That the study of literature has a promising future or, indeed that is has a future
at all, is not something that everyone seems to assume. Hence the recent appearance
of at least two publications with the interrogative title “Does Literary Studies
have a Future?.” In practice, to be sure, such question marks often prove to
be simply a prelude to some reaffirmation of the fact that literary studies is very
important indeed for various reasons and that therefore it deserves to be pursued
in the future. Thus Bruce Fleming, the author of “What is the Value of Literary
Studies?,” to quote another recent title, answers his own question with a pious
and inevitably self-serving account of how studying literature contributes to the
quality of public discussions. In many cases, then, the interrogative mode turns
out to be more like a rhetorical ploy. Nevertheless, the current popularity of the
question mark as the starting point of discussions on the future of literary studies
does seem indicative of a certain lack of confidence as compared to some thirty
years ago: at that time literary scholars were full of plans for the future, busy
founding journals like New Literary History and Poetics Today and, in the Netherlands,
founding chairs of Comparative Literature. At that time literary studies
looked less like a discipline with an uncertain future needing to justify itself than
like a model and source of inspiration for other disciplines who were in the process
of going through the famous ‘linguistic turn.
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