RICHARD POIRIER
independently of some mode of apprehending it. And what ideally
should that be? "What
is
poetry," Gertrude Stein once asked, "and
if
you know what poetry is, what is prose?" Since she was, as I am,
raising questions as a restraint against passing beyond them to larger
ones, she immediately adds that "there is no use telling more than
you know, no, not even if you do not know it." Few really intel–
ligent people would be anything but cautious in answering such ques–
tions, but then there are remarkably few intelligent people, and not
all of them are in departments of literature.
What I want to suggest
is
that all the elements in what
is
called
English studies are, or ought to be, in motion, including the student
and the teacher. A beautifully liberating instability, a relativity rather
than a "relevance," should be all we know and all we need to know
about English studies. And yet these inherent opportunities are gen–
erally disdained in the interest of grandiosities and pomposities and
large claims. Those who defend English as a humanistic scholarly
discipline, the traditionalists, as they might be called, are as implicat–
ed as those who want the teaching or study of literature turned into
a function of personal and political redemption. It's no surprise that
last year's dissidents are this year being recognized, vocally as well
as tacitly, as allies within the literary-academic establishment. (The
smarter traditionalists of the Modem Language Association know
their butter well enough not to care, for awhile, which side of the
bread it's on.)
The most vocal critics of English studies are excited by the
same illusions which bolster its most vocal defenders: the illusion,
first, of the necessity, and, second, of the enormous importance of
literary studies. These illusions, shared in some degree by anyone
involved in literary study, are difficult but necessary to resist. They
intrude themselves because the study is confused with the subject,
the teaching confused with the thing taught, the teacher, very often,
with the author, whom he is "making available" to the young and
to himself. It's a heady experience, after all, to have a direct line
to Shakespeare, especially when its assumed there's only one. Be–
cause of these confusions, the study of literature is supposed to have
some effect on the quality of life. So, it can be argued, is the study
of sociology or the study of history, but English studies blithely ap–
propriates these subjects at its convenience, while at the same time
