What Has Become of Literary Studies?

The scene: a graduate seminar in literature sometime in the eerily becalmed days of the mid-1990s, when for an aspirant to an academic job, the future seemed poised to break in one of two directions—either the long-promised wave of retirements and a deluge of open positions, or a decisive sign that the hiring trend line was never going to reverse its downward course. Imagine not quite knowing what would happen—even if that is now, in fact, very hard to do. Imagine, with even greater difficulty, sitting in that seminar as a widely read, charismatic literary theorist stood explaining that our line of work was a profession—one that involved duties and allegiances that extended well beyond the separate institutions that would support our existence in the form of paid employment. The place where the person worked was not all that important; we would be judged—and rewarded—elsewhere.