poetics altogether. Studies of consumerism, for example, can be based on
the analysis of shopping malls or Home Depot layouts; no literary texts are
required. Racial stereotyping manifests itself as readily in the newspapers
or cartoons of a given period than in novels or plays. Teen culture can be
explored through music, ¤lm, and computer games. The ideologies of glo-
balization and nationalism can be pro¤tably studied by examining network
television and Internet discourse. And popular ¤lm is much more telling, so
far as cultural theory is concerned, than are the art ¤lms of Federico Fellini
or Jean-Luc Godard.
By the early nineties, in any case, English (and foreign language) depart-
ments found themselves in the odd position of teaching any thing but litera-
ture. Indeed, I have seen job candidates who are vying for the precious few
tenure-track positions available actually apologize for discussing a novel or
poem and hurrying through these same discussions so as to get on to some
important theoretical point relating to postcolonialism or queer theory or
globalization. In this context, humanities centers inevitably ¤nd that the ap-
plications coming in from the anthropology department or the law school
are more interesting than those from English or such related ¤elds as musi-
cology and art history. Inadvertently, but surely, humanities has become so-
cial science without the statistics. No wonder, then, that foundation directors
like Robert Weisbuch see the humanities—and especially literary study—
as an embattled area, a ¤eld in crisis. No wonder that provosts and deans,
having to make dif¤cult budget decisions, cut positions that seem to be ex-
pendable.
But the crisis is not quite what we think it is. Poetics, we might say, abhors
a vacuum: if the university doesn’t offer courses on William Blake or Dante
Gabriel Rossetti, on Ezra Pound or Samuel Beckett, the action moves else-
where.^17 And here the impact of the Internet comes in. There are currently
at least three Samuel Beckett Web sites, beginning with the Samuel Beckett
On-line Resources and Links Page, which contains the texts of almost all of
Beckett’s works and a comprehensive set of secondary sources, including
articles, reviews, commentaries, videos of the major plays, interviews—in
short, an astonishing set of documents by and about Beckett. The site even
produces seven parodies of Waiting for Godot written over the years. Then,
too, the site is interactive, allowing for discussion about the varying and
constantly growing set of entries. A second Web site is The Samuel Beckett
Endpage, founded by Porter Abbott at the University of California–Santa
Barbara in 1996; this scholarly site contains recent Beckett news, scholarly
notes from around the world, biographical material, thorough bibliographies
Literary Study for the Twenty-first Century 13