field and its public legitimation, then, we need to inquire into the status of literature as cultural capital, as John Guillory has done in his landmark Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation. Guillory says almost nothing about cultural studies in nomine, but his book does theorize the relative “decline” of literary studies so provocatively as to afford us an explanation of why cultural studies might have become, for much of the discipline, the ideal self-description du jour. For Guillory, the status of literary study is inseparable from the larger social conditions that make literary study either valuable or superfluous as cultural capital:
It has proven to be much easier to quarrel about the content of the curriculum than to confront the implications of a fully emergent professional-managerial class which no longer requires the old cultural capital of the bourgeoisie. The decline of the humanities was never the result of newer noncanonical courses or texts, but of a large-scale “capital flight” in the domain of culture. . . . The professional-managerial class has made the correct assessment that, so far as its future profit is concerned, the reading of great works is not worth the investment of very much time or money. The perceived devaluation of the humanities curriculum is in reality a decline in its market value. If the liberal arts curriculum still survives as the preferred course of study in some elite institutions, this fact has everything to do with the class constituency of those institutions. (45–46)
Let me flesh out Guillory’s analysis with a brief anecdote, mediated by way of Richard Ohmann’s observation, in Politics of Letters, that
for Wesleyan students (and for those at Yale, Stanford, Wellesley, etc.) there is still no penalty for pursuing the humane and pleasant activity of reading good books and trying to understand the world. These students have a reserved place waiting for them in the professional-managerial class or the ruling class, some by virtue of having made it into an elite college, most by birth and nurture. (12)
When I first went “on the market” at the 1988 MLA convention in New Orleans, I interviewed for jobs at a wide array of schools, and nothing made the stratification of the profession so palpable to me as the answers I got when I asked my interviewers about the number of their English majors relative to the total number of undergraduates at their institutions. On one fine December morning I managed to go from an interview at Williams College, with more than 250 English majors among 1500 upper-division students, to Auburn University in Alabama, with an undergraduate enrollment of 21,000 and 120 English majors. Those numbers alone, it should be noted, determine much of the working conditions of faculty in English at both institutions: faculty at Williams are invited and expected to teach in the area of their “specialization,” and though their school generally values their teaching more highly than their research, the number of English majors enables the college to institutionalize a diverse array of advanced courses in English, whether these be courses in Restoration drama, film noir, or postcolonial theory. At Auburn, by contrast, the range of advanced courses is limited not by the research interests of the faculty but by the cultural capital of English at Auburn, and faculty accordingly teach more courses than their counterparts at Williams—and many more introductory courses, including courses in basic writing. Even at individual institutions, then, the content of the curriculum is determined largely by the status of English as cultural capital—or, more accurately, cultural capital is realized and invested as cultural capital precisely by means of individual institutions operating dynamically within larger institutions.
On one hand, the implications of this point are trivial, and everyone in English knows about them—just as everyone knows that the teaching load at Williams differs from the teaching load at Auburn. One might say, for instance, that Cain, Posnock, and Levine are worried about something that can be an issue only at relatively “elite” institutions, where cultural studies appears as a curricular option unavailable to colleges whose English curriculum is weighted heavily toward introductory courses, and where the question is not “how can we get our students to stop reverencing literature and start paying attention to the social text,” but “how can we get our students to pay attention to literature in the first place?” But on the other hand the point is fundamental to the role of cultural studies in English, insofar as cultural studies does not have to be confined to elite institutions, and can be as central to an introductory curriculum as to an advanced course of study; similarly, the point is fundamental to the constitution of English departments in the United States, insofar as the franchise of English depends on the institutional capital of English in specific institutional locations.
I will return to these issues in the chapters that follow, as I turn to the employment of English in specific institutional locations. For now, though, I want briefly to address the status of cultural studies as cultural capital. Guillory’s analysis takes for granted one of the premises of the New Right as articulated most clearly in William Bennett’s To Reclaim a Legacy, namely, that the humanities are in decline. Guillory rightly argues that this alleged decline of the humanities has nothing to do with the introduction of noncanonical works to the literature syllabus, and everything to do with the cultural capital of literary study and its relation to productive capital (that is, money) for college students. Hence Guillory’s attribution to the aspiring professional-managerial class of the sense that “the reading of great works is not worth the investment of very much time or money.” But what happens if we contest the narrative of decline at the outset, and try to account for the resurgence of undergraduate interest in the English major in the 1980s and 1990s?2 Surely it would be tempting but wrong (in Guillory’s terms and in mine) to attribute that resurgence solely or chiefly to the newer multicultural curricula in English.3 Perhaps instead we might point to two general economic factors that may have swelled enrollments in English in the past ten years—first, the widespread (but ultimately mistaken) belief that there would be a “faculty shortage” in the 1990s, such that employment in colleges (of great concern for graduate study) and secondary schools (of great concern for undergraduate study) would be a likely prospect even for people who received degrees in the humanities; and second, the widespread (and ultimately well founded) belief that the global economy was producing jobs that were less stable, less secure than the jobs of forty years ago, such that for some areas of nonacademic employment, a general liberal arts degree might be seen by prospective employers as more attractive than a degree that signified a college career of technical-vocational training.
Let me add to these observations the following questions: who, exactly, was “credentialed” by universities back in the days when the humanities were not in crisis? For whom was literary study a form of cultural capital? Might it not be the case, as Francis Oakley has suggested, that the rise in professional-vocational courses of training since 1970 (and the relative “decline” of the humanities) coincides with the arrival at universities of vastly more diverse student populations (particularly more diverse with regard to class origins) beginning in the late 1960s? My hope in raising these questions is not to claim that we’re just fine in the humanities these days, thank you, despite everything you’ve heard to the contrary. Rather, my hope is to raise questions about Guillory’s account of the relation between literary studies and cultural capital just as Guillory has raised questions about the relation between cultural capital and the canon. If it is true, as Guillory claims (as I would claim as well), that the status of literary studies as cultural capital does not depend, solely or chiefly, on the curricular content of literary studies, it may also be true that there is some degree of independence between the status of literary studies as cultural capital and the employability of a degree in English. It is possible, I am claiming, that “literature” may indeed have declined in cultural authority but “English” remains a potentially valuable career asset. To put this in more colloquial terms: whatever the status of “literature” as an index of cultivation and class status, degrees in English may still be convertible into gainful employment—not because they mark their recipients as literate, well-rounded young men and women who can allude to Shakespeare in business memos, but because they mark their recipients as people who can potentially negotiate a wide range of
