Coda - the professor of literature, in literature

Abstract

It is a curious fact about literature, but it really does seem to have a problem with literature professors. (A strange sentence, this, to pop into the start of a Festschrift essay – but, stay with me.)

The people most engaged in ‘professing literature’ (to quote Gerald Graff ’s memorable and punning title-phrase) are the very ones whom literary fiction can delight in diminishing. There is some poetry in which the trend can also be discerned, examples of which are referred to briefly below, but it is in the novel and the short story that the tendency manifests itself most strongly. Nor is it even necessary to refer to the tradition of the campus novel to see it. This is not only about the kind of academics satirised in the genre: characters who may be tenured in literature but who traduce its spirit through their conduct or through their ivory-tower perspectives and propensities for mandarinate presumption. The paragraphs that follow will therefore offer some examples of literature’s wider tendency for ambivalence (to put it mildly) about the figure of the professor of literature – without, however, providing any sustained attempt at comprehensiveness, rebuttal, modulation, confirmation or searching commentary. Proprieties must be observed: an essay that serves as a coda to a Festschrift is not the best context for any of those tasks. It will be enough to suggest that the trend exists. At its simplest, the trend would mean that those authoring what we think of as literature may be less than disarmed by those who make the study and teaching of it their life (or, if life here seems too positive a term and vocation even more so, then their career, their profession), and that they subsequently give expression to the sentiment by all the means, direct and otherwise, that literature has in its repertoires. And yet, why would the professor of literature, in literature, be depicted deprecatingly? What would the trend suggest about wider perceptions of ‘the profession’ – or, indeed, about literature itself?