More Not-Fully-Formed Thoughts on Literary Criticism
For my last piece, I explored a rather tone-deaf piece by Christine Smallwood on The Yale Review on the material conditions of criticism. Doing this helped me realize that I still have a lot of thoughts about the act of criticism. None of them are original, but I am jotting them down anyways, for myself, in case I want to revisit them years later. They have not been refined — they’ve come to me in this way on a hot June afternoon.
During the 1990s and 2000s, you could not skip a discussion on the literary canon, especially in the context of what deserves to be included in literature courses. The conservative camp naturally argued for preserving Greek tragedies, British poetry, and the Great (White) American Novel because these objects contained universal life lessons. Opposed to them were those scholars asking for increasing inclusion of literature by people of color, LGBTQ+ people, people with disabilities, and people in the Global South, among others. Form and genre also became a concern: novels, plays, and poetry could coexist next to films, comic books, and video games. In general, this camp rarely argued for the total elimination of the Eurocentric canon, but rather for its transformation into a multicultural one. Those European works that remained in the canon could, after all, be analyzed through the lenses of contemporary social issues like race, gender, and sexuality.
The position of conservatives never made much sense. Developments in the sociology of culture demonstrated that our classifications of certain artworks as essential and classical can be either intentionally excluding minority perspectives or just plain arbitrary. Moreover, artworks do not become immediate classics upon creation. It took years for Van Gogh to solidify his place in Western art history courses, for instance. Had it been for the conservatives of his era, perhaps he would not have entered the canon at all. Despite their façade of conservatism, cultural canons cannot exist without frequent critical inquiry and innovation.
The multicultural, non-elitist canon promised to modify education in the humanities. In some ways, it did: wonderful materials by minority authors became classroom staples — Sandra Cisneros and Toni Morrison could now be taught alongside Edgar Allan Poe and John Steinbeck in any American literature course. Lots of great scholarship originated too in the act of revisiting old literature with contemporary social discussions. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s critiques of Henry James and Marcel Proust taught us much about human sexuality in Western culture; Edward Said showed us how Austen and Conrad’s novels functioned as discreet weapons of the British empire. This work is necessary and valuable.
Yet sometimes it feels that making a more inclusive canon merely appeased the least ardent conservative defenders of the canon rather than truly transforming into an inclusive, loose list of must-reads. Old works can stay as long as they briefly teach us about the present. Today, I saw an announcement for an upcoming edited volume on Virginia Woolf’s work read through the lens of the Anthropocene. A popular term in the humanities and the sciences, the Anthropocene refers to the current state of human-caused environmental decay. Does Virginia Woolf’s work have a lot to say about the Anthropocene? Maybe. Yet it feels counterproductive to search for traces of the Anthropocene in an early twentieth-century white author when so many contemporary writings are urging people to worry about the environment. There is something awkward about using the decolonial writings of Ailton Krenak as tools to understand Virginia Woolf — this was not necessarily Krenak’s idea of what his passionate pleas to protect the Amazon would do. Most readers of such a volume — usually highly educated literary scholars — are already quite aware of the Anthropocene. Inserting this concept into Woolf’s work does not necessarily entail unearthing new knowledge that will inspire people to act.
This leads to an important question: is such state-funded academic literary criticism a “social need”? Even asking the question is certainly reactionary — in an ideal world we should not need to justify intellectual exercises and artistic production. Humans should be able to think about the Anthropocene in Virginia Woolf’s works simply because they like doing so. The current state of academia, however, complicates openly stating that. In a world where it becomes increasingly difficult to find well-remunerated employment, elected officials are scapegoating academic disciplines which do not result in specific, straightforward careers right after graduation. As neoliberal logic makes its way into the agonizing remnants of the welfare state, an education in the humanities becomes hard to justify. An English literature degree simply cannot compete with an engineering one if the end goal of an undergraduate degree is making money.
The humanities have defended themselves by proving that their graduates have gone on to find employment. Medical schools and corporations like Google love Latin and philosophy majors because of their unique background. Critical thinking and writing are skills that translate well to any career. These are compelling efforts to shut down anti-intellectuals demanding a return on their investment. There have also been efforts to promote greater dialogue among different academic disciplines, resulting in programs like the public humanities, data science for cultural analysis, museum and preservation studies, the medical humanities, Spanish language and culture courses for the health professions, and environmental literary studies. These creative programs, despite their perception as crutches for the limping humanities, have worked in attracting students to these fields and have produced interesting insights on their own.
Yet it remains easy for tenured literary critics to forget why they had to come up with them in the first place. Environmental criticism keeps searching for novel concepts, resulting in volumes about the Anthropocene in the work of authors like Seneca, Dickens or Virginia Woolf. The critic Friedrich Jameson had noticed the insatiable thirst for newness in the humanities already in 1991 with Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. This thirst has not been quenched. More and more concepts and theories are born everyday, partly in response to an eternally-changing world, and partly in response to the neoliberal demand for novelty in academia. Perhaps the critics studying the Anthropocene in Virginia Woolf are indeed passionate about the environment and Woolf. But perhaps this interested is somewhat shaped by industry trends and expectations— the Anthropocene is one of the latest trends in criticism, one that guarantees attention, funding, and a clique of fellow intellectuals to have conversations with.
It is naïve to believe that literary criticism plays a big role in changing the world for the better. An essay on Emerson, Nabokov, or an obscure contemporary author no one has studied yet will probably not lead us to assess our ways and change. It would be nice, however, if we still aimed for that in our scholarly engagements. Instead, careerism and its associated drive to find comfort push brilliant people into engaging with hot topics and trendy approaches in literary criticism applied to, ironically, authors and works everybody has studied enough already.
I conclude by saying that I do not oppose the work done on the Virginia Woolf and the Anthropocene book. I am confident there are plenty of stimulating ideas in it, and that Woolf does have something to say about humankind’s relation with nature. I wish, however, that such a work were not a product of structures of power in academia that reward specific approaches and subjects without even considering their afterlives outside of the university. Decolonial theory on the environment can certainly illuminate what Woolf wrote in her prose, but such a use of it risks neutralizing it, reducing it to a conceptual toy rather than a guiding light for Indigenous peoples across the world. More than ever, criticism needs not to forget its materiality beyond the interests of the Global North career academic; with the little power the critic has, they should aim to do more than uncritically following the footsteps of their successful colleagues and mentors.
