Sam Kahn, Associate Editor of Persuasion, defending the notion that “the humanities” are valuable for their own sake, argues that humanities courses are “wasted on people who aren’t interested in them” and that such subjects “have to be rescued from the schools” for those of us who value them and want to see them sustained.
This is mostly correct, except that to speak of “the humanities” at all is to accept that the subjects we associate with the term–literature, history, philosophy, the arts more broadly–have been brought together in the first place as “disciplines” to be taught–as fundamentally a product of “the schools”. Thus it is unclear where we might be taking the humanities after they have been rescued from their current academic imprisonment, and to what purpose, if we are taking them as a whole to resituate them in more favorable surroundings. Kahn’s current proposal to create a highbrow reading group (centered in the intellectual space occupied by Persuasion), with the mission “to read serious thinkers who are wrestling with deep problems of the individual and society,” is all well and good, but it hardly encompasses “the humanities” broadly understood, nor does it much move away from the “great books” approach, the underlying assumption of which is that “serious” writing exists to dispense wisdom and should be taught (or learned) as much as read–the series is to be called “Intellectual Bootcamp.”
The legacy of “wrestling with deep problems” should be preserved and communicated, of course, but the kind of reading group Kahn advocates, while it might provide for those who participate a kind of intellectual stimulation not easily found in current academic discourse, seems very limited in its reach and doesn’t really do much to ensure that humanistic inquiry is not merely preserved in some form but also renewed, away from the academic humanities departments that have failed to perpetuate it (and are being further eroded through budget cuts and the actions of the Trump administration). The “humanities” can’t be only the record of what has been written, created, or performed already but should also, it would seem, encompass its revision and expansion, the attempt to meaningfully contribute to the still dynamic development of the forms of humanistic thought and practice. If the academic humanities have presently reduced themselves to producing “scholarship” that simply reinforces progressive platitudes, the fondness of traditionalists for a curriculum centered on the “canonical” is just as restricted, settling for similar platitudes, in this case long-established and conservative.
As someone with little patience either with canons or with a politicized curriculum, I find the current state of what was my chosen academic subject, the study of literature, particularly dismal. For forty years now, the effort to dislodge the traditional canon, and the methods and assumptions that maintained it, has gradually replaced not only those methods but finally discarded literature itself. First “theory” superseded established modes of literary scholarship and analysis, followed by other approaches that rejected the “merely literary” in favor of matters deemed more substantial or important–history, culture, race and gender, and by now any subject of concern to socially responsible scholars about which literary works might be made to speak. It is not really an exaggeration to claim that the academic study of literature no longer exists within a discrete discipline the goal of which is to illuminate works of literature for their own inherent interest and value. Indeed, in many English departments, works of literature are only one of the cultural forms that are subjected to the various interpretive methods favored by faculty who nominally still identify as literary scholars.
If those seeking an education in literature and literary criticism apart from that now offered in universities fear it might lack the rigor and structure of an academic program in literature, they should think again: rigor and structure as applied to the assessment of literary value or the analysis of aesthetic form have long since disappeared from academic criticism. If they think a self-directed literary education would prove too scattershot, too unfocused, an unsystematic approach would be better than one not focused on literary education at all. If the goal of an academic education in literature is the professional one of preparing for an academic career of one’s own, that goal–even if it actually is not a literary education in literature-is an increasingly quixotic one, as the English department continues to shrink and becomes the inevitable target of elimination by the administrative powers-that-be. It is really very hard to see why anyone interested in becoming more knowledgeable about and more well-read in literature would choose an academic option at all.
In this way the humanities, at least in its literary version, won’t need to be taken away from the academy: they’ve already being given away. They probably don’t need to be “rescued,” but they can be reclaimed. However, is a self-directed study of literature the most efficacious way of carrying this out (and should such an approach be called “study”)? Kahn wants to relocate the study of the humanities in a collective endeavor, the reading group. While this is certainly not an “institution” on the scale of a university or an academic discipline, moving the study of serious books and ideas to such a body still translates the act of reading into a corporate activity in which the individual response is inevitably subsumed to the purposes of the larger whole. Of course, the university subsumes the books and ideas themselves to its own purposes (most immediately providing the substance for the branch of knowledge it came to designate the “humanities” in the first place), a move that reading groups would presumably avoid, but a reading group designed as “intellectual bootcamp” seems to assume that the books chosen will help its participants prepare for or develop a role as “intellectual” in the same way that university humanities departments prepared its graduate students to become professors.
Certainly reading groups can be designed for any number of purposes, including the intellectual enrichment of individual group members, and if such groups were to flourish in the wake of the demise of the academic humanities, this would unequivocally be a good thing. Groups organized through platforms such as Substack might gain particular prominence, contributing to the development of a hierarchy among groups (Persuasion‘s version as an Ivy League-quality group, e.g.), but this is probably unavoidable in any intellectual enterprise that attempts to establish and maintain a recognized body of knowledge or wisdom or achievement. (Publishing certainly doesn’t avoid it.) Still, somehow the humanities as a collection of reading groups or book clubs, no matter how intellectually elevated, doesn’t seem as august and authoritative as it is (or was) when installed as an assembly of academic subjects curated and made available for formal study by a great University. Perhaps then the question becomes: Why should we allow prestige or authority to be imposed between ourselves and the books that might be valuable to us? What is the point of gatekeeping not merely if the gate no longer works but when there really is no longer anything inside to be kept?
As students of literature, we can always learn from wise and knowledgeable teachers, but if what we want is to enhance our understanding of how literature works (for itself, not for other causes and purposes), the current regime in place in academic literary study won’t help us. But maybe we should stop looking for it to, or attempting to replace the current regime with one more likely to acknowledge our preferences. Maybe we don’t even need reading groups. The whole parlous state of the “humanities” in relation to clueless administrators, hostile politicians, and disciplinary dysfunction might remind us that books and ideas, writing and art are all utterly marginal to modern capitalist society and have been for the past two centuries. The “humanities” packaged as the aggregation of great books and canonical art, the knowledge of which familiarizes us with the pinnacles of human achievement, served presumptively to confer some measure of dignity on a calling, and those who followed it, often enough dismissed as impractical and unworldly. Yet what it accomplished most of all was to confer dignity on itself, and those who were admitted to its professional ranks, creating a new middle-class career path.
With that career path now increasingly strewn with obstacles, the practice of art and writing again stands as a pursuit the broader public mostly disregards (when not actively scorning it), and, given the collapse of its own support structures in the mainstream media and the “book business,” its ability to remain standing seems precarious indeed. But where academic study of art and literature is a wholly artificial construct whose absence in its current form might not be deeply mourned, writing and art-making are innate impulses (at least among some) that won’t easily be abandoned. Without the effort to curate the legacy of literature in its historical development or a secure foothold in mainstream publishing, however, serious literary writing that doesn’t appeal to a large audience or sustain the status quo in either cultural attitudes or accepted writing practices will only become further marginalized. As of now, a network of committed independent publishers and credible small presses still exists to continue offering such norm-challenging writing, but how long that could continue in the absence of both critical and commercial reinforcement is at best uncertain.
I don’t think that Sam Kahn’s proposal really provides such critical reinforcement. Its goal remains utilitarian, enlisting “serious thinkers” (which wouldn’t even necessarily include writers of fiction and poetry) in its own external agenda. If literature and allied literary criticism are marginal even in attempts to “rescue” the humanities, perhaps it is time for writers and critics whose deepest allegiance is to literature and not to the academy or the imperatives of capitalism, whose greatest ambition is not to be part of an “intellectual bootcamp,” or any other project for which literary works are valued for mostly instrumental reasons, to acknowledge the marginality of their vocation, and to embrace it. If a life devoted to literature and its interpretation actually can perform a useful social service, it is by offering an alternative model of being in the world, one that rejects the careerist and commercialized values American society most insistently promotes and cultivates instead the self-sufficiency of imagination and intelligence. A “literary life” would be one that resists the nonstop pressure to seek out the immediately expedient, pursuing instead a course perceived to be intrinsically worthwhile. If this ethos stands out as incongruent with the mindset that dominates American culture, this in itself is a contribution to the enrichment of that culture more valuable than any program of political activism by curriculum or training camps for intellectuals. Everyone who cultivates reading and writing as ends in themselves in this way becomes a teacher, perhaps the only form of teaching that remains after AI has finished making it obsolete as a profession.
Both “literature” as a collective body of important literary works and “humanities” as a broad area of studies in which literature occupies a prominent place are ultimately constructs created to facilitate teaching, so it is ironically appropriate that both are also in a state of terminal decline as teaching itself as a humanizing activity is threatened with displacement. The humanities have been in a long slide toward irrelevance for a long time now, however, so AI is really just delivering the coup de grace. Unquestionably it is being aided and abetted by universities themselves, not merely in their surrender to AI and other forms of destructive technology but in their resort to bottom-line thinking in remaking the university as a job training center (albeit a very expensive one), gladly jettisoning whole programs they judge to be superfluous to that mission.
But ultimately if blame for the demise of the humanities, especially in its literary studies division, is to be placed on one party above all, it is the humanities professors themselves–not exclusively the current cohort of hyper-politicized faculty but going back to that point sometime in the 1980s when the boredom of academic literary critics with mere literature reached a point of no return. Since then. this boredom has given way to an ever greater degree of self-satisfaction in the critic’s assumed superiority to the writer/artist, able as the critic is to rise above the writer’s confinement in his/her artistic vision and see the whole cultural/historical picture, surely a more adequate object of the critic’s high-minded attention. This process has now reached its logical culmination in a discipline without a definable subject beyond its implicit political advocacy and no describable method beyond the personal preferences of critics and teachers, but it also seems that there is no longer much of a mandate for this work among university officials, politicians, or the general public (and increasingly less among students). However, if the collapse of literary study as a pillar of the humanities also resulted in would-be “literary” scholars deciding their objectives were better met by turning to other disciplines or to direct political activism, this might return actual interest in literature back to those who appreciate it. This sort of “rescue” still leaves the future incarnation of what were the humanities uncertain, but it would be a place to start.
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