Literary Studies Deconstructed: A Polemic, by Catherine Butler

This is a timely, pertinent book, given how the changes brought about in academic literary studies over the past 25 years have caused the discipline to question its nature and purpose.

Fees have turned undergraduates into customers, claiming their right to know the longterm value of what they’re about to purchase. Universities have become more competitive and corporate, and the British government has embarked on an insidious policy of standardisation and monitoring. The most obvious case of the latter is the research excellence framework, the cause of neurotic self-scrutiny comparable to the run-up to the conclusion of one of Stalin’s five-year plans.

As Catherine Butler points out, literary studies has, potentially, more to fear from all this than most other subjects. Its “aims and scope” are, she observes, “loosely defined…[it] has never been, and shows no signs of becoming, a coherent discipline in the sense of being underpinned by an agreed methodology or philosophy. It is a mongrel subject.” But while its disparate nature might make it an easy target for the new corporate bullies, Butler argues that its woolly uniqueness is also its strength.

The prevailing theme of this volume is the author’s urge to encourage individuality, even perversity, as a hedge against the institutionalised ordinances that hold other disciplines in place. She looks at how criticism as an academic profession has led to a lack of understanding within universities of what happens in the real world of “lay” readers. She explores the opportunities made available by the largely derided instinct to treat fictional characters as real, or try and search out the true nature of an author by visiting places where they lived or which feature in their work. The ex cathedra opinions of writers should, she avers, be treated with as much respect as the findings of the professional critic, and the latter should aim for what she calls “originality and creative reading” (although I confess that I’m still not certain of what she means in her account of the latter).

Butler’s principal complaint is against the inability, or unwillingness, of literary studies to break down the boundary between what goes on inside universities and the far more diverse and eccentric universe of reading, writing and talking about literature outside academia. I share her infuriation. I’ve written about how evaluation – judging a novel to be worth reading, an author to be deserving of our respect – is endemic to all encounters between books and readers in the real world but ignored in English degrees.

Her enterprise is commendable and the book is a worthwhile contribution to the debate on literary studies. Occasionally, however, Butler becomes a victim of one of the diseases that have blighted the discipline. They are all there, the first-team of intellectual narcissists and jargon-mongers: Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Luce Irigaray, Hélène Cixous et al. It is of course impossible to write about the state of things and ignore these people, but Butler treats them with respect, and sometimes slips into a version of their inaccessible prose. No one is without blame, but the theoreticians are primarily responsible for turning literary studies into the heartland of the incomprehensible and irrelevant, and alienating the ordinary reader.

Richard Bradford is research professor of English at Ulster University.

Literary Studies Deconstructed: A Polemic
By Catherine Butler
Palgrave, 160pp, £49.99
ISBN 9783319904740
Published 22 July 2018