Arts and humanities in annular eclipse

John Guillory writes in Professing Criticism, a 2022 book, that literary criticism “originated millennia ago, achieved a maximal state of organization in the twentieth-century university, and now faces an uncertain future” (xv). He begins with a well-known story: nineteenth-century literary critics were self-trained journalists publishing in periodicals, while universities concentrated on philology–language instead of literature. “Literary scholarship” came into being as a profession after World War I, when it began to serve universities to offer electives and majors to its “clientele,” future members of a professional-managerial class (50-51). From a critic’s point of view, why not jump into the breach with your close-reading skills in pocket, since “professionals” receive higher status and compensation? The new English specialists stressed the exercise of scholarship (knowledge) rather than criticism (opinion). And here we are.

I’m reading Guillory’s tome while preparing to speak on a roundtable called “Avenues of Creative Scholarship,” and I’m only partway in, but what made my jaw drop when he speculated that since literary criticism wasn’t always a university discipline, it’s reasonable to imagine that the whole English Department enterprise was a blip, now ending. Arts and humanities curricula are being destroyed at places like West Virginia University–and declining in power and attractiveness at my own college–so why should this speculation surprise me? But somehow I’d always imagined that the eclipse would pass, perhaps once we got smart and recentered the discipline on what draws students in: reading personally, making their own literary art, asking high-stakes questions about what literature is and does. I mean, that could be true. Even now, there’s a bright ring around the shadow. But Guillory is right. To count on my discipline’s survival–to count on universities surviving in some shape comparable to their twentieth-century versions–is irrationally optimistic.

Witness the shuttering of The Gettysburg Review this week by the administration of Gettysburg College, apparently from a mixture of ignorance and indifference. The Chronicle of Higher Education published a deeply interesting (and paywalled) interview with GR editors Mark Drew and Lauren Hohle in which they discuss how consultants, framing themselves as efficiency experts, draw paychecks from many institutions by targeting the arts and humanities; Drew also reminds us that Kenyon College closed the Kenyon Review for a decade before thinking better of that decision. His own speculation: “The ideal fix, to my mind, is for the magazine to be endowed, either wholly or in part, so that we’re protected from the vicissitudes of changing administrations.”

Mark Drew was kind enough to advise me when Rod Smith was retiring from Shenandoah and we were considering how to pitch the next editorial search to the dean–I made a LOT of calls back then, pondering and strategizing. (Shenandoah was once almost shuttered, too, and Rod heroically saved it on a slashed budget by going digital–so there was a real prospect it might not survive his retirement.) I still think we made the best call possible by hiring Beth Staples, a strong teacher as well as a strong editor, and supporting her transition into a tenure-track position even as she revved up the undergraduate internship. The latter is outward-facing and “experiential,” a “high-impact educational practice,” to use the lingo–so we now emphasize more than ever its centrality to our curriculum as well as its very real fit with the college’s aspirations. But boy, does producing the magazine depend on a lot of undercompensated labor, spearheaded by one busy tenure-track professor with one course release. Did we trade precarity for a workload that’s not tenable over the long term? Many college- and university-based magazines are struggling with the same factors. I predict that even if protest-letter-writing admirers can reverse a closure here and there, and even if the arts retain their foothold in academe, there are more losses ahead.

I’m not worried that people will stop wanting to read, write, and publish literature. There’s so much joy in all three. I just wonder if academia will cease its patronage of these activities, and if so, what comes next. Academia is a mess, but it’s enabled me to make mortgage payments as well as art and criticism, and its support of those activities has diversified who can make a literary living. When I look back a hundred years, I see U.S. poet-critics who were either wealthy–often with a wife at home to manage the boring stuff–or struggling mightily for commercial success. Langston Hughes had an actual old-style rich patron for a while, until she tried to control what he wrote and he ditched her for a less stable, more entrepreneurial approach. All paths to making good art without private wealth are hard, but university employment increased the options.

Gettysburg Review actually published one of my very first works of creative criticism, “Coffee with Poets in New Zealand,” in 2013, so it played an authorizing role as I began to write Poetry’s Possible Worlds. And late this past summer, Mark Drew accepted a poem from my forthcoming book, Mycocosmic, so I guess I may be in their final issue. Also from Mycocosmic, here is my newest publication, “Submicroscopic,” in Literary Matters, born of a fever-dream desire to pack a whole heroic crown into a single sonnet by repeating elements from each line in the next–that doesn’t make sense, I know, but I was attending a virtual sonnet symposium at the height of the coronavirus. Micrometaphors happen when a university hands you a paid sabbatical.

My own uncompensated editorial effort kicks into gear today, as it does twice annually: if you’ve ever lived in Virginia for 2+ years, you can submit 3 poems to Shenandoah for free and possibly win a $1000 prize (yay, endowments!–not a huge one, but we’re very glad to disburse it). Siew David Hii is going to help me winnow the submissions down to twelve finalists and Anna Maria Hong will choose a winner. My other big extracurricular this month is the aforementioned roundtable at the Modernist Studies Association in Brooklyn, where I’ll also get to visit with my son for the first time since he started his math PhD program, so I probably won’t blog again for a bit.

But I’ll close by saying that whatever a literary blog’s “value” may be at this moment, keeping it has helped me build a bridge from scholar back to poet-critic again, in a reversal of the process Guillory describes. For me, blogging has created a precious space for writing as a way of thinking, apart from markets and academic credentialing, with an emphasis on process and lightning-fast feedback from readers. I remain so glad to be here.