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The desire called Cultural Studies is perhaps best approached politically and socially, as the project to constitute a “historic bloc,” rather than theoretically, as the floor plan for a new discipline.

—Fredric Jameson, “On Cultural Studies”

In the past decade, cultural studies has named a desire, a desire Fredric Jameson rightly links to the aspirations of populist intellectuals and the Utopian hopes of the Left. Yet cultural studies has also been presented more “theoretically” (or prosaically) precisely as the floor plan for a new discipline—a transdisciplinary or antidisciplinary discipline that promises to remake the humanities and redraw or erase the traditional boundaries between academic fields. What is arguably the most striking feature of cultural studies in the contemporary landscape, however, is the role it has played in the collective disciplinary imaginary of literary studies: in the latter half of the 1990s, the project called cultural studies has come to name not only a desire but also, and to the same extent, a pervasive fear.

The fear is a fear of dissolution, dissolution of the boundaries, the identity, the quidditas of literary study. After all, cultural studies, according to its own most common self-representations, has neither a methodology nor an object to call its own. It is quite possible, then, to understand the advent of cultural studies in literary studies as the amorphous outcome of three decades of intellectual debate in the field: as the discipline’s notion of “text” expanded to cover a variety of materials formerly considered nonliterary or extraliterary, and as the discipline’s methodologies increased in the number and variety of what once were called “extrinsic” approaches to literature, English departments have become places where a great variety of cultural texts are studied with a host of intellectual tools borrowed and modified from neighboring disciplines like history, philosophy, and anthropology. Its borders permeable on all sides, English has become an intellectual locus where people can study the text of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight from a Christian perspective, the text of the O. J. trial from a Foucauldian perspective, and the text of the Treaty of Versailles from a Marxist perspective. Appropriately enough, while cultural studies is hailed in some quarters as the means by which literary study can intervene in the social world of power, hegemony, and human affairs, cultural studies is decried in other quarters as the means by which a new generation of scholars will eventually eradicate whatever remains distinctive and “literary” about literary study.

In the pages that follow, I will not try to determine, once and for all, the correct formula by which English departments can blend the intrinsic with the extrinsic, the literary with the nonliterary, to greatest advantage. But I think it is a mistake to treat the prospect of cultural studies as a zerosum game, as if scholars and students cannot spend their time and energy analyzing the social ramifications of a text unless they agree to neglect the text’s formal and generic properties. The extent to which English departments incorporate the concerns of cultural studies will be the extent to which English departments institutionalize a mode of reading that asks after the production, reception, and social effectivity of texts; but the extent to which cultural studies becomes a mode of reading in literary study (as opposed to, say, a mode of reading in mass media and communications) will, conversely, be the extent to which cultural studies foregrounds the rhetorical operations of literature. It is entirely possible, in other words, to have your literature and your cultural studies too, if your literary study is cultural enough and your cultural studies is literary enough.

Those of my colleagues who fear that cultural studies will replace rather than enrich literary study, by contrast, are skeptical about precisely this point. As William Cain has recently charged, the arrival of new methodologies inevitably entails intellectual trade-offs, such that what we gain in the study of “culture” we must lose in the study of “literature”:

The Modern Language Association keeps insisting that the swerve toward cultural studies has not led to the displacement of this kind of close reading. But if you talk to teachers, it becomes evident that, in order to keep up with trends in cultural studies, they are cutting back on the time given to writers and books that students should be discovering and learning how to read. (B4)

Cain’s formulation contains its conclusions, of course: on the one hand, we have writers and books students should learn to read, and on the other hand we have “trends” in cultural studies. To the first we must do justice; with the second we are merely “keeping up.” This pretty much closes out the possibility that Stuart Hall, Eric Lott, or Janice Radway might qualify under both headings, as theorists in cultural studies whom students should discover and learn how to read. But as we shall see, Cain is far from alone in understanding the field in this way; and because our field is made up, in part, precisely by understandings of our field, we cannot chart the present and future of literary study unless we attend to why it is that cultural studies names both a desire and a fear.

Disciplines in the modern languages, in my view, should always be home to a variety of methodologies that ask what texts mean as well as how texts mean.¹ I am happiest, as a critic and as a reader, when I am learning how these two concerns are mutually illuminating—how the formal properties of a text are part of the work that text does in the world, and how its work in the world is enabled or conditioned by our understanding of its properties. But I am not narrowly prescriptive when it comes to asking what kindof work English departments themselves might do in the world. I believe there are any number of ways to introduce students to the demands and delights of close textual study, and it is of little concern to me whether our students start by reading Wordsworth and work their way to deconstructions of contemporary representations of race, or start by analyzing Madonna videos and work their way to an understanding of the Romantic crisis lyric. Accordingly, I do not lose much sleep worrying about whether my students (graduate or undergraduate) will carry on the work of literary study in the way I like most to see that work done. Nonetheless, it is clear to me that our disciplinary desires and fears are driven as much by our projections of the future as by our assessments of the present. The controversy over cultural studies is thus part of a more general crisis of reproduction in the modern languages—a crisis whose occasion is the question of whether there is any useful social purpose served either by literary study, narrowly conceived, or by cultural studies, broadly conceived.

A crisis of reproduction? Doesn’t that sound awfully melodramatic? Perhaps things are at bottom much simpler than that; perhaps it’s merely that many of our field’s major theorists, from Frank Lentricchia to Wendy Steiner to Edward Said, have rightly dissociated themselves from the excesses of “politicized” literary study and turned our attention once again to art, to beauty, to the purposive purposelessness of the play of forms. Is there really any reason to call this the occasion of yet another “crisis,” particularly in a field that always thinks of itself in terms of crises?

I believe there is; I think there’s more going on here than just a return to art, and I think we can begin to understand what it is if we attend to a certain generational anxiety that defines contemporary fears of cultural studies. The figure to which I want tocall attention (and on whom I hope to keep your attention for the remainder of this book) is the figure of the graduate student: here, the figure of the graduate student who no longer knows—or, worse, no longer desires to know—what might be “literary” about literary study.

William Cain’s account of the field depends heavily on just this figure:

Part of the problem is that the graduate students who become our faculty members are not prepared to teach close reading. They have not learned the skills as undergraduates and, unfortunately, no one in graduate school has encouraged them to make up for their lack. I scan hundreds of transcripts when we make faculty appointments, and they reveal a numbing non-literary sameness—a compilation of graduate literature courses that are really courses in sociology, media, postcolonial politics, and the like. Courses on sexuality are everywhere. But I rarely detect courses on the literary subjects that graduate students might eventually teach in classes of their own. (B4)

And his conclusion is as sweeping as it is stark: “When a graduate student leaves the university with a Ph.D., he or she has little idea of what it means to read a text carefully or how to convey to students the skills needed to perform this activity. Nor is he or she prepared to make the choices required when designing courses and curricula for undergraduates” (B4–B5).

It is tempting to surmise that Cain’s department of English at Wellesley College must have done some truly unfortunate hiring in the past few years, but similar reports up and down both coasts convince me that the phenomenon is not confined to Wellesley. From one prestigious, public eastern university comes the report that graduate students now study queer theory more than any other department “specialization” from another prestigious, public western university comes the report of a department riven between people who want to jettison literature from the curriculum and people who want to jettison everything but literature. And from the University of Washington comes the following report from Ross Posnock:

My work and teaching blend literary criticism and intellectual history in an English department where the ideology of cultural studies, as described by Jameson, clearly has enthralled the majority of graduate students. In English departments the embarrassed, defensive status of the intellectual is matched by the low repute of literature (indeed of the aesthetic itself) and of those who dare construe their job as primarily devoted to its internal explication and external contextualization.

In the postmodern regime of English studies the intellectual, literature, the aesthetic, intellectual history are all held under suspicion on grounds of complicity with the enemy, which includes various instruments of white male power—universalism, cosmopolitanism, elitism. (18–19)

It would seem, then, that the students invoked by Posnock are precisely the graduate students who apply for tenure-track jobs at Wellesley: disdaining literature and those who teach it, they nonetheless seek jobs in departments of English precisely in order to liberate English from literature, and to offer ill-conceived and poorly designed courses on cross-dressing, Chicana/o graffiti, Disney World, and the politics of postcolonial poststructuralism.

I do not deny that literary studies are in need of defense, and I do not deny that there are some departments of English that house and foster all the sins Posnock and Cain enumerate. But I do want to look more closely at what these defenses of literary study are in fact defending; as I will show when I discuss the introduction to George Levine’s important edited collection, Aesthetics and Ideology, there remains a profound ambivalence, even among defenders of the literary and the aesthetic, as to whether “the aesthetic” is important because of the uses it serves in legitimating a domain for literary criticism, or because it serves no use whatsoever. Before I discuss Levine’s introduction to Aesthetics and Ideology, though, I’d first like to file a contrary local report on the state of the discipline, just for the record.

At the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, we have done a fair amount of hiring after a few years of severe budgetary constraints; we have hired Ph.D.s from a wide variety of institutions, in a wide variety of fields from medieval literature to queer theory. I hope I will not flatter my junior colleagues unduly if I insist, contra Cain, that every single one of our recent hires knows how to read a text carefully, and almost every single one of those hires has been extremely successful in the classroom; every semester, the Illinois student newspaper publishes the names of faculty and graduate students who receive particularly strong course evaluations, and since 1990 the list from English has included almost every junior faculty member we’ve hired. They must be doing something right, surely—and because our junior faculty are reviewed by their senior peers every year, I happen to know that they’re quite capable of designing courses and curricula on their own. I mention this not to brag about our good fortune, however; I mention it because even though our department has fared very well in hiring smart theorists who are also good teachers, some of my senior colleagues nevertheless perceive a disjunction between theory and pedagogy, and worry accordingly that the recent “drift” of the department has not been good for undergraduate education. If William Cain’s department is haunted by fears that it is no longer possible to hire a Ph.D. in English who’s a good reader, then, in a much milder manner, so is mine—even though we have no younger faculty who would actually justify this fear.

In my department, in other words, this fear cannot be gauged by measuring the level of happiness or discontent with regard to actually existing junior faculty; it is too nebulous to be focused on any individual person—until we come across that one job candidatewho reads poetry for the “cultural text” but doesn’t know much about prosody, that one post-something theorist whose campus-visit presentation was difficult to understand. Then the discussion begins, and people wonder what other Ph.D. programs must be thinking these days, and how will our undergraduates ever be able to learn from these incomprehensible young turks, and what will become of literary study once we titans no longer roam the earth . . . And after a while I begin to wonder, how long have people harbored these fears, waiting for them to find an object? For ten years the department hires one good undergraduate teacher after another, and most of them compose syllabi full of works of literature (as opposed to, say, videos of the O. J. trial), which they train undergraduates to read closely, and now we have an anti-theory backlash? Apparently a very few of my colleagues had been waiting a long time to vent their fears about the horrible things that are happening to the profession, but hadn’t yet found the chance.

Usually these fears circulate around hiring and tenure, and they are tied as well to the question of whether new hires, in a research university, should be driven by the needs of the undergraduate curriculum (a Miltonist hired for a Miltonist retired) or by the research developments in theory and criticism (a queer theorist hired for an Augustan scholar retired). But on one occasion in the spring of 1994, when the department was charged with rewriting its bylaws (a job I regarded, at the time, as the intellectual equivalent of cleaning out the basement), we suddenly found ourselves in the midst of a substantive discussion over the content of our self-description: was it fair, we wondered, to describe ourselves as offering instruction in English and American literature, or should we say “literature in English,” even though we offer so few courses outside the Anglo-American specsrum? Should we say “literature and criticism” or “literature, criticism, and interpretive theory”? How should we describe our offerings in film? And last but first, should we amend “literary studies” to “literary and cultural studies,” and if so, how shouldwe recognize cultural studies in the curriculum?

These questions become all the more urgent when we turn to graduate study, where, indeed, Illinois has seen a good deal of variety in recent dissertations, and a great deal of speculation about the relation between dissertation topics and jobs. As I’ll explain in more detail in chapter 4, the job market is such that graduate students feel compelled to write extremely specialized dissertations even as they will likely be asked, if and when they get a job, to teach fairly general, unspecialized courses. But even among our graduate students whose work is most specialized and/or most inflected by critical theory, Illinois dissertations have been (like the popular T-shirts) largely literary. One of our most talented students did write a dissertation on British music halls and the emergent discourses of professionalism and propriety at the turn of the century, and got a job only after a number of frustrating years of searching; two of our other students whose work might fall under the cultural studies heading wound up writing on contemporary gay and lesbian literature, in one case, and contemporary anthologies of erotica marketed to women of various ethnic groups, in the other case. The vast majority of the rest of our students have been writing more or less traditional dissertations on novels, poetry, and drama of various periods; some are influenced by new historicism, some by feminism, some by Marxism, some by reception theory. None, so far as I know, are inclined to suspect literature of complicity with the enemy. And as for our new departmental self-description, it now reads like this: “The Department of English is organized to provide instruction in literatures in English, literary theory and criticism, the English language, expository and creative writing, writing studies, English Education, film, cultural studies, and closely related fields.” Those last four words represent all the minor compromises left over after the department had hashed out (in many committee sessions and then in a full faculty meeting) the relative place of linguistics, teacher training, theory, creative writing, business and technical writing, film, and (oh yes) literary and cultural studies; but the most controversial items, which not coincidentally are the focus of my attention here, were “literatures in English” and “cultural studies.”

So much for my contrary local report. For what it’s worth, it may serve as evidence that many departments of English may be troubled in one way or another, but are not quite as absurd as Cain or Posnock suggest. And yet it cannot be denied that the disciplinehas been indelibly changed by the past ten years alone, ever since deconstruction moved from the avant-garde of the field to the lingua franca of the culture, ever since Foucault and Gramsci (via new historicism, queer theory, and cultural studies) became the major discursive options for theoretically inflected cultural analysis. The discipline’s critics are not entirely wrong to suggest that in the present regime, one’s theoretical allegiances can determine one’s critical conclusions: either you believe in the forces of containment and recuperation, in which case it becomes your job to show how the seemingly “liberatory” or “progressive” aspects of the culture ultimately serve the conservative purpose of perpetuating a political order in which “freedom” is but a name for a particularly deceptive form of self-policing, or you believe in hegemony and resistance, in which case it becomes your job to show how the seemingly “repressive” or “reactionary” aspects of the culture ultimately can be made to serve surprisingly (yet reassuringly) liberatory or progressive ends.

In this dispensation it should come as no surprise that literary texts are commonly treated as pieces of cultural evidence rather than as artifacts to be explicated on their own terms (however their “own terms” may be construed). In and of itself, there is nothing wrong with treating literary texts in this way: they undoubtedly are, among other things, important pieces of evidence about the culture(s) from and to which they speak, and any reasonable historicist, feminist, reader-response, or psychoanalytic critic will say so. (Even myth critics, if there are any left on the planet, will agree.) On the other hand, there may indeed be something wrong with forms of cultural analysis that seem to dictate their conclusions in advance of their evidence, and there may indeed be something wrong with analytical procedures that fail to attend to the specific details of what kind of evidence is placed on the table. It may be folly to claim that English departments are places where graduate students hold literature under suspicion, and where jejune junior faculty are incapable of constructing a literature syllabus. Nevertheless, it is possible to ask a skeptical question about English in a different register: is the discipline dominated by reading practices that so determinedly overlook the specificity of textual genres (be they novels, verse satires, Hollywood screwball comedies, sonnets, epistles, mystery plays, manifestos, billboards, or laws) that, for the purposes of those reading practices, professors of English could just as well be reading anything at all?

George Levine’s edited collection Aesthetics and Ideology speaks directly to this question; one might even say that the book is itself, like the formation of theAssociation of Literary Critics and Scholars in 1994, a major announcement of a major scholar’s dissatisfaction with current practices in literary studies. But Levine himself is no nostalgic belletrist, and he has little sympathy with the ALCS theory that English departments have been taken over by rabid ideologues who hate great literature. How then, he asks in his introduction to the volume, “Reclaiming the Aesthetic,” can he call his colleagues to a renewed examination of aesthetics without being mistaken for a reactionary and an enemy of the people? How might he best frame his misgivings about contemporary criticism while retaining his political allegiances to feminism, multiculturalism, deconstruction, new historicism, gay and lesbian studies, and all their friends? “This book,” writes Levine,

and this introduction, have required that I face directly my own anxieties about what my passion for literature will seem like to the critical culture with which I want to claim alliance. . . . Beginning this book with the language of the affective, the sublime, the aesthetic, I hoped to rescue from the wreckage of the mystified ideal of the beautiful the qualities that allowed for such rich ambivalences. Eliot is anti-Semitic and worse. Arnold is both statist and snob. I wouldn’t be without the writings of either of them. That, I recognize, puts me and this book under suspicion. (11)

Levine occasionally gets quite dramatic on this score: the “anxieties” Levine faces seem to derive principally from the fear of losing face before one’s valued colleagues, and one would think, from reading Levine, that one’s valued colleagues are only all too ready to pounce on whoever starts talking about anapests and pastoral elegies instead of gender and hegemony. As Levine writes toward the close of his essay,

I am happy to see politics as an inescapable element of all human creation and to read every text into its political moment. But I ask, breathlessly and nervously, for the opportunity not, as I try to come to terms with the specific forms of literature, to use my understandings of these texts in a political program that turns them into instruments and destroys that very small breathing space of free play and disinterest left to those who risk finding value even in the literature that seems to despise them. (21)

Breathless and nervous, Levine appears to be under even heavier assault than are Ross Posnock and William Cain. All you have to do in an American English department, it appears, is to profess aloud your abiding love of literature, and the room will fall strangely silent; within days you will be labeled a revanchist; by the end of the term you’ll have been booted out of the fancy critical clubs, and come December you can just forget about getting that table by the window at the MLA’s annual Banquet of Critical Eminence.

There are, of course, a few serious questions buried in my somewhat facetious response to Levine’s somewhat theatrical “staging” of his book: does the politicization ofcriticism require a devaluation of aesthetics? Is it necessary to overlook the specific properties of literature in order to read literary works in terms of their relations to larger cultural formations?

Any assessment of the profession—any assessment of the functions of criticism at the present time—will turn on how those questions are answered. Roughly half the profession’s accusers seem willing to indict any and all “political” criticism, on the grounds that “politics” is precisely that which is bracketed or transcended by the monuments of timeless aesthetic excellence. The other half of the profession’s accusers make a more careful case, in which the politicization of literary study is a problem of degree rather than of kind: literature and criticism are inevitably entangled in social, historical, and ideological commitments, but contemporary literary criticism simply stresses this aspect of literature too strongly, just as an earlier generation of critics failed to stress it strongly enough. The first of these positions, in my view, is either contentless or intellectually bankrupt, and not even the ideologues of the Right, who so often use the aesthetic as a stick with which to beat “politically correct” literary criticism, believe a word of it. The second position seems to me quite plausible. And it is this position, apparently, to which Levine wants to claim allegiance as he tries to straddle aestheticism and historicism, formalism and feminism, the pleasure of the text and the epistemology of the closet. Unfortunately, his discussion of the role of aesthetics serves only to blur the distinction between position one and position two, and thus to invite, from politically minded theorists, the very kind of dismissal or condemnation it most fears.

By my count, there are at least half a dozen formulations of “aesthetics” in Levine’s introduction, and half a dozen corresponding diagnoses of what’s wrong with the profession. This in itself is not a bad thing, but it does indicate how difficult it is to devise a firm disciplinary basis for the protean thing called literary criticism. In his very first paragraph, for instance, Levine remarks that he “conceived this book in response to the radical transformation of literary study that has taken place over the last decade,” in part because that transformation marks “a change that might challenge the very existence of departments of literature in universities.” The paragraph closes with three questions that flow from this concern: “Can, in fact, a category, literature, be meaningfully constituted? If so, once constituted, is it worth much attention? Is not, after all, the real subject of literary study ideology, the real purpose political transformation?” (1). The first two of these are very good questions indeed; as I hope to have made clear thus far, I would like to inhabit a profession that asks them in the most rigorous possible manner. But the third question is a strict non sequitur; it even contains a non sequitur within a non sequitur. For if in fact it is not possible to constitute literature as a distinct category of writing (and many minds finer than mine have tried to do just this), there is no reason to assume that the subject of literary study is therefore ideology (whatever “ideology” might mean in this context); and even if the subject of literary study were ideology, there would be no warrant for eliding the study of ideology with the goal of political transformation. Many professors in history and political science, I believe, manage to study ideology without demanding to see their students’ voting records at the end of the semester. In the course of only a few lines, then, Levine has moved from asking fundamental and indispensable questions about the donnee of the discipline to caricaturing politically committed criticism in terms as reductive and (mis) leading as New Criterion boilerplate.

Levine then moves to more specific targets, naming Fredric Jameson, Edward Said, Stephen Greenblatt, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick as examples of politically committed readers. But as Levine immediately adds, his quarrel is not with these people, whom he credits with having “wonderfully enriched the possibilities of literary criticism”; his quarrel is with “their followers” who “reduce critical practice to exercises in political posturing” (2). Here again is that distinctive generational anxiety, the impulse to scorn the sort now growing up, all out of shape from toe to top: their parents had some redeeming qualities, but evidently those qualities were recessive, for the children display only the vices of their elders in exaggerated form. Yet three pages later, it turns out that Levine does have a quarrel with Sedgwick after all. Calling her work “a rich and illuminating criticism that makes literature more, not less interesting,” he nonetheless registers a complaint about its purpose: “like much of the best criticism today, it is, however, using literature primarily as a means to broad cultural conclusions” (5). This is so vaguely worded as to be self-defeating: it encompasses not only Sedgwick but Kermode, Frye, Trilling, Auerbach, Leavis, Eliot, and Arnold, all of whom saw “broad cultural conclusions” as a crucial element not only of literary criticism but of literature itself. Mimesis, after all, is a magnificently capacious term. So unless one wants to indict critics for drawing broad cultural conclusions from Blake, Stevens, Lawrence, or the metaphysicals, one will have to rewrite the indictment and submit it anew.

As it happens, that’s pretty much what Levine does in the remainder of his introduction. First, he moves back onto firmer ground, asking about the value of literary texts as evidence for cultural conclusions: “my remarks are not to question Sedgwick’s analysis of homosocial desire, but to require attention to how the overall argument of [Between Men] . . . implies very complicated arguments about the way literature works in culture” (6). In other words, if a good close reading can tell us a lot about a text’s rhetorical and ideological operations, what might we legitimately infer about how those operations might have refracted, resisted, or affected the culture(s) in which the text was written and read? “The question of what sort of evidence about culture ‘literary’ texts provide has by no means been resolved,” writes Levine (6–7). What, then, is the difference—if there is one, or only one—between reading treaties and treatises, and reading Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, as texts concerned with the English slave trade?

Had Levine stopped here, his introduction would have set us the worthy task of determining the cultural and evidentiary status of literature—a task sometimes neglected by cultural studies, partly because cultural studies too often attempts an analysis of “reception” without an explicit theory of reception aesthetics (the road not taken in American criticism thus far) or a theory of genre (a road neglected since Frye, with two major exceptions—Fredric Jameson’s neglected revision of Frye in The Political Unconscious, and the dissimilarly neglected work of Ralph Cohen). But Levine does not stop here; instead, he goes on to ask whether it’s worth reading literature at all “if what we want to know can be discovered through other materials,” and then to ask, apropos of D. A. Miller’s The Novel and the Police, why we should bother reading literature if we find it complicit with things we don’t like:

Miller’s answer, as I understand it, is that [the Victorian novel] enables readers to see how this bourgeoisifying project is carried on in other, contemporary, forms. In effect, the point of reading literature sensitively is to warn readers against reading literature. If one objects to the idea of the “liberal subject” and to the political regimes that rely on it, why further propagate texts enlisted on the side of the enemy? (9)

This is another set of questions altogether. It’s one thing to ask whether and how literary texts can provide us the material for “broad cultural conclusions”; it’s quite another thing to ask literature to provide us with a unique kind of informational content that can be found nowhere else in the world. And then it’s another thing to ask whether it makes sense to read influential texts and authors whose influence one may regret or wish to contest. And then it’s yet another thing to ask, as Levine does two pages later, whether the “aesthetic” might be a discursive realm of relative autonomy from purposiveness:

Does literature have any standing that might, even for a moment, exempt it from the practical and political critiques to which all other artifacts of culture are apparently subject? When art seems, directly or indirectly, intentionally or inadvertently, openly or surreptitiously, to sustain, create, justify, or forward politically or socially objectionable ends (from whose perspective?), are there any grounds for giving it the privilege disallowed to other enemies of the good, the true, and the just? (11)

Here too, there’s a trenchant question buried in an infelicitous formulation: what does Levine mean by “exempt,” and what does it mean to be exempt for a moment? Surely no working critic, not even the most besotted follower of Jameson, Said, et al., isso foolish as to call the police when Macbeth murders Duncan. So literature is probably exempt from the demands of quotidian practicality in that sense. But what kind of momentary exemption should we grant Ezra Pound when he writes, in his Pisan Cantos, that the goyim aresheep and are led to slaughter in great numbers by international Jewry? Are we to forswear our “practical and political” responses to this kind of profound obscenity, as did the 1948 Bollingen Committee, on the grounds that Pound’s work, as poetry, should be considered “exempt” from such concerns?

At this point we’re not yet halfway through Levine’s introduction, and perhaps we will be forgiven if we confess to confusion: what exactly is wrong with contemporary criticism? Let’s review what we have thus far. Does it neglect to ask whether literature is a meaningful category? Does it attempt political indoctrination as a result? Is it too cavalier about deriving broad cultural conclusions from relatively little documentary evidence? Is it inattentive to the possibility that its informational content might be unique? Does it attend to major writers merely to unmask their complicity in evil, and is it heedless of the dangers of further propagating the enemy’s texts? Or, having failed to ask the first of these questions, is criticism blind to the possibility that literature might indeed have a “special” status that exempts it from “practical and political critiques”? These questions, I should note, are not mutually exclusive: one can certainly say all these things about contemporary literary criticism, and one can even add, if one has a mind, that it’s poorly written, carelessly footnoted, inelegantly punctuated, shoddily bound, callously marketed, shamefully reviewed, and brutally expensive, too. But not all of these objections—Levine’s real ones, or my petty hypothetical ones—constitute or even license a close examination of the aesthetic.

Our confusion is real; it is, in many ways, the occasion for this book. Why, indeed, should the aesthetic be a critical component of the disciplinary definition of literature, as distinct from music, dance, or the plastic arts, where form is easier to distinguish from propositionality? More curiously, why should an aesthetic definition of literature be a critical component of the franchise of the English department? After all, we do not live in a world where university trustees, legislators, parents, and journalists rise up in arms whenever English professors fail to do justice to the sublime and the beautiful; as I’ll point out again in chapter 3, public furor over the mission of English rarely addresses anything other than basic writing courses—with the occasional exception of your standard-issue right-wing media campaign that alerts Americans to the shocking fact that Shakespeare is no longer taught in literature classes. What, finally, is the relation between the subject matter of literary-slash-cultural studies and the public legitimation of the discipline known as English? What is the relation between the field’s internal self-definition and its external constituencies?

We (I) cannot answer these questions directly, because they admit of no definitive answer; but we (I) can describe their parameters and suggest what’s at stake in trying to grapple with them. Fortunately, the reason the questions are not directly answerable is intimately tied to those parameters: the potential constituencies of the field depend largely on what the discipline of English means institutionally as a subject in college and high school courses, and what English means institutionally is dependent in turn on a congeries of social and economic movements well beyond the control of any one professor, department, or syllabus.

To grasp the relation between the subject matter of the field and its public legitimation, then, we need to inquire into the status of literature as cultural capital, as John Guillory has done in his landmark Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation. Guillory says almost nothing about cultural studies in nomine, but his book does theorize the relative “decline” of literary studies so provocatively as to afford us an explanation of why cultural studies might have become, for much of the discipline, the ideal self-description du jour. For Guillory, the status of literary study is inseparable from the larger social conditions that make literary study either valuable or superfluous as cultural capital:

It has proven to be much easier to quarrel about the content of the curriculum than to confront the implications of a fully emergent professional-managerial class which no longer requires the old cultural capital of the bourgeoisie. The decline of the humanities was never the result of newer noncanonical courses or texts, but of a large-scale “capital flight” in the domain of culture. . . . The professional-managerial class has made the correct assessment that, so far as its future profit is concerned, the reading of great works is not worth the investment of very much time or money. The perceived devaluation of the humanities curriculum is in reality a decline in its market value. If the liberal arts curriculum still survives as the preferred course of study in some elite institutions, this fact has everything to do with the class constituency of those institutions. (45–46)

Let me flesh out Guillory’s analysis with a brief anecdote, mediated by way of Richard Ohmann’s observation, in Politics of Letters, that

for Wesleyan students (and for those at Yale, Stanford, Wellesley, etc.) there is still no penalty for pursuing the humane and pleasant activity of reading good books and trying to understand the world. These students have a reserved place waiting for them in the professional-managerial class or the ruling class, some by virtue of having made it into an elite college, most by birth and nurture. (12)

When I first went “on the market” at the 1988 MLA convention in New Orleans, I interviewed for jobs at a wide array of schools, and nothing made the stratification of the profession so palpable to me as the answers I got when I asked my interviewers about the number of their English majors relative to the total number of undergraduates at their institutions. On one fine December morning I managed to go from an interview at Williams College, with more than 250 English majors among 1500 upper-division students, to Auburn University in Alabama, with an undergraduate enrollment of 21,000 and 120 English majors. Those numbers alone, it should be noted, determine much of the working conditions of faculty in English at both institutions: faculty at Williams are invited and expected to teach in the area of their “specialization,” and though their school generally values their teaching more highly than their research, the number of English majors enables the college to institutionalize a diverse array of advanced courses in English, whether these be courses in Restoration drama, film noir, or postcolonial theory. At Auburn, by contrast, the range of advanced courses is limited not by the research interests of the faculty but by the cultural capital of English at Auburn, and faculty accordingly teach more courses than their counterparts at Williams—and many more introductory courses, including courses in basic writing. Even at individual institutions, then, the content of the curriculum is determined largely by the status of English as cultural capital—or, more accurately, cultural capital is realized and invested as cultural capital precisely by means of individual institutions operating dynamically within larger institutions.

On one hand, the implications of this point are trivial, and everyone in English knows about them—just as everyone knows that the teaching load at Williams differs from the teaching load at Auburn. One might say, for instance, that Cain, Posnock, and Levine are worried about something that can be an issue only at relatively “elite” institutions, where cultural studies appears as a curricular option unavailable to colleges whose English curriculum is weighted heavily toward introductory courses, and where the question is not “how can we get our students to stop reverencing literature and start paying attention to the social text,” but “how can we get our students to pay attention to literature in the first place?” But on the other hand the point is fundamental to the role of cultural studies in English, insofar as cultural studies does not have to be confined to elite institutions, and can be as central to an introductory curriculum as to an advanced course of study; similarly, the point is fundamental to the constitution of English departments in the United States, insofar as the franchise of English depends on the institutional capital of English in specific institutional locations.

I will return to these issues in the chapters that follow, as I turn to the employment of English in specific institutional locations. For now, though, I want briefly to address the status of cultural studies as cultural capital. Guillory’s analysis takes for granted one of the premises of the New Right as articulated most clearly in William Bennett’s To Reclaim a Legacy, namely, that the humanities are in decline. Guillory rightly argues that this alleged decline of the humanities has nothing to do with the introduction of noncanonical works to the literature syllabus, and everything to do with the cultural capital of literary study and its relation to productive capital (that is, money) for college students. Hence Guillory’s attribution to the aspiring professional-managerial class of the sense that “the reading of great works is not worth the investment of very much time or money.” But what happens if we contest the narrative of decline at the outset, and try to account for the resurgence of undergraduate interest in the English major in the 1980s and 1990s?² Surely it would be tempting but wrong (in Guillory’s terms and in mine) to attribute that resurgence solely or chiefly to the newer multicultural curricula in English.³ Perhaps instead we might point to two general economic factors that may have swelled enrollments in English in the past ten years—first, the widespread (but ultimately mistaken) belief that there would be a “faculty shortage” in the 1990s, such that employment in colleges (of great concern for graduate study) and secondary schools (of great concern for undergraduate study) would be a likely prospect even for people who received degrees in the humanities; and second, the widespread (and ultimately well founded) belief that the global economy was producing jobs that were less stable, less secure than the jobs of forty years ago, such that for some areas of nonacademic employment, a general liberal arts degree might be seen by prospective employers as more attractive than a degree that signified a college career of technical-vocational training.

Let me add to these observations the following questions: who, exactly, was “credentialed” by universities back in the days when the humanities were not in crisis? For whom was literary study a form of cultural capital? Might it not be the case, as Francis Oakley has suggested, that the rise in professional-vocational courses of training since 1970 (and the relative “decline” of the humanities) coincides with the arrival at universities of vastly more diverse student populations (particularly more diverse with regard to class origins) beginning in the late 1960s? My hope in raising these questions is not to claim that we’re just fine in the humanities these days, thank you, despite everything you’ve heard to the contrary. Rather, my hope is to raise questions about Guillory’s account of the relation between literary studies and cultural capital just as Guillory has raised questions about the relation between cultural capital and the canon. If it is true, as Guillory claims (as I would claim as well), that the status of literary studies as cultural capital does not depend, solely or chiefly, on the curricular content of literary studies, it may also be true that there is some degree of independence between the status of literary studies as cultural capital and the employability of a degree in English. It is possible, I am claiming, that “literature” may indeed have declined in cultural authority but “English” remains a potentially valuable career asset. To put this in more colloquial terms: whatever the status of “literature” as an index of cultivation and class status, degrees in English may still be convertible into gainful employment—not because they mark their recipients as literate, well-rounded young men and women who can allude to Shakespeare in business memos, but because they mark their recipients as people who can potentially negotiate a wide range of intellectual tasks and handle (in various ways) disparate kinds of “textual” material, from memos, legal briefs, and white papers to ad campaigns, databases, and electronic newsmagazines.

And if we want to gauge the relative status (as cultural capital) of literature and cultural studies, we should have yet one more question for Guillory’s account of the field. If, as Cultural Capital claims, the new professional-managerial class no longer requires the old cultural capital of the bourgeoisie, then it is not clear whether all kinds of cultural capital are now utterly superfluous to the accumulation and distribution of productive capital (as Bill Readings emphatically argues in The University in Ruins), or, by contrast, whether a redesigned curriculum in the humanities might actually be of greater use to the credentialization of the professional-managerial class. In forwarding the latter suggestion (since I disagree strongly with the former),⁴ I do not want to be understood assaying anything so simpleminded as “we must substitute Toni Morrison’s Beloved for Milton’s Lycidas because this is what the new global economy requires”; to date I have heard of only one employer who asks such things of his job applicants: Milton Rosenberg of Chicago, who quizzes prospective college interns for his radio program as to whether they can name three nineteenth-century British novelists. (When I asked him whether it might not be more pertinent to a job in mass media that students be able to name three contemporary non-American novelists writing in English, I was dismissed in somewhat predictable terms, but I do not generalize from this that William Thackeray and Elizabeth Glaspell are necessarily more conducive to mass media employment than Margaret Atwood and Chinua Achebe.) Rather, I want to ask whether the advent of cultural studies can be understood as a response to the market value of literary study. This is not simply a question of whether English professors are offering courses on music video in order to remain somehow “relevant” to the cultural lives of their students (though it does participate in that question to some extent); more fundamentally, it is a question of whether the distribution of cultural capital serves a purely discriminating function, to naturalize and legitimate socioeconomic inequality, or whether the content of cultural capital might matter in some substantive way to the traditional liberal-progressive project of “critical thinking.”

Bruce Robbins raises precisely this question in his trenchant review of Guillory’s book: does the content of the curriculum signify in a meaningful sociopolitical sense, or is the curriculum primarily a means of marking and enforcing distinctions among our students regardless of whether those distinctions are built on Shakespeare or on Madonna? Robbins writes,

[E]ven if we believe that knowledge of Latin and Greek was no more than an empty diacritical mark differentiating rulers from ruled, it does not follow that either vernacular literature over the past seventy-five years or the content of today’s far more democratically accessible curriculum is equally irrelevant, that these too could serve only to differentiate. And if they are indeed functional, then it would also seem, for example, that the ability to get one’s own experience re-classified as part of cultural capital—which is one description of what multiculturalism is about—should also be classified as a genuine if not necessarily momentous redistribution of power. From the moment when knowledge of rap music or rape statistics or the genealogy of the word “homosexual” is measured on examinations and counts toward a degree, there has been some change, pace Bourdieu, in access to credentials. (373)

Note that neither Robbins nor Guillory is making the obvious (and, by now, quite tired) argument about curriculum change—the demographic argument, which says that new student populations require new course offerings. Both are rightly skeptical of that “representational” logic. Instead, they ask, as I am asking, whether the content of the curriculum in the humanities might have any important relation to the social standing of the humanities (and, as a result, to the health of the humanities in terms of enrollments, job placement, faculty lines, and cultural authority). Can we say that on some level, the profession somehow knows, structurally, that its prestige is not what it once was (for whatever reasons), and is trying to recoup some of its lost authority by redefining its object—not as the study of great works, but as the enhancement of rhetorical techniques of interpretation that can be applied to a vast variety of cultural “texts”? David Simpson, in his recent book The Academic Postmodern and the Rule of Literature, argues that this is exactly what’s going on when English departments start including “cultural studies” in their self-descriptions:

Both in Britain and the United States, humanities intellectuals are particularly vulnerable, because of our association with those very qualities [Thorstein] Veblen attributed to us, qualities of the occult and the liminal. This shared anxiety must be part of any comprehensive explanation of our current turn to cultural criticism, which paradoxically provides us with a rhetoric of referentiality, a posture of speaking about the world, even as we admit that the world is made up largely of representations. Cultural studies, as we now see it, is a form of survivalism, and those who deplore its incursion into the universities would do well to reflect upon the degree to which it ensures their own continued existence. (7)

Cultural studies as survivalism: that, in a nutshell, is both the desire and the fear driving the debates about cultural studies, as far as the near future of English is concerned. In this corner, David Simpson, cautioning us to think that cultural studies might actually be propping us up; in the far corner, George Levine, cautioning us to think that the prop might just deprive us of our public legitimacy as stewards of the aesthetic.

Interestingly, this polarized scenario comes in other versions; more interestingly still, they all lead to the same dystopian conclusion, as I’ll show in a moment. From the Left, especially the British Left most closely identified with cultural studies, there is the well-founded fear that in American universities, “cultural studies” will eventually come to be understood as a rough synonym for “the humanities.” The fact that the term has been appropriated by English departments, anthropology departments, communications and speech departments, and the foreign languages (where it is often seen as very much a survival mechanism that might compensate for the drop in enrollments for advanced language study) is ample evidence, to this wing of the academic Left, that the term “cultural studies” has lost its critical force and has become another name for business as usual on the leafy side of the quad. Conservatives have a similar story to tell. From Alvin Kernan’s book The Death of Literature to the proclamations of the ALCS, the message is pretty much the same: the kids just aren’t reading anymore. They come to college, their heads brimming with Beavis and Butt-Head but without the faintest notion who Chaucer is; and the professors, deserting their posts as educators, have given up trying to offer students the great books of the ages, either because they no longer believe in the concept of great books, or (more cynically) because they no longer believe they can sustain enrollments by professing the faith of the great books. Accordingly, departments of English are gradually becoming places that offer courses on Barbie dolls, rock stars, and the Disney empire, while seekers of truth pine desperately for the courses in Milton and Wordsworth the department no longer offers.

At least in this one respect, both the left and right wings of the culture wars can look at the American academy, hold their heads in their hands, and bewail what cultural studies hath wrought.

The reason Guillory’s theory of cultural capital is so germane to the future of literary study, then, is not that it clarifies matters but that it helps to explain why matters are as cloudy as they are. Depending on how one draws the connections among literary study, cultural capital, and meaningful employment, one can lament the turn to cultural studies and call for the restoration of literature to the central place in the curriculum, on the grounds that this will at once preserve the intellectual legitimacy of English and revive the discipline’s level of public support, or one can applaud the turn to cultural studies as that which will preserve the intellectual legitimacy of English and revive the discipline’s level of public support. And, in turn, each of these options can be cast quite differently, as a blueprint not for the revival of English but for its demise.

In The Western Canon for instance, Harold Bloom has mused that departments of English will gradually be pruned of their faculty who love literature until they are composed of small handfuls of close readers, whereupon they will have roughly the size and influence of departments of classics—which they will resemble in many other antiquarian respects. At the same time, critics of cultural studies who combine George Levine’s sense of the franchise of English with a healthy distrust of contemporary cost-cutting measures in academe claim that if literary study eventually becomes synonymous with cultural study, the department of English will be amalgamated with any number of cognate departments in the humanities, from anthropology and film to communications, rhetoric, and media studies. And then along will come some enterprising dean or provost who will look at all this “duplication,” all this mess of faculty purportedly studying the same thing called “culture,” and we will find our numbers cut in half as the university moves to eliminate or reduce some of its nonrevenue-producing activities like offering degrees in the humanities. Yet alternatively, if literary study follows the Bloom model, remaining literary study and refusing to cave in to the blandishments and temptations of cultural studies, departments of literature will find themselves becoming small, ineffectual side offerings in the general university market. Their faculty will be few and powerless, but proud and noble.

How can it be that both scenarios end in the destruction or evisceration of literary study and the humanities? If English departments embrace cultural studies in an attempt to appeal to the cultural needs of the professional-managerial class, they may be seen as duplicating the knowledges produced in other departments, and downsized or eliminated accordingly. And if English departments abjure cultural studies, they may be seen as irrelevant to the cultural needs of the professional-managerial class, and downsized or eliminated accordingly. Our future begins to sound like the opening of Woody Allen’s parodic commencement speech, in which he writes that mankind faces a crossroads: one path leads to despair and utter hopelessness, and the other leads to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.

Actually the choices before us are not two but four: cultural studies and eventual doom-by-duplication; literary studies and eventual doom-byirrelevance; cultural studies and prosperity with the nascent professional-managerial class; literary studies and prosperity with everyone who wants to study the aesthetic uses of language. And the way to decide which of these futures is most likely for literary study is simple: just figure out the exact relations among literary-slash-cultural study, cultural capital, student enrollments, and productive capital, and devise the curriculum accordingly.

I want to close this chapter by making a modest proposal, which, like all modest proposals, is much too radical for realization. It may be possible for English departments to foreground “literature” in the restricted belles-lettres sense in which the term has been understood in this century at the same time that literary study incorporates some of the concerns of cultural studies. It may be possible for English departments to make some claim on the interests of the professional-managerial class even as the needs of that class move further and further away from the Beowulf-to-Virginia Woolf canon of English literature. It may even be possible for English departments to expand their concern with the English language while becoming less . . . well, English in the process.

Notice if you will the odd fact that in debates over the place of cultural studies, critics rarely inquire into the place of contemporary writing in English. Even my own department’s bylaws, as I noted above, consider “literatures in English” a thing apart from “cultural studies.” All too often, when contemporary writing in English is taught (if it is taught at all) in literature departments, it comes under the heading of Postcolonial Literatures, World Lit, or (still worse) Third World Lit. In my own department, it is far and away the most underrepresented arena of writing; one of the stranger moments in our departmental deliberations, in fact, came just after some of my colleagues were finally convinced that “cultural studies” was a fair description of what some of us are doing at Illinois—when we then realized that we had advertised ourselves as offering “literatures in English” but only had two faculty members who had ever offered courses in literatures neither English nor American.

Reed Way Dasenbrock originally made this suggestion some years ago, before “cultural studies” had become a name for a fear and a desire, and I want to update his proposal and toss it onto the table just in time for the millennium. In Dasenbrock’s terms, the literature curriculum is currently organized around a “centripetal” canon centered firmly in the British Isles—the canon bequeathed us largely by F. R. Leavis and Scrutiny, “from which,” as Terry Eagleton has famously written, “criticism has never quite recovered” (28). This canon contains many of the greatest writers ever to inhabit and expand the English language, of course, but it also does double duty as an agent of Anglo-American national affiliation: just as the New Right likes to pretend that the United States has some deep genetic connection with Periclean Athens, so too do the Anglophile supporters of the centripetal canon like to pretend that you cannot understand “literatures in English” unless you have first completed the “coverage” requirements that will acquaint you with Gawain, the Miller’s Tale, and MacFlecknoe—not to mention the three nineteenth-century British novelists who will secure your employment by Milton Rosenberg at WGN in Chicago. Yet it is not entirely clear, at the very least, that the British canon before 1790 (exclusive of Shakespeare, of course, who not only is our language’s greatest writer but also cannot be challenged in the slightest without provoking a national scandal) is quite as deserving of the curricular place it now occupies in the United States; and it is not entirely clear why, if we now spend so much disciplinary time on British literature, we could not just as well (in some future incarnation) devote more of our time and energies to African, Indian, Caribbean, Australian, and Canadian writing in English.

One signal advantage of Dasenbrock’s formulation is that it reshuffles but does not entirely jettison the centripetal canon with which we now work:

In place of the centripetal canon oriented toward the England of Pope, Fielding, Richardson, and Johnson, a centrifugal canon might focus on Swift, Defoe, Smollett and Boswell. This is a slight change, perhaps, as all these figures are recognized to be important and are placed in the canon somewhere. But as one moves closer and closer to the present, a centripetal, Englandcentered canon captures fewer and fewer of the important figures, whereas a centrifugal canon focused on the totality of writing in English has no difficulty at all in representing the panorama of world writing in English. . . . Only a centrifugal conception of literature in English that embraces [George] Lamming and [J. MJ Coetzee as well as Shakespeare and Defoe can place all these works in the juxtapositions they deserve. (73–74)

Yet even as I cite these words I can hear the cries of my Augustan, Restoration, Renaissance/Early Modern, and medievalist colleagues, all of whom will insist that my modest proposal will marginalize their enterprises still further—at a time when most students are filing into their classes only because of their department’s requirement that English majors take x number of credits in courses prior to 1800 exclusive of Shakespeare. Their concerns are entirely justified. Interestingly, some years ago when I taught Dasenbrock’s essay as part of a graduate seminar on “canonicity and institutional criticism,” my students almost uniformly dismissed Dasenbrock as too timidly reformist: his centrifugal canon would shuffle the deck a little bit, they allowed, but wouldn’t alter the curriculum significantly enough to be called a strong form of canon revision. Politely but firmly, I pointed out to my students that our department contained almost no faculty qualified to teach contemporary world writers in English, and that Dasenbrock’s proposal would therefore have the truly radical effect of compelling Illinois (and not Illinois alone) to alter completely its hiring policies in the future. It’s one (relatively easy) thing to shuffle the canon, I suggested to my students; it’s quite another (much harder) thing to shuffle the professoriate. The objection that the centrifugal canon would make the English department more “presentist,” then, seems to me a valid point of concern—not least for those faculty who specialize in early periods of British literature.

To those faculty I can respond only by appealing to history, by way of John Guillory, who notes correctly that canon revision is—and has been for some time—a form of disciplinary “modernization”:

The objective of canonical revision entails in practice shifting the weight of the syllabus from older works to modern works, since what is in question for us are new social identities and new writers. In fact, the history of the literary curriculum has always been characterized by a tendency to modernize the syllabus at the expense of older works. (15)

And if the history of the literary curriculum is in part a history of the relation between literary study and the distribution of cultural capital, well, then, if Buchi Emecheta, Salman Rushdie, Nadine Gordimer, and Michael Ondaatje will soon be displacing Pope and Dryden the way Faulkner and Fitzgerald did fifty years ago, perhaps our discipline will be all the healthier for it.

There is another plausible objection to this modest proposal; this one comes not from faculty in British literature before 1800 but from faculty who now teach world literature. A “literatures in English” paradigm, some might claim, represents one more attempt on the part of the so-called First World to shore up its economy by drawing on the resources of the so-called Third. In the case of literatures in English, the situation might arise that U.S. universities would be training American citizens to teach African literature, thereby maintaining one branch of the professional-managerial class (the professoriate) by providing them with raw material imported from “developing” nations. Certainly, a curriculum with expanded offerings in Canadian, Irish, Caribbean, African, or Australian literature would necessarily raise the question of whether U.S. colleges would hire a given number of Canadian, Irish, Caribbean, African, or Australian scholars as teachers. At the very least, such a curriculum would provoke the question of how and why literatures can travel across national boundaries more easily than can some literary critics. But this potential problem for the curriculum can also be a potential source of strength: whereas the original institutionalization of the literature curriculum, in the United Kingdom and the United States, had clearly served the purposes of nationalism and particularism, a “literatures in English” curriculum explicitly presents nationalism not as an assumption but as an object of interrogation—whether Joan Didion and Ngugi wa Thiong’o are meditating on the fate of national identity or James Joyce and George Lamming are exploring the politics of exile. It is all but impossible, I suggest, to make “literatures in English” into an instrument of national solidarity and self-definition, and the cosmopolitanism of such a curriculum, like its presentism, may be more of a benefit than it now appears.⁵

Yet the relation between “world literature in English” and “transnational cultural studies” is not straightforward, and I do not mean to introduce Emecheta et al. to the English curriculum simply in order to smuggle in some version of postcolonial cultural studies on the sly. No doubt it is possible to construct a curriculum of world literature in English around the airline-magazine proposition that because the planet is getting smaller every year, the enterprising professional-manager of the future will have to be acquainted with diverse global cultures if s/he is to open crucial new overseas markets. (Our intro course in the works of Amos Tutuola and Bessie Head will acquaint you with local African customs that will be invaluable for negotiating cultural difference to your advantage!) Nevertheless, it is hard to deny that a curriculum centered around world literature in English would necessarily bump up against some of the concerns of cultural studies, and it is entirely possible that cultural studies could be realized (in an institutional sense) all the more readily by an English department that is determinedly transnational in scope, attuned to and critical of the geopolitical imbalances of power that have made “world literatures in English” a subject available for literary study in the first place. If literary study wants to become more cultural, and cultural studies needs to become more literary, it is hard to imagine a more fitting institutional negotiation of these desires than an English department whose curriculum centers not on the British Isles but on the global ramifications of the world travels of the language first spoken on the British Isles.

There are many reasons I find this revised literary-slash-cultural studies curriculum to be compelling, but one stands out above all—the pragmatic one. At present, the profession does not have much of a public rationale for itself; that lack of a rationale, in turn, is both the condition and the product of the debate over the status of cultural studies. What rationale we have usually relies on our functions as teachers of writing—which is one reason the discipline of literary study can be said to be parasitic on the discipline of writing instruction, as composition theorists and writing studies faculty have been pointing out for some time. The writing-instruction rationale works not only because it is plausible (English departments do try to guarantee a certain kind of access to advanced literacy) but also, crucially, because it is politically reversible: it can be used to justify English as a discipline that fosters critical thinking at the same time it can be used to justify English as a discipline that fosters employability, business competence, and maybe even long-term financial security. As I’ll argue in greater detail in chapter 6, the discipline has always required a rationale that has precisely this kind of political “reversibility”; and as much as I might hate to admit it as a progressive educator, and however much it might pain the liberals and conservatives to my right and the Marxists to my left, the rhetoric of public justification for intellectual work is necessarily a rhetoric of negotiation and double-voicedness—which is not at all the same thing, I hope, as a rhetoric of accommodation and double-talk.

But in the coming years, the writing-instruction rationale may very well leave English high and dry without a base of support for either literary studies or cultural studies. The reason is RCM, which in this context stands not for Royal Canadian Mounties but for Responsibility-Centered Management. RCM, apparently the latest successor to Total Quality Management, Theory Z, PQP, and myriad other business school budget-management techniques of the 1980s and 1990s, happens to be sweeping through the Big Ten universities of late, and the University of Illinois is in the process of converting to it as I write. In one way, RCM is an improvement over the opaque bureaucratic model now in place, for it has allowed us to discover that the budget of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences contains far less than its share of state money, and that, conversely, agricultural enterprises at Illinois are major beneficiaries of the money LAS is not getting. But in another way, RCM puts the humanities permanently on the defensive: every college, every department, is allowed a kind of block grant the amount of which is fixed by formula, and the college or department can spend that money as it sees fit—for a new faculty member or for a new photocopier or for extended building hours (since everything pertaining to instruction, including the costs of the physical plant, is now the responsibility of the department or college). A department can generate revenue in one of four ways: federal/state support, franchise fees, private grants, or tuition. Since the humanities are not often on the receiving end of major public or private grant funds, and since the humanities, unlike the football team, sell no T-shirts or logo-ridden outerwear, departments like English or French will have to depend almost entirely on enrollment numbers for their financial support. And in English, those enrollment numbers—which will in turn generate the funds necessary for faculty and graduate students—will consist disproportionately of the warm freshman bodies processed by the university’s required writing course.

In other words, in the era of RCM every English course, from Shakespeare’s Great Tragedies and Romances to Que(e)rying the Beat: Gender, Sexuality, and Transgression in Postwar “Hip” Culture, will depend for its existence on the substrate of Intro Writing that keeps the department solvent. Insofar as the existence of English will be enrollment-driven, the debate over literary and cultural studies will inevitably turn into a debate over whether English is “surviving” or “caving in” by offering courses in contemporary culture. But it will be ultimately irrelevant to the real conditions of English, in which both traditional and untraditional forms of textual study will be just two kinds of dessert, more like than unlike, made available only so long as Intro Writing is offering a sufficient number of undergraduates the meat and potatoes of English—the only courses with enough status as cultural capital to induce large numbers of students and taxpayers to believe that they might just be worth the investment of some time and money.

It is in this context, finally, that we need to find a rhetoric of justification for literary study that incorporates some of the concerns of cultural studies and refrains from relying on introductory composition for public support. I do not believe that “contemporary world writing in English” answers all these concerns; surely, if John Guillory is right, the category of “literature” will not regain its prestige and cultural authority simply by adding exotic new writers to its lineup. All the same, I am surprised that so few of my colleagues—aside, obviously, from Reed Way Dasenbrock—have considered “literatures in English” as a possible organizational rubric, particularly since the literary-slash-cultural studies debate so often makes it sound as if we must rob Peter to pay Paul: the more culture, the less literature, and vice versa. “World writing in English,” I think, at least holds out the appropriate prospect of making literary study more cultural, and cultural studies more literary, regardless of how many warm bodies are processed by Composition next semester.

To entertain this conclusion is to understand that in the university setting, disciplinary disputes, even of the most rarified kinds, are inevitably also disputes about relations of intellectual production. What we teach, and where we teach, affects how we hire; how we hire (intellectually as well as economically, from endowed chairs in cultural studies to adjuncts in introductory courses) profoundly affects what we teach. In the chapters that follow, then, I want to keep a dual focus on the employment of English—looking not only at how English can be employed (which will take up the bulk of the second half of this book) but also at the conditions of employment in English. And if we want to get a sense of the contemporary crisis in those conditions, we could not do better, at the present time, than to turn away from the competing claims of literature and culture for a moment—with the proviso that we will return to them shortly, but only after we have visited Yale.