given by the likes of Jaroslav Pelikan, C. Vann Woodward, Vincent Scully,
Caroline Walker Bynum, and Emily T. Vermeule—all of them serious schol-
ars and outstanding intellectuals in their respective disciplines, ranging from
architecture (Scully) to history (Woodward) to classics (Vermeule). Accord-
ingly, when William Ferris, the chairman of the NEH, explained his hope
was that in making the Jefferson Lecture a presidential event, “the humani-
ties” would be brought “into the lives of millions of Americans who don’t
know what the humanities are and have no sense of the great work we do
[at the NEH],”^5 what he was really saying was that the term humanities no
longer means any thing. At best, it seems, the term has a negative function,
speci¤cally, in the case of the Jefferson Lecture, giving the president a chance
to make a speech that would not be overtly political but would deal with
what are vaguely conceived as “humanistic” values. And of course this “lec-
ture” would be written by the president’s speechwriters—a situation that in
the scholarly community would be classi¤ed as simple plagiarism.
Given this climate, perhaps we can think more seriously about the state
of the “humanities” if we begin by getting rid of the word “humanities”—a
word, incidentally, of surprisingly recent vintage. The ¤rst edition of the
Oxford English Dictionary (OED), whose supplement appears in 1933, does
not include it at all. Humane, humanism, humanist, humanity, humanitarian:
these are familiar cognates of the word human, but humanities was not the
term of choice for an area of knowledge and set of ¤elds of study until after
World War II. The more usual (and broader) rubric was Liberal Arts; Arts
and Sciences; or Arts, Letters, and Sciences. The shift in terminology, re-
®ected in the now-ubiquitous humanities centers, humanities special pro-
grams, and humanities fellowships, testi¤es, paradoxically, to an increasing
perplexity about what these designations might mean.
When we study the roster of fellows at the various humanities centers and
institutes in the United States, a clear trend emerges: anthropology and his-
tory have taken over the humanities ¤eld. In 2003 I served on the selection
committee for internal fellows at the humanities center of a leading Mid-
western university, and although the staff very much hoped to attract can-
didates in art history, literature, musicology, and philosophy, the competitive
applications came from what we might call the proto-social sciences, like en-
vironmental studies or human biology. Indeed, the top candidate in the pool
was a professor from the law school.
How did we get into this bind? As someone trained in the discipline of
English and Comparative Literature, I want to take a look at what tradition-
ally has been one of the central branches of the humanities: the study of
literature or, as I prefer to call it, poetics. “Literature” is an imprecise desig-
Literary Study for the Twenty-first Century 5