Conclusion

Abstract

In the introduction to this book, I posed two questions that I said a reconstruction of the profession must answer for our students and others: what is good literature, and what is literature good for? By redefining “aesthetic value,” “literature,” and “literary criticism” in terms of the institutions that sustain them, the first part of my book primarily attempted to answer the first question. The second part then explained why other contemporary varieties of antiformalism fail to answer both questions more adequately than formalism did, largely because they tend to adopt their own version of formalism. These other responses to formalism, for the most part, hope to avoid the first question, but they also fail to answer the second question because in denying the distinctiveness of literature and its study, they arrive, albeit by a very different route, at the same answer traditional formalists always gave: that literature is good for nothing at all. To this point, the primary answer I have given to this second question is my suggestion in Chapter 3 that we think of the institution of literary studies as functioning like a Ministry of Disturbance for a democratic society as a whole. But I still have not said enough about how my informalist reconstruction can answer this second question. To do that, I need to explain what I mean by a democratic society and why such a society needs a Ministry of Disturbance. I will attempt to do so in this conclusion by describing what I take to be the distinctive role of literary studies within the humanities, the distinctive role of the humanities within the university, and the distinctive role of the university within a larger democratic society.