To print this page, select "Print" from the File menu of your browser salon.com > Books July 21, 1999 URL: http://www.salon.com/books/it/1999/07/21/literature Who killed literature? An aging professor offers his last pleas to help his expiring vocation. - - - - - - - - - - - - By Jose Klein As anyone who's ever had a parent can attest, advice annoys. Even when we know we should take heed, there is something about the lofty heights from which pearls of wisdom drop that make them feel like hail. In a similar way, Carl Woodring's latest book, "Literature: An Embattled Profession," abounds with sound advice for the endangered world of higher learning in the humanities, even though it's all too likely to fall on deaf ears. Woodring, a professor emeritus in English at Columbia University, has spent some 50-plus years in the fray of the culture wars. And now, just a stone's throw from octogenarianhood, he reports back to tell us what he has learned along the way. The central lesson he wishes to impart is the value of literature -- its power to enrich lives and elevate the soul. Worried that this lesson is increasingly lost on a general public that by and large feels alienated from the ivory tower, he has written "Literature" as a plea to practitioners of literary criticism to lower the drawbridge for the intelligent layperson. He mounts a two-pronged case, first against current literary critics and theorists and then against the institutions that house them. In well-wrought and engaging prose he sketches the last three centuries of American literary study -- from etymological studies firmly grounded in Greek and Latin to the New Critics of the early 20th century who opened the door to contextual interpretation. Finally, he arrives at the current moment, when Post-Structural criticism has, in his eyes, taken a wrong turn and abandoned the recreational reader's concerns. In short, he blames the ascent of theory for encouraging professional students of literature to look down on the ordinary readers' desires for plot and character, beauty and meaning. It is here that Woodring is at his best. Clear-eyed and witty, he articulates feelings that have been welling up in a literate public for years. He shows how jargon serves as a means for academics to sequester themselves from the general reading public, so that readers who had once "found the literary scholars unutterably dull now can protest additionally -- and they can quote -- comically unintelligible." The book then assails the administrative wing of higher learning. Displaying exceptional polish as a researcher, Woodring demonstrates how universities have become grotesquely top-heavy with management. Citing one example of administrative excess after another, he paints a vivid picture of universities that hire more vice-presidents, who in turn need more deans, support staff, office space and equipment, all of which raise tuition, swallow grant money and squeeze academic departments. Woodring succinctly summarizes the bureaucratic logjam: "Employees numbering twenty thousand will consider themselves collectively vital to twenty-three hundred faculty and forty thousand students, but many of them are vital only to each other." Consequently, universities have created a glut of jobless Ph.D.s, and increasingly resorted to the cost-cutting practices of hiring student assistants and adjunct lecturers to replace professors. In the final two chapters of the book, Woodring doffs his diagnostic cap for a prescriptive hard hat, and quickly the book unravels into moralistic hodgepodge. It becomes easy to imagine the entire project springing from one of those if-I-ran-the-world conversations in the teachers' lounge. He has a lot of ideas for fixing the bugaboos that have irked him not only at university but also primary and secondary levels of education. Many of his rants pertain to the art of teaching freshman composition. Leaving no stone unturned, he covers such dire topics as the neutered suffix ("Spokespersons yes, waitpersons maybe; fireman is a nuisance, with firefighter available; airman can die of neglect") and e-mail discussion groups. Although his detailed prescriptions are meant to weave a tapestry that molds writers of "clarity and vigor," these chapters -- reminiscent of college course descriptions -- go down like a Wasa cracker. Guidance in the observation of detail should come early. Have each student describe, for example, the similarities and differences of two houses near the classroom (affluent teachers have been known to pass out tokens for transportation to distant houses), and then assign to classmates X, Y, and Z the task of rewriting the descriptions by A, B, and C for greater accuracy and detail. For fairness and other advantages, a further step adapted from interactive core programs would have the descriptions and evaluations further evaluated in class discussion." Just reading about it makes me want to bolt to the nearest registrar's office and hand in a drop slip. Imagine having to actually perform the assignment. Toward the end of the book, Woodring takes time out to sing the praises of the core program at Columbia College, a series of mandatory courses covering seminal humanities texts spreading from Homer to Camus. This program became the subject of controversy first during the canon debates, over the number of female and non-white authors on their syllabuses, then later as featured in David Denby's 1996 "Great Books: My Adventures With Homer, Rousseau, Woolf, and Other Indestructible Writers of the Western World," in which Denby -- then a reviewer for New York magazine -- returned to Columbia to read great books and muse about the culture wars. Yet for Woodring, the core seems to be about a more enlightened form of elbow-rubbing. "A Manhattan or Albany lawyer," he states, "who hears another in the firm allude to idols of the cave with reference simultaneously to Bacon and Plato recognizes a fellow graduate of Columbia College." Sure: They're at the water cooler. They exchange a couple of secret handshakes and a laugh about "The Golden Ass." Meanwhile the rest of us can't get a cup of water without being subjected to their insufferable erudition. I don't mean to suggest to that the world wouldn't be a better place if all college graduates had, as Woodring puts it, "read carefully under tutelage the same epics, dramas, satires, and philosophic and political essays," but rather to illustrate how easily literariness morphs into pretension. What is strangest about this book is that while cobbling such a passionate argument for a new inclusive spirit in literary studies, Woodring has written a book with such obviously limited appeal. Even he himself says in the introduction that the book would address issues most pertinent to those whom "might choose to attend an annual meeting of the Modern Language Association." Choose to go to the MLA conference? I didn't know people did that. And yet, I hesitate to dismiss the book out of hand. No one can doubt that he has thought an awful lot about the meaning of literature. And many of his conclusions and suggestions are apt and admirable -- though in the end, I wonder what they add to the debate. salon.com | July 21, 1999