Critical Inquiry

Nick Gillespie from the April 1998 issue

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Literature Lost is compelling in many ways, perhaps most forcefully simply as a performance: It embodies the critical dialogue it espouses. The very strengths of the book, however, make its failings loom larger. Given the resonance of its title, it's not surprising--but no less annoying--that Literature Lost is suffused with a relatively uncomplicated longing for the olden days when critics "prided themselves on using their language well" and "excellence was their watchword."

It's a safe bet that critics throughout history have always been fond of their writing and have believed themselves to be excellent at their various perorations. Without ever quite spelling out the terms, Ellis evinces a fairly narrow ideal of legitimate literary criticism, pooh-poohing thematic studies and the application of critical methods such as close reading and rhetorical analysis to nonliterary objects.

His fretting over the perceived lack of scholarly interest in major figures such as Shakespeare is unconvincing. The Bard still bestrides the critical industry like a colossus and, whether Shakespeare courses are required or not, it's tough to find an undergraduate English major who has not been exposed to him; similarly, the proliferation of mandatory "great books" and "intellectual heritage" college courses mean that students are more likely to encounter Plato, Aristotle, Dante, and the rest of the old gang than they might have been 20 years ago.

More important, Ellis sometimes focuses on scholars who are peripheral to contemporary literary studies, although they may be influential in other disciplines. This tendency is most obvious in his discussion of feminist criticism. He spends a fair amount of time on people such as Marilyn French (author of The Women's Room), Catharine MacKinnon, and Andrea Dworkin, none of whom can be mistaken for a major player in literary criticism, feminist or otherwise.

He also calls attention to scholars, such as Peggy McIntosh of Wellesley's Center for Research on Women, who argue that men and women literally think along different lines: Men think "vertically"--logically, individualistically, competitively; women think "horizontally" --intuitively, socially, compassionately. While there is no dearth of silly ideas circulating in literary studies, such a schema is not one of the more widespread ones.

Conversely, Ellis ignores immensely influential figures such as Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, and Hélène Cixous--all of whom have had a profound impact on literary and cultural studies. Though he discusses Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's influential 1979 study of representations of women in Victorian literature, The Madwoman in the Attic, he seems to have little awareness of the acts of literary recovery it both reflected and helped inspire. Indeed, a great deal of feminist criticism focuses less on "theorizing" about gender differences and more on establishing what women actually wrote and under what circumstances.

The results can be quite fascinating, for they often fill out a literary history that, while not completely excluding women writers, was quick to dismiss such figures out of hand. For example, generations of professors have passed on to students Nathaniel Hawthorne's infamous remark that his work was scarcely noticed because of the "damned mob of scribbling women," the female authors who had a strong, perhaps even dominant, position in the literary marketplace of antebellum America. But it has only been in the past couple of decades that scholars have begun to actually look at the works written by Hawthorne's female, and often more popular, counterparts, such as essayist Margaret Fuller, editor and author Lydia Maria Child, and novelist Susan Warner. The result is a far richer literary tradition, not merely one that pays obeisance to identity politics. Child's 1824 novel Hobomok, for instance, is interesting in its own right and provides a compelling contrast to both Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales and Hawthorne's depictions of the Puritans.

Ironically, such research--under way in many periods and genres--seems to comport pretty well with Ellis's appreciation for literature. "Literature," he writes, "can be thought of as a kind of forum in which the members of a society reflect together and brood upon the many issues that arise
in their lives." Indeed, such an understanding of the function of literature (or, for
that matter, culture in general), suggests that the "issues"--and the texts--being brooded upon are likely to change as readers themselves change: The increase in the number of women in literary studies over the past few decades brings with it greater attention to, or a different perspective on, writing by and about women.

This is not to endorse a simplistic notion of identity politics along the lines of, "Women want to read about women, blacks about blacks, working-class people about working-class people." Certainly one of the great reasons to read literature is to experience the unfamiliar. But readers are also drawn to works that have some real or imagined relevance to their lives, and often that relevance has something to do with the reader's personal background (how else to explain that a disproportionate number of American critics of Irish literature have names like Moynahan and O'Hara? Or that universities in the South are more likely to teach something called "Southern literature"?).

In fact, Ellis consistently acknowledges that literary studies is an ongoing, decentralized process, driven largely by readers' various interests: "The canon is...the result of the actions of all kinds of readers....Professors whose reading lists consist of books that students find uninteresting or directors who put on plays the public won't pay to see soon find their cultural influence declining sharply, if they ever had any."

Although such a dynamic incorporates a feedback mechanism that should soothe Ellis's worries--he even notes that "far too many people are involved to make...control possible in anything but the short run"--he seems highly ambivalent about any specific instance of change. Given his apparently conservative inclinations--"resistance to change is a notion that is valid in many human contexts," he writes--and his knowledge of literary history, he may be able to embrace change in the abstract while rejecting it in the concrete.

A reason for that may be that, although he recognizes that the literary canon (and by extension, the proper methods, scope, and objects of literary study) is always under revision, Ellis fails to articulate a method by which legitimate (to him) change occurs, opting instead for what Marxists would call "mystification"--that is, the attributing of social process to vague, ineffable forces. "To be sure, new additions to the canon occur from time to time," he writes at one point; at others, he speaks of "natural change" and changes occurring "naturally through readers' decisions." What bothers him , he says, are "changes brought about by fiat."

But such an opposition fails to do justice to how authors and books get added and subtracted from "the canon." All such changes are "natural" in that they happen over time and create a sorting process that, as Ellis points out, is difficult to rig to any ideological or even aesthetic agenda. But all such changes are done by "fiat" in that one can point to specific decisions to include a writer on a syllabus or drop him from an anthology.

Consider the case of Henry Roth's novel Call It Sleep. Published in 1934 to excellent notices, it sold poorly and vanished down the literary memory hole until 1956, when influential critics Alfred Kazin and Leslie Fiedler named it one of "the most neglected books of the past 25 years" in a symposium in The American Scholar, the journal of Phi Beta Kappa. Both went on to champion the book at length in other forums. The first paperback edition of Call It Sleep--a direct result of renewed critical attention--came out in 1964, and since then the book has worked its way into the syllabi of many college courses on the 20th-century American novel.

Over time, Roth will disappear again, replaced by some other now-marginal writer. This is a "natural" process, but also one made up of "fiat" decisions. Certainly it is a process we can analyze.

It's also worth recognizing that the current race-gender-class emphasis did not happen overnight. Though its practitioners may fancy themselves revolutionaries, they did not simply take over the university system like a band of guerillas storming the palace gates. As with prior critical movements, race-gender-class scholars made a long, slow march to a position of power. (And when their fall comes, they will doubtless see it as the result of a swift, brutal plot, just as Ellis views the current "corruption of humanities.")

Interestingly, Literature Lost itself is an argument for change, or at least a re-evaluation of major premises in contemporary literary studies. In articulating his case as well as he does, Ellis also underscores the primary way change happens, at least in the intellectual marketplace: through the force of ideas.