Literature Profs, Love What You Teach

Mark Edmundson’s essay:

 https://theamericanscholar.org/teach-what-you-love/#.X1_y3i1q2hA

My two cents:

Nice essay. I’d be less tolerant of what Roger Scruton calls the “meta-merde” pouring out of the French dudes. And Edmundson is too rhapsodic about the soul broadening effects of great literary works. The strongest reason to study and teach them exists for its own sake: which is to say, engaging what the greatest in thought and creativity have thought and created is its own justification. That seems self evident to me. And that engagement does enlarge us insofar as we have a better understanding of Chaucer or Shakespeare or Milton and so on. Are we improved morally by that; do we become more virtuous, beneficent, generous, open, in a word, better people by that? Edmundson thinks so. I don’t. We essentially become more cultured, which is a different thing. When I studied English literature there were, roughly, as many self-dealing, petty creeps teaching in the English department as there were in the other sectors of life I experienced. But all that said, the underlying theme here is surely right: teach what you love; love what you teach; and “Don’t be so negative!”

R:

I agree.  But the rot began in the 19trh century when universities became research instiutions because science was the now the basis of knowledge.  The effort to oppose this was made by religious folk who were what were called Christian humanists.  They lost, so English departments had to find things to research.  The first subject was the history of the language, which used literary works to illustrate that history, as literary works had been used to teach Latin and Greek.  Then literary history became the basis of research, not history as whatever background knowledge was needed for appreciation, but as an end in itself.  New Critcism figured out a means to make the interpretation of literary works a form of research, but it became clear that endless interpretation did not progress, just demanded new ways to interpret.  The last of these was deconstruction, which ended it.  This was replaced by the "new literary history," and what we have today is its current incarnation.  Both the old and the new literary history assume that the works are more or less readily understood, and the focus then shifts to one form of history or another.  

One cannot oppose this with appreciation, since that is not a basis for research.  The assumption now is that we understand Othello, and what we understand is how the implied values are bad.  In a way, what goes on today is appreciation, only what that reveals is the moral wrongness of the values that were assumed at the time.  Call it moral criticism.