The Literary Scholar as Literary Critic? How the Study of the Relation between the Academic and the Public Discourse on Literature can Help to Understand the Function and Value of Literary Studies (original) (raw)
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In his lecture 'The Enigma of Illegibility' of 1977, the Dutch Slavist Karel van het Reve launched an all-out attack on literary studies. He renounced this field of scholarship in its entirety because, in his view, it does not contribute to the appreciation of quality in literary works. His argument was essentially twopronged: 1) to enjoy and appreciate good books we do not need the analysis literary studies provide of these works; 2) literary studies fail to explain why some books are better than others. As Van het Reve (1979: 129) stated, good "books, plays, stories and poems, were written to be read by the public without explanation". Apparently, the author supposes that good books possess 'universal' qualities that are immediately appreciated by readers from different times and different cultures. Great art must be a-historical: it compresses the distance in time and place between author and reader. A work of literature that can only be appreciated if placed in its historical context lacks this universal appeal.
literary history as a challenge to literary theory
In our time literary history has increasingly fallen into disrepute, and not at all without reason. The history of this worthy discipline in the last one hundred and fty years unmistakably describes the path of a steady decline. Its greatest achievements all belong to the nineteenth century. To write the history of a national literature counted, in the times of Gervinus and Scherer, De Sanctis and Lanson, as the crowning life's work of the philologist. The patriarchs of the discipline saw their highest goal therein, to represent in the history of literary works [Dichtwerke] the idea of national individuality on its way to itself. This high point is already a distant memory. The received form of literary history scarcely scratches out a living for itself in the intellectual life of our time. It has maintained itself in requirements for examinations by the state system of examinations that are themselves ready for dismantling. As a compulsory subject in the high school curriculum, it has almost disappeared in Germany. Beyond that, literary histories are still to be found only, if at all, on the bookshelves of the educated bourgeoisie who for the most part opens them, lacking a more appropriate literary dictionary, to answer literary quiz questions.
Review Critical Literary History: Two Good Practices
The eighteenth century is certainly not the most popular period in Dutch literary history. The works that were published and the authors that were active in this period are mostly unknown to the public. Ask an average group of first-year students in Dutch language and culture about their image of the eighteenth century and their answer will most probably be 'none'. Already in its own time, eighteenth-century Dutch literature suffered from a lack of appreciation. In the Southern Netherlands, French was the dominant language and Dutch literature only fulfilled a minor role in cultural life. The Dutch Republic was simultaneously caught in an all-encompassing mood of decline, which led to an idolising of past literary heroes – Vondel, Cats – and envious glances at the blossoming literary cultures of neighbouring countries, first France, later Germany and Great Britain.
To which extent is 'nature' a cultural or discursive construct? The question seems paradoxical and intractable since 'nature' by definition opposes the very notion of constructedness or historicity; yet there are indications that each literary generation re-invents its own cultural horizon by re-interpreting a sense of non-culture and nature. In order to clarify this historical and conceptual paradox, the idea and literary treatment of nature and rusticity are sketchily surveyed from classical primitivism to the present day. The conclusion that suggests itself is that 'nature' is one of the strongest and most invariant topics in the Western imagination, exhibiting a good deal of consistency through changing periods and literary fashions. If there is anything paradoxical about the link between nature and contemporary ('postmodern') literary culture, it lies largely in the fact that this follows after a period (Modernism) which was unusually averse to a celebration of nature and rusticity. Nature means many things, but in general its semantics lie somewhere on the opposite side of culture. In the present context I use the term in its specifically rustic and idyllic sense, as the opposite of controlled urbanity and ordered civilization: the ambience of the countryside where life is informally ordered by the seasons, by the cyclical, largely spontaneous fecundity of field and forest, and by tradition rather than by arrangement. 1 Hugo Claus, De geruchten (Amsterdam, 1996). So far, the novel has not (yet) been translated into English. This article was realized in the context of a research-project on literature in Belgium (Flanders), which is currently carried out thanks to the financial support of the Leuven Research Fund at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. I wish to thank Eveline Vanfraussen, Anneleen Masschelein and the participants at the Amsterdam-Conference on Georgic literature for their valuable comments on earlier drafts of my text.
Slavic and East European Journal. Vol. 50, No. 1 (2006). Pp. 204-212, 2006
Of course, I am no soothsayer, and the answer to my outrageous title is probably dependent more on what happens outside the university than anything that could take place inside its hallowed walls. For all I know, the ongoing transformation in the function of education in American society may render humanistic education utterly obsolete in the coming decades, which would certainly have a "chilling effect" on the study of Russian Literature (Scholes; Drucker). But I do not intend to rehearse the familiar territory of The University in Ruins here (Readings; also see Guillory). What I am concerned with is our very own little comer of the university, the Slavic Department, and my own sub-discipline within it, the study of Russian Literature. What is its outlook for the coming hundred or so years, given favorable, or at least not saltstrewn, institutional soil to grow in? 2 I offer to you that the future does not look so bright.
History of Literature Here and Now. Experience and Doubts
Bulgarian historical review, 2018
The paper deals with some methodological problems in literary history and searches for their analogues and connections in historiography. What defines a text as literature? What does literary history really examine? The centuries-old unity of Bulgarian literature-does it really exist and what are its boundaries in time and space? The paper questions some established notions about these topics and suggests that such questions and doubts are related to the historiography.