Pleasure was paramount for Aristotle, as it was for Plato, who banished
the poets from the Republic because their work produced too much pleasure
and passion in its audience. But of course the pleasure calculus is complex:
“one should not seek,” we read in Poetics XIV, “from tragedy all kinds of
pleasure but that which is peculiar to tragedy, and since the poet must by
‘representation’ produce the pleasure which comes from feeling pity and fear,
obviously this quality must be embodied in the incidents” (#1453b). Cathar-
sis, the purgation of pity and fear, is not an end in itself; it is a particular kind
of poetic pleasure. And so on.
It is, I would argue, the contemporary fear of the pleasures of represen-
tation and recognition—the pleasures of the ¤ctive, the what might happen—
and its subordination to the what has happened—the historical/cultural—
that has trivialized the status of literary study in the contemporary academy
and shrunk the corresponding departments. Indeed, the neo-Puritan notion
that literature and the other arts must be somehow “useful,” and only use-
ful, that the Ciceronian triad—docere, movere, delectare—should renounce
its third element (“delight”) and even the original meaning of its second ele-
ment, so that to move means only to move readers to some kind of speci¤c
action, has produced a climate in which it has become increasingly dif¤cult
to justify the study of English or Comparative Literature at all.
Given this climate, we are now witnessing a deep pessimism, expressed in
various jeremiads as to the death of humanistic studies in our time. In a re-
cent essay, “The Humanities—At Twilight?” George Steiner argues that in
contemporary technocratic mass culture, there may, alas, be no room at all
for the humanities:
Democracy and economic-distributive justice on a democratic plane
are no friend to the autistic, often arcane, always demanding enterprise
of “high culture.”... Add to this the failures, the collaborative trea-
sons of the clerics, of the arts, of the humanities in the fullest sense,
during the long night of this centur y in Europe and Russia. Add to this
the fundamental doubt... as to whether the humanities humanize,
and the thrust of the crisis is inescapable.^23Interestingly, Steiner’s elegiac essay never refers to a single work of art
written since World War II: Adorno’s adage that there can be no poetry after
Auschwitz seems to be taken as a given. Again, Steiner seems to be wholly
unaware of the digital media and their particular kinds of cultural produc-
tion and dissemination of literature. This retro Kulturdrang strikes me as just
as problematic as Weisbuch’s “how-to” practicalities. For one cannot kill the
18 Chapter 1