Literature and Education Lionel Gi an New Literary History, Vol. 13, No. 2, Narrative Analysis and Interpretation. (Winter, 1982), pp. 341-371. Stable URL: hitp://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0028-6087% 28 198224%2913%3A2%3C341%3ALAE% 3E2.0.CO%3B2-3 New Literary History is eurrently published by The Johns Hopkins University Press ‘Your use of the ISTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR’s Terms and Conditions of Use, available at hhup:/www.jstororg/about/terms.huml. JSTOR’s Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at hup:/www jstor-org/journals/jhup.heml, Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the sereen or printed page of such transmission, JSTOR is an independent not-for-profit organization dedicated to creating and preserving a digital archive of scholarly journals. For more information regarding JSTOR, please contact support @jstor.org. hupulwww jstor.org/ Thu Jul 6 07:26:12 2006Education in the University Literature and Education* Lionel Gossman ws the mid-sixties an Anglo-Indian film, directed by James Ivory, had a brief showing in a few major cities. Shakespeare Wallah por- trayed the dwindling fortunes of an itinerant troupe of English Shakespearean actors doing the circuit of the Indian hill towns in the years following independence. In the last scene of the movie, a class of Indian schoolboys emerges from a performance of Othello and eagerly waits to catch a glimpse of a sexy Indian screen actress, who is sched- uled to pass by. ‘The teaching of literature, until very recently at least, seemed as well established as the British Raj once was in India. Even now, in our time of austerities and cutbacks, departments of language and litera- ture, graduate and undergraduate, stil dot the academic landscape more thickly than Indian Army barracks were once scattered over the landscape of the subcontinent. The MLA—the professional organiza tion of university teachers of modern languages and literatures—has so many thousands of members that only two or three cities in the ‘country have enough hotel rooms to accommodate those who attend its annual conventions. It was not always so. Both the teaching of literature in colleges and universities and the category of literature itself, as we now know them, are of fairly recent date, not much more than a century old. Before that, English, and modern literature in general, was not a regular subject of instruction in most colleges and universities, and to the ‘extent that it was taught, no special expertise was deemed necessary to teach it. The first experimental class in English literature at Princeton, for instance, was taught in 1846-47 by a professor who usually gave the course in Christian evidences." In 1877 William Stubbs, the great Oxford historian, testified before a Royal Commission that he op- ig “dilettante teaching, such as the teaching of English ” connected in any way with the historical school at Oxford. Another witness would concede only that English literature might be * The present essay i. lightly revised version of a public lecture given at Princeton University in February, 1981. Te was one of a series of Spencer Trask lectures on “Literature and Social Change.” organized by Professors Alvin Kernan and Earl Miner (0028.6087/82/180341-5181.0000 Copyright® 1982 by New Litrary History, The University of Vieginia342 NEW LITERARY HISTORY a suitable subject for “women... and the second: and third-rate men ‘who [will] become schoolmasters."? In the remarks that follow I have tried to arrive at some under- standing of the changing place of literature in education over the period extending approximately from the Enlightenment to the present time. I am aware that to attempt such a venture in the scope ofan essay requires great naiveté, great foolhardiness, or a willingness to be satisfied with rapid generalizations that no true historian, perhaps, would entertain in himself or countenance in others. All the more reason for me to claim the customary privilege of an excusatio proper infirmitatem. 1 do not have a historical training, and Lam not an expert in the history of education; nor have I had the occasion of a long period of leisure at a national research institute to turn myself into one. Its asa teacher of literature that I have become interested in the history of the teaching of literature, and itis the uncertainty surrounding the teaching of literature at the present time as wellas the perplexities that I myself often experience as a teacher that have led ime to take a retrospective view of the activity I am engaged in. I apologize for its inevitable shortcomings, simplifications, and omis- sions. Neither of the two terms—literature and education—whose relations 1 propose to explore is unproblematic, though there appears to be an intimate connection between them. (I am reminded of the late Roland Barthes's pithy definition of literature: “Literature is what gets taught. Period.”)? In the common usage of the seventeenth, ighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries, the term literature meant something different from what it means, except in rather special us- ages (e.g., the “literature” on a subject), to us today. “Literature,” Matthew Arnold wrote, “is a large word; it may mean anything writ- ten with letters, or printed in a book. Euclid’s Elements and Newton's Principia are literature. All knowledge that reaches us through books is lterature.”* Such a comprehensive notion of literature may already have been an anachronism in Arnold’s time,* but it corresponds to the idea people had of literature in the seventeenth and eighteenth cen- turies atleast. It would be tedious to quote dictionary definitions from this period or to give examples of usage. I hope the reader will take my word that they bear Arnold out. The “Catalogue des écrivains francais” at the end of Voltaire’sSiécle de Louis XIV included, besides many entries that the twentieth-century reader would expect to find—Bossuet, Corneille, Moligre, Racine, minor poets like Ben- serade and Chaulieu, novelists like La Calprenéde and Scudéry—a considerable number that he would not have expected to find: the philosophers Descartes and Gassendi; Mabillon, the founder of dip-