Reader’s Digest

On the face of things, it was a dream assignment. In the fall term, when everyone was still fresh from their summer vacation and filled with that delicious sense of promise that only the start of a new academic year can bring, I would teach an entire course devoted to the life and works of Oscar Wilde. Everything about the prospect appealed to the literary traditionalist in me. All summer I fed upon visions of the return to campus. As my children built castles in the sand, I constructed them in the air: halcyon scenes of a rumpled but kindly professor leading a dozen or so eager undergraduates through Wilde’s oeuvre as the mellow autumn light played upon the faux-Doric columns of Varsity Towers. It would be, I told myself, a small but significant victory for learning for its own sake. There would be no self-aggrandizing claims to social relevance, no strained connections to the authorized topics of the day, no uneuphonious references to environmental crisis or social justice. There would be no “learning outcomes” that could be written in a language other than the music of each student’s innermost soul.

Like many of my colleagues, I was raised in a school of literary hard knocks. I was taught from an early age to approach literature in a spirit of almost clinical detachment. Works of art were really “texts,” and texts were in fact tissues of second-, third-, and fourth-hand discourse, which derived meaning from those vast and abstract systems — history, ideology, language, psychology — that lurk behind the mirage of the author’s consciousness. Imaginative enjoyment, aesthetic appreciation, emotional response — seemingly intuitive ways to engage with the material at hand — were relegated to hushed conversations in the corridor before class or the more animated ones that took place in the bar afterwards. When the professor entered the room, we went to work. We always historicized, we brushed each document of civilization against the grain, we decentred the bourgeois subject, we demystified aesthetic ideology, and we thumbed our noses at the intentional fallacy. This is how we acquired the tools with which to pick the locks of each set of heavy iron gates that stood along the steep and winding path to the academy.

The very idea of teaching a course devoted to a single author seems vaguely subversive in the modern university. The assumptions about value and genius that are implied by such an enterprise are seen as vaguely elitist: antique notions that dead white men once believed in. The main exception, of course, is Shakespeare, but the Bard is a cultural galaxy of such powerful gravity as to be able to warp the fabric of space-time that operates within the field as a whole, so that he can withstand each new wave of decentring and desacralization.

To read Oscar Wilde in the modern university, I reasoned, would be to cultivate a productive form of cognitive dissonance. My aim would be to “magnify the contradictions,” as the Maoists used to say. In the one corner, Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde, advocate of “art for art’s sake,” believer in leisure and hedonism as the true paths to spiritual wisdom, and an immortal lord of language, whose epigrams and paradoxes will live forever in the annals of literature. And in the other, the pettifogging bureaucrats of modern knowledge production, who treat works of art as occasions for scholastic drudgery and joy-sapping critique, who convert students into walking portfolios of GPAs and human capital, and whose prose is a thick gruel of cliché, jargon, and redundant signposting. Any student who used the arid formula “This essay will argue that . . .” would receive an instant F in my class.

Yet when that fall finally came around and the mellow light began to play upon those distinctive columns, things did not turn out quite as expected. It was harder than I had imagined to convert the university seminar room into a zone of pure aesthetic experience — and not only because the moulded plastic furniture and streaky whiteboard were such a far cry from the exquisite interiors in which Dorian Gray and Lord Henry Wotton pursued their musings. The problem went deeper than that. How exactly does one teach aesthetic judgment? What grading scheme does one use for the appreciation of beauty? How does one design an assignment to measure the development of a person’s soul? And then there was the problem of aesthetic experience itself — or the fact that aesthetic experience is rarely simply itself, is in fact forever opening out onto other areas of life and other domains of knowledge, prompting questions, inviting analysis, divulging concepts. Art is an occasion for beauty, but it is also always about something. And that something — a magical portrait stored in the attic that hides a man’s sins, for instance, or a frivolous, self-deceiving individual, who, by a strange twist of fate, happens to have been “earnest” all along — invites us into the murkier realms of morality, politics, justice, and knowledge.

Of course, Wilde knew all of this. No one should take his claims about “art for art’s sake” at face value. “There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book,” he said. “Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.” But Wilde’s seeming amoralism was a provocation against the bourgeois morality of his day. This is why his work appeals so strongly in our own age of neo-Victorian didacticism, in which art is valued for its social message and supposedly offensive books are weeded out of our libraries. Aestheticism was one of the first modern movements that sought to focus the attention of its audience on the disorienting pleasures of the pure form of the artwork — the primal thrill that human beings derive from the act of representation itself rather than from its thematic content. And that pleasure is indeed primal. The thrill that we derive from the very fact that human beings can fashion artifacts in language, paint, or sound that are both part of and separate from the world at large goes all the way back to the figures on the walls of the caves at Lascaux and Chauvet. Those early practitioners called it magic. We call it art. Either way, it seems to be hard-wired into our nature as intelligent creatures.

But, as Wilde also knew, that moment of primal pleasure is all too fleeting. It is a brief pulse of intensity, which, if we wish to prolong our enjoyment, must be embellished with analysis, interpretation, research, discussion, and reasoned argument, indeed with all of the traditional tools of scholarship and criticism that we learn within the academy. For Wilde, art and criticism went hand in hand, were equally primal aspects of mankind’s nature as an artmaking creature. Analysis need not kill the pleasures of the text; rather, it enhances and extends them.

Perhaps inevitably, then, as the semester progressed, the original dream of pitting Wilde against the university gave way to a less antagonistic vision of Wilde and the university as embodying different facets of the same underlying human capacity. When studied with the kind of sustained care and attention that is really possible only in the seminar room, the brilliant aesthetic surfaces of his texts could be made to fold seamlessly into their seeming opposites: critique, contextualization, scholarship. So, rather than simply bathing in the glow of fleeting moments of aesthetic plenitude, my students and I learned about Wilde’s life and times, read some of the ancient and modern classics that influenced his style, studied the transcripts of his two High Court trials and his conviction for gross indecency, pored over contemporary newspaper reports and reviews, traced his legacy in later books and films, and connected his output to the major critical trends of the last half century or so of academic literary studies, from post-colonialism to critical race theory, from deconstruction to the new formalism. All the while, and not just in the corridor before class and at the bar afterwards, we paid close attention to the types and qualities of pleasure that his works stimulated, not because there was a grade for that but because it would have been unnatural to do otherwise.

The tensions between pleasure and judgment, or between art and scholarship, will be familiar to anyone who has taken English at any point in their school or university careers. As John Guillory points out in Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organization of Literary Study, from 2022, they have been present in a variety of forms throughout the long history of literary criticism — all the way back to classical Greece, where new plays were performed in front of official judges who criticized them before a live audience and right up to our current era of hyperspecialization, hyperprofessionalization, and hyperbureaucratization.

Guillory is the closest thing that literary studies currently has to a superstar, one whose scholarship cuts through from the seminar room to the public mediasphere. Professing Criticism achieved the impressive coup of being discussed at length in both the Chronicle of Higher Education and the New York Times. But it is surely a sign of the times that it is a socio-historical meta-analysis of literary studies and its current travails that makes the news rather than, say, an actual work of literary criticism. If Guillory’s book doesn’t quite amount to an autopsy, it is nevertheless the kind of complex diagnosis that is offered when the vital signs are weak and the patient requires urgent care.

Professing Criticism is an awesome feat of scholarship, the product of an entire career’s worth of reading in the deep history of criticism and an almost Olympian synthesis of its findings into a ratio studiorum, or a plan of study for English literature today. It is a rare scholar indeed who can discuss with equal authority Aristotle’s Poetics, seventeenth-century drama, and the latest debates at the MLA. Despite his enormous erudition, however, Guillory’s most brilliant trick is simply to state in the clearest possible terms the core activities that constitute the profession. The trick is both simple and brilliant because the rest of us literary scholars seem to have lost sight of these core competencies in the mad dash to keep up with each new critical trend. “We have been living in this institution so long,” he dryly notes, “that we no longer see it.”

At the centre of Guillory’s diagnosis is what the sociologist Max Weber called “professional deformation,” or the way in which our careers can bend us out of shape. This is not just a problem faced by literary scholars but a structural feature of modernity. Today there are no Renaissance men or women. When we become aeronautical engineers or investment portfolio managers or literary critics, we hone some of our human potentials and neglect others. As Guillory puts it, “The most highly specialized, highly skilled forms of cognitive labor entail a correlative disability.” In the case of literary studies, professionalization brings with it enormous benefits but also significant costs. On the positive side of the ledger are job security, social prestige, and a community of fellow practitioners; the intellectual benefits of discussion, debate, and peer review, which, in the ideal case, ensure that new arguments are properly tested and new methods are held up to scrutiny; and, again in the ideal case, protection from the marketplace, where values are determined by the fluctuations of supply and demand rather than as the result of judgment and expertise. On the negative side are the narrowness of specialization, the underdevelopment of alternative competencies and world views, the proliferation of technical jargons and protected fiefdoms, and the peculiar kind of hubris that mistakes expertise in one professional field for privileged knowledge about the world at large.

It is this last deformation — the tendency of literary scholars to mistake their core methods for a master key with which to criticize society as a whole — that has most profoundly bent the profession out of shape. This is the ironic core of Guillory’s argument: as literary studies has gotten smaller over time, both as a narrow academic specialization and as a decreasingly popular major, the claims that it makes about the world have ballooned to comically oversized proportions. These days literary scholars talk less about parataxis and polysyndeton and more about environmental crisis and systemic racism. What started out as a criticism of the text has become a criticism of everything.

Guillory’s historical sociology brings welcome clarity to a series of schisms and controversies that have been bubbling away within literary studies, and to some extent within the culture at large, since the 1960s. The field was transformed in the ’60s by the social movements of the day, such as the New Left, feminism, Black radicalism, gay liberation, and environmentalism, and by new theoretical approaches derived from Continental philosophy, such as post-structuralism, sociology, psychoanalysis, and cultural studies. These transformations enlivened the discipline enormously. The intellectual thrill of critical theory has acted as a great stimulus to scholarship and a draw for students, especially at the graduate level. Rich fields have been opened up, in particular the study of previously neglected works by women and people of colour. It is entirely appropriate that literary studies should meet the challenge posed by critical theory — that it should interrogate its central assumptions, analyze its conditions of possibility, subject its most cherished beliefs to scrutiny. Critique is an integral part of the transmission of culture. Without it, culture becomes static and self-satisfied.

But, as Guillory points out, the wider currents of post‑’60s critique have also led to some perverse consequences that leave literary criticism ill equipped to defend itself in today’s more hostile environment. The first was the refocusing of radical politics on the discipline itself. As the social movements of the ’60s petered out in the political retrenchments of the ’70s and ’80s, the radical professoriate increasingly took the institution of literary studies itself as the object of critique. It was from this impulse that the “canon wars” of the ’80s and ’90s and the “decolonize the curriculum” movement of more recent times emerged. Struggles over the political representation of minority groups were transposed onto the terrain of literary history via the surrogates of the canon and the curriculum.

The other key development was the increasing demand for “topicality”: the tendency of professors to pluck their research topics from the headlines of the liberal press. Hence the now common course formula of “Literature and . . . ,” into which teachers may insert whatever contemporary issue they are most passionate about or that seems most “relevant” to the lives of their students. It will come as no surprise that classes in literature and gender, literature and race, and literature and the environment are more common than, say, literature and macroeconomics or literature and theology, both equally pressing matters of concern. Again, the urge to topicality skews the original aims and objects of the discipline: texts become occasions for political debate (or, worse still, political preaching) rather than works of art in their own right. Literary history is foreshortened and books that fail to echo the political sentiments of the present are discarded or traduced. As Guillory archly points out, in certain quarters whole swaths of literary production have come to be seen not as objects of scholarship, let alone occasions for appreciation and enjoyment, but rather as obstacles to the wider political aims of the professoriate.

Some have objected to Guillory’s delivery of such a lengthy internal critique of literary studies at a time when the discipline faces so many threats from outside. English departments in Canada and throughout the anglophone world are in poor health, certainly in comparison with how they were faring before the 2008 financial crisis. Surely the overblown rhetoric of some critics is a minor irritant — and par for the course in any field — compared with the threats posed by declining enrolments, frozen hiring budgets, rising tuition costs, economic inequality, the increasingly desperate scramble to find good professional jobs after graduation, the coming disruptions of artificial intelligence, and the willful philistinism, if not outright hostility, of the administrators and politicians who hold the purse strings. The critic Jonathan Kramnick has described this upheaval as a potential “extinction event in the history of knowledge,” as an entire generation of scholars retire without replacement and whole branches of the curriculum are left to wither and die. This crisis of replication is seen not just in literary studies; it applies to varying degrees across the whole of the humanities curriculum, from history to philosophy, from languages to religion.

As if these challenges were not severe enough, literary scholars must also reckon with the diminished status of literature itself in the wider cultural ecosystem. It can often seem these days as though we are teaching literature in an incipiently post-literate society. When literary studies was one of the most popular majors in a postwar university system flush with public funds and swollen with the baby boom generation, books enjoyed both cultural prestige and popular appeal. To take just one example, in 1964 Saul Bellow’s novel Herzog, unmistakably a serious work of art in the English language, sold 142,000 copies in hardcover in the United States. An equivalent novel today would be considered a success at 10 percent of that figure. Back then, the printed word had not yet been displaced by television, let alone the internet, social media, and the smartphone, as the dominant medium of entertainment and enlightenment. The prestige conveyed by a degree in English literature could also be converted relatively easily into the more tangible rewards of paid employment in the middle-class professions, even if a detailed knowledge of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese did not directly aid in the completion of one’s daily tasks. These two structural supports — literature’s relative popularity and the cultural capital conferred by its study — have been severely weakened in the last thirty years or so. Literature is a minor cultural form in the digital era, and the tech billionaires who have built the new economy simply don’t trade in our currency.

In the spirit of realism and modesty with which he approaches his topic, Guillory offers no sweeping program of reforms and no grand designs for the salvation of the discipline. Instead he counsels a “reestablishment” of literary studies around its core competencies and objects of knowledge: that is, the interpretative analysis of works of art in English over the course of its long history from its emergence as a vernacular literary language in the medieval period to the current era of global English. As he notes, this program avoids the “overestimation” of the socially transformative effects of analyzing texts, but he nevertheless insists that the study of literature is an authentic part of human knowledge. Any university worth its salt should be committed to preserving and expanding that knowledge.

The scholar Simon During recently courted controversy when he grouped Guillory’s work alongside that of Kramnick, Rita Felski, and Michael Clune, who have offered their own visions for how English literature might avoid disciplinary overreach and rediscover its core competencies, as part of a new “conservative” movement within the field. The utterance of such an epithet in tones other than those of severe disapprobation is vanishingly rare in literary circles. This was bold talk indeed, even if During did make it amply clear that the conservatism he was describing was an internal stance in relation to literary studies, rather than a matter of party politics. Indeed, in his reckoning, the conservative program for refocusing literature on its proper domain of expertise comports with a wider left-wing politics that seeks to protect knowledge and culture from the depredations of market fundamentalism and authoritarian populism.

I suspect that many of my colleagues would still balk at the term, in spite of During’s careful delimitations, not least because the values of gradual change and presumptive trust in tradition that he evokes, and that were once part of a mainstream ideology, have long since been supplanted by the stew of far-right insurrectionism and cultural grievance that passes for conservatism today. Perhaps a more appealing term around which the field might rally is “conservationist,” which strikes me as a more realistic goal of the business of literary studies in the era of shrinking departments, strained literacy, and sweeping techno-revolution. We are keen to conserve natural ecosystems, so why not cultural ecosystems as well? Progressives gladly endorse the conservation of natural habitats and dwindling biodiversity. Why not add Milton and Spenser to the endangered species list? After all, conservation is not simply a matter of suppressing change or preserving our objects of concern in aspic. Conservationists rely on the latest scientific knowledge and produce new insights into the species they conserve, but they do so only insofar as those insights and innovations ensure the continued flourishing of the organisms they seek to protect. At the heart of conservationism are judgments of value. We should conserve literature, just as we should conserve the biosphere, because of its inherent value, in this case as a part of human knowledge.

Oscar Wilde narrowly avoided becoming an academic. He was a brilliant but wayward student who was suspended from his Oxford college after returning late for the start of term from a tour of Italy and Greece — which he quipped was “quite as good as going to lectures”— but still managed to graduate with a first-class degree and the prestigious Newdigate Prize for poetry. He then studied for a junior fellowship, the first rung on the ladder to an academic career, but was not awarded the position. Scholarship’s loss was literature’s gain. After briefly toying with the idea of becoming a school inspector, Wilde made his way to London in search of “success: fame or even notoriety.” It is curious to think that in an alternative universe, Wilde would have missed his calling as a writer and lived out his days as a provincial administrator, ensuring that pupils followed the prescribed curriculum in classics and English, science and mathematics.

In London, Wilde made a minor name for himself as one of the louche young men who hung around at fashionable gallery openings and as the author of a poorly received book of poems, which the critic Edmund Gosse referred to as “a curious toadstool, a malodorous parasitic growth.” His big break came with his 1882 lecture tour of Canada and America, during which he travelled to such cultural hot spots as Moncton, New Brunswick, Macon, Georgia, and Stockton, California, delivering more than a hundred talks with titles such as “The English Renaissance” and “The Decorative Arts.” The tour was carefully stage-managed by Wilde’s agent, William Francis Morse, in order to cash in on the popularity of Gilbert and Sullivan’s aesthete-satirizing comic opera Patience, which was touring North America at the time, as well as on Wilde’s own celebrity as an exotic creature from the British art world. This was a far cry from the rarefied society of Magdalen College. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, Wilde’s lecture was interrupted by rowdy Harvard undergraduates who parodied the speaker’s outlandish dress and posture; in Leadville, Colorado, he was given a tour of the famous Matchless silver mine by a group of workers inspired by his message that art and beauty should be made available to the common man. They named a new shaft the Oscar in his honour.

It would be wrong to see Wilde’s North American tour — and his subsequent career as a magazine editor, essayist, author, and media personality — as a clean break with his abortive academic career, however. While on tour, Wilde handed out visiting cards with the self-awarded title “Professor of Aesthetics.” In spite of the air of Barnum and Bailey about the whole enterprise — Barnum himself actually invited Wilde to appear in the ring alongside Jumbo the elephant, a PR opportunity that the aspiring author wisely declined — the lectures themselves were serious disquisitions on art history and the ennobling effects of aesthetic experience. There was an idealistic mission lurking behind the comic theatricality that was drawn directly from the classical humanities curriculum that Wilde had absorbed at university. This is what the critic Linda Dowling called “aesthetic democracy,” a belief that the fruits of humanistic learning should be available to all members of a civilized modern society.

It was a similarly idealistic vision that Wilde outlined in The Soul of Man under Socialism, his idiosyncratic defence of libertarian socialism and, for much of the twentieth century, his most frequently translated work, a rare instance of an English text made available in Mandarin, Yiddish, and Faroese. In it, Wilde imagined a utopian world in which all productive labour is fully mechanized so that each member of society can enjoy complete leisure and total freedom. (Perhaps someone should hand out copies before the next shareholders’ meetings of Nvidia and Palantir.) The proper goal of socialism, he argued, was not the formation of “Industrial Tyrannies” controlled by party or state, nor a kind of universal philanthropy that would simply replicate the relations of hierarchy and dependence that characterize capitalist society, but a new age of individualism, in which each human being would have the freedom to cultivate their innermost potentials to the furthest possible extent. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the man in the green velvet breeches and flowing cape argued that the point of socialism was to free us from the “sordid necessity of living for others.”

The problem, however, is that human beings are notoriously bad at dealing with the qualified freedoms and partial leisure available in our current societies, let alone the full‑fat versions that would be on offer in a fully automated socialist utopia. Given a spare couple of hours, most of us barely know what to do with ourselves. Instead of seeking “joy and beauty,” we doom-scroll on our phones or slump on the couch in front of Netflix. This is why Wilde defines the highest goal of human existence as “cultivated leisure” rather than, say, pure freedom or the fulfillment of our wildest desires. It is no accident that the Greek term schole, from which we derive our words “school” and “scholar,” refers both to “idleness” and to “learning.” The pursuit of wisdom requires leisure; and insofar as human beings can achieve anything approaching wisdom, it discloses leisure as the proper end of human existence. Or, to put it slightly differently, utopia is a school, and vice versa.

As Wilde pointed out, few societies in history have granted genuine leisure and freedom to anyone other than a tiny class of privileged men — emperors, kings, aristocrats, and a handful of rebel artists, such as Wilde’s Romantic heroes, Shelley and Byron — and only then in the context of wider social relations of exploitation and oppression. Even fewer have truly valued joy and beauty above the worldly pursuits of status and wealth, desire and satisfaction. It is all too easy in our contemporary age of hypercritique to dismiss Wilde as a privileged fop and the gospel of “art for art’s sake” as a smokescreen for ideology. But both during his circus-like lecture tour and in his brilliant essays, Wilde argued that cultivated leisure should be the right of the many, not the privilege of the few. His carefully constructed persona as an aristocratic dandy-aesthete was not a gesture of elitist hauteur but a kind of prefiguration of the better future he hoped to bring into existence for everyone.

So, as another academic year rolls around and we make our way back to Varsity Towers, I would like to urge everyone — professors and students, deans and administrators, first-generation students and the scions of the managerial elite — to focus their attention on the utopia of idleness and wisdom that hovers just out of sight behind the professional deformations and bureaucratic perversities of the modern academy. When you do so, you might also contemplate enrolling in a class in one of the core disciplines of the humanities program, such as philosophy, history, or literature — what we might call the PHIL subjects, the ones you do out of love, not duty, and the ones in which you remain an amateur even when masquerading as an expert. These are both some of the oldest forms of human knowledge and some of the few majors where we prepare for a better future by learning how to spend our leisure hours wisely.