Literature Lost: Social Agendas and the Corruption of the Humanities. - book reviews

Reason, April, 1998 by Nick Gillespie

The title of John M. Ellis's Literature Lost calls to mind a story about the novelist Bernard Malamud. Malamud was carrying the completed manuscript of a new book with him on a New York subway. Somehow or other, he got off the train, having left the manuscript behind. As with most things forgotten on a New York subway, it never surfaced again. There are other such cases of "literature lost": T.E. Lawrence fatuously mislaid his first version of Seven Pillars of Wisdom (also on a train - perhaps writers should only travel by foot); a draft of Jean Genet's novel Our Lady of the Flowers, written on paper bags while in prison, was destroyed by malicious guards; Aristotle's legendary treatise on comedy - around which Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose revolves - has never turned up. In such literal instances of "literature lost," a text, or version of a text, is gone forever, living on only as a tantalizing possibility in the reader's imagination.

Ellis, of course, is making a different sort of allusion, one that invokes Paradise Lost, Milton's epic "of man's first disobedience." For Ellis, the original sin of today's academics is highly politicized criticism that seeks first and foremost to evaluate literature based on whether it conforms to current notions of social justice. Literature Lost is an eminently readable, insightful, and thought-provoking book that goes far beyond the often touristy and shallow journalistic critiques of academic political correctness by people such as Dinesh D'Souza, Richard Bernstein, Thomas Sowell, and Charles Sykes.

This should hardly he surprising: As a professor emeritus of German at the University of California at Santa Cruz and the author of 1989's Against Deconstruction, Ellis is not simply better versed in au courant academic argot; he has a much deeper knowledge of the culture of literature departments and of university life. And, to his credit, Ellis is anything but a reactionary ideologue. Indeed, the great virtue of Literature Lost is that it engages in extended, informed, and open argument. Hence, though he openly scorns deconstruction, New Historicism, and other forms of literary criticism that have risen to power over the past two decades or so, Ellis can also acknowledge that the influence of thinkers such as Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault "energized" a "stagnant situation" in the field of literary studies. The result is a book that is both an excellent introduction to its topic and a nuanced polemic of interest to academic readers of all persuasions.

Ultimately, Ellis is writing less about literature being "lost" and more about its being displaced by other, nonliterary concerns. (His subtitle also misdirects the reader - though it invokes the "corruption of the humanities," the book is devoted exclusively to literary studies.) "In a comparatively short time, academic literary criticism has been transformed," he writes. "Many [critics] now regard social activism as the major purpose of literary criticism, and social activism of a very specific kind: the primary issue in all literary texts is the question of oppression by virtue of race, gender, and class." If possible, Ellis is understating things when he notes that the dictum "everything is 'in the last analysis' political" has become a bedrock assumption in literary criticism.

Contrary to writers such as Roger Kimball, Ellis does not simply attribute the current emphasis on race, gender, and class to tenured radicals who came of age in the 1960s and their graduate-student proteges. Provocatively, Ellis suggests that although "those in the grip [of race-gender-class criticism] are critical of the Western tradition and define themselves by their opposition to it...the impulse itself is so much a part of the Western tradition that the attitudes it generates can be said to be quintessentially Western."

Invoking such figures as Tacitus (the first-century A.D. historian who measured the decadence of his native Romans against fictively democratic and virtuous Germanic barbarians), Rousseau (who invidiously compared 18th-century Frenchmen to imagined, pre-social Noble Savages), and Margaret Mead (whose "sentimentalized Samoans" provided an ideological counterpoint to repressive Americans), Ellis sketches out a "uniquely self-critical" attitude of the West.

Indeed, he even notes that the crimes of which the West stands accused - racism, sexism, colonialism, etc. - are essentially transgressions against universal rights that are themselves products of the Enlightenment. In a sense, Ellis implicitly likens the current state of literary studies to another artifact of Enlightenment thought: the French Revolution. Just as that attempt to secure the "rights of man" ended in a bloody reign of terror, so too, suggests Ellis, are contemporary literary studies devouring their own.

Treating literature as exclusively - or ultimately - political yields various baleful effects, says Ellis, who wisely acknowledges that literature often does have a significant political dimension. From a professional perspective, such an approach denigrates the tools of literary analysis in favor of those from other fields. "Race-gender-class criticism belongs firmly in the category of activities that may involve literature but that center around something else," writes Ellis. "To put the matter simply, when you reduce literature to a single issue, your reasons for doing so must have nothing to do with literature, and consequently neither will your results." In this way, such critics not only undermine the legitimacy of literary studies as a distinct academic discipline, they often borrow indiscriminately from fields in which they are anything but expert. That's one of the reasons why "psychological" and "economic" approaches to literature continue to rely heavily on outdated concepts derived from Freud and Marx.