528
RICHARD POIRIER
statement of the case, and the virtues of stating it in this particular
way, with the designation of organized literary studies as a technol–
ogy, is that it might help to make our language about the issues less
fevered, less pretentious, less self-serving, less inspired with the idea
that the study of literature is equivalent to literature itself and that
literature is equivalent to culture, much less the humanities. The way
any profession is talked about by its practitioners is as important as
what is done in it, especially in the effect of that talk on others. It is
better to err on the side of modesty since much of the trouble with
literary-cultural studies is the result of its having, through most of this
century, erred on the side of excess.
The usefulness of calling the profession of English Studies a
technology may be arguable, but there can be no doubt that for good
or
ill
literary culture has never in the past been so dependent on the
decisions made, at a technical level, in departments of English. By
using the word technology I mean to insist upon how apparently
technical most of these crucial decisions are and how very mundane
matters prove to be more important than most of us have been led to
believe. Take the syllabuses of a given number of courses. These are
absolutely central in establishing the hierarchies of literary values for
a generation of students; in maybe the majority of cases the syllabus
determines which books of poetry, for example, will go on
to
grace
the family shelves in years to come. Literary history and history itself,
as
it
can be read in literature, derive increasingly from the reading
lists of courses, and these, in turn, are a reflection of the dominant
methodologies, or ideologies, in any given English department. A
teacher chooses one book rather than another for a class because he
or she knows how to teach it, or because he or she has been taught it
well in graduate school or as an undergraduate. Some books and
authors of the present century would probably never have come to
be
called "major" had they depended on the free play of taste by that
literate but, when it came
to
English and American literature, untu–
tored audience who determined such matters up to the first decade of
this c.entury. In the operations of a free market, a market undirected
by the massive enterprise of the classroom study of literature, it is
unlikely that
Moby Dick,
the later James,
Ulysses,
Eliot, Pound, or Ste–
vens would have attained anything like the place in the history of
literature which they now hold, a place in some of these instances
