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traction. There will continue to be people who respond to these com–
plex verbal constructs both as aesthetic objects and as representations of
experience that may be morally, psychologically, and socially illuminat–
ing. This is not in the least to deny that literature, as we have been re–
minded perhaps too often, is deeply implicated in class, race, gender,
economics and politics, but it is not reducible to any of those categories,
as many campus ideologues have tended to argue.
There are still some students who come to our universities with a
strong sense of this irreducibility of literature because at the age of fifteen
they have actually read Jane Austen or Dickens or Conrad and have
found a great deal to engage the mind and excite the imagination which
is not exhausted by the political contexts of the books, implicit or ex–
plicit. One should of course not discount the possibility that some of
these young people will be persuaded to see the "naivctC" of their early
reading by a sufficiently magnetic instructor promulgating a particular
ideology. Can anything be done to counter such influences? On the level
of university politics, my impulse would be to urge people who still care
about literature and humanistic inquiry not
to
be pusillanimous in
speaking and voting on curriculum and appointlTlcnts, but given the aca–
demic subspecies of human nature, any such exhortation would clearly be
futile. It is the classroom that seems to me the crucial arena for the fu–
ture of the humanities. The teaching of literature has to do above all
with the reading of literary texts, not merely with reading through them
to a supposed network of discourses of power. The activity of reading
remains urgently involving, and the willingness to abandon it is the real
treason of the intellectuals - a betrayal of their vocation as teachers - in
our time.
But what, after all, is reading? Many will hasten to object that after
deconstruction, hermeneu tic theory, the new historicism, reader response
theory, de Man and Foucault, reading has been irrevocably
"problematized": the myth of the authoritative rcading - did it ever re–
ally exist? - has been exploded, and a reading, say, of Jane Austen that
makes masturbation or British imperialism the crucial issue is at least as
legitimate as one that traces the subtle play of her ironies. I would be
the first to concede that there are wheels within wheels in any act of lit–
erary interpretation; in fact, what I would consider to be the high fun of
reading really good literature is intimately associated with the formidable
capacity of densely imagined literary artifacts to generate multiple read–
ings, some complementary, others mutually contradictory. Fun of any
sort, however, is little in evidence in the earnest homiletic and hortatory
stances typically assumed by the ideological critics. Though one must
grant the justice of their repeated contention that everyone who teaches
literature has at least an implicit "agenda," there is a world of difference
