A few months ago I heard the president of a major university defend the humanities. He praised the profundity of the West’s great thinkers, the civilizing effect of major poets and novelists, and the aesthetic delight afforded by masterpieces. I kept asking myself: How can he lie like that?
As the president well knew, this description of the humanities has provoked derision—and a lot worse—for the past three decades. In English departments, it is the literary equivalent of creationism. Instead, we are told, there is no such thing as intrinsic literary greatness, there are only works called great because they serve oppressive elites (not including college professors). I began to notice that academics use one description of the humanities with their colleagues while gulling the public with another.
If English professors don’t believe in great literature, why should students? If the classics are no more important than “any artifact or practice,” why single them out for study?
In his profound and crisply written new book, James Seaton dwells on the highly influential Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Its editors paraphrase a key tenet of the dominant movement called “cultural studies,” which, having generated numerous subdisciplines—working-class studies, whiteness studies, environmental studies, and several more—has set the critical agenda:
Literary texts, like other artworks, are neither more nor less important that any other cultural artifact or practice. Keeping the emphasis on how cultural meanings are produced, circulated, and consumed, the investigator will focus on art
