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Searching for Authority 

RICHARD HERTZ 

Western University 

 

 

The discourse around English departments stresses critical thinking and interpretation, 

new media, inter-disciplinarity and innovative pedagogies. But the future of the English 

Department is, in a very real way, the men and women English Departments around the 

country will hire over the next few months. Candidates are asked to specialize in a time 

period, a geographical location, and specific kinds of texts. Just as importantly, they share 

an approach to intellectual activity.  

We specialize in geographical regions because English literature is, still, mostly 

identified as British and American literature. This makes sense inasmuch as nobody can 

read everything. But we have to remember, too, that the study of literature has often been 

tied to nationalist or patriotic ends: consider the European search for national epics in the 

nineteenth century and America’s search for the Great American Novel in the twentieth. 

And we specialize in time periods for the same reason: nobody can read everything, and 

English departments should be able to teach their students, at a minimum, the history of 

English language literature from Chaucer to Toni Morrison.  

But in both time period and geographical location, the specialization seems to be 

without end rather than without cause. We do need to focus on one time period for the 

purposes of teaching graduate students; on the other hand, teachers of contemporary 

literature should have the skill set needed to teach all literature to undergraduates, and to 

notice interesting and research-worthy details in all texts. The specialization we see now 

— where, for instance, a candidate for twentieth-century American jobs can apply for 

early modernist, mid-century, post-war, and post-1969 positions — distorts both our 

reading and our teaching. The literature of the eighteenth century, in particular, suffers 

from this: although its poets, novelists, and essayists have much to teach us about our 

world and our literature, rigid specialization means that it is rarely taught, trapped 

between the popular fields of Renaissance and Romantic literature, to which it provides a 

genuine, fascinating, and border-line unknown alternative. Similarly, geographical 

restriction distorts our understanding of English and American authors: Faulkner is the 

most American of writers, but even he claimed Joyce, Mann, Cervantes, Dostoevsky, and 

Tolstoy as his most important influences.  

The focus on texts written by minorities is far more justifiable. The expansion of the 

canon is one of recent English scholarship’s most important achievements; rare indeed is 

the syllabus without texts by previously under-represented groups. But the method we 

seem to have chosen for this reformation is puzzling. Scholars are now asked to 

specialize in literatures by minorities, which leads to new forms of exclusion. 



59    Hertz 

 

Ghettoization can be a progressive moment: if a group has had no space, providing a 

space specifically for that group is important. But it is a step. As an end point, it 

encourages us to compartmentalize literature even more. We can keep the differently 

colored or differently gendered separate in our minds and studies, save for a token Latina 

on the 101 syllabus.  

A stranger version of the specific kind of text specialization comes in the proliferation 

of jobs for specialists in poetry and drama. Sociologically, this makes sense, because 

poetry and drama have lost so much of their influence over the last forty years. But it is 

simply not possible to study literature before about 1980 — and in most languages other 

than English, not possible at all — without reading a range of poetry and drama alongside 

prose. To return to the eighteenth century, Swift’s greatest achievements straddle the 

almost-but-not-quite novel, lyric, and satirical prose and poetry. More recently, it’s hard 

to understand Pound or Beckett without Joyce; hard to understand much postmodern 

prose without the modernist poets. Many professors of ‘fiction’ are simply unaware of the 

state of poetry in America, and the professors of poetry — often, of course, poets — are 

shut off from much of the most important research and teaching in prose.  

But the most worrying aspect of the Department’s future comes in our common 

understanding of intellectual activity. In short, our theoretical approaches are chosen not 

due to their practical results (i.e., they do not help us better to understand texts or world). 

They are fuelled by a crisis of confidence.  

Like all institutions, the English Department needs authority and legitimacy in order to 

fulfill its tasks. In the past, particularly thanks to the GI Bill, critics took on the mantle of 

cultural arbiter or defenders of the literary tradition. This was tied in with the 

parochialism discussed above, and, in the sixties and seventies, critics and theorists quite 

rightly started to question this authority. One welcome outcome was the expansion of the 

canon. One side-effect was that the old authority and legitimacy of the English 

Department was, bit by bit, demolished. In its place we set the authority of critique, and 

ran through structuralism, post-structuralism, neo-Marxism, feminism, gay rights, anti-

racism, and New Historicism all in the space of one structuralist’s lifetime. The study of 

English, which had previously been seen as one of the valuable privileges of a liberal 

democratic society, was revealed, too often accurately, to be an ideological prop for a soi-

disant liberal democratic society. The study of theory, on the other hand, became a 

weapon in the fight against society. But why should an English department be dedicated 

to the study of one very small sub-field of philosophy? And can we justify the existence 

of such a department? Clearly not. Hence a crisis of confidence: how to legitimize the 

existence of the English Department? From what authority do we speak?   

Now consider the most recent boom industries in literary study. Evolutionary criticism 

accepts the claim that scientific method — an explicitly non-hermeneutic approach to 

study — can inform us about things that, we previously thought, require hermeneutic 

approaches. Area studies has exploded, expanding and splintering, to continue the 



Searching for Authority  60 

 

compartmentalization of literature, without any sense that that process itself might be 

harmful. Digital Humanities, when used as a battle-cry, should give anyone who’s read 

the Benjamin/Adorno debate on film a heart attack.  

Why are these three trends — all much desired specializations, and not only in English 

departments — so prominent in the humanities? Because they are all ways to claim 

authority as scholars. The intersection between science and literature makes it possible 

for us to claim that we are producing socially valuable knowledge: science is, as we all 

know, the source of all knowledge. Area studies allows us to claim authority as liberal 

democrats, continuing the fight for canon expansion, albeit with ever diminishing returns 

(and ever greater ghettoization: not only is literature in Spanish cut off from literature in 

English, literature in Spanish by Chicanos is cut off from literature in English by Puerto-

Rican-Americans and so on). Transatlantic studies gives the appearance of inter-

disciplinarity and historical importance, but doesn’t require any genuine challenge to the 

department’s parochialism. Digital Humanities can be easily explained to boosters, 

politicians and administrators — it prepares students for life in a digital age. By 

definition it requires innovative (for which read, far too often, ‘cheaper’) teaching 

methods and a focus on new media, which are both fiscally rewarding buzzwords.     

Thus we can legitimize our highly privileged positions in society: students are helped 

by English Departments to become scientifically informed, high-functioning global 

digital citizens in our ever-increasingly diverse and media saturated world.  

What we do not do, it appears, is read widely or with depth. Literature as an object of 

value fell between the cracks of critique and self-preservation. I like to think that what 

professors really want, really will be doing in the future, is reading Sappho or Césaire 

aloud to freshman. I like to think that, perhaps, all this isn’t our fault: isn’t the University 

to blame, with its bureaucracy requiring more and more money and time from its 

students, and, therefore, more and more utilitarianism from its faculty? Isn’t the 

government little better, politicians having newly defined ‘citizen’ and ‘successful 

graduate’ both as ‘productive employee’? Certainly. But for all that, the future of the 

English Department looks grim indeed if not even we are willing to say, simply, that the 

Department’s function is the teaching and reading of literature from around the world, in 

all its genres and modes, from ancient prayer to Youtube, and that we do this in order to 

preserve what is worth preserving, and, crucially, to criticize that which is not.  


