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
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
