also a shift in literary studies away from classical antiquity toward vernacular languages and national literatures. In this context the category of “literature,” which had already developed from the designation of printed matter in general to a term that conferred upon selected texts the distinction of high quality and demanded the exercise of tasteful discernment in its use, became a kind of master genre, a boundary object that helped to rationalize curricular regularities in relation to the bureaucratic structure of the educational apparatus. What in the eighteenth century was a course of lectures in rhetoric and belles lettres would mutate into a panoply of courses on literary forms (the triad of poetry, drama, and prose supplying the overarching generic logic) and national traditions that, when entered upon a student’s transcript, promised his or her exposure to a standardized regime of study that could be measured in credit hours, billed for tuition, and used by administrators to determine the allocation of institutional resources.3
In the shift from classical to vernacular languages, the category of “literature” thus helps adapt the academic genre system to the way, in Luckhurst’s words, a “generation [of] scientific workers, teachers, and engineers … confront the traditional loci of cultural authority.” John Guillory, surveying the changing historical forms of the literary canon, writes of this nineteenth-century development that “it is only vernacular writing that has the power to bring into existence the category of ‘literature’ in the specific sense of poetry, novels, plays, and so on. The brackets that close around a particular set of genres at this time increasingly distinguish it on the one side from philosophical and scientific writing, and on the other from scripture” (76). These generic enclosures within the academy would come to complement and reinforce the separation of “literature” from the mass cultural genre system as a whole throughout most of the twentieth century.
Guillory argues that the displacement of the classics by vernacular “literature” changed the canon of texts used in advanced literary pedagogy but retained a crucial element of that pedagogy’s fundamental form, the phenomenon sociolinguists call “diglossia.” In the strict sense of the term originally formulated by the linguist Charles Ferguson, diglossia refers to a hierarchical differentiation of functions between a common, spoken language and one “which is learned largely by formal education and is used for most written and formal purposes but is not used by any sector of the community for ordinary conversation” (quoted in Guillory 69). Guillory stretches the concept of diglossia to include the practice of preserving and disseminating a canonical body of writing in the schools in order to inculcate an advanced linguistic competency. Thus what was formerly a linguistic distinction becomes a generic one, and the displacement of the classics by national traditions as “loci of authority” in the university curriculum institutionalizes “different practices of the same language” that help to coordinate different levels of educational attainment with different class destinations (Macherey and Balibar 47, quoted by Guillory 78).4 The ability to operate this genre distinction, then, is one of the specific disciplinary mechanisms by which the schools perform the function of “ideological state apparatuses”—as Louis Althusser called them in his most famous and influential essay. The ideological self-recognition associated with “literature” has to do with becoming a full-fledged human being regardless of class position (though of course one’s facility with and discernment of literature are strong signals of class), while the discourses of the various technical competencies excluded from that category are “practical” and job oriented—hence direct determinants of one’s economic status. It is easy to see how this dichotomy would come to dovetail with the rift between modernist experimentation and the more formally conservative methods of mass cultural artistry.
These developments are of course not isolated within the schools. Richard Ohmann usefully contrasts the “sacralization” of higher culture signaled in the second half of the nineteenth century in the United States by the founding of municipal art museums, symphonies, and opera companies with the burgeoning sphere of popular consumer culture in the same period:
Elites carried forth the “sacralization” of art and culture: purging it of amateurism, widening the separation between creators and audiences, framing art as difficult and pure, divesting it of more accessible, popular elements. Barnum-like exhibits were distinguished from art museums; ragtime from the symphony. Vaudeville, dime novels, comics, the saloon and the dance hall, Coney Island and the nickelodeon, the ethnic club and the sports park drew more uniformly working class participants. Culture became a system that clearly signaled and manifested social class; refined and sacralized at the top of the hierarchy, pleasure-seeking and openly commercial at the bottom. (221)
Explaining the twentieth century’s peculiar rearticulation of the longstanding European division of high genres and high style from low ones as a reordering of the distribution of literacy and the cultural competencies and privileges attached to it supplements and complicates the thesis concerning commercial narrative production proposed by Fredric Jameson in his essay “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture.” There Jameson proposes that the specter of commodification looms over high modernism just as much as over mass culture. Where the products of the culture industry are explicitly designed as commodities, and their production intentionally organized around commercial activity, the artifacts of high modernism are, according to Jameson, just as strongly determined by their rejection of commodity status. One needs to add, however, that the antithetical practices of high modernism and mass culture reiterate the generic and disciplinary division of literary study from technical and scientific training in the schools, and that what Jameson quite reasonably sees as a set of heavily constrained responses to the pressures of commodification might also be seen as practical, goal-oriented management of the linguistic resources corresponding to that division. The mass cultural genre system would from this point of view be engaged in what Spinuzzi calls “thinking out” the technical and instrumental character of advanced capitalist social interaction. But this “thinking out” takes place within the constraints of class, and the management of narrative in mass culture includes—as Jameson goes on to argue in “Reification and Utopia”—the way it negotiates the tension between the commercial status quo and class-based fantasies of liberation from that social order.
The relation between the genre systems generated in commercial publishing and the academy is not one of simple exclusion or straightforward hierarchy, then, but rather involves a distribution of the social functions of narrative across the fields of education, employment, and consumption. The tensions of class dominance and resistance pervade the entire field. As Theodor Adorno famously observed in a letter to Walter Benjamin dated March 3, 1936, both high modernism and mass culture “bear the stigmata of capitalism,” representing the “torn halves of an integral freedom, to which, however, they do not add up” (Culture Industry, 2). Merely to condemn the “culture industry” as a debased form of more authentic traditional cultural practices enforces a false separation upon cultural analysis that encourages nostalgia and elitism. Yet to celebrate the mass cultural system as the realm of the popular, embracing the wider reading audience that the elitist practices of high modernism and the upper levels of academic literary specialization exclude, would be to confuse consumerism with democracy.
Nonetheless it is entirely appropriate to draw upon Gramsci’s distinction between organic and traditional intellectuals to speak here of the confrontation of organic versus traditional genre systems. This opposition does not have to do with the political activities of the intellectuals involved but with the institutional locations where the genre systems are primarily enacted—in the cauldron, so to speak, of commodity production, on the one hand, and in the ivory tower of the academy, on the other. The academic genre system, organized around the category of literature, imports and hybridizes genre categories that emerged in previous social formations and mediates their ongoing impact upon the present. Its task is to help construct the meaning of tradition. The mass cultural genre system arises out of the distribution of cultural resources and the inextricably entwined commercial and cultural motives of practice organic to the contemporary social formation, and its task is to help coordinate these various resources and motives. Its emergence within the specific historical constraints of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American and British capitalism is the topic we turn
