until they are composed of small handfuls of close readers, whereupon they will have roughly the size and influence of departments of classics—which they will resemble in many other antiquarian respects. At the same time, critics of cultural studies who combine George Levine’s sense of the franchise of English with a healthy distrust of contemporary cost-cutting measures in academe claim that if literary study eventually becomes synonymous with cultural study, the department of English will be amalgamated with any number of cognate departments in the humanities, from anthropology and film to communications, rhetoric, and media studies. And then along will come some enterprising dean or provost who will look at all this “duplication,” all this mess of faculty purportedly studying the same thing called “culture,” and we will find our numbers cut in half as the university moves to eliminate or reduce some of its nonrevenue-producing activities like offering degrees in the humanities. Yet alternatively, if literary study follows the Bloom model, remaining literary study and refusing to cave in to the blandishments and temptations of cultural studies, departments of literature will find themselves becoming small, ineffectual side offerings in the general university market. Their faculty will be few and powerless, but proud and noble.
How can it be that both scenarios end in the destruction or evisceration of literary study and the humanities? If English departments embrace cultural studies in an attempt to appeal to the cultural needs of the professional-managerial class, they may be seen as duplicating the knowledges produced in other departments, and downsized or eliminated accordingly. And if English departments abjure cultural studies, they may be seen as irrelevant to the cultural needs of the professional-managerial class, and downsized or eliminated accordingly. Our future begins to sound like the opening of Woody Allen’s parodic commencement speech, in which he writes that mankind faces a crossroads: one path leads to despair and utter hopelessness, and the other leads to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.
Actually the choices before us are not two but four: cultural studies and eventual doom-by-duplication; literary studies and eventual doom-byirrelevance; cultural studies and prosperity with the nascent professional-managerial class; literary studies and prosperity with everyone who wants to study the aesthetic uses of language. And the way to decide which of these futures is most likely for literary study is simple: just figure out the exact relations among literary-slash-cultural study, cultural capital, student enrollments, and productive capital, and devise the curriculum accordingly.
I want to close this chapter by making a modest proposal, which, like all modest proposals, is much too radical for realization. It may be possible for English departments to foreground “literature” in the restricted belles-lettres sense in which the term has been understood in this century at the same time that literary study incorporates some of the concerns of cultural studies. It may be possible for English departments to make some claim on the interests of the professional-managerial class even as the needs of that class move further and further away from the Beowulf-to-Virginia Woolf canon of English literature. It may even be possible for English departments to expand their concern with the English language while becoming less . . . well, English in the process.
Notice if you will the odd fact that in debates over the place of cultural studies, critics rarely inquire into the place of contemporary writing in English. Even my own department’s bylaws, as I noted above, consider “literatures in English” a thing apart from “cultural studies.” All too often, when contemporary writing in English is taught (if it is taught at all) in literature departments, it comes under the heading of Postcolonial Literatures, World Lit, or (still worse) Third World Lit. In my own department, it is far and away the most underrepresented arena of writing; one of the stranger moments in our departmental deliberations, in fact, came just after some of my colleagues were finally convinced that “cultural studies” was a fair description of what some of us are doing at Illinois—when we then realized that we had advertised ourselves as offering “literatures in English” but only had two faculty members who had ever offered courses in literatures neither English nor American.
Reed Way Dasenbrock originally made this suggestion some years ago, before “cultural studies” had become a name for a fear and a desire, and I want to update his proposal and toss it onto the table just in time for the millennium. In Dasenbrock’s terms, the literature curriculum is currently organized around a “centripetal” canon centered firmly in the British Isles—the canon bequeathed us largely by F. R. Leavis and Scrutiny, “from which,” as Terry Eagleton has famously written, “criticism has never quite recovered” (28). This canon contains many of the greatest writers ever to inhabit and expand the English language, of course, but it also does double duty as an agent of Anglo-American national affiliation: just as the New Right likes to pretend that the United States has some deep genetic connection with Periclean Athens, so too do the Anglophile supporters of the centripetal canon like to pretend that you cannot understand “literatures in English” unless you have first completed the “coverage” requirements that will acquaint you with Gawain, the Miller’s Tale, and MacFlecknoe—not to mention the three nineteenth-century British novelists who will secure your employment by Milton Rosenberg at WGN in Chicago. Yet it is not entirely clear, at the very least, that the British canon before 1790 (exclusive of Shakespeare, of course, who not only is our language’s greatest writer but also cannot be challenged in the slightest without provoking a national scandal) is quite as deserving of the curricular place it now occupies in the United States; and it is not entirely clear why, if we now spend so much disciplinary time on British literature, we could not just as well (in some future incarnation) devote more of our time and energies to African, Indian, Caribbean, Australian, and Canadian writing in English.
One signal advantage of Dasenbrock’s formulation is that it reshuffles but does not entirely jettison the centripetal canon with which we now work:
In place of the centripetal canon oriented toward the England of Pope, Fielding, Richardson, and Johnson, a centrifugal canon might focus on Swift, Defoe, Smollett and Boswell. This is a slight change, perhaps, as all these figures are recognized to be important and are placed in the canon somewhere. But as one moves closer and closer to the present, a centripetal, Englandcentered canon captures fewer and fewer of the important figures, whereas a centrifugal canon focused on the totality of writing in English has no difficulty at all in representing the panorama of world writing in English. . . . Only a centrifugal conception of literature in English that embraces [George] Lamming and [J. MJ Coetzee as well as Shakespeare and Defoe can place all these works in the juxtapositions they deserve. (73–74)
Yet even as I cite these words I can hear the cries of my Augustan, Restoration, Renaissance/Early Modern, and medievalist colleagues, all of whom will insist that my modest proposal will marginalize their enterprises still further—at a time when most students are filing into their classes only because of their department’s requirement that English majors take x number of credits in courses prior to 1800 exclusive of Shakespeare. Their concerns are entirely justified. Interestingly, some years ago when I taught Dasenbrock’s essay as part of a graduate seminar on “canonicity and institutional criticism,” my students almost uniformly dismissed Dasenbrock as too timidly reformist: his centrifugal canon would shuffle the deck a little bit, they allowed, but wouldn’t alter the curriculum significantly enough to be called a strong form of canon revision. Politely but firmly, I pointed out to my students that our department contained almost no faculty qualified to teach contemporary world writers in English, and that Dasenbrock’s proposal would therefore have the truly radical effect of compelling Illinois (and not Illinois alone) to alter completely its hiring policies in the future. It’s one (relatively easy) thing to shuffle the canon, I suggested to my students; it’s quite another (much harder) thing to shuffle the professoriate. The objection that the centrifugal canon would make the English department more “presentist,” then, seems to me a valid point of concern—not least for those faculty who specialize in early periods of British literature.
To those faculty I can respond only by appealing to history, by way of John Guillory, who notes correctly that canon revision is—and has been for some time—a
