Aesthetics, Close Reading, Theory, and the Future of Literary Studies

Abstract

We have seen throughout this book that a kind of “back to basics” mentality tends to set in whenever the humanities seem to be in crisis. Whether we have been looking at general debates about the value of the humanities, arguments about revising core curricula, or narrower debates about how disciplines such as literary studies ought to respond to theoretical and methodological innovation, we have repeatedly encountered the idea that the humanities are in crisis because they have strayed from their traditional, basic mission. And it is almost always professionalization, with its theories, methods, and esoteric areas of specialization that is the culprit. I want to look more closely in this chapter at how a rhetoric of return has structured recent debates about the future of literary studies. What we will see is a kind of mirror image of the larger humanities crisis we have been tracing. In literary studies, the “back to basics” argument goes something like this: Literary studies went off the rails when it stopped caring about literature and became preoccupied instead with a variety of ways to contextualize it. The obfuscating jargon of theory has replaced an appreciation of the beauty of literary language, and the tendency to read literary texts as containing bad ideologies that have to be ritually corrected in front of students has turned the literature classroom into a space for political proselytizing. The antidote is a return to fundamentals: close reading and the analysis and appreciation of literature’s aesthetic and formal qualities. Such a return promises to restore literature itself to the center of literary studies, and it will have the salutary effect as well of depoliticizing the field.