The Future of Literary Studies?

Abstract

Transforming a phrase like »the future of literary studies« into a question is by no means an unquestionable operation, for it is bound to generate new questions regarding the status of this question. Is it a ›philosophical question‹, a question which, according to a definition by Jean-Francois Lyotard², has no possible answer and which, therefore, we only ask with the intention of producing a proliferation of further questions? Or is it what one might call a ›real question‹, a question for whose solution there is a concrete (perhaps even an ›existential‹) need? For many decades now, literary critics have been handling questions regarding the future and the social functions of their disciplines as philosophical questions. As such, they have inspired some of the most intense debates in the profession, and have thus greatly contributed to keeping it alive in potentially difficult times.

With the name ›literary studies‹ I refer to the (heterogeneous) totality of academic activities that departments and programs of literature have practiced during the past two centuries. Without underestimating the considerable difference between the Anglo-american and the Continental traditions in this field, I use the word as an equivalent for the German notion of ›Literaturwissenschaft‹. — My thought about the future of literary studies has largely profited from long conversations with John Bender and from three undergraduate courses that I taught in the Department of Comparative Literature at Stanford with Jeffrey Schnapp, Daniel Seiden, and David Palumbo-Liu between 1991 and 1993. I want to thank them, our students, and those colleagues who heard previous versions of this essay as lectures at Berlin and Berkeley for multiple criticisms and suggestions. Thanks also to Harrison Brace for editing my article. — The following pages were written in English because I am eager to discuss ›the future of literary studies‹ with colleagues and students in my own everyday working context.