Literary Criticism As An Interdiscipline

On "Hungover From The Bad Old Days of High Theory (Criticism LTD, Episode #2)

Matt Seybold has brought us again to a question I’d phrase as, why is criticism institutionally weak? A twin question lurks behind this one: why is criticism seen as intellectually weak in relation to other disciplines that work on overlapping topics?

The stakes are obviously high, as we’ve been reminded yet again by the recent action of the University of West Virginia zeroing out its language programs, as has happened many times before. Can academic criticism defend its institutions against existential cuts?  

In this episode of “Criticism Inc.,” John Guillory traces criticism’s funding problems to alleged problems with research methods. He suggests that academic critics won’t be able to control their funding, hiring, or anything else about their institutional destiny unless they deal with the internal crisis of their methods

I agree that there’s a strong correlation for any university discipline between funding stability and healthy, recognized research (see, for example, here, here, here, and here).  The questions are whether there’s a causal connection between the two crises, and which way the causality runs. 

To simplify the options, did criticism screw up its methods, leading to research that administrators and colleagues in other fields don’t think produces knowledge, which thus causes disinvestment and cuts? Or did disinvestment and cuts reduce research funding and employment security in ways that damaged criticism’s research practices and outcomes from coast to coast?  

Seybold asks Guillory about this.  Can we address “the cultivated capacities for aesthetic pleasure . . . without first addressing this collapsing infrastructure”?  He does not interrupt a particularly direct and illuminating response from Guillory.  Guillory rejects Seybold’s causality (the second option) and argues for the first. (I have silently edited the rush transcript):

There is an external crisis, which is a crisis of funding and public support. And there is an internal crisis, which has to do with the feeling of exhaustion in the sort of basic enterprise, the basic mission of the discipline. All the excitement in the discipline now is related to subfields.

Guillory uses ecocriticism, disability studies, affect studies, queer studies, and critical race theory, among others, as examples of subfields that have captured the excitement of criticism. He continues:

We do have a discipline in which the subfields dominate over the fields. The fields were defined--and this was . . . part of the occasion of the internal crisis of exhaustion--by periods and definitely connected with the category of literature, with literature as object. And I think there was a sense of exhaustion. Something, something gave way in high theory. Some failure to carry on with the kind of extrapolation from the concept of high theory, essentially an extrapolation from concepts like writing or the sign, signifier, the whole constellation of high theoretical concepts.

For Guillory, criticism’s first problem is that it’s not a coherent (never mind unified) discipline anymore, but has fallen apart into a set of subfields that don’t communicate with each other. He thinks this situation is bad. But how do we know that it is? 

He implies that the field of criticism was unified before, and seems to assume that unity is better, especially when asking other people for money. He also seems to claim that it was unified by high theory.  He defines high theory as a combination of periodized literary history from which “extrapolations” are made (an interesting term where other disciplines might say “claims”) — extrapolations “from concepts like writing or the sign, signifier.” I assume this defines high theory as reading texts deemed literary through literature’s status as a linguistic object. Thus, the core of the previously unified field was reading literature as language through a set of complex concepts (which were often borrowed from other disciplines like linguistics and continental philosophy).   Then, there was an “internal crisis of exhaustion.”  “Something gave way in high theory.”  Things fell apart; the center could not hold.

But to repeat the question, was criticism unified before? Why is not being unified bad? If high theory had become intellectually exhausted, then critics were right to move on to other topics and other methods. The main argument for sticking with high theory would then be pragmatic: though it has actually said all that it has to say, managers and STEM faculty recognize it as proper criticism, so we should keep it as a familiar public face while the discipline advances diversely as it must.

I don’t know whether Guillory thinks high theory had lots of life left it in but was carelessly abandoned by critics chasing trends. But I do know that high theory did not unify criticism into a coherent field. Literary study has never been unified, as Gerald Graff showed going on four decades ago in Professing Literature (a title on which Guillory’s book title riffs). In addition, high theory did not provide even temporary unity but, if anything, made criticism’s existing dualism worse. Graff and many others identified an ancient dualism between text and context in literary study that was reinforced by deconstruction and related high theoretical practices. The boundary was particularly barbed for at least ten years, let’s say between 1976 and 1986. 

For example, one of my favorite chapters of one of my favorite critics in graduate school, Chapter 4 of Paul de Man’s Allegories of Reading (1979), begins like this:

In literary studies, structures of meaning are frequently described in historical rather than in semiological or rhetorical terms. This is, in itself, a somewhat surprising occurrence, since the historical nature of literary discourse is by no means an a priori established fact, whereas all literature necessarily consist of linguistic and semantic elements. Yet students of literature seem to shy away from the analysis of semantic structures and feel more at home with problems of psychology or of historiography. The reasons for this detour or flight from language are complex and go far in revealing the very semiological properties that are being circumvented. (79)

De Man assumes a binary opposition between text and history—ironically rather essentialist—and then adds that historiography was not an autonomous intellectual practice but a “flight from language.” He posits a (traditional) gulf between the two sides of text / literature and history /society and also that history, in relation to literature, is a symptom of a resistance to language. For him, language and history weren’t reciprocal dimensions of the meaning of the literary text, or collaborative methods and bodies of knowledge to enable literature to shed light on the problems of the world. History, in relation to literary texts, was an evasion of the true status of literature as semiological and rhetorical artifact.  

I remember perfectly well what I liked in 1985 about de Man’s work: it made literary criticism a discipline with intellectual priority to others (like history and economics). Criticism had the drop on them, it was philosophically “upstream” of other fields including the sciences in which I’d spent most of my undergraduate years. De Man and high theory more broadly gave literary study both a mission and a pre-eminence, a superior status among the faculties where, in U.S. colleges and universities, it had always played third or fourth string. 

However, this attractive avant-gardism did not unify criticism, but divided it. It was a divisive position, quite intentionally. It sought to cast historical, social, anthropological and political analysis as outside true criticism. This splintered English and language departments, sometimes acrimoniously. There were many good things about the advanced study of literature in the 1980s, but I did not experience a single afternoon of a unified profession.

Much of high theory—certainly de Man’s version—was constitutively opposed to interdisciplinarity. This appeared in our everyday education, in which training in neighboring fields was mostly DIY, and also in cross-disciplinary relations. As one historian put it to me (they’d been reading Foucault in graduate school at the same time I was), high theory “did much to create the lack of respect for criticism in other parts of the university both because of its arrogance and because of its willful refusal to really engage with anything outside of itself.”  I did hear this quite a bit at the time. 

When the discovery of de Man’s antisemitic wartime journalism hit the news in late 1987, high theorists mostly tried to segregate literary theory from this matter of historiography, which made things worse. Although the attacks were unfair to high theory as a body of thought, my memory is that high theory didn’t become exhausted so much as it was discredited, in part because it seemed to many outsiders unable to deal forthrightly with public questions.

De Man aside, U.S. high theory represented a portion of literary studies rather than literary studies as a whole. It was anchored in English poetry and Comparative Literature dominated by French and German (Ignacio M. Sanchez Prado is eloquent on the benefits of putting Spanish back in). High theory was the zone of literary study arguably most removed from intellectual and social movements then transforming fields like history and (re)creating others like Black Studies.

Although I worked and studied in Cornell’s English department, my research was in American Studies, which was rooted as much in history, Marxist political economy, and ethnic studies as in literature, and which preferred Foucault to de Man.  So I had to take de Man’s exclusion of historiography metaphorically rather than literally. My dissertation demonstrated Emerson’s emptying out of the subjectivity of possessive individualism through detailed and deconstructive close readings. But the dissertation turned out to be on the way to a book version about Emerson’s creation of “submissive individualism” for the middle-classes of an emerging corporate America. I had to move back and forth across the profession’s internal border as hardened and enforced by my favorite literary critic. I couldn’t write about corporate subjectivity without studying economic history. I couldn’t write the chapter, “Corporatism and the Genesis of Liberal Racism” without reading Du Bois on Black Reconstruction. I couldn’t write the chapter on Emerson’s revisions of Congregationalist models of the language of belief without studying intellectual history, and so on. Graff acknowledged this challenge to his dualist framework in his chapter, “The Promise of American Literature Studies.” This and similar interdisciplinary challenges are a permanent feature of criticism.

In short, since criticism has never been unified, and since it was not unified even temporarily by high theory, then perhaps criticism as a collection of subfields does not constitute an internal crisis. And if a disunited assembly of subfields is not an internal crisis, then disunity didn’t cause the external crisis of department closures, adjunctification, graduate program cuts, and terrible research funding.

Further points seem inevitable to me. Perhaps criticism has always been an interdiscipline. Perhaps the co-presence of scholars and critics, philologists and historians, sociologically and aesthetically-oriented close readers, canonical and non-canonical syllabi, literary and media scholars, readers and writers, is not the problem but the solution. 

Perhaps we should stop describing the profession as a civil war between contradictory dualisms that has created a hundred-year internal crisis and instead marvel at the sheer range of our hybrid knowledges.

Perhaps we should see this multiplicity as a sign of criticism’s attachment to literature, not its rejection. What is more endlessly interdisciplinary than the novel, the long poem, the literary essay? Who enacts a more profound obligation to connect what has been separated by academic disciplines than literary writers?

Perhaps in a world where every major problem has only multi-disciplinary solutions, and where every technological approach goes wrong unless embedded socio-cultural knowledge, we should see criticism not as defective but as the future of knowledge.

If we do treat criticism as an interdiscipline, then our issue becomes not the fact of having subfields but the health and quality of each — and of their interrelations.  We want criticism to be a good interdiscipline, not a bad one. Here, Guillory raises two important issues.

These subfields are actually bits and pieces of interdisciplinary enterprises. So they're not really necessarily literary at all. If you're talking about ecocriticism, what exactly is the relation between literature, that's concerned with, or readable in the context of the ecological crisis of humanity and works of literature?

It seems like a little bit of a falling off. If you're matching the climate crisis of the human race, you know, the Anthropocene with a particular poem by Wordsworth, what's the relation between those two things? It's very hard to say what literary study is doing on behalf of the climate crisis by talking about a particular poem by Wordsworth.

Not that there's not a relation between Wordsworth and the environment, because, of course, we've, you know, rediscovered the whole subject of nature in Romantic literature by way of the climate crisis. But what is it doing? What is that criticism doing for the climate crisis? If it's going to be solved, it's going to be solved at the level of politics, at the level of engineering is probably the most important thing, so far as the important human practice. So far as the crisis is concerned, it's engineering. And we don't really have all that much to do with engineering. 

Guillory is entirely right to say criticism’s subfields are interdisciplinary, in that they draw on methods and content from other fields. In fact, criticism has always done this. The outside disciplines between 1976 and 1986 would have been led by structural linguistics, phenomenology, and feminist history, among others. Now our outside disciplines also include environmental sciences and computer engineering. (Our established partners like linguistics, philosophy, and feminist history have not disappeared, and one can get tired out by the sheer size of criticism’s intellectual family, especially when too many turn up to the same dinner.)  What has happened is not a shift from a field to a set of subfields, but a rotation in the external partners that criticism’s leading subfields bring to the rest of criticism-as-interdiscipline.

The other points Guillory rightly raises are, what is the subfield’s relation to its outside partner, and what really does it have to contribute to common questions?  “What is that criticism [of Wordsworth’s poetry] doing for the climate crisis?”  He doesn’t actually give Matt or himself a chance to answer the question before he shuts it down: criticism does nothing—the solution is engineering.

This certainly isn’t right. Addressing the climate crisis is, just to name three factors, one part engineering, one part governance, one part human behavior in all its cultural complication, psychological darkness, and semiological-rhetorical intensities acting on human consciousness at every moment. Every climate engineer I’ve met wants help with problems of adoption and use, problems of popular resistance and acceptance, problems of the fit of technology to human needs they know they don’t really understand. Many know that there will be no solution to the climate crisis without a revolution in North-South economic relations, which is simultaneously political, organizational, and cultural. Engineers are willing to take help from experts on literature, culture, history—the devil is in the delivery of useful ideas, not the epistemology of their origins. I have met many who find value in literary critic Rob Nixon’s concept of slow violence, both for illuminating “engineers without borders” work and for modulating their own expectations of what they can achieve—to invoke just one well-travelled example from ecocriticism.

Take a second arena: during the pandemic, pharmacological scientists invented vaccines at unprecedented rates. Meanwhile, most countries couldn’t get access to the vaccines because of international and economic relations embodied in legal and financial systems that are in turn operated through a range of cultural beliefs (e. g. in intellectual property) and relations to persuasive language that criticism studies. Similarly, the United States had vaccines, but couldn’t get a percentage of its population to take them. Infection and death rates are tied directly to a set of cultural beliefs and practices that flow from texts, media presentations, discursive subcultures, and a range of semiological and rhetorical behaviors. Listen, for example, to the headway made on these issues by Zoe Chace and her collaborators on a This American Life episode, “The Florida Experiment.” “So far as the crisis is concerned,” it’s actually culture, not (only) pharmacological engineering. 

A final example from my primary “subfield,” critical university studies. In Dark Academia, Peter Fleming analyzes the fact and effects of academics being now viewed as “hired labour who can be replaced at a moment’s notice” by administrator-bosses.  “What are the alternatives?” he asks. “The problem is not a lack of a better model for governing universities, particularly public ones. There are plenty of those available . . . No. The trouble is how we might realise them given how embedded the present system now is” ( 5). This is right, and “how we might realise” X is a masterplot of literature as such, and a core theme of criticism regardless of subfield. Fleming is saying we know enough about organizational sociology, but we don’t understand the conjunction of individual psychology, group formations, resource and institutional pressures, governmentalities, and discourse. The conjunction is, once again, what always confronts literature and criticism. An interdiscipline like literary criticism is suited to representing and also addressing big problems that are invariably mixtures of objects and of their primary fields.

If we set aside Guillory’s premature closure of his question, we can better see its importance: the reader of Wordsworth has to be competent in the methods of the disciplines that they use, regardless of their origins. They have to understand their combination of methods such that they can explain it to, say, a colleague who specializes in biological statistics in relation to species diversity. They also have to be able to articulate what their critical methods bring to the interdisciplinary effort. 

For someone working in ecocriticism as opposed to environmental biology, this will always involve some use of literary texts and of close textual analysis. I agree with Guillory and the profession’s conservative wing about this—“I’m an ecocritic” needs to be specifiable as a distinctive professional expertise. 

That said, how does the profession develop, explain, and use coherent interdisciplinary methods? The main way is multi-disciplinary training. An ecocritic would ideally have a doctorate in literary studies and a doctorate in environmental sciences. But this is the elite solution. I had lunch with a computer scientist at the University of Cambridge the other day, who was telling me English had recently hired someone with a similar combination—a doctorate in computer science as well as English. This person will be able to create knowledge in their subfield of digital humanities that has internal coherence and validity—and that can also be joined up directly with research occurring inside and outside criticism as an interdiscipline.

Most universities try to do a version of this cross-training. But most have limited funds, especially public research universities in the United States, and most have even more limited funds for the humanities. So the norm is getting a certificate in digital arts or computer design or feminist theory by taking 2-3 courses in those subjects as part of one’s PhD in literary studies. And the typical humanities doctoral candidate will do this without undergraduate foundations in programming or cognitive science or philosophy, and will do it as a graduate student employee—serving as, say, a TA for 50 students per quarter.  If they manage to get a tenure-track job, they will as a professor be in a parallel situation at any but a couple of dozen elite universities. Literary scholars can’t usually pool a single research staffer for a department of 20 or 30 (while a physics department might have 30 research staff for 30 faculty). Their humanities center might have a budget analyst to help with grants, who will be working for 15 departments at a time.

The quality of research in every field depends directly on material resources. This is even more true of interdisciplines. A subfield like ecocriticism or DH is constantly evolving and demands its practitioners have deep knowledge not of one field but of two or more, knowledge that must stay current.  This requires time to do research rather than teach. It requires funds to create, administer, and support groups that can bring diverse expertise together.  It requires funds for group engagement—mutual teaching, constant communication, further private study, further collaborative work.  I have been a PI or co-PI in two multi-year interdisciplinary groups, one funded by NSF and the other by NEH. One set aside almost no time for study and intellectual communication. The other spent 20 hours a week for 12 weeks doing this, with regular updates afterwards. The second was more successful intellectually than the first—and its conceptual developments hinged on a nearly unique humanities funding situation: the project received one of exactly 10 collaborative federal research grants in the country that year coupled with a residential research group at a humanities institute that may no longer be funded to offer these. Were such research support routine, criticism would operate on a completely different level—the level of most of our partner disciplines.

It is indeed very difficult to achieve and sustain really high quality across criticism as an interdiscipline. This is a hard problem. But it has nothing to do with the subfields’ multiplicity or their interdisciplinary status as such and everything to do with their induced poverty.  The external crisis of underfunded working conditions causes the internal crisis of underdeveloped relations with external partners, and insufficient expertise in some shared methods. (It is not the only cause but in my view it drives the others.) I’m sorry even to use the term “internal” crisis because I don’t think our existing research is deficient—I think it’s remarkable. But I do know it doesn’t reflect the full ambitions of its literary critics or of its partner disciplines, and we would have better answers to Guillory’s question about how interpreting Wordsworth addresses the climate crisis if we had the level of research funding that typifies many other fields.

I note that Guillory is very interested in this problem: when discussing the relation between law and literature in critical race theory, he says, “what we haven't figured out is the institutional structure, the relation, between disciplines, fields, and subfields . . . We haven't found a way to bring all those things into relation.” He’s right that if we have an “internal crisis,” this is it. But the crisis isn’t the lack of a central “field” to unify the subs but the lack of material infrastructure.  It’s not that we “haven’t figured out . . . the institutional structure.” It’s that we’re too underfunded to build one in academia. And one result is superb younger critics leaving for platforms outside the university of the kind Matt discussed with Ryan Ruby.

Well, maybe there is an internal crisis, and that is the fear and confusion a simple question raises in some number of criticism’s senior leaders. 

What you have is administrations, legislatures, these funding agencies that previously were supporting the enterprises of the humanities and literature among the humanities. And they're looking at us and they're saying, I don't know what you're doing. This doesn't sound like literature to me. I thought we were supporting literature departments.

In my experience, legislators not actively prosecuting culture wars don’t ask this question. But university administrators do. It is an uninformed question that should be treated literally as a request by a lay person for information from an expert. 

Let’s switch to physics.  A provost says to the chair of the physics department, “You guys keep inventing all these new particles; some of you are working with biologists, and others are talking about exoplanets. I don’t know what physics does anymore.” 

The chair, who understands how to explain profession-based research knowledge (her professional association does it on a daily basis), thinks to herself, “you don’t know what physics is doing anymore because you’re not a physicist.  And really you never did know: your undergrad physics course taught you as little about what physics does as your Shakespeare survey course taught you what literary critics do.”

The chair then says, “There’s no reason for you to know—you’re not a physicist. Our department is especially good in three subfields—particle physics, which is internally complex, some issues in quantum mechanics relevant to astronomy, and experimental imaging techniques involving interfaces between physics and biology. You might not see the relations among these three projects, or why they are all physics, but the department does. I do. When I now tell you why they are all variations of physics, you probably won’t understand what I say, and if so, you’ll have to take my word for it! It all makes sense in the terms of our profession.”  And so she goes on to explain. The chair invokes her profession of “physics” as an authority, rather than joining in doubting its foundations because some outsider has noticed its plurality.

Physics’ many subfields also make sense in terms of the historical levels of funding for physics—Oppenheimer should have reminded critics of the life on Planet Money, on which physicists have in most periods been able to try out anything they want, and also maintain their relationships in spite of the usual disagreements.

Criticism should treat administrative doubts in exactly the same way: as questions that can be answered by referring to the field’s research questions, areas of teaching, scholarly findings, and interrelations among subfields. We will need to help people—starting with our own administrators—approach other people’s knowledge with humility and respect.  

Guillory suggests that our problem is we have been immodest—we’ve tackled climate change and anti-Black racism and transphobia and the like, and that while other fields are up to the job we are not. 

I believe the evidence points the other way: criticism has suffered a plague of modesty. It is expressed as a false sense that inadequacy or incoherence is in us, when in fact it is outside, in the infrastructure that doesn’t exist and that imposes slowness, incomplete linkages, and privatized scholarly labor

Modesty is our problem, particularly in infrastructure. Literary study is too poor to do the background academic labor to build the cross-disciplinary expertise that its ambitions deserve. When it can, critics will be able to join the coalitions of subfields that is the best way humanity has to address large world problems that are also coalitions of factors and entities. Our national associations need to insist that the coalition be put together properly, and then actually build the infrastructure that would allow the coalition. The coalition of subfields that make up the interdiscipline must have people in the right numbers and with the right training, have the proper equipment and systems on hand, and have lots and lots of time and effort and money to make mistakes, to try things out, to fail, to try something else, to put ideas together this way and then another way, to cook the various combinations multiple different ways as is the regular case in the bench sciences and in engineering. (Magnetic-storage media exist in large part because engineers “made and characterized over 30,000 different multilayer combinations”(McCray 2009, 67)). 

In such a model, subfields and their interdisciplinary attachments look not to a central paradigm but to interrelations they have built up from their own activities. The solution is not a new conceptual core. The solution is infrastructure, collaboratively and horizontally made through multifarious research practices supported by funding strategies we need to build. 

Doing this is going to be really hard, but focusing on the immodesty of our subfields is keeping us from getting started. Criticism has a crisis—the external one. That’s the one we need to fix.

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Christopher Newfield is Director of Research at the Independent Social Research Foundation in London. He was formerly Distinguished Professor of English at UC-Santa Barbara and President of the Modern Language Association. He’s the author (or co-author) of numerous books in Critical University Studies, most recently The Great Mistake (Johns Hopkins UP, 2018) and Metrics That Matter (Johns Hopkins UP, 2023).