Literature should be a source of wonder, insight, delight, and sublime experience.
And yet … the profession is sickly, jaded—and for a generation has repelled aspiring writers, teachers, and scholars. A diagnosis from “When Nothing Is Cool,” by Lisa Ruddick (thanks to Michael Strong for the recommendation). Ruddick quotes writing coach Gina Hiatt on clients who have been through the professional wringer and come out dessicated:
[They] sense “an immorality they can’t put their finger on” in the thought-world of the humanities. They struggle as writers because talking the talk would make them feel complicit, yet they cannot afford to say, in Hiatt’s words, that “the emperor has no clothes.” Some keep their best ideas out of their scholarship for fear that if they violate certain ideological taboos, others will “hate” them.
For excellent scholarly analyses of what happened to literature, I recommend Irving Howe’s mid-twentieth century “The Culture of Modernism” and John Ellis’s late-twentieth-centuryLiterature Lost.
