Elegy for Elegy

Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

• Elegy for Elegy
• Daniel T. O'Hara (bio)

Jeffrey T. Nealon's new book, Elegy for Literature, is a scathing critique of the profession of literary study. It lays out succinctly the post–World War II anatomy of its current status as a bitter joke in academe only a bit higher on the public totem pole of magazine status than Animal House–style fraternities. And that is the extent of the good news.

Basically, due to a combination of economic mismanagement, thanks to the wholesale adoption of neoliberalism by administrators and state and federal governments over the last forty years (i.e., since Reagan), along with the self-destructive criticism directed by scholar-critics themselves against all professions under the banner of Foucauldian theory of modern biopolitics, literary study has been reduced from the institutional bastion of Arnoldian humanism to the revolutionary vanguards of the inhuman phantasms of capitalism. Reading this book is like watching poor adjuncts holding up their ragged and soiled academic caps and gowns before throwing them into the monstrous spectral incinerator of all hope in some latter-day variant of Dante's Inferno. Here is Nealon in his own discerning critical words:

So we return again to that basic issue for literary study: how does literature function, today? While on the whole within English departments there is a great deal of common ground surrounding literary studies' value and some disagreement (mostly between those who feel that literature is a discipline of historically connected books/ideas and those who think it's a biopolitical exercise in teaching sensitivity toward other points of view and ways of life), consistently elided remains the most foundational question of all: what is literature good for, today, in the United Biopolitical States of America?

Nealon goes on to examine the promise of the novel, especially contemporary autofiction, demonstrating that such promise of creative identity transcending [End Page 157] the reach of biopolitics and nostalgic humanism remains phantasmal. The nature of such discourse, however, is not plumbed here.

The reader is not left without any hope. In the reflexive ironizing of the "Epilogue: Where I Predictably Assert the Kind of Thing I Do Is the Key," Nealon discloses how each example of art is an imaginative making not only of a sui generis "poem" (as it were) but also its own project of theory. Even a flower arranged by chance may be read in this fashion, as well as when a human hand intervenes to ruffle the petals a bit. In this latest context, "the work of literature … has inexorably become the work of theory—learning privileged methodological modes that can resonate productively with all things great and small, everything from airports to Lego blocks." Nealon continues, explaining that "the work of literature … has become the theoretical or methodological attribute of a certain mode of practice—an orientation or a way of life—not an attribute inexorably attached to any given disciplinary objects or set of object." This is why Nealon himself can teach or write about such practices whether they inhabit a poem, a novel, a drama, or a bouquet (my example, by the way, not necessarily Nealon's).

For me, then, this means that I can read, for another project of my own on T. S. Eliot's criticism, the following passage from his "The Poets on Poets" pamphlet Dante (1929), rejoicing once again in doing so, surprisingly all in accord with Nealon's own devastating critique:

The experience of a poem is the experience both of a moment and of a lifetime. It is very much like our intenser experiences of other human beings. There is a first, or an early moment which is unique, of shock and surprise, even of terror (Ego Dominus Tuus), a moment which can never be forgotten, but which is never repeated integrally; and yet which become destitute of significance if it did not survive in a larger whole of experience; which survives inside a deeper and a calmer feeling. The majority of poems one outgrows and outlives, as one outgrows and outlives the majority of human passions: Dante's is one of those which one can only just hope to grow up to at...