What is now called “literature” was born in the eighteenth century. Before then there was writing, but no authors; printed texts, but no publishing. For literature is not a thing like a chair, the essence of which can be wrapped up for all time in a tidy formula—the imitation of human action, the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings, the criticism of life—but is instead a social practice, undertaken at a distinct time and in a distinct place, requiring certain institutional arrangements for its support. And the institutions that sustain literature in our day have all arisen since the Enlightenment. The image of the artist as a special person, a creative individual devoted to a sacred calling, exempt from the cash nexus, whose one obligation is to realize his inner vision—this is merely the ideology of romanticism and modernism. It gives literature the appearance of belonging to an autonomous, elevated sphere of human life, but in reality literature is saggingly dependent upon such aspects of modern society as high literacy rates, copyright law, the taboo against plagiarism, dictionaries with prescriptions on usage, research libraries, criticism, scholarship, and the university curriculum. It would be a mistake to conceive of literature as having an existence apart from such things.

Something like this is the intellectual background to Professor Alvin Kernan’s new book, The Death of Literature. It is a view familiar to anyone who has read much literary scholarship in recent years. Although Kernan calls his book “a piece