Literary Subfields, Ecocriticism, and the Eclipse of the Humanities
The Spring 2024 issue of Liberties features an essay, “Curricular Trauma” by Len Gutkin, on the decline in the humanities, with a particular focus on the study of literature. The cause of this decline is “overdetermined”; “anyone who claims the crisis is univariate is propagandizing.” There are external pressures that have constrained the humanities, to be sure, but there are also problems that have festered within.
One development Gutkin discusses is how traditional areas of study have been supplanted by politicized subfields (perhaps in an effort to make the study of literature more “relevant”).
Traditionally, English literary studies has been organized in two principal ways: by period (“Elizabethan,” “nineteenth century”) and by genre (“poetry,” “the novel”). Often but not always, a faculty position consisted of some combination of period and genre (“We seek a scholar of the English literature of the eighteenth century with particular expertise in its poetry”). There are a few murkier designations, too, such as “modernism” and “Romanticism,” which name both periods and aesthetic tendencies. Finally, there are, or there used to be, a handful of single authors considered so important that they constitute fields in themselves: in English, Shakespeare first of all; then Chaucer, Milton, and, distantly, Spenser. (Of these, only Shakespeare still survives as a hiring category.) While other major figures — Dickens or Wordsworth or George Eliot or T.S. Eliot, say, and more recently Thomas Pynchon or Toni Morrison or John Ashbery — have long enjoyed robust scholarly communities, there have almost never been faculty positions devoted exclusively to them. Finally, there were the small number of subfields proper, which tended to demarcate minority literatures in a particular period (like “twentieth-century African American literature”).
This was a broadly if never en
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