What, then, of the “crisis” in the humanities? Given the astonishing in-
terest in artworks and poetries manifested on the Internet, is the crisis per-
haps more apparent than real? Yes and no. Within the academy, and especially
in literature departments, it is real enough, as the shrinking enrollments and
depressed job market indicate. But these phenomena may well be symptoms
of something else—a bad ¤t between an outmoded curriculum and the ac-
tual interests of potential students. The main thrust of curriculum changes
in English courses over the past few decades has been the shift in attention
from major writers to minority ones and hence to include many more po-
ems and ¤ctions by underrepresented racial and ethnic groups as well as by
women. But without clear-cut notions of why it is worthwhile to read literary
texts, whether by established or marginalized writers, in the ¤rst place, the
study of “literature” becomes no more than a chore, a way of satisfying dis-
tribution requirements.
“Theory” courses, as currently taught, exacerbate this problem. Suppose,
for example, a class is assigned Peter Bürger’s now-classic Theory of the
Avant-Garde, along with some Marxist theory that provides background for
Bürger’s argument. The book posits that the early-twentieth-century avant-
garde was a brave attempt to transform art but that it failed because it did
not succeed in overturning the bourgeois institution of art as autonomous.
But Bürger seems to equate the avant-garde with a few Dada and Surrealist
works, for instance Duchamp’s Fountain, and makes no mention of the Rus-
sian avant-garde that is arguably the very core of avant-gardism in the early
twentieth century, the one avant-garde that fused, at least brie®y, the radical
aesthetic and the political critique that Bürger takes as a requisite for genuine
avant-garde activity.^20 The narrowness of Bürger’s de¤nition puts his theory
into serious question. But the student who has yet to be exposed to the works
themselves (French or Russian or otherwise) cannot possibly make a rea-
soned critique of Bürger’s thesis.
Or take the current cult of Adorno, as presented to students who have
no way of contextualizing his dense theoretical and critical commentary.
When, for example, we read in Adorno’s “On Lyric Poetry and Society,” “My
thesis is that the lyric work is always the subjective expression of a social an-
tagonism,” and “the objective world that produces the lyric is an inherently
antagonistic world,” we should be aware that Adorno’s is a wholly Eurocen-
tric position and that he takes nineteenth-century German poetry and phi-
losophy as normative.^21 But was the classical Chinese poem “the subjective
expression of a social antagonism”? Are the lyrics in George Herbert’s The
Te m p l e such an expression? And is it necessarily true that Heinrich Heine was
not Baudelaire’s equal because the former “surrendered more willingly to the
Literary Study for the Twenty-first Century 15