Lots of people (and some bears) spend lots of ink on what literary studies offer. This post is about what we (should) actually want from it.
This is a big question; so I'm going to approach it from a wide angle.
What do we want from the study of anything? At base, knowledge. But knowledge for itself is not always enough for people. What people want is knowledge with which they can do something.
Consider the principal aim of the natural sciences (science from scientia, or 'knowledge'): to acquire knowledge about the natural world. That the study of physics tells us plausibly that there is a force associated with mass called gravity is interesting. Knowing this is valuable. What's more valuable for many, however, is not simply knowing about gravity, but the fact that knowing about gravity enables us to do all sorts of fun and useful things. Like egg drop competitions, at which the author has always excelled.
The distinction here is simple: knowing is one thing; applying knowledge is another.
The relationship between these two--knowledge and its application--is more complicated, however. Because when we set out to apply knowledge of certain kinds of force, rigidity, strength, volatility, etc.--knowledge of the natural properties of things--we usually need to be sure that our knowledge is accurate. Because when it's not, bridges collapse, things explode, and people get hurt. Accordingly, the fields of knowledge that we apply to things like building bridges and generating power are not merely accuracy-driven because their principal aim is to know the natural world; they're also accuracy-driven because of the types of application they have.
To recap: the study of the natural sciences is accuracy-driven; its primary objective is to know accurately the natural world; and this accurate knowledge is widely applied precisely because it is reliably accurate. In a sentence: the quest for accuracy is the driver of the study of the natural world.
For a long time in literary studies, accuracy has also been a primary objective (that is, accuracy of interpretation). The task and value of the literary scholar has been largely to interpret what an author meant in a literary work. What an author meant (authorial intent) would then be taken as the meaning of the work; after all, the work is decidedly the author's. After a while literary scholars began to question the value and plausibility of authorial intent, yet maintained that the principal value of literary scholarship is accuracy of interpretation. Literary scholars began to argue, plausibly, that it is simply impossible for us to get inside the heads of authors, living or dead, in the moments in which they write a literary work. Instead of focusing on trying to prove the impossible--trying to prove intent, not just in general terms, but in terms of the specific meanings of words and phrases--literary scholars would do better to focus on relationships between wider histories and contexts surrounding the literary work, and what the words and phrases in the work mean in light of their historical context, as a means of determining an accuracy of meaning in the work. The result of this movement is twofold: 1) we have what the New Critics W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley called the 'intentional fallacy,' the notion that what the author intended to mean is neither available to the scholar (possible to derive), nor particularly relevant to the scholarship (worth investigating in light of the spuriousness of any claims of authorial intent, or especially important for judging the artistic merit of the work as art); 2) we have Roland Barthes' notion of the 'death of the author,' the idea that the author relinquishes control over the text in the process of writing, and, consequently, the text (no longer called a 'work') speaks for itself.
After all of this, however, literary scholarship has remained relatively preoccupied with the idea of accuracy of interpretation. Even if that accuracy has since relied less on notions of authorial intent, and more on wider historical and textual support for arguments about meaning. Astute readers among you will notice that with the interventions of Wimsatt and Beardsley that I've discussed above, a new element surfaces in my discussion, as well as a new evaluative criterion to consider here: the question of literature as art, and its artistic value. I will discuss this in another post in more detail, but here I only want to say, in the service of following this line of discussion of the primary aim of literary scholarship being accuracy of interpretation, that for the longest time in literary studies, and even to a large extent today, to hold up a literary text for interpretation presupposes an answer to the question of its artistic merit: if it's worth interpreting by literary scholars, it must have artistic merit.
To recap: just as the driver of the natural sciences is accurate interpretation of the natural world, the driver of the humanistic sciences (scientia, 'knowledge'), which include literary studies, has long since been and to a great extent continues to be accuracy of interpretation of humanistic objects of study (here literary texts).
Herein lies the central problem, as I see it, with literary scholarship: accuracy.
Just as answering the question of authorial intent is rightly deemed an impossibility (it is what Karl Popper would have called an unfalsifiable question), so too is almost any claim made by a literary scholar about a literary text. There are relevant conditions here:
Firstly, a literary scholar can observe the presence of a word or phrase in a text with as much certainty as a physicist can observe the presence of a subatomic particle through a microscope; the literary scholar cannot, however, prove in any objective sense a universal meaning of that word or phrase. The point here is that, whereas there is the possibility of deriving objectively accurate answers to falsifiable questions, questions like 'what does this phrase mean' are not falsifiable questions, and cannot be answered with any objective accuracy.
Secondly, however, unfalsifiable questions of the sort that literary scholars pose about literary texts can be answered with precision, which is to say that the relevant counterpart to objective accuracy in this case is not 'making shit up.' What I mean here is that literary scholarship can marshal precise attention to textual and historical evidence, reasoned arguments that are logically coherent in the most formal sense, and a depth of subject-specific knowledge in order to say something plausible about a literary text, such that levels of 'repeatability' among scholarly readings are actually quite high, even if there remain fundamental disagreements and contradictions between sound arguments.
Here, then, is the crucial point in all of this: the primary aim of literary scholarship is not to make accurate interpretations of literary texts. In fact, even when authorial intent and accuracy of interpretation were at their strongest as critical objectives, no literary scholar, to my knowledge, ever claimed that his or her reading of Beowulf was an unfalsified, objective truth of the cosmos or the natural world. Nonetheless, when we hold in comparison what C.P. Snow called 'the two cultures,' the proponents of that culture which is primarily concerned with deriving accurate interpretations of the natural world will almost always posit a critique of literary scholarship on the basis that no knowledge it produces (if we can call it knowledge at all) can be tested to the extent that we can say it is objectively and universally true.
What a profoundly silly accusation.
The accusation that literary scholarship cannot prove objectively and universally its conclusions is not so profoundly silly because it's false, but the opposite: it's so profoundly silly because it's so self-evidently true. Is this really what we've been arguing about since the days of Leavis and Snow? Really?
Exasperation aside, the point here is that only a fool would judge the value of literary scholarship by how it measures up to a quality to which it expressly never aspires: to tell a universal, objective truth. When Sir Philip Sidney wrote in his sixteenth-century Apology for Poetry that 'a poet...nothing affirmeth, and therefore never lieth,' he was insightful about one thing in particular: it's not only possible, but noble and worthwhile to pursue forms of knowledge that aren't necessarily concerned with deriving an objective, universal truth about the natural world. In other words, we should ask unfalsifiable questions too, and answer them with rigor (even Popper agreed with this, and posited the idea of 'criticizability' as an overarching notion under which the particular condition of falsifiability is housed).
It has taken this long to arrive at the beginning of the discussion about what we want from literary studies. What we don't want from literary studies, as I have explained, is what literary studies is not (alas!); so let's not critique it for what it is not and what it never aspired to be.
What literary studies can (and does) offer is a form of knowledge which is (unsurprisingly) humanistic, and is more concerned with the relationship of the person to the natural world, rather than the objective facts of the natural world itself. This much is obvious. What we want from literary scholarship, then, is deep and extended knowledge of human interactions with everything. Yes, everything. Because that's what humans do. We interact with everything, then we write about it. I know you're disappointed with this conclusion, which is why this isn't the conclusion.
Back to the initial distinction I made between knowledge for itself and applied knowledge, we can consider a few more things before concluding:
Firstly, literary studies, and the wider humanities, are sciences (scientia, 'knowledge'). They concern certain fields of inquiry and produce knowledge. This is a fact. The reason we should recognize these fields as sciences is not to poach social and governmental cachet from the natural sciences and their widespread and widely recognized applications, but because we need to be reminded that humanistic fields produce knowledge.
Secondly, the knowledge produced by literary studies (here again I narrow the scope back down to my primary subject in this post, backing away from claims about the broader humanities for the time being) is a vast for-itself knowledge. Reading literary texts themselves is certainly an instructive process; nobody would deny that they learn from reading literature, and here I don't even mean sweeping 'life lessons' or moral precepts, but simply minute bits of knowledge (read The Old Man and the Sea and tell me you know nothing about fishing). The literary scholarship itself organizes and ameliorates that knowledge by adding context, providing new readings and interpretations aimed not at being universally accurate but at creating an idea for consideration, an idea that could lead to any number of possibilities, from simply 'oh, that's interesting' to 'oh, maybe aesthetics are a more important aspect of hardware design than I initially thought.' And therein lies the application of knowledge that might be considered of the realm of ideas rather than interpretations: ideas are an essential part of progress in any field, from ethics to public policy to hardware design.
What we want from literary scholarship, then, is ideas. Teachable, intriguing, instructive, informative ideas. Maybe you're still disappointed, because this conclusion is so obvious. It's almost as though, once we've identified the basic facts that literary studies 1) is a field of precision and not accuracy, 2) does not pretend to universally prove its conclusions, and 3) produces a knowledge that is of the realm of ideas, as opposed to the realm of interpretation, we can see literary scholarship for what it is, and not what it isn't. Consequently, we can find what we want from literary studies, rather than wallowing in what we falsely (and inaccurately) presume to be its shortcomings.
