PMB's not particularly well written Part I argued two basic points:
1) Many of those who study literature lack a foward-looking or future-oriented mentality when it comes to approaching the study of literature.
2) As a result, as the world moves on in various ways, literature scholars will have to respond to accusations of obsolescence with innovation within the field.
PMB recognizes that these two formulations sound more like the jargon of one of the greatest enemies of progress in any endeavor: corporatization. So, to add substance to the arguments roughly outlined in Part I, PMB proposes Part II, an elaboration on what is meant by 'innovation':
In Part I, PMB suggested that the last real innovation in literary study was the post-structuralist intervention of the 1970s-80s. Post-structuralism was itself a major structural break in the study of literature. Whereas before the post-structuralist intervention, literary scholars mainly addressed aesthetic questions (what is the form of this piece of writing?; is this a work of art?; what is being communicated in this art form?; how is this work related to other works in its period?, etc.), after this intervention literary scholars began to address layers of meaning not just within, but beyond a piece of writing as 'work of art.' Put simply, this was a major innovation because it conceived of literature not just as art to be studied as art, but as a kind of social-historical document that says something about how we live, what we think, what's going on in the world, and how we relate to the goings-on.
In this sense, innovation is not just a creative way of thinking about a particular piece of writing (no doubt scholars have been doing this since the post-structuralist intervention), but a systematic change in the methods and perceived purpose of the field. Post-structuralism, which hailed primarily from a number of French scholars occupying fields called 'the human sciences,' shifted the scholarly emphasis from literature-as-art to literature-as-document, thus shifting our scholarly purpose from being or becoming experts on literary taste to being or becoming experts on the written word as a record and a driver of human behavior.
In some ways, this innovation of the 1970s-1980s hasn't even fully sunk in, and has been resisted both from within and from beyond the field. Today, for example, the term 'literary criticism' still prevails.
'Literary criticism' is an obsolete term, and a misleading term as a result. Unlike art critics or food critics, those who study literature--generally mislabeled 'literary critics'--are not necessarily purveyors of taste. The purpose of literary study is not to provide people with a sense of which books are 'good' or 'great,' or even to assess the artistic or aesthetic value of a literary text. True, those who study literature are generally best equipped to make assessments of the artistic or aesthetic value of literature, and they often do just that; but this is occupational hazard for the literature scholar--a corollary activity that markets demand and sometimes even pay (modestly) for. Reviewing a book in order to give the 'lay' reader a sense of its artistic or aesthetic value--what literary critics have in the past (in the times of literary criticism proper) termed its 'literary value'--is a side activity to the core function of literary study, analogous to what the production of better television technologies has been to the core work of plasma physicists. In other words, the most publicly visible function of a given pursuit is not necessarily its only or even most important function; and this is certainly the case for those who study literature. While there remains an abundance of people who still believe that what matters most about a book is whether it is 'good literature,' the work of telling people, via arguments from authority, what they ought to think is 'good' and what they ought to think is trash is not work PMB is prepared to hang his hat upon.
What we call 'criticism'--literary criticism, art criticism, food criticism, film criticism, and all other formulations of taste-making industry--is not and has never been about transcendent value, but contingent value, as Barbara H. Smith suggested in 1988. These forms of criticism respond to broader economies of value--markets for taste--and not some transcendent greatness. This is a truth that all contemporary 'literary critics' know very well--or at least have been taught very well--but are frequently happy to ignore if it means holding onto that sliver of broader political and economic influence: the ability to speak and write with authority about the undeniable ability of literature to mesmerize us all, and attribute that mesmerizing effect to some mythical aesthetic quality or great complexity that economists, political scientists, sociologists, physicists, biologists, neurologists, etc. have repeatedly failed to grasp.
In short, 'literary critics' have relied for too long on their ability to say interesting and compelling things as critics, or purveyors of taste. PMB finds it far more interesting and compelling to approach the relationship between literature and people in a vastly different way, not about what people and history tell us about literature, but what literature tells us about people and history. The first thing to be said about literary criticism, then, is that 'literary criticism' is both the wrong term and the wrong approach to the study of literature.
PMB will explain further in Part III, forthcoming.
