Literary Theory Was Corrupted, But...

There Are Signs of Hope

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I didn’t have a name for it. I just knew I hated it.

That’s how I felt when I first began studying literature at a public university and encountered a morass of muddled ideas about literature, language, and truth that all but spoiled the beauty and art of great books, which was what had caused me to fall in love with them in the first place.

Eight years and many hours of research and study later, I understand that higher education has been infected with the hybrid beast of neo-Marxism and postmodernism, with a nihilistic bent. In college, we read almost exclusively Marxist, neo-Marxist, and postmodernist theorists, such as Marx, Foucault, Derrida, Gramsci, Spivak, Althusser, Sartre, Lukács, Lacan, and members of the Frankfurt School. And there was nary a mention that literature might be approached in another way, a way that didn’t focus on hidden oppression, power dynamics, and the subconscious desire for sexual perversion (sometimes of the Freudian variety). My professors just dutifully repeated the prevailing orthodoxy of contemporary literary criticism.

Few areas of study have suffered more than literature under the hegemony of “wokeness,” as this new ideology has come to be known. In his book on The Quest for Shakespeare, Joseph Pearce describes in vivid terms what modern literary criticism has been reduced to. Though Pearce speaks specifically of Shakespearean critics, his description is applicable to most (though not all) critics in any literary specialty:

The historicists, new historicists, feminists, postfeminists, deconstructionists, et cetera ad nauseam, are lying broken at the feet of the unbroken Shakespeare, picking over the pieces of their own theories, arguing over the meaning of the monsters of their own monstrous musings, missing the point and impaling themselves on the point of their own pointlessness.

“Missing the point” is a very good way to describe an analysis of The Tempest that tries to read it as a commentary on colonialism, with the monster Caliban a helpless victim of the white European “colonizers,” or an examination of Hamlet that reduces all the complexity and mystery of its haunted young protagonist’s words to an Oedipus complex.

The work of these critics is “pointless” in terms of its objective value. However, in another sense, their work has not been pointless; it has been sharpened to a shadowy sword with which to slay the traditional study of the humanities.

Real literary study is about the exploration of the good, the true, and the beautiful as found in the written word. It is about the quickening of the heart and buoyancy of soul that comes when you encounter a beautiful passage near the end of a long novel that seems to cut through the very fabric of daily existence, to rend the curtain, so that you see a glimmer of the real and the eternal. It is about the best and highest achievements of humanity in understanding and representing the mystery that is the cosmos. It is about wonder and imagination, passion and adventure, suffering and triumph, the highs and lows of human nature and human experience.

The fact that modern criticism has obscured all this is dangerous—not just for literature, but for culture and society itself. A society that reduces art to the level of crude power dynamics and political jargon, or worse, mere sexual innuendo and perversion, can only be passing into the last stages of depravity and decadence—and collapse. Such cultural cannibalism is a sign of an anguished and deeply disturbed people. It is a sign of terminal societal illness.

But all is not lost. Through circumstances like the recent Harvard plagiarism scandals and the work of thinkers and investigators like Jordan Peterson and Christopher Rufo, the mask is being torn off of academia, revealing the ugliness and stale breath of intellectual corruption beneath. This is a great step in the right direction. More work needs to be done, certainly, but there are signs of hope here. The best disinfectant is sunlight.

At last, the universities are beginning to encounter friction in the promotion of their “woke” (and broke) ideology. The Chronical of Higher Education reports that campuses are “[making] changes in response to anti-DEI [Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion] legislation and mounting political pressure.” Anti-DEI politicians have launched “an assault” since early 2023 against colleges’ DEI work, and there has been so much legislation taking aim at colleges’ DEI obsessions that The Chronicle has an entire webpage dedicated to tracking these laws. The Chronicle explains, “Republican leaders say the practices violate free speech, break antidiscrimination laws, and are a misuse of public money.”

Of course, not only colleges’ hiring and admissions procedures but also their curricula need to be overhauled. Many of the ideas that have resulted in DEI programs throughout our institutions originated in the murky interior of the ivory tower—its classes, conversations, and scholarly publications.

In February 2023, The New Yorker published a feature by Nathan Heller on the enrollment decline in humanities courses. You might think this spells doom for literary studies, but it all depends on what factors are driving the decline. I suspect that the bankrupt enterprise (literally and figuratively) of neo-Marxist critique has begun to run its course, which is a good thing, a spark of hope. One of the most insightful passages of the New Yorker piece comes near the end:

Others, though, suggest that the humanities’ loss of cultural capital has been hastened by the path of humanities scholarship itself. One theory is that the critical practices have become too specialized. Once, in college, you might have studied ‘Mansfield Park’ by looking closely at its form, references, style, and special marks of authorial genius—the way Vladimir Nabokov famously taught the novel, and an intensification of the way a reader on the subway experiences the book. Now you might write a paper about how the text enacts a tension by both constructing and subtly undermining the imperial patriarchy through its descriptions of landscape. What does this have to do with how most humans read? Rita Felski … has argued that the professional practice of scholarship has become self-defeatingly disdainful of moving literary encounters.

This, I think, is a key factor in the decline in interest in the humanities. Scholars have themselves become irrelevant, but this also opens the door to a rediscovery of true literary scholarship. That rediscovery may be underway through “postcritique,” a movement that seeks to find new ways to interpret literature outside the critical theory/Marxist tradition. Postcritics engage literary works with wonder, enchantment, and delight in the reading process.

Interestingly, the literature programs Heller profiles that seem to be doing well are the ones that take a more postcritical approach. As one professor Heller interviewed put it: “We are very concerned with the beauty of things, with aesthetics, and ultimately with judgment about the value of works of art. I think there is a hunger among students for the thrill that comes from truth and beauty.”

If students are, indeed, beginning to rediscover that thrill, then we may yet dare to hope for the future of education and literary studies.

This article originally appeared on Intellectual Takeout. https://intellectualtakeout.org/2024/08/literary-theory-was-corrupted/#comments