A student of literature in the university today can be forgiven a certain bafflement about what constitutes the function of the discipline. What, exactly, is literary studies? Is it a kind of history, a branch of philosophy, the study of rhetoric? Is it about becoming a better reader, in an ethical or technical sense? It’s not about learning how to write; that’s what MFA programs are for. One might turn to histories of the discipline in an effort to clear things up — but here, too, the same confusions apply. The history of methods of scholarship and criticism is its own subfield, and one can find convincing arguments to suit most any purpose.
In practice, what one believes literary studies is, or should be, often depends on where one went to university. Certain figures loom larger in the imagination of one institution than another. The history of literary studies at Columbia must include Lionel Trilling and Edward Said; at Yale, the genealogy needs to account for a transition from William Wimsatt to Harold Bloom and Paul de Man. The fact that almost no one currently teaching at Yale wants to claim these ancestral figures as influential is itself part of the story. Influence is cunning and seldom direct. But even a perfect genealogy would not imply that the methods and traditions these figures espoused were handed down in an unbroken line. It turns out that no one has really measured how accurately or effectively any understanding of how to read literature propagates throughout a culture. The Modern Language Association does not own a patent or have a monopoly on reading practices. Mutations happen often. And there remains the uncomfortable fact that most people’s deepest reading habits are developed in a secondary education system, not the university.