When Literature Lost Its Way

How the Literary Academy Abandoned Humanistic Inquiry

I’d always wanted to be a professor of literature. Sitting in Columbia University’s academic advising office during my freshman year at one of America’s premier institutions for literary study, I pressed my heels into the carpet to dispel my nervousness—I was about to plan my journey to the ivory tower. Shaking my advisor’s hand, I remember sharing my vision of myself ten years down the road: I would stalk into a lecture hall in a cashmere collared sweater and glasses, and, poetry book in hand, recite the opening lines of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. Then, I would ask my students what they thought it all meant.

I can’t quite remember my advisor’s exact reaction to that particular vignette, but if she laughed at me, she would have had a point. Ten years from that day, I would not be in academia.

Columbia University nearly eradicated my lifelong love of literature. You might be thinking that anyone asked to read for a living would eventually learn to detest the very act itself, and while this may have contributed to my disillusionment with the literary academy, the real plague that drove me away was something much more insidious: literary theory.

All across American college campuses, literature departments have been infested by a lopsided political agenda that masquerades as “literary theory.” This ideology, often presented under the guise of feminist scholarship, Marxist critical theory, or Postcolonial thought-experiments, has poisoned the study of literature and convinced students of English that the purpose of literature is not to explore the human condition but to drive political and societal change. As a result, literary fields such as publishing, academia, and journalism are increasingly dominated by ideological extremists who seek to bring the focus of literary study away from the humanistic tradition and towards their own political agendas.

What is Literary Theory?

To understand how literature has become captured by the ideological left, we must first understand the concept of literary theory—both a tool for literary interpretation and a lens through which students of literature are asked to consider broader cultural and political debates.

For centuries, literary study has always asked fundamental questions about human nature: “What is the importance of family?” (Anna Karenina), “What is revenge?” (Hamlet), or “What is the nature of love?” (Jane Eyre). More recently, however, the ideological overtake of literary theory by the political left has convinced young students of literature that all literature must necessarily speak to contemporary political questions, shifting the discourse away from universals to particulars. Through queer theory, “What is the importance of family?” becomes “What are the oppressive structures inherent in the traditional family model?” Similarly, Postcolonial theory reimagines “What is revenge?” as “How do power dynamics shaped by colonialism inform acts of resistance?” Feminist theory takes “What is the nature of love?” and asks “How does love reinforce or challenge patriarchal systems?” These shifts exemplify how modern literary theory often prioritizes a critique of societal systems over the exploration of timeless, universal questions about human nature. While these new approaches may offer valuable insights in limited settings, they risk narrowing the scope of interpretation by subordinating the text’s inherent questions to contemporary ideological agendas; in turn, the overreach of theory diminishes the magic of literature by reducing it to a political vehicle rather than an art form.

But how did we get here—and why?

Early Literary Study

We can date the modern American academy back to the 19th century, with the emergence of the “liberal arts” education system in many elite universities such as Harvard and Yale. Inspired by the Greek paideia—a type of education concerned with well-rounded humanistic inquiry— scholars of the 1800s such as Matthew Arnold promoted the idea of literature as a repository of moral and cultural wisdom, laying the groundwork for the methods that would shape the study of literature into the 20th century. The liberal arts system, structured around a centralized European canon, emphasized both critical thinking and Protestant ideals yet left many unanswered questions in terms of literature’s actual purpose.

Enter 20th century literary scholars.

Conservative thinkers of this era set out to develop a more centralized purpose to studying literature and believed that education should be instrumental in the development of moral character. Among the most prominent of these intellectuals were Paul Elmer More and Irving Babbitt, who spearheaded the New Humanist school of pedagogical thought. Discrediting the naturalist, romantic, and utilitarian thinkers of the previous century, this movement emphasized the need for humanistic inquiry—asking important questions about what it means to be human—in the literary academy.

Deriving many of their views from the tradition of classical liberalism, More and Babbitt had a heavy influence on my personal literary idol, the American-turned-British poet T.S. Eliot—arguably the most important forerunner of modern literary criticism. Drawing on More and Babbitt’s foundation, Eliot devised the school of thought we know today as New Criticism—the default method of literary analysis presented in American high school classrooms. While its formal name has fallen out of fashion, New Criticism is the methodology we all know today as “close reading.” With its relatively straightforward premise of deriving meaning through the observation of word connotation and sentence structure, New Criticism soon established itself as the dominant ideology of the early 20th century literary academy. While its reign never quite faded into total oblivion, it would soon be overshadowed by the beast of literary theory.

Russian Formalism

Across the ocean, in a Russia shattered by a recent revolution, the Russian Formalists aimed to create a system of textual analysis that would focus on a work’s structural or linguistic elements rather than its relationship to politics. Leading Russian Formalist critic Roman Jakobson, for one, believed that a text’s distinctive syntactic features were inseparable from its fundamental meaning, and it was through this close analysis of syntax that the Russian Formalists proposed we approach literature. Rejecting the idea that literature should be evaluated on the basis of its ideological or moral messaging, Russian Formalism instead focused on how narrative structures and poetic devices shape the meaning of a given literary text.

As Russian Formalism seeped into the American academy, it gained immense popularity and was soon established alongside New Criticism as the dominant mode of literary thought. And had the study of literature been organized around a broader scope of texts instead of a primary Western canon, perhaps they would have retained their rightful place in the academy. Instead, scholars soon encountered a seemingly insuperable problem: if you keep close-reading the same set of texts, you eventually run out of new things to say.

The ebb of New Criticism and Russian Formalism thus gave way to a new ideology: progressivism.

The Influence of Pragmatists and Progressives

While Babbitt pushed a model of education that primarily focused on the individual—i.e., the effect of a given text on personal moral development—his main adversaries, a group of philosophers belonging to a school of thought called Pragmatism, believed that education could not be self-contained and introduced the concept of “practical effects” to the educational sphere, according to which any object might be defined by the nature of its external repercussions. Under this model, the big names in Pragmatism—Charles Sanders Peirce, John Dewey, and William James—began to blur the dictates of objective truth; by 1903, in a lecture delivered at Harvard University, Peirce encouraged this pragmatic maxim to “allow any flight of imagination provided this imagination ultimately alights upon a possible practical effect.” In other words, Peirce and his fellow pragmatists began to claim that individual truths were predicated on one’s surrounding reality. Dewey, in turn, believing that education should serve a social function, founded the University of Chicago Lab School, an experimental private institution founded on the premise of learning through discovery of individual truths. It was at this school that I spent my most foundational intellectual years.

I do not wish to blame the Pragmatists for the downfall of our society, but if you sense where this might be going, you might observe that this innocuous group of philosophers opened quite the can of worms. And while the Pragmatists didn’t explicitly dabble in literary theory, their educational philosophy soon found its way to Babbitt’s greatest rivals—the Progressives. Backed by Woodrow Wilson, the Progressives incorporated pragmatist philosophy into their teachings and introduced the idea of government intervention in education as a function of greater social good. By the 1930s, Babbitt’s classical liberalism was on the way out, and a new perspective—based on fostering empathy and social awareness—was born. Thus literature shifted away from its humanist ideals toward humanitarian ones.

Reader-Response Theory

Meanwhile, back in the literary academy, scholars such as Louise Rosenblatt and Wolfgang Iser, influenced by this new strain of progressivism, began toying with the idea that a reader’s personal experience is central to understanding a given literary work. Borrowing from Rosenblatt and Iser, critics William K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley soon published a 1947 essay titled “The Intentional Fallacy,” which challenged the concept of authorial intent and proclaimed that a reader’s response to a given text should be independent of its author’s original intention. This revolutionary idea—that it didn’t matter what the author meant—gained immediate traction in the academy and soon became the cornerstone of many schools of contemporary literary thought.

In the present day, this method of analysis is often associated with Yeshiva University professor Stanley Fish, whose writing focuses on subjective reader experience and argues that the meaning of a given text should depend almost entirely on a reader’s individual interpretation. According to Fish, meaning is not inherent in a given literary text but is rather produced by “interpretive communities”—groups of readers (e.g. academic departments, fan clubs, or students in a single classroom) who share a set of conventions and strategies for making sense of the texts in front of them. This method, Fish argues, allows for “shared understanding,” even if such an understanding is not the “correct” one.

While Reader-Response theorists did not completely obliterate objective meaning from the study of literature, they certainly contributed to its downfall.

Structuralism

But before we jump ahead to the complete erasure of the concept of objective truth from the literary academy (it’s coming), let’s take a brief detour to France.

The year is 1916. A posthumous publication of a series of lectures by Ferdinand de Saussure effectively creates the field of modern linguistics and redefines the way that we think of words. Saussurean linguistics—as outlined in his Course in General Linguistics—is predicated on the concept of the “sign,” a double entity that is composed of a “signifier” and its “signified.” Picture a horse, for example. Under the Saussurean linguistic system, the physical horse standing before us is the “signified” and the word “horse” is the “signifier” that denotes the idea of a horse in our language. We use words to communicate meaning, and the meaning of each “signifier” is inherently tied to its “signified.” If I say the word “cat,” for instance, an image of a different sort of animal materializes in your brain. However, that horses are called “horses” and cats are called “cats” is completely arbitrary—at least according to Saussure. There’s no particular reason, Saussure argues, that a horse is called a “horse” and not a “kompumpum” (I made that up, please don’t attempt to Google it).

Signs, then, are completely arbitrary in our language—or in any language. But they are not only arbitrary but also differential: their value is determined by the nature of the other signs around them. You knew I was talking about a physical horse because I told you to picture a horse, but if I had told you to picture two little kids horsing around, you’d have a completely different image in your mind despite the fact that I’d just used the same word. The idea here is that we know what words mean based on context—and that no words can attain their proper meaning when considered in a vacuum.

Saussure meant no harm. He was only attempting to explain how language works. But his revolutionary Structuralist ideas quickly paved the way for the rise of Post-Structuralism and Deconstruction—which began to erode academic discipline in the literary world once and for all.

Post-Structuralism & Deconstruction

Claude Lévi-Strauss, the father of Post-Structuralism, was not a literary critic but an anthropologist. By now, you might be picking up on a pattern—few theorists who contributed to the downfall of intellectual rigor in the literary academy had anything to do with literature at all. Yet Lévi-Strauss’s ideas were instrumental to the development of postmodern literary thought, and he remains one of the most widely read figures in the academy today.

Borrowing from Saussure, Lévi-Strauss argued that the fundamental unit of structure in mythology—what he called the mytheme—could be explained using a concept called binary opposition theory. Lévi-Strauss was initially only interested in the field of ethnography and the way in which different civilizations have historically approached mythology, yet his contributions to ethnography were quickly repurposed in English departments across the world.

Following an infamous trip to Brazil, Lévi-Strauss set out to reinterpret Saussure’s Structuralism by arguing that just as the meaning of language arose from setting words in opposition to one another, cultural myths have always been constructed by juxtaposing two opposing ideas. Drawing heavily on the Hegelian dialectic, Lévi-Strauss demonstrated that mythology was created by humans to reconcile and examine opposing concepts in life and to help us understand binaries such as good/evil, day/night, man/woman, etc.

That rings true—even cross-culturally. But what does that have to do with literary theory?

Well, Lévi-Strauss’s reinterpretation of Saussure’s Structuralism was central in establishing the school of Post-Structuralism that surfaced in the 1960s and still informs literary study today—and an academy that soon became obsessed with destroying the idea of the binary.

But it is no accident that our society began to lose faith in the notion of objective truth specifically when it did: midway through the twentieth century. The advent of World War II had shattered worldwide trust in both classical liberalism and the old order, leaving previously established truths either in complete shambles or in danger of subversion. By the 1960s, societies across the Western world had experienced a fair share of revolutions that disrupted the way the West had always conceptualized liberal ideals. Worldwide social reform throughout the decade opened up the academy to more progressive ideas amongst members of the New Left. When the Marxist thinker Herbert Marcuse, for one, joined the faculty at Columbia University, he brought his theory of “repressive tolerance” to the literary sphere, arguing that traditional tolerance in society perpetuates repressive ideologies and that true liberation can occur only when society becomes intolerant of hierarchies based on race, class, gender, etc. Marcuse’s ideas found fertile ground in the academy, where scholars began questioning the notion that literature could be viewed outside of a sociopolitical context, and by 1966, an Algerian-French professor named Jacques Derrida published a lecture presented at Johns Hopkins University called “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.”

It was this essay that would change literary theory forever.

Derrida’s lecture drew heavily on Saussure and Lévi-Strauss, but unlike his predecessors, Derrida believed that Structuralist theory relied too heavily on the idea of a privileged “center.” In Derrida’s view, binary opposition in the West had always developed with a hierarchical dimension that necessarily privileged one binary over the other. Good always trumped evil, day always trumped night, man always trumped woman, and so on. But what if nights were equally valid? And weren’t women just as competent as men?

There is, of course, value in Derrida’s claims. The problem, however, is not that women can’t be superior to men but that when you eliminate hierarchies as a whole on a societal level—when you tell human beings that evil is just as valid as good (because who is to say what constitutes evil and what qualifies as good?)—you begin to open doors to a nefarious system of moral relativism that strips human beings of the very tenets of existence that have always given them meaning.

The following year, Derrida adapted this morally relativistic view into his longer work Of Grammatology, where he set out to deconstruct the entire history of what he termed “Western Metaphysics.” In Of Grammatology, Derrida argued that the Western tradition had always privileged one side of the binary over the other—specifically, speech over writing—and in so doing coined the term “logocentrism” to identify a system in which words constitute an objective, external reality and create immediate access to meaning. For Derrida, this mode of interpreting the world around us was a giant faux pas. Logocentrism thus took on a negative connotation as Derrida began to destroy the pillars of objective reality and create a school of thought called Deconstruction. In Derrida’s view, the idea that the meaning of literature—or any other facet of external reality—was so readily accessible to readers was flawed almost to the point of deplorability. There was no objective meaning in literature—and those who purported to extract it were doing the whole thing wrong.

It was thus that Derrida created a world where objective humanistic inquiry in literature was on its way to extinction.

Postmodernism

Following in Derrida’s footsteps, as well as in those of Wimsatt and Beardsley, French critic Roland Barthes shifted literature’s burden of meaning entirely to the reader with the publication of his 1967 essay “The Death of the Author.” As its title suggests, Barthes claimed that authorship and historical context were irrelevant to literary hermeneutics—and that a reader’s personal interpretation of a given text should take precedence over its objective meaning.

Two years later, fellow French postmodern scholar Michel Foucault reinforced Barthes’ ideas with the delivery of his lecture “What Is an Author,” insisting that the concept of “author” itself was simply a societally constructed abstraction that had historically served to ascribe meaning to a given autonomous text. If you’re familiar with this fashionable concept of the “social construct,” you might not be surprised to learn that Foucault was one of its prime architects. In fact, Foucault’s four-volume History of Sexuality, which explored the development of and attitudes towards sexuality in the West, introduces the idea that sexual morality is culturally relative and that sexuality itself is ultimately just a social construct. These writings soon set the stage for queer and feminist studies, which would politicize literary study once and for all.

Queer, Feminist, Marxist, and Postcolonial Studies

The year is now 1976. Even before Foucault made his entrance onto the academic stage, the concept of objective truth was already losing ground in the academy. The expansion of American higher education after World War II resulted in a massive influx of PhD students, who, pressured to publish at astronomical speeds, aligned themselves with the hazy theorizing of the French postmodernists rather than adhering to academically rigorous inquiry. It didn’t help that McCarthyism of the previous decades had propelled an overwhelming number of self-proclaimed Marxists into the academy, who welcomed intellectual dissidents rejected from all other mainstream institutions.

Feminist and gender theorists thus entered the spotlight in swarms, with writers such as Judith Butler and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick building on Foucault’s lazy theorizing and setting out to redefine society’s conception of “gender”—especially in the context of literary analysis. Ethnic studies followed suit, with the entrance of Edward Said and Gayatri Spivak’s Postcolonialism examining the repercussions of white exploitation of colonized peoples in both literary and anthropological studies. Around this same time, Columbia and UCLA Law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw began to advocate for the welfare of marginalized black voices and thereby established Critical Race Theory and intersectionality. The Neo-Marxism of Walter Benjamin, Frederic Jameson, and Theodor Adorno similarly informed the ensuing discourse on equity in the academy and soon became yet another staple of literary criticism. Out of Neo-Marxism came Stephen Greenblatt’s New Historicism, which stripped literature of its “fixed” literary value and ascribed objective literary quality to the existing power structures of the time.

By the 1980s and early 1990s, the ideological transformation of the academy was complete.

Literature in the Academy Today

Today, literary study is no longer an academic pursuit but a battleground for social justice, where the value of a given work is judged less by its aesthetic or intellectual merit and more by the political and social messages it conveys (or, in many cases, the messages imposed upon it). The literary academy has become an intellectual playground for identity-based literary criticism—feminist, post-colonial, and queer theory, to name a few—and seeks to challenge traditional, “mainstream” narratives through theory, which has become an excuse for academics to parrot certain ideologies over others. This approach is not merely a matter of prioritizing one overly-politicized lens over another—rather, it has become the only acceptable way to study literature, with all dissenting viewpoints shunned and eradicated.

Because literary theory has become the sine qua non for the study of literature, there is no more room for conservatives or traditionalists in the English departments across America. Furthermore, as English departments continue to dig themselves further into the theory rabbit hole, many scholars of literature are no longer studying literature itself. In the spring of 2024, for instance, we witnessed the overtake of college campuses by the ideological far left through illegal encampments; these prolonged protests, which often culminated in hatred and violence, were often led by graduate students in English departments and other related fields. They spouted the rhetoric of Edward Said and claimed that they were doing social justice work—without knowing a thing about the world outside of the narrow viewpoints they had been taught in their departments.

By the time I hit my own graduate years at Columbia, I had learned every detail about Karl Marx and Judith Butler yet had been asked to read only a few—if any—novels as a part of my program. Moreover, I found myself among a cohort of students driven not by love of art and beauty but by hatred and resentment.

The following year, I withdrew from academia.

Looking back, I recognize that the problem arises with the way that English departments teach students to analyze literature—far-left schools of literary theory have become so intertwined with literary study that it seems unfathomable to think that they might have very little to do with the study of literature itself.

Yet this narrow-minded focus on ideology obscures the broader, more universal themes that literature can and should address, resulting in an environment where literature is less about exploring the complexities of the human experience and more about advancing a particular political agenda. In many cases, these agendas have nothing to do with the texts in the English literary canon (though this notion in itself is on its way out as well) and are artificially imposed through the methods of postmodernist thinkers. Literary study, once a place for deep intellectual engagement, has thus been reduced to an ideological battle, and literature itself has become nothing more than a political vehicle, abstracted from its former glory as an art form.

But true lovers of the humanities know that the fundamental purpose of literature is not to create societal change but to fill the world with beauty through which we can better understand ourselves.

I once thought that I was alone in loving literature in this peculiar way, but I know now that there are so many reasonable voices who are equally as disheartened by literature’s annexation by the far left—and that we can do our part to encourage modern readers to consider literature in a different way and restore it to its onetime place among the classically liberal tradition. Above all else, literature is an expression of human emotion and beauty, and if we are to salvage humanistic inquiry, we must emphasize literature’s ability to explore the human condition and foster empathy across cultural and historical boundaries. By re-centering the study of literature on its aesthetic and philosophical dimensions, we can preserve its relevance and richness for future generations.

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