While he may be best known for the controversial point that literary scholars critique their own discipline as a form of “surrogacy” for political action, his work ranges over other topics: the history of the discipline, its forgotten prototypes (belles-lettres and philology), the death of oratory, and the contradiction of teaching an increasingly global set of works in the English language. Our panel takes up some of these questions and applies Guillory’s work to problems he did not necessarily address.
In “Post-Colonial Studies: An Obituary,” Vikrant Dadawala argues that postcolonial theory has become increasingly marginal within the study of world literature as scholarship returns to methods originating in philology and area studies. This transpires even as student interest in the colonial encounter has exploded. What happened to postcolonial studies? In Guillory’s account, the field of Global English is fast becoming a distinct discipline, antithetical to the study of canonical figures such as Chaucer or Milton. Ironically enough, it is Global English that seems poised to address the changing needs of the market, despite its revolutionary rhetoric.
Dadawala proposes a pedagogy that synthesizes postcolonial theory and area studies. Drawing on his experience teaching South Asian and diasporic literature to students in the United States and Canada, his paper focuses on classroom encounters with texts that unsettle simplistic thinking about colonialism, postcolonialism, and English studies: letters by sepoys who fought for King and Empire, Rabindranath Tagore’s bittersweet indictment of colonialism in his final public speech, and the darkness of V.S. Naipaul’s oeuvre.
Jacob Romanow is also concerned with very recent developments in criticism. In “Bad Formalisms: Method Exhaustion at the End of a Discipline,” he considers scholarship that attempts to marry formalist method with grand political action. He argues that these “bad formalisms” panic over the problem of scale. How can literature or criticism rightly take on capitalism, climate crisis, fascism? Such questions are best understood as a professional deformation, a transference of disciplinary anxieties onto matters of world significance. Some literature, some theory, may help some readers address these sociocultural questions, but they are hardly literature’s cross to bear.
These studies take for granted what Caroline Levine designates “the portability of forms.” However, portability has its limits. Scalar legerdemain and overclaims for portability might, we think, help us land a seat at the big kids’ table. Spoiler: they don’t. However, they do make it harder to do other things, for example naming misuses of language and recognizing the situated work of form. These implicit defenses of the humanities are not really attempts to forestall disciplinary exhaustion; instead they contribute to the writing of our own obituary. Is that what we want to write?
For Justin A. Sider, the first draft of such an obituary might have been written in the latter twentieth century, when poetry was knocked from its high perch in the discipline. In “What is Literary Criticism Without Poetry?” he considers the consequences for English studies of this displacement. Foundational works of Anglo-American criticism (for example, those of I.A. Richards, William Empson, Cleanth Brooks or W.K. Wimsatt) trained their readers principally on poetic analysis. However, the most important theoretical projects defining the field since the early 1980s prefer the novel as the genre that offers neater entrée to questions of representation, politics, and social life.
Sider examines the implications of this change for the practice of criticism, particularly with respect to the “overestimation of aim” that Guillory argues characterizes our generally marginalized discipline today, in which all genres may go the way of poems. Could the treatment of poetry be the canary in the coal mine of literary studies’ social inertness? And if so, could returning to its possibilities be a way of redescribing the discipline’s social role? Sider argues that poetry’s advocates from the early twentieth century saw it as a special form of mediation, and as generating an oppositional force including but reaching beyond issues of identity and representation.