Afterword: the present crisis
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
Summary
The foregoing pages end their chronicle well before the teaching of English literary history in the national universities. Mid-eighteenth-century criticism had an uneven and uncertain footing: half scholarly, half public, each viewed through the looking glass of the other. The institutional instability of our origins can tell us something about our present. A view taken from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century reveals a deceptive symmetry. Mawkish tributes to literary tradition and stringent efforts to update cultural study once more for the next millennium are not hard to come by. But both seem to testify to a pervasive and wide-ranging crisis: diminished expectations, organizational downsizing, wide-spread anti-intellectualism, educational defunding. The eighteenth century came up with literary tradition as a way to think about the market, the division of labor, and the public. To argue that these institutions later dissolved the idea of the canon to which they gave birth would be a conservative tautology. It is safer to say, I think, that the modernity of tradition has once more become antique. The canon debate now takes place within an increasingly reduced sense of its own importance. Pressed by straitened circumstances, an initially curricular argument has in recent years widened into a discussion of the very rationales and futures of the discipline. (How should, for example, literary study represent itself to its publics?)
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- Making the English CanonPrint-Capitalism and the Cultural Past, 1700–1770, pp. 237 - 245Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1999