NEWS FLASH! In the last days of the last year of the twentieth
century, The New York Review of Books has made an amazing and
horrifying discovery: that the teaching of literature in our
university English departments is in deep—well, let us say trouble.
Just imagine! So grave has the situation now suddenly been
discovered to be by the New York Review’s editors that they have
thrown all caution to the winds and actually published an article in
their issue of November 4 that poses the question: “What does it all
mean? Should the teaching of English be given a decent burial, or is
there life in it yet?” While the answer to this question remains
moot, both in the article and in the academy itself, its
author—
Andrew Delbanco, the Julian Clarence Levi Professor of the
Humanities at Columbia University—doesn’t
hesitate, except in
one important regard, to describe the wounds that have been
inflicted on the patient he has been called upon to attend under
emergency conditions.

What now passes for the teaching of literature in our university
English departments, writes Professor Delbanco, “has come to reflect
some of the worst aspects of our culture: obsessing about sex,
posturing about real social inequities while leaving them
unaddressed, and participating with gusto in the love/hate cult of
celebrities.” And further:
“In what is perhaps the largest irony of all, the teaching of English
has been penetrated, even saturated, by the market mentality it
decries. The theory factory (yesterday’s theory is deficient,
today’s is new and improved) has become expert in planned
obsolescence.”
There is even a good word for Lionel Trilling in this article, and a
hint, quickly balanced by equivocation,
that some of the new fields
of study in the English departments—“feminist, gay and lesbian, and
postcolonial studies, the New Historicism … and, most recently,
‘eco-criticism’”—might just not be as wonderful as they have been
claimed to be.

Let us acknowledge, then, that there is much that is excellent in
Professor Delbanco’s article, which is called “The Decline and Fall
of Literature” and reviews a slew of recent publications on the
subject. Yet it must also be said that there is not much in the
article that will be new to readers of
The New Criterion. It was in
our issue of December 1983, after all, that we published René
Wellek’s essay “Destroying Literary Studies,” which sounded the
alarm about the very developments that have now brought the study of
literature in our universities to the brink of extinction. From his
position as a scholar in comparative literature at Yale University,
Professor Wellek understood exactly what was at stake:

Today [the] whole edifice of literary study has come under an attack
that is not merely the normal criticism of certain aspects of a
changing discipline but an attempt to destroy literary studies from
the inside. The attempt seems to have succeeded in certain academic
circles; it has enlisted the support of a number of journals and has
affected many students, apparently all over the country. It has
hardly dislodged or even modified up till now the practice of the
vast majority of teachers and students of literature. But it has had
considerable publicity and, if it should be generally effective and
find many adherents among the younger generation, may spell the
breakdown or even the abolition of all traditional literary
scholarship and teaching.

For issuing this warning, René Wellek was denounced by the then
president of the Modern Language Association, Professor Helen
Vendler, as an “old-fogey”—so was another eminent literary scholar,
W. Jackson Bate—as the rush to complete “the breakdown or even
the abolition of all traditional literary scholarship and teaching”
proceeded on its merry, nihilistic course.

Why was it left to a few conservative writers—our own Roger
Kimball, author of Tenured Radicals, prominently among
them
—to resist this destructive course, which began in the
literature departments of the universities and soon spread to
virtually every branch of the humanities and even into the law
schools? The truth is, the liberals both in and out of the
universities felt obliged to lend support to this anti-literary,
anti-humanistic, anti-social cultural movement because it was
correctly seen to be a coefficient of the radical counterculture of
the late 1960s and 1970s. To take up a position against
the
campaign to “deconstruct” the legacy of Western civilization was
tantamount to declaring oneself to be of a conservative turn of
mind, and, in the universities in the aftermath of the 1960s
counterculture, that meant professional suicide in all but very
exceptional circumstances. It is because Professor Delbanco could
not bring himself to confront the patently political character of
this assault on literary study
that his
article on “The Decline and Fall of Literature” remains a flawed
and, in some respects, an even cowardly critique. It is also
remarkably ungenerous, if not actually unforgiving, in its refusal
to acknowledge that, until recently, it was largely left to writers
outside the academy to sound the alarm about a development he new
regards as dire. But had he openly acknowledged these conservative
precursors, would The New York Review have published Professor
Delbanco’s article? We doubt it. Still, though the hour is late and
the patient barely breathing, we welcome even this flawed attempt to
set the record straight.