I’ve been reading, in a fairly desultory and despairing fashion, articles and books defending literature and in particular literary criticism as academic discipline. Desultory because I don’t have time given my 4/4 teaching load plus research deadlines for a dedicated journey down the rabbit hole, despairing because it’s clear that the powers-that-be simply aren’t listening, because many of my fellow literary folks have clearly dropped the gauntlet, whether they understand that or not, and because none of what I have read so far offers, in my opinion, an effective argument that speaks to its multiple audiences in the right manner with the right evidence and reasoning.

Given the unending “crisis in the humanities” and literary studies in particular, I have to ask: have we utterly lost sight of the fact that criticism is a form of teaching? Much is made lately of how teaching is, or should become, the center of higher education, and that is indeed as it should be. But a pernicious binary is being constructed, sometimes by misguided administrators, sometimes by faculty themselves who seem to have become lost in the weeds.

Criticism and interpretation is nothing more than a message to another. The same is true for all academic publication–no difference between science, political science, sociology, etc., in this regard. But with administrative movements afoot that imagine that innovation can happen purely for the sake of business profit, or that somehow we don’t need medical research to advance medical knowledge (because “research” can be defined as anything we want it to mean now), what we need to be asking in literary criticism and literary studies is what is the point of us.

I read the review/roundtable on Jonathan Kramnick’s Criticism and Truth in the Chronicle of Higher Education, and came away disappointed both by what (according to the interlocutors) constitutes Kramnick’s argumentative approach, and some of the comments of the interlocutors themselves. To be clear, I haven’t read the book yet (and probably will not have time to for some months). But if Kramnick’s defense of criticism relies on vague modifiers like “apt” and “elegant” that merely beg the question, we aren’t going to make any headway; these only replicate the age-old problem. On the other hand, I was pleased to see Michael Clune pointing out that we can’t defend literary criticism without taking into account the value of its object, literature, and then disappointed that Clune replicated the division between teaching and criticism. Criticism IS teaching, merely in a different medium and with a wide range of audiences and formats, including book reviews, blogs, paratextual material like introductions, and of course academic research essays themselves.

At its best, and I’m speaking here of literary interpretation, or more generally the interpretation of artistic “texts,” not professional writing/technical writing, criticism is a kind of virtual conversation between readers of that specific text. Some seem to have adopted, without much good grounds for doing so, the idea that a classroom discussion is sufficient, that we don’t need well-curated textbooks when OER will do (burdening the faculty member with what is essentially having to “write” their own textbook), we don’t need to guide students to anything but their own interpretation based on their limited world experience and cultural and personal predispositions, i.e., presentism.

Granted that not all criticism is equal–some is simply bad, some is directed at other professional critics to the exclusion of the neophyte, some merely restates the obvious and worn. But the best criticism validates what even the neophyte student often felt somewhere in the back of their mind but could not articulate. The best criticism opens up the text to new horizons, often by either close reading (yes), or historicization, or engaging with theoretical approaches old and new.

To pretend that we can study the ART of literature without studying its history and without engaging with criticism is no different than saying we can study the ART of visual arts, music, film, video games, etc., without art history, music theory, and all the other criticism and interpretation that helps us understand the artistic experience we’ve just enjoyed (or hated) and fosters innovation. And to starve our students hungry for art and expression of access to other voices, other approaches–a virtual conversation with someone from across space and time–most often those students whose lack of these is most acute and poignant, is elitist and anti-democratic. There seems to be a popular fallacy circulating, too, that somehow a literary research paper is not a creative act, or a personal act on the part of the writer. This is simply not true and, in my experience, it’s usually the opinion of students whose educational experiences have been uninspiring, and academic faculty who use this argument to browbeat their departmental competition. Yes, the academic research paper has specific formats and requirements that must be met, but this is for the purpose of promising innovation, not for the purpose of killing creativity. Writing a research paper is an act of reading and appreciation of what another artist has produced, merely one form of response among many possible (which of course includes making your own art in response). And good research papers–which it takes many years to master as a form–offer new insights that we otherwise would have missed. That is their entire reason for existence.

Creativity is not ever sui generis, even when it seems to be so because the mind has unselfconsciously absorbed influences. To teach using criticism, that is, to assign the reading of criticism and the writing of criticism along with the textual object of that criticism, is to offer a counter to the overwhelming forces of popular media and popular discourse. There is nothing wrong with the popular per se; but the popular, especially in our time of ten second videos and sound bites, can hardly be expected to do better than whet an appetite and leave the audience coming back for the algorithmic bread-crumby MOARRRRR.

Penny dreadfuls were the Victorian pop culture of their day, cheap, thrilling, and easy reads. There’s nothing wrong with entertainment as escapism (guilty as charged), but to restate an old saw, the good (as opposed to elitist) reason why academics have historically more often taught Madame Bovary, Jekyll and Hyde, Middlemarch, Heart of Darkness, or Ulysses rather than The String of Pearls is simply that there is more to say about them, they open up to more interpretations, they encourage that conversation between readers that happens in the classroom and in the virtual classroom that is criticism. And they advance the art form, they innovate, they teach us what is innovative and how to innovate. And, innovation in the arts and criticism can certainly mean “new ideas that make people uncomfortable” such as the demand for representation of previously excluded minorities.

I’ve been teaching and publishing for over 40 years now (how did that happen?), and I’ve taught The String of Pearls, on which the musical Sweeney Todd is based, which was fun. Dracula is better. It’s not only longer (though longer isn’t always better), but it’s richer, more complicated, more surprising, and not necessarily because Stoker intended it to be so. There is simply more going on. We can run out of things to say about String in a couple of class meetings, but Dracula could potentially hold our attention for an entire semester. This is why Dracula has generated many more reams of literary criticism, that is, interpretations, than String, or why Lord Jim beats out some of Conrad’s shorter work like Falk in terms of critical attention.

If I sound like I’m stating the obvious, it’s because I think the obvious needs restating. We make too many unspoken assumptions in literature departments, too many about what we imagine we agree and disagree on, too many without open, transparent, and productive dialogues. If we are going to defend the humanities, we have to defend them to ourselves, yes, but we have to speak to many audiences at the same time.

And now for an excerpt from the other text that inspired my thoughts today, as I prepare for another two weeks teaching Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, Wilde’s essay The Critic as Artist:

GILBERT. Yes; the critic will be an interpreter, if he chooses. He can pass from his synthetic impression of the work of art as a whole, to an analysis or exposition of the work itself, and in this lower sphere, as I hold it to be, there are many delightful things to be said and done. Yet his object will not always be to explain the work of art. He may seek rather to deepen its mystery, to raise round it, and round its maker, that mist of wonder which is dear to both gods and worshippers alike. Ordinary people are ‘terribly at ease in Zion.’ They propose to walk arm in arm with the poets, and have a glib ignorant way of saying, ‘Why should we read what is written about Shakespeare and Milton? We can read the plays and the poems. That is enough.’ But an appreciation of Milton is, as the late Rector of Lincoln remarked once, the reward of consummate scholarship. And he who desires to understand Shakespeare truly must understand the relations in which Shakespeare stood to the Renaissance and the Reformation, to the age of Elizabeth and the age of James; he must be familiar with the history of the struggle for supremacy between the old classical forms and the new spirit of romance, between the school of Sidney, and Daniel, and Johnson, and the school of Marlowe and Marlowe’s greater son; he must know the materials that were at Shakespeare’s disposal, and the method in which he used them, and the conditions of theatric presentation in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, their limitations and their opportunities for freedom, and the literary criticism of Shakespeare’s day, its aims and modes and canons; he must study the English language in its progress, and blank or rhymed verse in its various developments; he must study the Greek drama, and the connection between the art of the creator of the Agamemnon and the art of the creator of Macbeth; in a word, he must be able to bind Elizabethan London to the Athens of Pericles, and to learn Shakespeare’s true position in the history of European drama and the drama of the world.

The critic will certainly be an interpreter, but he will not treat Art as a riddling Sphinx, whose shallow secret may be guessed and revealed by one whose feet are wounded and who knows not his name. Rather, he will look upon Art as a goddess whose mystery it is his province to intensify, and whose majesty his privilege to make more marvellous in the eyes of men.

And here, Ernest, this strange thing happens. The critic will indeed be an interpreter, but he will not be an interpreter in the sense of one who simply repeats in another form a message that has been put into his lips to say. For, just as it is only by contact with the art of foreign nations that the art of a country gains that individual and separate life that we call nationality, so, by curious inversion, it is only by intensifying his own personality that the critic can interpret the personality and work of others, and the more strongly this personality enters into the interpretation the more real the interpretation becomes, the more satisfying, the more convincing, and the more true.