Adam Kissel

Literature Lost: Social Agendas and the Corruption of the Humanities
by John M. Ellis
Yale University Press, 1997
272 pp. $25.00 ($17.50 at amazon.com)
Chapter 1 on the Web:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/longterm/books/chap1/literaturelost.htm

John Ellis's Literature Lost cogently but bitterly denounces a pervasive race-class-gender hegemony in today's academy. Posing as literary scholarship, political advocacy has replaced sincere readings of literary texts. Some scholars hide behind impenetrable jargon and the supposed authority of fashionable literary theory. Worse, many scholars openly assent to this revolution in the humanities, claiming that evaluative statements of merit, and even rationality itself, no longer hold in today's postmodern world.

Ellis dissects their totalizing claims as well as the specific claims of proponents of merely politicized readings of literature. He finds "a startling decline in the intellectual quality of work in the humanities and a descent to intellectual triviality and irrelevance that amounts to a betrayal of the university as an institution." This finding would be horrifying if we had not already perceived its truth. Terry Eagleton's The Illusions of Postmodernism (1996) and plenty of other works have exposed the shallowness of much contemporary politico-literary criticism. What gives Ellis his bite, however, is a clear and trenchant analysis of the faulty logic of those scholars who justify political advocacy in literary work.

As Ellis sees it, their logic boils down to this: since nothing is completely objective, apolitical, and immune from power struggles, everything must be subjective and political and about power; since the Ivory Tower never has been completely unstained by dishonesty, dishonesty may reign. In other words, the Tower is not snowy white; therefore these scholars justify a Tower made ebony black. Where are the nuances in their claims, he asks, or a real recognition of innumerable shades of gray?

Ellis also shows that the race-class-gender camp has attempted poorly what the Western tradition has done so well. Western history is rife with the kinds of claims that only recently have been called political correctness. Although it has become fashionable to assail the Enlightenment as a monolithic instrument of oppression, Ellis demonstrates that the essence of the Enlightenment is to ask questions, to be skeptical of ourselves and of what we can know. Enlightenment ideas help us recognize with humility that civilization reduces injustice more than it perpetuates injustice; civilization aims to keep us from our natural propensity to abuse one another. Most importantly, the very notion of innate human value stressed by the race-class-gender camp got its start in the Enlightenment. Even a quick glance at world history shows that Enlightenment values have made the West a world leader (though there is still quite a way to go) in civil rights, feminism, and genuine concern for the human person. Lest the inevitable attacks on Ellis's purported racism or sexism diminish his argument, Ellis preempts them with a more vibrant celebration of Western success against racism and sexism (partial though it is) than we usually see in the advocates' own pessimistic partisan politics.

Indeed Ellis calls for a return to a humanistic respect for literature. Traditional readings of literature approach books with no preset agenda beyond a desire to appreciate and understand their various effects on us. For this reason, traditional scholarship can expose us to as great a diversity of human expression as exists in all of our literature. The canon grows as more works speak to us across time and cultures. We can read out of texts, not into them. If we are good readers rather than good advocates, a superior work of literature might actually be able to change our minds.

When it comes time to name names, we recognize a few of the usual suspects: Fredric Jameson, Michel Foucault, Stanley Fish. But Ellis singles out the University of Chicago's own Gerald Graff (Director of the rather new Master's Program in the Humanities, or MAPH) for special condemnation. Graff claims to "teach the conflicts," says Ellis, but he downplays or completely hides the traditionalist point of view (particularly in Graff's recent Beyond the Culture Wars). I find this comment a bit of a stretch. In the MAPH promotional literature, for example, Graff reprints an email to his students that shows a much more moderate position:

Here his warning against the recent privileging of race, class, and gender looks identical to some of Ellis's claims in Literature Lost.

One starts to see that Ellis might unfairly lump all the race-class-gender scholars into the same leaky (or nearly sunk) boat, while some of them actually may rest somewhat more safely on, say, an island pitted with quicksand. And a few such scholars, Ellis implies but seems not quite ready to admit, might just have a corner of solid ground. Ellis probably overstates the integrity of race-class-gender studies. It seems more likely that as the Ivory Tower is perceived as crumbling, each individual ideology wants a piece.

What about our fine scholars in the humanities here at the University of Chicago? Of 36 professors in the Department of English whose specialties and works-in-progress are listed, five deal explicitly with gender or sexuality; two study Marxism. Only one refers specifically to race. A few others dabble in these topics, but many more study trendy cultural issues like postcolonialism. Still, over half of the department does not register any race, class, or gender advocacy whatsoever. What does a survival rate of fifty percent say about the "corruption" of the department? In comparison, among the 28 professors in the Department of Literature at John Ellis's university (UC Santa Cruz), fourteen register gender advocacy and four study race (none directly mention Marxism). Santa Cruz sports a two-thirds casualty rate. If the literate public knew this statistic, Ellis says, they would be storming the Ebony Tower to free our students from the race-class-gender ascendancy.

Of course, advocate professors potentially could teach courses just as free from ideology as their more traditionalist colleagues, and I would like to give them the benefit of the (admittedly large) doubt. This winter's graduate courses in English, for example, look surprisingly tame. We recently have had traditional courses in subjects as old as Old English, rhetoric (though it lately has been called "Style and Structure of Discourse"), and the skills of plain old good writing about good literature. Indeed the humble symbol of a "Little Red School House" may fit our university better than either an Ivory Tower or an Ebony Tower. The humanities at the University of Chicago, gratefully, seem not so corrupt as one finds at many other American universities. But we're close.