collapse and where such moments of collapse create new and often unlikely readerly alliances. A similar phenomenon is explored in Jan Stievermann and Daniel Silliman’s “Reading the Supernatural in Contemporary Christian and Ethnic Fiction.” The authors show how the appropriation of the supernatural helps to solidify the structures of two reader communities that would seem hardly compatible at first sight: that of popular evangelical fiction and that of postwar and contemporary ethnic minority fiction. The supernatural informs various uses of literature at the same time, oscillating between different reading goals (for example, religious conversion vs. ethnic identity formation) and different reading institutions (for example white Christian middle class audiences vs. ethnically and religiously diverse university class rooms). Whereas the critical acclaim for ethnic fantastic literature - and the rather mixed critical reception of evangelical fiction - may be reduced to the 12 For instructive discussions of this phenomenon see Leypoldt’s essay in this volume and Aubry 2006. Introduction 9 question of literary quality, Silliman and Stievermann suggest a different explanation: “The networks of institutions that produce and support these texts, and establish the interpretive communities that define them, seem more important in shaping the critical responses of academics than any actual textual features.” VI. The Politics of Reading A final set of questions explored by the contributors to this volume concerns the political dimension that some reading practices may or may not take on. Reading and writing will always be embedded within larger social and political environments, without, however, simply reproducing them. In order to illustrate the complex relation between politics, on the one hand, and the logic of readerly discourses, on the other, this book also looks at the invention of a “politics” or “ethics of reading” with a particular focus on the gradual politicization of the academy since the 1960s. Winfried Fluck’s essay “Shadow Aesthetics” discusses this phenomenon in exemplary fashion. Fluck examines three major shifts in the institutional history of American studies since the 1940s, revealing that the field has been in perpetual need to authorize its existence from within its very own disciplinary confines - sometimes in correspondence with and sometimes in opposition to a politically pervasive Zeitgeist. Insisting on the distinctly aesthetic uses of the literary artwork as a “de-pragmatized object,” Fluck’s essay highlights a set of questions that are central to this special issue in general: How is what we do within academic reading circles related to - or relevant to - what we do beyond them? Is there a connection between the politically inspired liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s (e.g. Civil Rights, The Free Speech Movement, Gay Liberation after Stonewall) and, for instance, the institutionalization of deconstruction as a critical paradigm? 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