Beauty Barred

Abstract

When humanities professors get down to the business of structuring syllabi and lectures around beautiful literature, they are likely to be discouraged. The discipline of literary studies in the United States, after all, has pretty much collapsed. The designation English department no longer corresponds to any institutionally organized activity involving written texts in English whose words intend to have much more than the pragmatic function of, say, political speeches designed to get out the vote. The very properties distinguishing literary from nonliterary language—metaphor, rhythm, formal coherence, complex individual points of view, thematic ambiguity, and so forth—have disappeared as subjects of discussion from much of the intellectual work that people who continue to call themselves English professors produce. Instead of this model of activity, we remain today within a determinedly content-driven analysis of a wide range of texts (only some of which are written) that takes place in essays and books whose function is frequently political: these works intend to shore up support for a range of politically and psychologically liberatory trends, and the literature the works consider often exists as little more than a verbal bolster for political positions.