Abstract
The term “market” has negative connotations in the humanities: it describes the bitter competition for resources such as staffing and classrooms, and the emergence of the “student-as-consumer” who expects to have a say in curricular decisions. The mutual hostility of art and commerce already was a tenet of Romanticism, and grew during the Modernist era. While the danger of the corruption of art by commerce is real, the claim that literature resides inside a timeless space, unsullied by financial interests, has become a barrier to its appreciation by more than a small caste. It is time to reconsider the relationship between literature and the market through a more nuanced understanding of the metaphor of the literature student as a “consumer”, as well as a “producer” of culture.
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Notes
- 1.
The governors of Wisconsin and Kentucky are at the vanguard of the trend in higher education to emphasize STEM and other disciplines considered relevant to economic growth at the expense of the traditional liberal arts, in particular the humanities. Governor Bevin of Kentucky made the point very concisely, singling out French literature as a symptom of the university’s lack of responsiveness to economic anxiety: “There will be more incentives to electrical engineers than French literature majors. There just will” (quoted in Beam 2016).
- 2.
When Bourdieu and Passeron conducted research for their landmark book Les Héritiers (The Inheritors, 1964), a substantial percentage of upper-class children were more familiar with inherited culture, such as canonical literature or classical music, than ones from less wealthy families. As Dominique Pasquier has shown in Cultures lycéennes. La tyrannie de la majorité (high school cultures: the tyranny of the majority, 2008), this is no longer true. “Inherited culture” is “remote culture” for all but the tiniest minority of today’s student population.
- 3.
To return to the GATT negotiations: it is understandably frustrating for American negotiators that Europe refuses to import GMOs despite the lack (so far) of conclusive scientific evidence that they are harmful. The scientific question of “sanitary and phytosanitary” concerns is one that ultimately will be decided. But no such objective criterion can be invoked in order to stop Wisconsin from calling one of its cheeses “Roquefort”. Such an injunction is based simply on the belief in radical, albeit often subtle differences between terroirs, which is akin to the belief that all local culture is unique and untranslatable. That is the widely-shared belief on which resistance to the growing globalization, Americanization, and commercialization of culture depends.
- 4.
These figures come from the website cbo-boxoffice.com, which compiles statistics on movie viewership in France; as of this writing, Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015) was on its way to challenging for the spot held by both of the earlier movies, but had not yet succeeded.
- 5.
The cultural impact in France of anthropologist Marcel Mauss’s 1923–4 book on the potlatch, Essai sur le don [The Gift], can be attributed at least in part to its illustration of how value can function in non-relative terms. In other words, the competing clans during the potlatch festival are not simply trading gifts; they are “out-gifting” one another in an orgy of expenditure and sacrifice that makes classical economic theory irrelevant. It therefore works well as a metaphor for the Romantic conception of art that followed the “consecration of the author” (see Bénichou), and that continues to feed the fear of contamination by the market.
- 6.
In France, the equivalent expression is “le client est roi” [the customer is king].
- 7.
Quoted by Michel Boué in his article “Robert contre Fitzpatrick” in the French communist newspaper L’Humanité of April 10, 1992. Boué and Mnouchkine became friends at a cultural festival organized by Robert Fitzpatrick, then president of the California Institute of the Arts, during the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics. They both were shocked that this former French professor and art historian later became the CEO of Euro Disney, a promotion that makes more sense if one knows that Cal Arts, in yet another example of continuity between commercial and non-commercial culture, had been founded by Walt Disney himself. In a conversation with Fitzpatrick while the park was under construction, Mnouchkine accused him of collaborating in a “cultural Chernobyl”. Now she is better-known for those two words, at least in the Anglophone world, than for her considerable dramatic oeuvre.
- 8.
In another sign that France is, surprisingly, prepared to consider opening up “taught culture” to “culture of proximity” (understood primarily as commercial popular culture) is the publication in Le français aujourd’hui of articles such as Christine Prévost, “Quelle place pour les ‘produits culturels de masse’ dans la classe de français?” [what is the place for “mass ‘cultural products’ in French class?] (2011).
- 9.
Pasquier’s statistic that less than 2 percent of lycée students listen to classical music may seem low, but is consistent with other sources. A 2014 survey of lycée students in the Val-de-Loire region revealed that approximately 8 percent sometimes listened to classical music, and far fewer list it as their favorite genre (Hannecart 7). Pasquier’s statistics are from her book Culture lycéennes: La tyrannie de la majorité [high school cultures: the tyranny of the majority] (2005) which includes surveys on the increasing weight of “culture of proximity” in students’ lives. As far as reading is concerned, other surveys show that while more than half of lycée students read outside of school, a much smaller percentage read on their own the “serious” literature that their teachers would like them to (Baudelot et al. 1999).
- 10.
Henri Bouasse, the early-twentieth century physicist quoted in Chapter 4, did not hesitate to point out to his literature colleagues that many of their students were bored stiff by the authors on the official list for the bac exam.
- 11.
For just one example of the anti-PISA critique from the scientific perspective, see the anthology edited by S. T. Hopmann, G. Brinek, and M. Retzl: PISA Zufolge PISA/PISA According to PISA. Hält PISA, was es verspricht?/Does PISA Keep What It Promises? (2007).
- 12.
Once again, these examples are taken from an excerpt of the test administered to American students. However, every country received an identical set of questions translated into the local language, so that the results would be comparable. Therefore, French students not only had the same passage of One Hundred Years of Solitude and questions, they also had identical versions of the other examples from the PISA test mentioned in this chapter.
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Guiney, M.M. (2017). Harnessing the Neo-liberal Beast. In: Literature, Pedagogy, and Curriculum in Secondary Education. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-52138-1_7
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