Abstract
As I argued at the MLA in 1997, the power of literature within the
cultural field has declined over the course of the twentieth century. At
the turn of the twentieth century literature commanded immense social
power. Such power was multifaceted, including literature's entertainment
value, its supposed ability to convey knowledge of several different
kinds, the feeling of national identity that a literary tradition was
said to embody, its aesthetic qualities and the class-identified taste
that recognizing such entails, and the economic value that printed goods
had in the consumer market place. At this point, literature was
integral, not autonomous. Bourdieu's "loser wins" theory would predict
that as literature became less connected economically and socially, it
would become richer as cultural capital. There is some evidence that
literature's increasing autonomy in twentieth-century America did for a
time have this effect. One might see the 1950s as the high watermark of
literature's symbolic capital. The intellectuals of the 1930s, those
associated with The Fugitive and those associated with Partisan Review,
may be the first real generation of American intellectuals, i.e., of
cultural interpreters whose power derived from being positioned outside
of the dominant institutions of cultural power. These intellectuals
championed literature in precisely the terms Bourdieu would recognize,
literature as autonomous from politics and class, from economics and
audience. They championed literally obscure writing which most people
could not read, or at least not without the intellectuals' help. By the
1950s they began cashing in on the symbolic capital they had accrued.
Literature was widely revered. Lionel Trilling's book notes reached
hundreds of thousands of book club members. Millions of college students
learned how to read literary works, all of which were now held to
require New Critical explication. But what Bourdieu's theory can't
account for is that this economy cannot be infinitely reproduced. The
value of literature cannot be sustained by its symbolic capital alone.
Perhaps it could if a consistent hierarchy of authority and taste
existed to complement the more or less consistent class hierarchy, then
literary symbolic capital might always be a means to advance in that
hierarchy. But in present day America, cultural authority is weak.
Sacred culture no longer seems so sacred, perhaps the result of too
widespread dissemination. Moreover, the vast expansion of college
education has turned the U. S. into a nation that has less need for the
authority of cultural experts. I'm here suggesting that we professors of
literature have perhaps helped to put ourselves out of business. If we
want to stay in business, I think we need to be less autonomous, less
devoted to preserving or transmitting consecrated works. We need to
speak in our writing to the larger public about the whole range
representations by which they make sense of the world. In other words,
the upshot of the shift in the cultural field is the precisely the
opposite of what Bourdieu's logic would suggest. Instead of insisting on
the autonomy of the literary, we need to treat it as one medium among
many. The most useful response to the decline of literature is to
recognize that culture has expanded, and that it requires the kind of
analysis previously reserved for the literary. An historically informed
cultural studies is then the appropriate academic response to the new
cultural field. |
