Literary Elitism

and being nice

Earlier this month, the Substacker that goes by the name of “Bentham’s Bulldog” posted a critique of continental philosophy. BB’s arguments are familiar to me: they’ve been levied against literary theory (a field that overlaps quite a bit with continental philosophy) for years. The critique goes: theory prose is unintelligible and jargon-laden; the arguments aren’t advanced in a rational or inferential way; and, once the claims of continental philosophers/theorists are decoded, they’re either unspectacular, banal, or nonsensical. All of these accusations have been levied, at times accurately, against literary theory since the 80s.¹

Some defenders of continental philosophy responded reasonably and thoughtfully. But many other responses, which BB summarized in another post, came across as, in BB’s words, “smug, condescending, sneering…many of the dismissals didn’t even try to argue I was wrong but just called me names.” Some people seemed to argue that BB should spend years reading Hegel, and secondary literature on Hegel, before should dare criticize Hegelians; others simply called him stupid and incapable of understanding what he criticized.

I think there are two problems with responding in this way. The first is a moral problem: I think that, in most cases, it’s wrong to insult or disparage others. The second is a practical problem: dunking is a form of rhetoric that fails to persuade anyone that theory/continental philosophy is good, makes the academic humanities seem hostile and unwelcoming, and indicates deeper cultural problems within the academic humanities that prevent academics from meaningfully engaging with general readers.

Let me run through my reasoning here. First, this fails to persuade anyone that theory/continental philosophy is good. Rhetorically speaking, many of these comments were appeals to authority (as any first-year English student will tell you, these are the least effective means of persuasion). The essence of the argument is something like: “I’ve got a PhD in continental philosophy, so you shouldn’t trust your own instincts or beliefs about the value of what you read; instead, you should assume that you’re wrong and that I’m right. Only those who spend years reading continental philosophy, or who have a PhD in the subject, are qualified to assess the value of continental philosophy.”

The problem with this argument is that appeals to authority only work when your audience shares faith in the authority you cite. Humanities academics are often very invested in status, fame, prestige, and authority. Among graduate students, insecurity and impostor syndrome (and the pseudomasochistic striving for approval from authority figures that these things can lead to) are common. To this academic audience, appeals to authority can be persuasive. But outside of literary academia, where decreasing numbers of people believe that a humanities PhD confers any real expertise on its holder, these appeals to authority just don’t work. Very few people have faith in the authority of continental philosophers! So arguments based on that authority aren’t persuasive.

What these arguments do is to make the academic humanities seem unpleasant and even anti-intellectual to outsiders. They make the academy look like a place where people don’t strive to reason with and persuade one another, but a place where people are simply told what to believe by authorities, where their own responses and perspectives and experiences simply aren’t considered worthy of real consideration.

More broadly, I think that these responses point toward a more general problem in the culture of the academic humanities: a sense of self-importance and a willingness to dismiss others’ ideas instead of engaging them. This attitude comes across as dismissive and forbidding to those very people on whom the humanities depend for their continued existence. If professors and grad students feel OK publicly insulting twenty-two-year-olds who they think are ignorant, what does this imply about their attitudes toward their own students? Do these attitudes show up, consciously or unconsciously, in the way that students or other newbies are treated? Why would anyone want to join an intellectual community that treats initiates as unintelligent and unworthy?

---

Recently I’ve been thinking that English teachers need to seriously reckon with the fact that many people hate English class because their English teachers made them feel stupid and small, not because they do not consider literature worth their time, money, or effort. Of course there are many truly kind, delightful English professors and teachers. But we need to consider the possibility that the reputation of the discipline might have something to do with what it is actually like.

People really hate being made to feel stupid, and they often see English professors as snobs who make them feel stupid. Earlier this week, I asked my own students how they think the university has changed the way novels are written and received, they were pretty uniformly negative—a few students said that studying literature in the university has sucked all of the joy out of it, and one (spontaneously) said that part of the reason why was that they did not like being told what to think or believe about literature. They wanted a conversation where their thoughts were being taken seriously, and in too many cases, they weren’t getting that. These were English majors and minors—smart young people who write fiction as a hobby, who look at BookTok, who read big fat books for fun, who decided that the study of literature was worth a good deal of time, effort, and money—exactly the sort of people who should feel most welcome in an English department. But they don’t. This strikes me as a problem worth solving.

---

One subscriber left me an interesting note on my new reader survey. It was a response to a question about what I really, really shouldn’t do on this newsletter (which has garnered a number of funny and, at times, cutting responses). I hope one anonymous author won’t mind my reproducing it here:

This is a personal pet peeve of mine but… please, don’t succumb to elitism! I grew up writing a lot of fanfiction and like, tropey fantasy when I was writing original fiction, and I’ve branched out since then but still love, respect, and do all of that stuff. But it’s also meant that for a good half of the conversations I have about writing, I tend to always deal with comments that look down on what I do or imply it’s ‘less than’ instead of just… ‘different.’…Also… I’d like to get into reading more poetry & more ‘literary’ stuff! (Still not entirely sure what ‘literary’ means.) It would be nice to have something that makes that feel approachable because wow do I not know where to start.

This person is exactly the kind of person who should feel most welcome in literary conversations! They come across as sensitive, curious, and thoughtful, with a touch of uncertainty about where they fit in, but above all someone who’s interested in learning more about literary fiction, but who feels out of place in the literary culture that actually exists right now. I have started to understand, just from interacting with my small readership here, and from reading more posts about literary studies, and from listening to my students, is how very hurt a lot of people are when they are told that the things they like are contemptible. People carry this hurt and resentment with them for decades.² Whoever wrote this post is exactly the kind of person who should be, could be, a lifelong reader of the kind of literature I like best: the sort that moves, puzzles, and challenges its reader. They are, to speak in economic terms, the target market. They are, it often feels, my people. So why do they feel so unwelcome in so much of our literary culture? I think at least some of it has to do with the culture itself.

---

So I guess what I am doing, here, is tone policing (which Google’s AI informs me is a “form of gaslighting”—uh oh), or maybe tedious, moralistic lecturing.³ And maybe my argument seems pretty rich in our current popular and political culture, which is so saturated with insult and degradation that it has become a kind of constant background noise. But shouldn’t the life of the mind bear fruit? Shouldn’t philosophers and literary critics be uniquely careful and precise with their words, and thoughtful about the effect that their words can have? Shouldn’t intellectuals be characterized by intellectual generosity and a willingness to listen and respond?

It’s important for writers and intellectuals, especially ones who decide to engage with the general public, to think carefully about how they write and why. If the academic humanities want more respect, and if we want to create a literary culture that meaningfully includes both academics and general readers, perhaps we should stop using appeals to authority and to respectfully engage with arguments that contradict academic orthodoxies. Real cultural authority comes from making solid arguments and imparting genuine value to readers and interlocutors, not rolling your eyes or scoffing at them, as if this is enough to demonstrate the superiority of your knowledge. This isn’t to say that you shouldn’t call a spade a spade, or that if someone is promulgating evil ideas or acting in bad faith that you can’t vigorously contest or criticize them (although it’s often probably more effective simply to ignore them). Righteous denunciation does have its place. I just don’t think it should be the default tone. If you want to build and maintain a healthy intellectual community where everyone feels welcome to join, a good place would be to treat others with kindness and respect.

1. I happen to be more sympathetic to literary theory than BB seems to be. I also found his post unpersuasive. I don’t think it showed a sustained and good-faith effort to understand the work he criticized, and I didn’t find his context-free quotations of randomly selected paragraphs from difficult and long books to be very persuasive evidence of their intellectual paucity.

2. This is not, by the way, to say that nobody can claim that one work of literature is “great” or more worth reading than other works of literature, but that these sorts of claims about value can be made in ways that come across as sympathetic rather than mean-spirited. It’s not always necessary to denigrate one thing to lift another thing up. I’ll be honest: I don’t care for any of the fanfiction I’ve read, and I don’t care for fantasy or romance novels. It doesn’t do what I like to watch art do. I can have that preference, and believe that I hold that preference for good reasons that might be persuasive to other people, without suggesting that there’s something wrong with those who differ.

3. Maybe I’m also victim-blaming—trying to shift the blame for the decline of the academic humanities on its practitioners rather than university administrators, politicians, and others who are in the process of defunding and dismantling them. But two things can be true at the same time. It can be true both that certain elements of academic humanities culture are unwelcoming and unhealthy and that the field is under a sort of attack, and that both things are contributing to the financial and enrollment problems in these fields.