Dorothy--That's exactly it: we all read English. We don't all have
fluency in higher math and physics by age 18-21.
So I think the answer to your first question is that few people believe
that a "guide" is necessary to understand literature, and they will
reject your assumption that literary study is or is like science. Even
the community of literary scholars has never been persuaded of these
things. In mainstream academe and definitely in its margins and in the
public, "-ist" approaches to literature are often rejected for many
perceived failings, but particularly offensive is the idea that
value-laden, ideology-driven analysis should have the status of "science"
or acquire a presumptive authority when the ever-changing values and
ideologies in question are widely regarded as alien and hostile to the
dominant culture by supporters and detractors alike.
You seem to want to be accepted as an authority who practices methods of
analysis that confer authority on the discipline because they produce
accurate results. Science is able to work this way: its claims of
objectivity and truth through method have been vindicated by the results,
or at least that is what most people believe. "Historicist and gendered
arguments," on the other hand, have not accomplished any such thing and
cannot expect to do so. In fact, historicist analysis has been used to
dismantle the whole idea of scientific objectivity, neutrality, etc., and
the most scientific aspects of literary study, such as textual criticism,
have come under the same critique.
Literary study is a legacy of religious scripturalism. The canons and
core habits of thought that became the preconditions for the emergence of
a literary discipline belong to a movement that continues to emphasize
and extend the autonomy of the individual reader/interpreter. Science is
catholic, scholastic and ultramontane. The reading public is highly
anabaptistical, and so are literary scholars, but when faced by
"puritans," like Hooker, they see the necessity of "catholic"
structures... -Dan Knauss
On Wed, 18 Feb 2004 09:43:51 -0600 Dorothy Stephens <[log in to unmask]>
writes:
Although I've hugely enjoyed the humor of this strand and have
seen in it more appreciation of Tolkien than Steven Willett has seen,
Steven's message has forced me to rethink my assumptions about Tolkien.
Nevertheless, I couldn't disagree more with his analysis of the "formal
academic study" of Spenser. The "formal academic study" of physics means
that the average high-school graduate can no longer remotely understand
cutting-edge physics without the help of an advanced scholar's
explanations, but few people seem to think that this is a big mistake on
the part of academia. Why must literary study continually face the
charge of elitism simply for making intellectual advances? We all read
English, and we are all subject to time; why should scholarly
investigations of mechanisms and implications of the former phenomenon
draw so much more lay wrath than scholarly examinations of the mechanisms
and implications of the latter? Moreover, I can guarantee that whereas
most students come into college unable and unwilling to read Spenser (or
Shakespeare, or Austen for that matter), their introduction in my courses
to the historicist and gendered arguments developed by current Spenserian
scholars gets them excited about, and personally engaged with, The Faerie
Queene. There are many reasons for the disappearance of fireside reading
of Spenser, but academia isn't one of them.
Dorothy Stephens
