A phenomenon: when a scientist applies for a research grant, s/he often has much of the groundwork completed for the proposed project. Why? Because science researchers often spend around half of the duration of a funded project gathering data for the current project, and the other half working toward the next project. Of course this isn't always the case, but it happens, and it's sort of cool.
One of the very cool things about scientific research is that it's generally very forward-thinking and future-oriented. Accordingly, you wouldn't fault a scientist today for having not yet cured a disease or invented a way to travel from Australia to Mexico in an hour. On the contrary, the value of scientific possibility is precisely what commands funding for research.
When it comes to the study of literature, however, the idea of future-orientation is usually taken as a joke, not just by people who think there's no such thing as non-scientific innovation, but from literature scholars themselves. There are plenty of exceptions to this rule, of course; but what passes for 'innovation' in literature scholarship and in disciplinary organization today is generally about reclaiming something lost, rather than positioning for something new. PMB is more than sympathetic with a number of ideas about the extent to which literature is undervalued in today's world; but there's a lot more to this picture.
Arguably the last significant innovation in literary scholarship--an innovation which, incidentally, rendered English departments the perceived intellectual powerhouses of the university at the time--was the rise of French post-structuralism in the late 1970s. Heavily derided (Derridaed?) today, the post-structuralist turn nonetheless represented an important break in the intellectual history of literary study. It blurred disciplinary boundaries between literature, philosophy, and the social sciences, allowing literary scholars to look beyond tired approaches to a weary set of canonical 'literary works.' Today, many would look back on this moment as the beginning of the end of literary study, blaming it for all subsequent funding and public-relations problems of English departments. In some ways, those people are correct. But what we should take from this last major point of disciplinary innovation is not that 'there is nothing outside the text,' or any of the cryptic aphorisms of this intellectual movement, or that post-structuralism was the death of literary study, but that it's important, and maybe even beneficial, for disciplines to develop over time, rather than let themselves stagnate as relics of a bygone era. Because that's what they're saying about the study of literature, in case you haven't heard:
Obsolete.
Useless.
If a bunch of idle, rich bohemians want to laze around reading books all day while the rest of us get on with the business of life in the 21st century, let them be (but don't expect us to pay for it).
Sure, there's no point in letting go of some of the legitimately undervalued aspects of literary study that have long since been central to the profession. There's no point in capitulating to the arguments of the naysayers, nor in allowing the debate to be framed only in the naysayers' terms. But this doesn't mean, either, that we'll find all the answers to our problems by looking backward, or by attempting a glorious return to a mythical time when a literature professor was like Tom Hanks' Robert Langdon, Harvard Professor of 'Symbology,' gallivanting about the globe saving the world with ancient knowledge.
What's the next move, then?
