The Real TroubleAuthor(s): George LevineSource: Profession, (1993), pp. 43-45Published by: Modern Language AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25595508 .

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The Real Trouble

George Levine

My rather obscure qualifications for commenting

publicly on English as a troubled field are only that I

entered the profession several millennia ago, when it was perhaps insufficiently troubled, and that I can

notice differences now. Some examples: English is a far more exciting and interesting, if qualitatively uneven,

discipline than it seemed to be back then, and its cur

rent troubles have come about largely because it takes more risks, makes bigger mistakes, reaches out farther,

welcomes more diversity, does better by women and

minorities, and confronts its own assumptions

more

directly and perhaps even with greater sophistication. If

the curricular wars and the fragmentation of our inter

ests and objectives and theories and ideologies were the

only troubles we face at the moment, I would think my task here no trouble at all, and with the prerogative of

seniority, I would write the discipline a relatively clean bill of health. The seven or eight hundred sessions on

just about anything at each MLA convention suggest both the fragmentation that the doomsayers lament and an

extraordinary and productive vitality that man

ages to contain itself within one professional organiza tion. Trouble of this sort we might all welcome. There is real trouble, though, and it has to do with

money. We were less troubled in the fifties at the very moment when English and higher education were

experiencing their most rapid and rich expansions ever.

When I got my degree from the University of Min

nesota, almost all my colleagues, no matter how dumb

they were, got at least three job offers. I can therefore notice that the troubles of the discipline of English, and its public excoriation by political bigwigs and

many representatives of the print media, are contem

porary with a terrible new austerity. After nearly twenty years of contracting markets in academia?with some

thing of a blip for a few years in the eighties?those of us who entered the profession so prolifically in the fifties and early sixties are hungry for students and more or less helpless to find them satisfying work when we are done with them.

This is real trouble, perhaps the primary trouble. And my

crystal ball tells me that if by some miracle academia becomes

_ affluent again, and the country

stops worrying about taxes,

most of our troubles now will seem trivial, the culture wars

will settle into armistice, and theoretical and ideological fragmentation will look more

like fun than like disaster.

People don't usually talk about these things when

they worry about the discipline, but I'm looking for real

trouble. And there's another problem, one related to

money troubles and the institutional place of English: at the moment, the profession doesn't know or even

want to know what it is. Nominally, we teach in English departments

or literature departments. But many of

the best-known in our field are professionally interested in things that are only marginally related to English or

literature. I don't want to bore you with a litany of our

divergent preoccupations?cultural studies, film, gen der, psychology, sex, pop culture, multiculturalism.

Just consider what goes on at MLA conventions, in

dozens of different suites and ballrooms, where our

colleagues build, or cash in on, their reputations in the

discipline, and you'll be reminded of what I mean.

Moreover, in much of the best-known criticism in recent years, the first objective, however mediated by a

study of texts, is social or political change; literature, insofar as it has been traditionally called that, is often

regarded as a kind of enemy of change and serves pri

marily to be demystified, denaturalized, and shown to

be complicit with dominant ideologies whose traces it seeks invariably to efface. I say these things not because I support those cccurgers of the so-called politically correct?those scourgers whose bad faith and reduc

tionism need not be insisted on here?but because, by carrying out these multiple and often conflicting activ ities under the protection of English departments, we

have left the profession particularly vulnerable to pop ular chastising and threatening. Moreover, I believe

The author is Kenneth Burke Professor of English and Director of the Center for the Critical Analysis of Contemporary Culture at

Rutgers University, New Brunswick. A version of this paper was pre sented at the 1992 MLA convention in New York.

Profession 93

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44 The Real Trouble

that we need to consider some of these anomalies in

the discipline now, in practical institutional terms. We must examine the value of the literary and the aesthetic

(even if only in the terms that Eagleton offers in The

Ideology of the Aesthetic) if English, as a profession sus

tained by publicly and privately endowed institutions, is to survive.

This conclusion seems inescapable to me because the two functions of English departments that institutions and the culture as a whole endorse, and pay us for, are

perhaps the two to which we as research faculty mem

bers are least committed. One is the teaching of writing as a basic skill that all educated people need to acquire,

One of the most

difficult questions is whether the now

prevalent model

of the research

oriented career can he sustained.

and the other is the teach

ing of literature as it is

widely understood by those who don't make the

study of it their profes sion. I am not arguing that faculty members do not teach the courses?

freshman writing or intro

duction to literature?but

that a mark of their suc

cess is the degree to which

they do not have to teach them. The recent MLA report in Change, "Continuity and Change in the Study of Literature" (Franklin, Huber, and Laurence), shows that a high number of traditional classes with traditional objectives are still

taught at our

colleges and universities. And another

recent MLA report, "Teaching Responsibilities of Mod ern Language Faculty Members" (Huber), indicates that many faculty members continue to teach both

introductory literature courses and freshman composi tion. But the evidence is clear that research orientation

and high rank move faculty members further from such introductory teaching and that, at doctorate

granting institutions, the proportion of those courses

taught by senior faculty members is markedly lower.

This is an old story that we need not deny because it

has been used so destructively and unintelligently by those?often powerful people?who are unhappy with the humanities and the academy these days. It is true

that while much of the effort of the profession goes into the teaching of writing, few of the bright stars in the critical and MLA firmament shine because of their successes in teaching writing or lower-division lit erature courses. In my experience, teachers who spe

cialize in such work remain on the margins of the

literary and critical hierarchy, and that usually means,

among other things, both less recognition and lower

pay. Formal study of what the public at large considers the great works of English literature is now increasingly not what the younger scholars I know want, or are

trained, to do.

I believe that these troubles of the profession, which have a long history but are exacerbated by our current

money troubles, derive primarily from this disharmony between our

training and our institutions' expecta

tions. Looking at our troubles from that perspective would likely prove more fruitful and more painful than would trying to impose some kind of arbitrary unity of methods and objectives on ourselves. Gerald Graff tells us to teach the conflicts. That, however, is the easy

part. The point is not to stop the important and excit

ing work that is going on now but to reconsider it in

the light of larger issues. The hard part is to find jobs, and jobs that matter, and to reconcile our training and

professional satisfactions with our institutional and social obligations to the people whose money we take.

The format of this short essay gives me an excuse not

to spell

out my points, not to answer my own ques

tions. It allows me not to consider the peculiarities of

my position as commentator?for instance, as a rela

tively comfortable member of a research faculty in a

large state university. I take advantage of the format.

Considering what my comments mean is more diffi

cult, and at this point I'm not sure I know. But it does seem to me that under the present conditions, mem

bers of the profession of English had better be think

ing?as my colleague Bruce Robbins, for example, has in his new book, Secular Vocations?about their posi tions as

professionals. Those in large research depart ments should be making decisions about cutting back on the number of graduate students they admit. (Even

if the market turns around in a year or two, there are

plenty of good unemployed PhDs out there who are

eager to find work.) They should be rethinking their

teaching responsibilities. They should be taking far more seriously than they at present do the disparity between their sense of what constitutes useful work in

English and what the state and most people who send

their children to universities think such work is.

One of the most difficult questions the profession will have to face is whether the now prevalent model of

the research-oriented career can (or even should) be

sustained when it often diminishes teaching for the

best-qualified scholars and critics, builds a cadre of

teaching assistants and part-time lecturers to teach

most undergraduate students, and fosters graduate pro

grams with students who, we know, will never be

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George Levine 45

employed. And that question is related to the problem of what it is we do when we do research.

Institutional support for literary research is based on

the model of the sciences, and in recent years we have all been trained to talk about science as just another discourse and to blur the distinctions between literary and scientific "constructions." But anyone who has ever served on a

university-wide promotions commit

tee knows that there are radical differences between sci entific research and literary research?both in the immediate effect on the culture at

large and, even more

important from the venal perspective of universities, in the amount of money each brings in. The differences extend to the evaluation process itself, since referees in

most sciences give astonishingly precise estimations of

the quality of the candidate's work and of where it stands in the profession as a whole. My aim is not to

express "science envy" but to register a difference that, I

believe, should signify for the work we do. That work will be institutionally misunderstood and misrepre sented as long as it is sustained on the model of science.

I am not proposing a program of action here but

making steps toward developing an agenda. What is at stake is the very nature of the profession as it develops into the next century. We have been behaving (what ever we claim) as though the research model of careers in English is a natural one. The evidence seems clear not only that it is unnatural or constructed (as various histories of the profession, like GrafT's Professing Litera ture, show) but also that it is full of contradictions.

More important, the research model now seems to be

damaging both to people who aspire to join the profes sion and to

undergraduate students whose instruction

depends on it; at the same time, it is, as we have

recently found to our cost, extremely vulnerable to

close scrutiny?fairly or

unfairly. I can speak as freely as I do because I am safely

reaching the end of a long and well-rewarded career as a research professor, as one whose publications have

often led to release time and yearly leaves. It is a ques

tion I cannot fully confront myself: whether I would

accept a shift in the profession that would alter the reward system, diminish my graduate teaching, and

make my publications (which seem at times to con sume me) loom less significantly. I probably belong to

the wrong generation to ask.

But the work to be done must begin within depart ments and programs that have resisted structural (as

opposed to ideological or theoretical) change until now. We must learn to build departments whose inter ests and objectives are less at odds with their immedi ate public responsibilities. We must decide whether we

can, in good conscience, sustain our sense that the crit

ical function of literary or cultural study is primary, whether we can continue to pursue work that resists

both literature and the institutions that allow us to flourish without changing our relation to those institu tions. We must find ways to avoid the accusations of bad faith that come not from the William Bennetts and Lynne Cheneys and Roger Kimballs of this world?whose own bad faith is self-evident?but from ourselves as we think about the students who didn't find work, the students we didn't teach, and, yes, the

taxpayers who do not understand what we do and why we are paid either for not teaching their children or for

training them to believe that their values (which sent the children to college in the first place) are wrong.

Works Cited_ Eagleton, Terry. The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Oxford: Blackwell,

1990.

Franklin, Phyllis, Bettina J. Huber, and David Laurence. "Continu

ity and Change in the Study of Literature." Change Jan.-Feb. 1992:42-48.

Graff, Gerald. Professing Literature: An Institutional History. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987.

Huber, Bettina J. "Teaching Responsibilities of Modern Language Faculty Members: Findings from the 1990 MLA Membership Survey." Unpublished report. MLA, 1992.

Robbins, Bruce. Secular Vocations. London: Verso, 1993.

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