538
RICHARD POIRIER
kind, not necessarily having to do at all with the promotion of an Ideal
of literature. Let literature take care of itself, and let professors of
English begin at last to take care of their classes, teaching them to
spell, to punctuate,
to
annotate,
to
listen, look at and enact words and
sentences, to spot repetitions and recurrences until these are at last
recognized as types and genres of mind, and then to see these in turn
as facts of history, equal to any other facts of history, historical experi–
ences in themselves which do not need the sanction of other kinds of
historical experience.
All of this will be labor, and labor is not kind to the self–
importance which is peculiar to literary people. More than that it will
require labor from students at a time when they seem unusually loath
to exert themselves. Given the punitive demands for high enrollment
as a justification for the offering of any course, especially in state
supported institutions, courses in the humanities which call for a lot of
reading, and especially a lot of writing, often are so under-subscribed
as
to
be declared economically unfeasible. Departments in the
humanities can therefore bring about a needed radical reformation of
themseives-one that will eventually result in a re-location of respon–
sibilities in the entire curriculum of the humanities and the social
sciences-only if they are economically empowered to do so. The first
and most pressing innovation is therefore financial support of a
wholly original kind: not for expansion but for the retraction of the
functions of already existing departments of literature.
