Literature: An Embattled Profession

By Carl Woodring
Columbia University Press (New York, 1999)

Woodring really has quite the knack for imagery. In the opening sentence, Woodring describes literary study as a “besieged baronial mansion, with parapets erected to make it equally fortress and prison”.

In Chapter four, Disruption, Deconstruction, and Diaspora, Woodring criticises the weaknesses in literary study as a field, namely,

1. The focus of theory in the modern study of literature.
While Woodring appreciates that theory has brought new light to the genre, he describes it thus: “Focus on theory has intensified an unearned vanity. Good work has been done, but it is as if we accomplished the basic research for which no application was ever to be sought, nothing that served any purpose beyond the sharpening of minds – like the sharpening of knives for the display under glass in a museum.” (69)

2. Academically trained fiction
“But academically trained fiction, introducing further subtleties of technique to be admired as variations on narrative, threatens to merit William James’s assessment of his brother as being able to do everything to a story except tell it. The academy, which has produced both author and audience for such fiction, would do better to teach undergraduates exactly, exactly what is wrong with novels by John Grisham and Danielle Steele.” (73)

3. The use of Freudian analysis
“Authors of books claiming intellectual and moral superiority over a writer or other accomplished figure as subject seldom apply a Freudian scalpel to their own motivation.”

4. The fragmentation of literary study
“What deserves rebuke in literary and cultural studies today is the fragmentation – a seriocomic scenario in which sodden firefighters spray water on each other while the house burns down.” (93) The Modern Language Association in Detroit increased from 62 sessions in 1947 to 745 sessions in 1997 to accommodate the “Marxists, feminists, Sassurians, Lacanists, Ricoeurists, Bakhtinists, biographers, New Historicists, classicists, Romantics, gays, lesbians, whateverists” (94).

Woodring also comments on other theories of literary criticism, such as the deconstructionists, new historists, Marxists, etc. He suggests that the solution is not to eliminate diversity but to discover and promulgate what is common.