The Spring 2024 issue of Liberties features an essay, "Curricular Trauma" by Len Gutkin, on the decline in the humanities, with a particular focus on the study of literature. The cause of this decline is "overdetermined"; "anyone who claims the crisis is univariate is propagandizing." There are external pressures that have constrained the humanities, to be sure, but there are also problems that have festered within.
One development Gutkin discusses is how traditional areas of study have been supplanted by politicized subfields (perhaps in an effort to make the study of literature more "relevant").
Traditionally, English literary studies has been organized in two principal ways: by period ("Elizabethan," "nineteenth century") and by genre ("poetry," "the novel"). Often but not always, a faculty position consisted of some combination of period and genre ("We seek a scholar of the English literature of the eighteenth century with particular expertise in its poetry"). There are a few murkier designations, too, such as "modernism" and "Romanticism," which name both periods and aesthetic tendencies. Finally, there are, or there used to be, a handful of single authors considered so important that they constitute fields in themselves: in English, Shakespeare first of all; then Chaucer, Milton, and, distantly, Spenser. (Of these, only Shakespeare still survives as a hiring category.) While other major figures — Dickens or Wordsworth or George Eliot or T.S. Eliot, say, and more recently Thomas Pynchon or Toni Morrison or John Ashbery — have long enjoyed robust scholarly communities, there have almost never been faculty positions devoted exclusively to them. Finally, there were the small number of subfields proper, which tended to demarcate minority literatures in a particular period (like "twentieth-century African American literature").
This was a broadly if never entirely coherent system, with rough parallels in other humanistic fields. But in the last decade, it broke down almost completely. The rudiments of the old categories persisted — or at least some of them did; others, like "modernism," flickered out of existence entirely — but the real energy was in the subfields, like "ecocriticism." The proliferation of subfields can look bewildering and baroque to an outsider, both weirdly random and oddly specific. A perusal of some recent job advertisements gives the flavor. Skidmore seeks a medievalist "with research and teaching experience in the field of premodern critical race studies," especially one who might bring "an intersectional approach." The University of Saint Joseph, in Connecticut, wants to hire a scholar of Renaissance literature who can also teach "gender studies, postcolonial studies, and/or social media writing." Colby College needs a scholar of pre-1800 British literature (a capacious swath!) and is "especially interested in candidates whose work engages the environmental humanities or premodern critical race studies." (Perusing these ads, one notices how common is the "or" linking two utterly disparate subfields, as though the hiring committee couldn't help but admit to the arbitrariness of the whole business.) Santa Clara University would like to hire a medievalist or early modernist with expertise in "culture, race, social justice, and Digital Humanities." Vanderbilt is looking for an English professor "whose research engages the study of race, colonization and decolonization, diaspora, and/or empire"; period is unspecified, but "substantive investments in periods prior to 1900" are welcome.
The Vanderbilt posting represents the completion of the takeover of the field by the subfields. Period is left vague; genre goes completely unmentioned. Both are replaced by a list of linked historical topics. The uninitiated might wonder: Why is this a job in literature? The answer has to do with the political commitments, implicit in some cases and explicit in others, of the subfields, commitments that are much less obviously entailed by the older period or generic categories. This is not to imply that "race, colonization and decolonization, diaspora, and/or empire" are somehow invalid fields of academic inquiry. They are urgent topics for political, sociological, and historical analysis. But they are also, in the context of a literary studies department, frank political signals. Less sophisticated than Vanderbilt, Santa Clara gives the game away by including "social justice" in its litany of subfields.
