Work

English Studies in Canada, Dec, 2004 by Evan Watkins

Definitions of "work" take up a number of pages even in the OED, reflecting the multiple and complicated networks in which some version or another of its meanings has a role. But for literary studies in the university the central meaning would seem to be simply a literary composition (often plural, the c so notes) viewed in relation to its author (e.g., the works of Virginia Woolf). The OED follows with its usual samples of usage, in this case dating back into the 14th century. Things are rarely that simple, however, and certainly not the world of work(s) in literary studies. Early 20th-century modernism emerges as more complicated as more studies proliferate, and within that complexity one strand in particular had a great deal to do with overloading the usages of work as a name for literary compositions. Largely in reaction against industrialization and the "industrialized" imagination of a rapidly growing "mass culture it he connection between literary composition and work reacquired a whole range of meanings involving labour. More specifically, the range pointed toward a kind of handcrafted artisan labour that could stand in dramatic contrast to the culture industry's repetitive, anonymous, banal, machine-made proliferation of cultural goods. Crudely, "the work of literature" also came to mean the idea that making literature took one hell of a lot of work in contrast to this other stuff.

Modernism in some of its many versions at least remains the matrix of institutionalized literary study in the u.s., and the elaboration of literary works into the work of literature as I'm describing above had a central role in that development. To some great extent it helped determine everyday practices in the classroom-the work one does as a student of literature in the university. I fit takes a lot of work-artisan and individualized-to make work of literature, correspondingly one can expect that the encounter with one of these much worked on works will also require a lot of work. Back when I was an undergraduate, somewhere around the 14111 century when OED recorded usages commence, we learned a de facto ranking of literary works by how long they took to write. We knew the Wake was better than Ulysses not only because it was harder to read, but more importantly because it took longer to write. Lot of work went into that one. There were anomalies in that ranking of course-Faulkner's famous six weeks at As I Lay Dying for example, which continued to trouble a number of my teachers. Unlike industrial mass culture production, however, artisan labour could allow differential intensities of effort. And after all it was still hard to read, if not quite in the same class as the Wake.

Hard to read suggests work, but it also helps in identifying what kind of work exactly. "Hard" in this instance means difficult, something you ant get right away. You have to work to understand the meanings. That's how you know this stuff is work, standing in contrast to mass culture mass produced texts. After all you couldn't really distinguish it on the basis of immediate emotional impact, memorability, or finally even on the basis of visible skills. Some kind of complicated meaning (or some meaningfully complicated refusal of either meanings or complications) seemed about all that was left. For perhaps all too obvious reasons this emphasis on meanings sat very well indeed with the institutional development of literary studies since a) it made available something to do in class, the work of figuring out meanings; b) it yielded a way of determining the required evaluative hierarchy-some people could figure out meanings better than others and did n work than others, starting at the top with the instructor and moving on down through the grading scale for students; c) it suggested a rationale for the continued production of literary scholarship, i.e., of the potentially endless individualized artisan labor of figuring out the potentially endless meanings of "the work'

A lot has changed since the heyday of the New Criticism that seems an obvious referent for the classroom/scholarship instanced above. But a lot of the basics remain: if in different ways, nevertheless were still figuring out meanings in class, still grading students, still producing individual scholarship as artisan labor. At the same time, however, other usages of "work" have become more visible in university departments. To take some random examples, the end of term evaluation forms that students fill out often ask whether "the amount of work" assigned seemed appropriate, a nice instance of the immediate collision of quantity and quality that happens SO often in OED definitions of work. Universities must often agree contractually with graduate student unions on the total amount of work hours that TAs can be responsible for, where work doesn't seem to mean reading Milton. Administrators at a number of big city universities, and of every campus in the University of California system where I(unmoral work, have begun to worry more and more about how a great many people who work at the university-particularly clerical-technical staff and often junior faculty-can no longer afford to live where they work.