Why Literature Now? Author(s): Karen Newman Reviewed work(s): Source: PMLA, Vol. 117, No. 3 (May, 2002), pp. 501-503 Published by: Modern Language Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/823152 . Accessed: 01/10/2012 19:53 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . Modern Language Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to PMLA. http://www.jstor.org II7 3 | Why Major in Literature-What Do We TellOur Students? 501 Now? WhyLiterature NOT BEINGAN EVANGELIST, I WASN'T surehow to respondto the question"Whymajor in literature-what do we tell our students?"In over twenty years of teaching and advising, I have never sought to persuadestudentsto major in any field.Occasionally,when a womanadvisee who came to Brown to majorin physics or engineering has decided to shift to literature,I have triedto talk aboutthe difficulties women face in the sciences, the science classroom's chilly climate, and gendercompetitionto persuadeher to stick it out andbecome the engineeror physicist she wantedto be. But proselytize?Never. But since I believe passionatelyin the power and significanceof literature,I determinedto try to write about why. There could be no moment more appropriateto such a task thannow. I write these words in the weeks following the attacks on the WorldTradeCenterin New York;I write as an intellectualand an academic,on sabbatical in Paris, where I have come to finish a book on early modern London and Paris and the impact of urbanizationon cultural production:on theater,the book trade,readingpractices,urbanrepresentation, urbangenres. Distracted by death, terror, anthrax, the bombings in Afghanistan, and the news, compelled to "read"these events as they are reportedand presented, I am as certain as I have ever been of the power and significance of literarystudy. Why literaturenow? Because literatureinsists emphaticallythatwe readandinterpret,that there are no easy answers,neveronly one meaning or perspective.Literatureinsists on interpretation, on point of view, on polysemy. How do we address the question of meaning in today's global world?What is rhetoric,and how does it persuade? Rhetoric, writes Roland Barthes, in "The Old Rhetoric: An Aide-Memoire,"one of his most powerful and erudite essays, is a vast empire.ThoughBartheswrites specificallyabout rhetoric in the West, its imperial ambitions and KAREN NEWMAN is University Professor andprofessorof comparative literature andEnHerbooksincludeShakespeare's Rhetoric of glishat BrownUniversity. ComicCharacter, FashioningFemininityand EnglishRenaissance Sheis at Drama,andFetalPositions: Individualism, Science,Visuality. workon a studyof the impactof urbanization on culturalproduction inearlymodernLondonandParis. reach, the power of rhetoricis starklydisplayed in ourcurrentglobal impasse.How do we understand and interpretwords like pro-choice, prolife, unborn child, fetus, author, text, terrorist, freedom fighter, civilian, war, crime, crusade, terrorism, martyr,suicide, propaganda, news, fundamentalist,fanatic, God? These words and how we understandthem and thousandsof others are critical in the root sense-they bear on the crisis in which we findourselves. The philosopher and culturalcommentator RichardRorty has attackedliterarystudies over the last several years, claiming that literatureis in dangerof a fall into knowingness, "a state of mind and soul,"accordingto him, "thatprevents shuddersof awe and makes one immune to enthusiasm."Those of us who teach and study literature,he argues, have abandonedinspiration for knowingness. But knowingness matters: it makes readingand interpretationpossible. While I drove my college-age daughterto the airportnot long ago, she asked me if Shakespeare really wrote his plays. She was reading Shakespearein a class in which the question of his authorshiphad been discussed.On planes, in dentists' offices, waiting in lines, when asked what I do, if I say I teach Shakespeare, almost invariablythe firstquestion anyone asks is, Did Shakespearereally write his plays? What I answer, and what I said to her, is that theater in Shakespeare's day was collaborative, that he wrote plays with other people, that readers and editors since have rewritten the plays as well, 502 0 w I.0 0 .0 c .on u Q, +Ir Why Major in Literature-What Do We TellOur Studerits? but that yes, the man we call Shakespeare did write much of the plays we call his. Virtually every case made for putative authorship of Shakespeare'splays is on behalf of a memberof the educated Tudorelite-Francis Bacon, Viscount St. Albans; the earl of Southampton;Edward de Vere, the earl of Oxford. What makes Shakespeare's authorship suspect is what we would now term his class, or as The Reader's Encyclopedia of Shakespeareputs it in describing the authorshipdebate,"[S]uchprofoundand wide-ranging works could not possibly have been written by an ill-educated man from the country" (Campbell and Quinn 115). Generations of bardolatorshave not wanted to admit that a man of the middling sort with no university education could have been the author of Hamlet. I explained to my daughterthat grammar school in Shakespeare's day was different from our modem counterpart-in a Tudorgrammar school Shakespeare would have learned Latinand readthe classics. Many fewer men and no women went to university then, and there were many otherways of becoming educatedin late-sixteenth-centuryLondon. WhenI teachMacbeth,we discusshow Lady Macbeth is made accountable throughher language for Macbeth'sactions.We study expectations for women in Shakespeare'sday. We look carefully at the poetry, at how Lady Macbeth's speeches produce her character and make us judge her.My knowingness,as Rortycalls it, enables students to see that class and gender, race andnationality,sexualityandreligionmatter,that thereareno easy universals.Toimaginethatreading knowinglyprecludeswhatRortytermsinspirationbut what I would call aestheticpleasureis mistaken.Rortyadvocatesthatwe literatureprofessors remainin a kind of perpetualadolescent crush, gushing over the beauties of the greatcanonical authors,but any readerof Proustknows that the recognition of blemishes and faults, venalityanderrorthwartsneitherpassionnorlove. Nor is interpretationsimply a rationalchoice or a smorgasbordwhere,as readers,we get to take [ PMLA our pick and fill our plates with whatever we choose. Literaturedramatizesprecisely how choices areshapedanddeterminedfor us through words. Late in Henry James's The Ambassadors, Lambert Stretheris confronted by Chad Newsome's sister SarahPocock, who has come to Paris to bring Chad-and Strether-back to Woollettand "save"themfromFrenchvice. Stretherasks her if she has not found Chadchanged: "Youdon't,on yourhonor,appreciateChad'sfortunatedevelopment?"Mrs. Pocock exclaims, "I call it hideous"(279-80). Hideous or fortunate? Like Strether,we arecalled on to judge andinterpret,to readsigns andpersons;we learnaboutthe limitationsof judgmentas we watch Strethersee and not see. James'snovel dramatizesthe limits anddifficultiesof thinkingandinterpreting,but it does not allow us to choose Mrs. Pocock's view. The readingof literatureteaches how interpretation is shapedand producedby nation, religion, class-in short,discriminationsof all kinds. Rortyis rightthatsome would makeof literatureandculturalstudies"onemoredismalsocial science."But therehave alwaysbeen badreaders, and in my experience they are often those most prone to enthusiasms.What professor of literaturehasn'tbeen approachedby a scientistof one persuasionor another-life, physical,or socialandbeen confrontedwith chargessimilarto those Rortymounts:"Iloved literaturein college, it inspired me, so why can't I understandwhat you are talking about?""What'swrong with the humanitiestoday?""Jargonis everywhere."I don't expect to be able to understandthe most recent workin visualperceptionor molecularbiology or applied math, fields in which a specialized vocabulary and analytic precision are presumed. Producing the study of literatureas inspiration and mere appreciationhelps to justify inequities in the allocation of resources in a global culture whereinspiration,strongfeeling, andbelief without knowingness seem everywhereto lead to inequity,bigotry,hatred,anddeath. By "knowingness"Rorty means to invoke what he judges a fallen knowledge and to im- I 7 .3 W iy Major in Literature-What Do We TellOur Students? pugn what is sometimes united underthe heading "politicalcriticism."Perhapsno text I know better exemplifies the refusal of the opposition between knowingness and aesthetic pleasure than Toni Morrison's brilliant Playing in the Dark: Whitenessand the LiteraryImagination. Her readings of Willa Catherand MarkTwain, of Ernest Hemingway and Edgar Allan Poe reveal with extraordinarypower the significance of racialist and racist thinking in the making of Americanliterature,but at the same time Morrison demonstratesthe pleasures and intricacies of the very texts she reads so knowingly. Her book ends with these words: "All of us, readers and writers, are bereft when criticism remains too polite or too fearful to notice a disrupting darknessbefore its eyes" (91). Knowledgeis unruly, its forms inextricable one from the other, its productionthe result of intellectual labor as well as of the pleasures of reading. If we are to educate and be educated, to open the minds of THE PROGRESSION FROM LANGUAGE instruction or composition to the higher discipline of literatureis no longer the only or even preferredpath everywhere. For example, MIT stresses that its literatureprogramgoes beyond the traditional: others and to be open to new knowledge, we must refuse simplistic oppositions: politics or aesthetics, knowingness or inspiration,cultural capitalor greatbooks. Read literaturenow. 503 rF 0a '3 Io We T U" WORKS CITED (A Barthes, Roland. "The Old Rhetoric: An Aide-M6moire." The Semiotic Challenge. Trans. RichardHoward. New York:Hill, 1988. 11-93. Campbell, O. J., and EdwardQuinn, eds. The Reader's Encyclopedia of Shakespeare.New York:Crowell, 1966. James,Henry.TheAmbassadors.Ed. S. P. Rosenbaum.New York:Norton, 1964. Morrison,Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whitenessand the Literary Imagination.Cambridge:HarvardUP, 1992. Rorty, Richard. "Point of View: The Necessity of Inspired Reading." Chronicleof Higher Education 9 Feb. 1996: A48. First presented in a longer version at the MLA Annual Convention. Hyatt Regency Chicago. 28 Dec. 1995. 5, 3 Do WhyMajorin Literature-What WeTellOurStudents? RANDOLPH D. POPE, Commonwealth Professor of Spanishat the University of Virginia, has writtenbookson Spanishautobiography andon the Spanishnovelthe latest being UnderstandingJuan Goytisolo(U of South CarolinaP, numerousarticles on Spanishand LatinAmerican litera1995)-and The programin Literatureleading to the deture. He has been editor of the Revistade estudioshispdnicosfor over gree of Bachelorof Science in Literatureis a decade.Heis writinga bookon the newSpanishnarrative. equivalentto the curriculain English(or literary studies)of the majorliberalartsuniversities. The Literaturecurriculumis notablealso for its inclusion,alongwithtraditionalliterary themes and topics, of materialsdrawnfrom jor in literature.The pitch is usually straightforward: the study of literatureprovides a superb filmandmedia,frompopularculture,andfrom minorityandethnicculture. ("Major") way to think aboutthe world;to study societies, one's own and others;to improveone's capacity There is only a fuzzy agreementaboutwhat to express ideas concisely and effectively; and we recommendwhen we invite a studentto mato gain access to a shared knowledge that is