Phyllis Rose's Cautionary Tale About What Happens When You Fail to Speak Up and Defend the Things You Love

This is from Rose's book The Shelf, my read du jour:

     My generation was shaped by an approach to literature that began with Romantics, was codified by Matthew Arnold, and reaches its peak through a broad group of critics that included Lionel Trilling and F.R. Leavis. It believed that literature was an instrument of moral education. It imbued literature with depth and urgency, what we did not hesitate, as late as the 1960s, to call relevance to life. It believed that novelists and poets were special beings, "unacknowledged legislators," people who taught and enlarged us. Through them we might investigate every important issue. Not matter what future you imagined for yourself--as a doctor, a lawyer, a banker, a cabaret singer-- engaging with literary texts in your student days would benefit you. Therefore, for a while the study of literature moved to the center of the liberal arts curriculum. Many of us became "English majors."

     This approach had flaws, of course. It always risked becoming moralistic, and it elevated certain writers over others, writers whose works were considered especially meaningful. By the last quarter of the twentieth century, a reaction had set in. Any attempt to justify literature as giving the reader something became suspect. We had known for a long time not to seek a simple message in literature. But under the influence of French criticism, we were led to believe that there was nothing there at all. Everything we thought we saw in fiction, we ourselves brought to the text. A text was a culturally produced set of markers, no more, and the author's role in producing the text was very small. Nothing could be more ridiculous than to discuss what he or she was trying to say. That nothing lay at the heart of literary experience--no author-intended meaning or even set of concerns--was, temporarily, refreshing.

     We English majors, despite our military epithet, never understood that we had to fight for the literature we so much enjoyed. Its study seemed so well-entrenched, we took it for granted. When the Trojan horse arrived, in the form of clever, infinitely sophisticated professors of literature from France, we accepted their delicious gifts of irony, novelty and nihilism and did not see the danger. Now, a generation later, the edifice that took a hundred years to put in place, and that spread a kind of enlightenment over America, is gone. We have to do all over again the work of proving that there is any point to reading a novel besides making time pass more quickly. This book is my way of making amends for not fighting when I should have. I thought the problem would go away if I waited, and eventually it did. But, as with a tsunami engulfing a city, when the waters receded, the city was gone.