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| Vol. 24, No. 16 | March 4, 1999 |
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| Vol. 24, No. 16 | March 4, 1999 |
BY SUZANNE TRIMEL
In its provocative mission statement five years ago, the fledgling Association of Literary Scholars and Critics announced its intention to focus on "broad conceptions of literature rather than the narrow, highly politicized ones often encountered today." Dean Austin Quigley of Columbia College is the 1999 President of the organization.
Because the new organization claimed a number of distinguished literary scholars among its members, including John Hollander of Yale, E.D. Hirsch Jr. of the University of Virginia and Karl Guthke of Harvard, the statement was widely interpreted as a direct challenge to the main professional organization of literary critics and scholars, the 32,000-member Modern Language Association (MLA).
The Association of Literary Scholars, to its dismay, quickly became known as the anti-MLA as its efforts to broaden the base of literary scholarship became more widely known. Its organizing principle was the belief that with the rise of new literary models, a new literary society was needed to refocus literary studies on "literature as literature and not as symptomatic of something else defined in advance of an encounter with literature," says Quigley. "The consequences of prevailing tendencies to use literature primarily to illustrate political or theoretical presuppositions is to impoverish literary studies by limiting in advance the wide variety of things that can be learned from literature."
With the battle lines drawn, everyone waited for the next round. But in a sign that perhaps there is little taste anymore for the kind of acrimonious debate that might have raged over this issue a few years ago, both sides appear to have avoided direct criticism of each other. Today, the Association of Literary Scholars has grown from 400 members during its formative period in the fall of 1994 to well over 2,000, including many more younger scholars. A new journal, Literary Imagination, is due out this spring and the group will hold its fourth annual conference next fall in New York City with Dean Quigley presiding.
Quigley, an authority on Harold Pinter and modern drama, believes changing trends in scholarship over the last few decades have ironically deflected attention from the centrality of literature to literary studies.
The Association of Literary Scholars, says Quigley, "reemphasizes the primary focus on literature not in opposition to literature's capacity to promote social change, but in order to extend further the range of its potential impact. It is important to distinguish," he stresses "between cultural conservationists and cultural conservatives."
Quigley is sensitive to the perception, though, that the Association of Literary Scholars, which includes both classicists and modernists, may be viewed as a throwback to a more exclusive era in the academy before critical theory, feminist criticism, cultural studies, and other new literary models gained currency. Rather than challenging the potential contribution of these extensions of literary studies, however, the founding members of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics felt that, in actual practice, the literary profession is making literary studies too confined and fragmented by relying excessively on narrowly defined issues of gender, class, race and politics when analyzing individual works. The result, they say, is that the study of literature is metamorphosizing into a branch of the social sciences.
"Rather than opening up the exploration of social issues, literary studies is tending to close off original thinking about them," says Quigley. "The goal of the Association is to restore an intellectual terrain in which readers can exercise their capacity to think for themselves rather than rely upon various kinds of theoretical/political machinery to do their thinking for them."
Quigley emphasizes that the group promotes no ideological position or political view and prefers the more inclusive model of co-existence between the Modern Language Association and the Association of Literary Scholars.
"We are seeking to correct an imbalance, not to replace one interest with another," says Quigley, who points out that he retains his membership in the MLA, whose president this year is also a Columbia faculty member, University Professor Edward Said. "No reasonable person would question the importance of race, class and gender issues in literary and social analysis, but many doubt that that set of categories exhausts the posibilities of literary analysis. They also doubt that such categories are themselves fruitfully deployed if considered solely in terms of struggles for power."
"There is a general conviction in the Association that it may not serve anybody's interest to go about the study of literature as if there is only one way to do so," says Quigley. "Indeed, many people join the Association because they like to think for themselves and are dissatisfied with programmatic approaches to literature in which the answers to questions are presupposed by prior political or theoretical commitments. For most members the dissatisfaction is as much with the platitudes of the political right as with those of the political left, for literary studies are well served by neither."
But he notes that with the current polarization in the profession "there is an immediate assumption, if you question either one of these positions, that you must necessarily be adopting another. This, as much as anything, indicates why literary studies needs a new professional organization that will bing a new kind of intellectual rigor and imaginative creativity to professional debate."
Quigley says the Association of Literary Scholars seeks to broaden the literary context by exploring literature "as a world phenomeon that can display similarities across cultures, and not just highlight differences among them. Our interest is in the continuity of literary studies pursued across historical time and geographical and cultural space as a way to understand differences. This is why the organization is not restricted to scholars of modern European languages and literatures but also includes classical scholars and those studying literature around the world."
While the group has issued no formal position on the literary canon, Quigley, who presides over Columbia College's famed Core Curriculum, notes that literary works that survive do so because "they reflect a history of value judgments that continue to be made and continue to be reviewed. These are works that men and women agree over time contain important things to know. Are there additions and changes over time? Of course."
An important concern of the new organization is to bring writers, publishers, critics and scholars together in a renewed effort to understand the workings of the literary imagination, said Quigley. In addition to academic and independent critics, members include writers and poets such as Margaret Atwood, David Ferry, Donald Hall, Shirley Hazzard and Charles Simic.
For any literary organization, the annual conference is the main forum for serious critical and scholarly work. The Association of Literary Scholars, in keeping with one of its objectives-"to foster appreciation of a common literary culture"-has avoided a schedule made up of a bewildering variety of concurrent sessions-the MLA has as many as 800 during its annual conference-in favor of a series of four plenary sessions focusing on literary biography, the state of literary studies, translation and poets and teachers.
"In this way, we have a common intellectual experience, for all who attend, and we avoid the premature narrowing of issues to be investigated," said Quigley.
Quigley said the new journal will not seek to provide a new manifesto for literary studies nor will its editorial policy "register an implicit set of unshakable convictions."
Its goal, he said, will be "precise in its minimal objective-to refocus literary studies on literature." For this reaon, he said, the journal will welcome the work of members and non-members alike.