Literature and Institutions Symposium

2017

The two-day symposium investigated the entanglements between literature and institutions, offering examples and case studies from a broad range of historical and cultural contexts.

THIS IS AN ARGUMENT for the possibility of literary humanities: a literary version of humanities as well as humanities that look at literature for the human person to assert his or her selfhood. I am not merely speaking for the human aspect within the discourse of humanities but rather intend to show how the idea of the human is fundamentally rooted in a poetic sensibility that breaks through social and political barriers. Literary writing enables and sustains the possibility of the human in the face of violence unleashed by a culture industry rooted in global consumerism. Literary humanities, I believe, forms the ethical basis to rethink the role that humanities can, do, and will play in bringing about transformation. This paper also argues that scientific and technological knowledge is a cynical enterprise without literature, which plays a vital role in raising questions related to the future of humankind. Literary writing forms the basis to articulating how we think about literary humanities. Writers who use literary language specialize in the art of looking at truth from the perspective of illusion. In the process of using an illusion to depict reality, they politicize writing by portraying societies not as static entities but dynamic forces constantly in motion. Such politicization happens through an insight into the illusory and fluid character of social reality. My paper argues for literary humanities as the meta-language in which the humanities speak of and for themselves, enabling the possibility of a human person that defies any simple generalization based on external parameters.

This paper reviews the concept and the corpus of English literature and its development in the context of culture and the academy from the 18 th Century onwards. I argue that the category of literature is a 'liquid' notion best understood as a form of 'social action' (after Eagleton) relevant to wider social, cultural, and political contexts that produce and 'consume' it. In the academy, through extending the notion of the institution to a wider social and political context, literature could be best understood as an 'institutional reality' reflecting perceived relations of power. Deeming literature as an ideological tribute is crucially important to arguing against the monolithic and essentialist (Anglo-American literary tradition) as embodying a universal value that still prevail in post-colonial institutions. This argument helps conceptualise and interrogate the cultural constructs embodied in English literature, in general, and the English canonical texts, in particular; it also makes it possible to refute the claim that literature transcends its local boundaries and nationalist sentiments to articulate the universal concerns and values of all people. In my approach to these claims and assumptions, I resort to a critical narrative review to the 'story' of the English literature in cultural, political, social, geographical and institutional contexts.. In academy, particularly in post-colonial settings, I conclude that the adopted literary tradition reflects a matrix of relations of power and institutional affiliations. Such conceptualisation of literature helps to challenge the claim that English literature largely embodies a humanistic enterprise of universal values and uniform human experience. Literature has been subordinate to the fluidity of cultural tenets, which in themselves have undergone several historic, paradigmatic, and institutional transfigurations and perversions. Both the notions of culture and literature are subject to similar social and historical trajectories. 'Institutionalising' literature has epitomised the concept and determined its value, and how it mirrors wider cultural relations of power. Drawing on these observations, I argue that there always exists interplay between the text and the wider context responsible for producing and disseminating literature, which intersects with institutionally established ideologies and practices. I understand the notion of context to refer to the 'system' or the 'institutional cultural capital ' (Bourdieu, 1998) that is responsible for normalising and regulating textual knowledges, and which projects literature as an 'institutional reality '. As Popatia (1998) argues, the interaction between text and context is often governed by an ideological and hegemonic discourse that seeks to prove itself as the most legitimate.

Do literary studies have any value? It is a question clearly related to that of the existence of literature per se, which we are no closer in 2015 to having settled, despite decades of revanchist positivism in the discipline. Th irty years after Terry Eagleton summed up a decade's worth of thinking on the matter by claiming emphatically "not only that literature does not exist in the sense that insects do, and that the value-judgments by which it is constituted are historically variable, but that these value-judgments themselves have a close relation to social ideologies," we appear rather to have sidestepped the outrage than to have addressed it. 1 If there is no such thing as literature, then it can have no value, and the critical study of it must be valueless indeed, which is scarcely an implication any tenured professionals in the trade could be counted upon to endorse. Or else, if our basic business is to "constitute" the being of literature through historically variable, ideological value judgments, then we are caught in the repetitive act of extracting the very values that we have always already put there. Th e "value of literary studies" would thereby consist in the tautological art of projection upon and extraction from an inexistent object of a set of preexistent guild "values," the eff ect of which is to make literature appear , to produce it as a social and cultural good. Without us, it would not exist, but fl icker out into the meaningless babble of the world. But with us, it exists only at the cost of vindicating our values, and not its own.

Inti Revista De Literatura Hispanica, 1998

Cultural Sociology, 2015

Literature is the art form of the nation-state. The written word was at the peak of its influence from the Enlightenment until late in the 20th century. National literatures became central to the development of national identities and the formation of national art worlds. Moreover, they were important vehicles for the exchange of ideas. However, the central position of the nation-state has dwindled due to the centrifugal effects of globalization and regionalization. Simultaneously, literature has given way to other, mainly visual and digital, cultural forms. In the process, it has lost much of its political clout. Literature seems to pose little or no threat to those groups it may previously have worried, and is of little consequence to elites in the 21st century. Instead, it has become an object of cultural consumption, for dwindling and aging publics.

Literature

While reports of the death of literature are greatly exaggerated, reports of the decline of Aestheticism, New Criticism, and the printed word are not. Literature as a critique of society is alive today, but to survive tomorrow in any form it will need to engage environmental, climate, and pandemic public health issues. Without such engagement, there will be no civilization, and, thus, no literature. Literature can survive now, but to thrive, essays in literary criticism may have to not only (i) continue to discuss canonical and (ii) minority writing but also (iii) partner with cultural studies and/or (iv) expand the definition of literature to include “the best stories”, (v) especially multimedia stories. Critics would also be well advised to (vi) balance abstraction and theory with close, detailed readings of literature. Editors might encourage new essays demonstrating that (vii) unity in literature is compatible with the celebration of diversity, that explore (viii) the relationsh...

International Journal of Culture and History , 2023

This paper takes into view literature on a global scale and from throughout time to investigate what we can say about its general and specific relevance for human society. The issue raised here pertains not only to the relevance of literature per se, but specifically to the question of how it relates to us as human beings, defining us in endless ways. In order to illustrate the central points addressed in this paper, numerous examples from the Middle Ages to the modern world are drawn from, such as Hartmann von Aue's Der arme Heinrich (ca. 1190), Don Juan Manuel's El Conde Lucanor (1335), Bertolt Brecht's ballads, and Robert Frost's modern poetry. The conclusion emphasizes that the critical function of literature in all human societies cannot be overestimated. At the risk of preaching to the converted, here we are confronted with the ultimate challenge in the Humanities once again. Insofar as literature has always mirrored, or engaged with, the fundamental issues in human life, we can establish its function as life-determining in philosophical, religious, political, ethical, or moral terms.