Published Spring/Summer 2008
 
How American Universities Learned to Love American Literature
(on Elizabeth Renker's The Origins of American Literature Studies: An Institutional History [New York: Cambridge UP, 2007])
by Maurice S. Lee | ns 70
Anyone who has been to the annual convention of the Modern Language Association will sympathize with a basic premise of Elizabeth Renker's The Origins of American Literature Studies: Given differences in mission, selectivity, size, geography, endowment, and demographics, it is difficult to generalize about the institutions that produce the professional identities of literature professors. Presidential addresses can talk about solidarity and the state of the profession as a whole, but as job candidates run their gauntlet of interviews and as the institutional affiliations on convention badges conjure fantasies and nightmares of alternative lives, one is vividly reminded that professors of literature struggle for all sorts of capital—economic, cultural, and curricular—in a variety of contexts. Kingsley Amis, David Lodge, Philip Roth, and other novelists offer comic and sometimes penetrating views of English professors and the narcissism of their small differences, but literary scholars know such differences matter and sometimes look toward history to understand the conditions of their field.
Renker focuses on the rise of American literature from "social inferiority" to "curricular canonicity" in United States higher education between 1870 and 1950 (3-4). The story rightfully has what Renker calls "ragged edges," for—as the MLA convention reminds us—no aggregation of data or appeals to common principles can normalize the diversity of universities and colleges (8). Yet as sensitive as Renker is to institutional differences, she also pursues a more encompassing narrative that takes the shape of a Behind the Music episode: After decades of struggle and marginalization, professors of American literature by the mid-twentieth century achieved the institutional respect that we more or less enjoy today, at least until scholars of video games do to us what we did to philologists.
In tracing the legitimization of American literature, The Origins of American Literature Studies works within an established subfield. As its recent twentieth anniversary edition attests, Gerald Graff's seminal Professing Literature (1987) remains an influential book. Following Graff, much work has treated canon formation, methodological controversies, the nationalistic roots of American literary scholarship, and the desperate conditions of the job market. Renker is interested in all of these topics, though her book falls most squarely in the tradition of Graff, Paul Lauter, John Guillory, and David Shumway insofar as it provides a deep history of American literary studies. Parts of Renker's argument have been generally recognized by scholars and are able represented in her book: Modern literatures do not enter most college curricula until the last few decades of the nineteenth century; literary criticism struggles to displace philology in the newly professionalized academy; and American literature does not achieve full status in English departments until the rise of nationalism during World War I and World War II.
What differentiates The Origins of American Literature Studies is its refinement of—and in some cases, challenge to—broad historical narratives, a contribution that stems from Renker's original and democratic approach. Rather than focus solely on the elite institutions that dominate disciplinary histories of English, Renker examines four diverse case studies: Johns Hopkins University, Mount Holyoke College (originally Mount Holyoke Female Seminary), Wilberforce University (originally The Ohio African University), and Ohio State University (originally The Ohio Agricultural and Mechanical College, and also Renker's home institution). The Origins of American Literature Studies also breaks new ground by deemphasizing scholarly publications that shaped the direction of the field and exploring instead "the primary archive of bureaucracy: course catalogs, hiring records, administrative bulletins, presidents' reports, minutes of department meetings, curriculum development materials, and so on" (6).
The book is indeed "An Institutional History." The archives of bureaucracy that Renker examines won't be turned into a screenplay anytime soon. They may even remind one of the neglected documents piling up in one's faculty mailbox. Be that as it may, Renker shows that institutional materials can be immensely revealing; for if ideological critiques work well in theory and provide useful conceptual frameworks, to understand specific institutional dynamics is to study the levers and gears of administration. Renker's research shows that "American literature's social functions in the educational system were foundational to its curricular identity, quite independent of the content of its canon" (4). For Renker, it mattered little what particular texts were taken to represent American literature, for the field was marginalized from the beginning—seen as too modern, too accessible, too popular, too feminine, worse even than British literature, and thus deserving of less curricular space, fewer advanced seminars, and fewer tenured specialists.
This was particularly true at Johns Hopkins, which led the charge for professionalization in American higher education. While other colleges and universities began to teach American literature in the final decades of the nineteenth century, Hopkins did not offer its first course until 1905, and the class was headed by a belletristic professor who had written his dissertation on Chaucer. They did not offer a seminar in American literature until 1925, and that class only lasted two years, after which classes in American literature were demoted from the English department to the College Courses for Teachers, a program designed for female students and run jointly with a women's college. For Renker, it makes sense that Johns Hopkins was both a leader in professionalism and a laggard in American literature: The subject was considered so unserious as to be taught by women in secondary schools.
The situation at Mount Holyoke differed but the status of American literature remained low. The school offered American literature courses from 1887 to 1897; but as it made the difficult transition from a religion-focused, pre-professional seminary to an aspiring academic institution, it "attempted to mimic Ph.D. culture and did so in part by eliminating American literature" (50). The subject was not fully restored to the curriculum until 1909 at which time it was taught by a professor who had written her dissertation on Spenser. As at Hopkins, American literature at Mount Holyoke took much longer than its British counterpart to secure an institutional place, even in a women's college less averse to such "feminine" subjects.
Renker argues that race played an analogous role to gender at Wilberforce University, where "American literature served Jim Crow" in the early twentieth century (64). At a time when Booker T. Washington clashed with W. E. B. Du Bois over educational philosophies, Wilberforce taught American literature, not in its ambitious upper division college, but rather in its "Normal" school, which was equivalent to a secondary institution and served accommodationist ends insofar as it prepared students to teach other black students and thus avoid professions denominated white.
The final case study that Renker presents is Ohio State University, whose land-grant mandate and populist constituents forced professors of all literature to defend their subjects in terms of practical applications. Checking Midwestern perceptions of literature as an effeminate and aristocratic pursuit was the "bottom-up pressure" of students who flocked to Ohio State's only American literature course (110). The university's "top-down" response in 1906 was to lower the course to an introductory level, indicating a general lack of respect that was not fully resolved until World War II made American literature eminently practical insofar as it supported national ideology. The case of Ohio State is the strongest example of a phenomenon that Renker notices in other areas of her book: High student demand for American literature courses increased the field's institutional status, despite resistance from within the profession.
The final chapter of The Origins of American Literature Studies departs from the historical methods used in the rest of the book to argue that the bottom-up influence of students has become a double-edged sword for current and future professors of literature. Envisioning the possible "end of the curriculum" (126), Renker predicts that information-age students asserting their consumer preferences will render literature—American and otherwise—increasingly less popular and thus less successful in the struggle for institutional status. Live by enrollments, die by enrollments—a logic that, as previous chapters show, held true even in a bygone age when students had considerably less power over curricular options. Few will argue with Renker's general assessment: Book reading is in decline; students' relations with the world are increasingly mediated by technology; open-source websites such as Wikipedia challenge traditional notions of authorship and noetic authority.
Yet what makes so much of Renker's book convincing is largely missing from the final chapter. Instead of finely-grained discussions of the specific pressures and decisions that are pushing institutions toward the end of the curriculum, the final claims of the book are more sweeping and the argumentation looser. English departments have clearly lost market share, and new disciplines are gaining institutional purchase. But it is unclear to me that information-age students process information in radically different ways, and it may be that some crave the very kind of connectedness that a curriculum can give. Renker offers her predictions as such and is careful to leave the future open-ended. My own suspicion—informed by Renker's case studies and their valuable correction of disciplinary history—is that the future of literary studies will have more ragged edges than Renker suggests in her conclusion. Whatever the case, as professors of American literature continue to struggle for institutional resources, The Origins of American Literature Studies provides a nuanced and original history of such necessary work.
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