I’m genuinely grateful for essays like this, even when I find myself disagreeing with them at a foundational level. As someone who was also a literature major, I recognize the longing underneath this piece. Many of us came to literature because we believed books asked the biggest human questions. What does it mean to love? To suffer? To belong? To be human across time and culture?
So I understand the fear that something essential has been lost.
But where I struggle is with the assumption that there isn’t room for all of it.
The article frames literary theory as if it replaced humanistic inquiry rather than expanded it. As if asking questions about power, identity, or history somehow erased beauty, moral reflection, or universality. Yet when I think back on my own education, the opposite was true. Theory didn’t take literature away from me. It complicated it. It made texts feel more alive, not less.
Reading Shakespeare through questions of gender does not cancel Hamlet’s meditation on grief. Reading Morrison through history does not diminish her artistry. Asking how systems shape characters does not prevent us from asking what it means to be human. Literature has always held multiple conversations at once.
What feels narrow to me is the idea that there was ever a pure, apolitical golden age of literary study. The canon itself was built through cultural decisions, exclusions, and historical context. Even “close reading” emerged from a particular intellectual moment with its own assumptions about meaning and authority.
So maybe the better question isn’t: How did theory ruin literature?
Maybe the more helpful questions are:
Are we teaching students how to hold multiple interpretations without collapsing into certainty?
Are we reading widely enough to encounter both beauty and discomfort?
Are we helping readers see literature as art and as a record of human struggle?
And most importantly, are we inviting curiosity rather than prescribing one correct way to read?
Because literature has never survived by narrowing its lens. It survives because each generation asks new questions of old texts and finds itself there anyway.
I’m thankful for the conversation this essay opens, even as I hope we can move beyond the idea that loving literature requires choosing sides. The richest classrooms I experienced were not the ones that abandoned humanistic inquiry, but the ones that trusted literature to be large enough to hold contradiction.
And maybe that spaciousness, more than any single methodology, is what keeps literature alive.
I wanted to study literature like you but the University of Washington was so obsessed with theory that I eventually moved to creative writing. Silly me thought we would spend more time talking about novels than Foucalt.
Now I am sales manager at a software company who reads lots of novels.
I went through the same thing in the late 1980s early 1990’s at UCLA. I dreamt of being a literature professor as well, but my dream was dashed by the garbage of critical theory such as ‘queer’ theory, Marxism, and all the other ‘isms’ which had nothing to do with literature but the rigid ideology of people with a persecution complex. I remember a friend of mine who was working on her Ph.D on Joyce bringing back the MLA for 1989 and seeing the papers that were delivered. One paper that has never left my mind because it was just so outrageous, was on ‘Emily Dickinson and Masturbation’. I couldn’t believe it. I remember reading a review of a book in the NYT’s where a scholar claimed Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony was about ‘rape’. Thanks for writing this piece, people need to know why people like you and me didn’t pursue our dreams because of what’s it’s been turned into. I just finished rereading Wuthering Heights over the weekend as I refuse to see the new film…
If you’re interested in a report from someone who was there and points to a number of interrelated sociological and intellectual issues, I commend to your attention Camille Paglia’s “Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders: Academe in the Hour of the Wolf,“ Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics, Third Series, Vol. 1, No. 2 (Spring 1991), 139-212.
I always considered myself a feral reader. I grew up in rural Wyoming, and beyond being taught how to read, I wasn't given a lot of guidance or encouragement. I discovered reading and quickly developed deep relationships with authors without any similarly deep relationships with other readers or with theory. It's always seemed strange to me that any reader would choose other readers or theory over books and authors.
This is such a sharp and necessary critique. It immediately made me think of R.F. Kuang’s Yellowface—that book is a brutal, honest look at exactly what you’re describing: the publishing industry as a cold, calculating machine that prioritizes 'marketability' over the soul of the work. Having worked in print design before moving into AI engineering, I’ve seen how the 'packaging' of a story has started to matter more than the prose itself. We’re increasingly producing books that are easy to sell but hard to remember. If literature loses its ability to be 'difficult' or 'strange,' it loses its purpose. Thank you for this wake-up call.
Great article! I learned a ton. So do you think this politicization of academic English departments has hit a large majority of schools equally? Or is it less pronounced outside the status-obsessed Ivy League and its northeastern cousins? I wonder if there’s an opportunity for some high-quality liberal arts schools here, to make their name righting the ship, by building the kind of department you imagine?
My PhD work was in Romance languages and literatures. The tsunami of theory hit US French departments a good decade or more before it reached US English departments.
I found much of literary theory interesting, even formative. And, like Chantel Grant, I salute your evident mastery of the core texts even while I question some of your conclusions.
That said, for a variety of reasons I left my program when I reached the ABD level (a master's degree, plus all the course work and exams for the PhD). I went on to spend forty years as a trade and academic book editor.
In the course of that work, I edited both Jacques Derrida and Judith Butler. One of them was open and incredibly gracious. The other was sour, crabbed, and self-important.
It would seem that English departments have been thoroughly hollowed out. I very nearly became an English major. Instead, I got a Bachelors in Anthropology.
And I keep thinking of what Vaclav Havel had to say about the hollowing out he experienced growing up in the Soviet Bloc.
Thank you for a scholarly analysis of the transition of the aesthetic study of literature to the production of sociopolitical propaganda. You've given your readers a lot of valuable history and context. I, for one, am grateful. My latest (not my current) novel is set in the years 1969 through 1976, when my character, a young man, returns from Vietnam to his former life in an Irish working-class neighborhood in Philadelphia. The POV character, Carl Melcher, wants a traditional relationship with a beautiful, but liberal college girl, yet is also enthralled by and caught up in the quickly changing world of the 1970s (drugs, anarchism, free love), a world that is trashing the traditions he and his family took for granted.
I've been trying to find a home for it for two years and will soon publish it myself on Amazon KDP. Although your critical essay lays out the specifics of why my work has not, and never will be published by the Literati, I had already figured out through my own unrewarded efforts that my work is quickly and easily (based on demographic information and POV choice)--though erroneously--identified as binary-biased and quickly dismissed out of hand.
My last commercially published work was published in the early twenty first century (2001-2005), a time you equate with the culmination of the ideological transformation of the 'academy' (and its captive institutions--publishing, literary criticism/review magazines, etc.)
I've lived long enough to have seen (although not as clearly as today) this sad transition.
Thank you for having the courage to lay out your case. It is right on target and so will likely get a lot of push-back.
Excellent analysis, although I would place the loss of faith in established verities back to World War I and its aftermath. Balance-of-great-power diplomacy and small-scale military engagements gave way to wholesale, industrial slaughter and political retribution disguised as international cooperation, thereby laying the groundwork for World War II. Meanwhile, the Bolsheviks replaced autocracy with authoritarianism and literally refashioned existing works of art to suit their political ends, prefiguring today’s academy.
Current MA student, it’s my second career. I got my BA 20 years ago and have been trying to figure out what happened in that time! Can you recommend a book on this or have you thought of writing a book on this? I’m very interested and would love to help you on this!
Thank you. Literary theory today mostly equals anger and blame and very little actual literature ... as you argue. As great literature leaves one with an enriched emotional palette, much theorizing today leaves one feeling diminished, even empty. I say 'mostly' because there have been voices and perspectives I've been introduced to that I would not have been otherwise.
Thank goodness for those mostly outside the academy who can choose what they want to read and whose lives have been and will continue to be enriched deeply by great literature. And when a work touches one deeply, there are many great resources for deeper analysis.
A wonderful essay! May you continue to write and share your ideas in this form.
I’m genuinely grateful for essays like this, even when I find myself disagreeing with them at a foundational level. As someone who was also a literature major, I recognize the longing underneath this piece. Many of us came to literature because we believed books asked the biggest human questions. What does it mean to love? To suffer? To belong? To be human across time and culture?
So I understand the fear that something essential has been lost.
But where I struggle is with the assumption that there isn’t room for all of it.
The article frames literary theory as if it replaced humanistic inquiry rather than expanded it. As if asking questions about power, identity, or history somehow erased beauty, moral reflection, or universality. Yet when I think back on my own education, the opposite was true. Theory didn’t take literature away from me. It complicated it. It made texts feel more alive, not less.
Reading Shakespeare through questions of gender does not cancel Hamlet’s meditation on grief. Reading Morrison through history does not diminish her artistry. Asking how systems shape characters does not prevent us from asking what it means to be human. Literature has always held multiple conversations at once.
What feels narrow to me is the idea that there was ever a pure, apolitical golden age of literary study. The canon itself was built through cultural decisions, exclusions, and historical context. Even “close reading” emerged from a particular intellectual moment with its own assumptions about meaning and authority.
So maybe the better question isn’t: How did theory ruin literature?
Maybe the more helpful questions are:
Are we teaching students how to hold multiple interpretations without collapsing into certainty?
Are we reading widely enough to encounter both beauty and discomfort?
Are we helping readers see literature as art and as a record of human struggle?
And most importantly, are we inviting curiosity rather than prescribing one correct way to read?
Because literature has never survived by narrowing its lens. It survives because each generation asks new questions of old texts and finds itself there anyway.
I’m thankful for the conversation this essay opens, even as I hope we can move beyond the idea that loving literature requires choosing sides. The richest classrooms I experienced were not the ones that abandoned humanistic inquiry, but the ones that trusted literature to be large enough to hold contradiction.
And maybe that spaciousness, more than any single methodology, is what keeps literature alive.
I wanted to study literature like you but the University of Washington was so obsessed with theory that I eventually moved to creative writing. Silly me thought we would spend more time talking about novels than Foucalt.
Now I am sales manager at a software company who reads lots of novels.
Best thing I've read today. Too accurate. You go!
Excellent analysis and summary. I’m sort of glad you left academia, because now your ideas can reach far beyond classroom walls. Thank you, Ms. Libes.
I went through the same thing in the late 1980s early 1990’s at UCLA. I dreamt of being a literature professor as well, but my dream was dashed by the garbage of critical theory such as ‘queer’ theory, Marxism, and all the other ‘isms’ which had nothing to do with literature but the rigid ideology of people with a persecution complex. I remember a friend of mine who was working on her Ph.D on Joyce bringing back the MLA for 1989 and seeing the papers that were delivered. One paper that has never left my mind because it was just so outrageous, was on ‘Emily Dickinson and Masturbation’. I couldn’t believe it. I remember reading a review of a book in the NYT’s where a scholar claimed Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony was about ‘rape’. Thanks for writing this piece, people need to know why people like you and me didn’t pursue our dreams because of what’s it’s been turned into. I just finished rereading Wuthering Heights over the weekend as I refuse to see the new film…
If you’re interested in a report from someone who was there and points to a number of interrelated sociological and intellectual issues, I commend to your attention Camille Paglia’s “Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders: Academe in the Hour of the Wolf,“ Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics, Third Series, Vol. 1, No. 2 (Spring 1991), 139-212.
I always considered myself a feral reader. I grew up in rural Wyoming, and beyond being taught how to read, I wasn't given a lot of guidance or encouragement. I discovered reading and quickly developed deep relationships with authors without any similarly deep relationships with other readers or with theory. It's always seemed strange to me that any reader would choose other readers or theory over books and authors.
If you ever want to lead a movement to replace the word "horse" with "kompumpum," count me in. 💖📚
This is such a sharp and necessary critique. It immediately made me think of R.F. Kuang’s Yellowface—that book is a brutal, honest look at exactly what you’re describing: the publishing industry as a cold, calculating machine that prioritizes 'marketability' over the soul of the work. Having worked in print design before moving into AI engineering, I’ve seen how the 'packaging' of a story has started to matter more than the prose itself. We’re increasingly producing books that are easy to sell but hard to remember. If literature loses its ability to be 'difficult' or 'strange,' it loses its purpose. Thank you for this wake-up call.
It's like that movie American Fiction.
Great article! I learned a ton. So do you think this politicization of academic English departments has hit a large majority of schools equally? Or is it less pronounced outside the status-obsessed Ivy League and its northeastern cousins? I wonder if there’s an opportunity for some high-quality liberal arts schools here, to make their name righting the ship, by building the kind of department you imagine?
My PhD work was in Romance languages and literatures. The tsunami of theory hit US French departments a good decade or more before it reached US English departments.
I found much of literary theory interesting, even formative. And, like Chantel Grant, I salute your evident mastery of the core texts even while I question some of your conclusions.
That said, for a variety of reasons I left my program when I reached the ABD level (a master's degree, plus all the course work and exams for the PhD). I went on to spend forty years as a trade and academic book editor.
In the course of that work, I edited both Jacques Derrida and Judith Butler. One of them was open and incredibly gracious. The other was sour, crabbed, and self-important.
It would seem that English departments have been thoroughly hollowed out. I very nearly became an English major. Instead, I got a Bachelors in Anthropology.
And I keep thinking of what Vaclav Havel had to say about the hollowing out he experienced growing up in the Soviet Bloc.
Thank you for a scholarly analysis of the transition of the aesthetic study of literature to the production of sociopolitical propaganda. You've given your readers a lot of valuable history and context. I, for one, am grateful. My latest (not my current) novel is set in the years 1969 through 1976, when my character, a young man, returns from Vietnam to his former life in an Irish working-class neighborhood in Philadelphia. The POV character, Carl Melcher, wants a traditional relationship with a beautiful, but liberal college girl, yet is also enthralled by and caught up in the quickly changing world of the 1970s (drugs, anarchism, free love), a world that is trashing the traditions he and his family took for granted.
I've been trying to find a home for it for two years and will soon publish it myself on Amazon KDP. Although your critical essay lays out the specifics of why my work has not, and never will be published by the Literati, I had already figured out through my own unrewarded efforts that my work is quickly and easily (based on demographic information and POV choice)--though erroneously--identified as binary-biased and quickly dismissed out of hand.
My last commercially published work was published in the early twenty first century (2001-2005), a time you equate with the culmination of the ideological transformation of the 'academy' (and its captive institutions--publishing, literary criticism/review magazines, etc.)
I've lived long enough to have seen (although not as clearly as today) this sad transition.
Thank you for having the courage to lay out your case. It is right on target and so will likely get a lot of push-back.
Nice to know you are out here.
Impressive analysis. To beauty. Long may it endure.
Excellent analysis, although I would place the loss of faith in established verities back to World War I and its aftermath. Balance-of-great-power diplomacy and small-scale military engagements gave way to wholesale, industrial slaughter and political retribution disguised as international cooperation, thereby laying the groundwork for World War II. Meanwhile, the Bolsheviks replaced autocracy with authoritarianism and literally refashioned existing works of art to suit their political ends, prefiguring today’s academy.
Current MA student, it’s my second career. I got my BA 20 years ago and have been trying to figure out what happened in that time! Can you recommend a book on this or have you thought of writing a book on this? I’m very interested and would love to help you on this!
Thank you. Literary theory today mostly equals anger and blame and very little actual literature ... as you argue. As great literature leaves one with an enriched emotional palette, much theorizing today leaves one feeling diminished, even empty. I say 'mostly' because there have been voices and perspectives I've been introduced to that I would not have been otherwise.
Thank goodness for those mostly outside the academy who can choose what they want to read and whose lives have been and will continue to be enriched deeply by great literature. And when a work touches one deeply, there are many great resources for deeper analysis.
A wonderful essay! May you continue to write and share your ideas in this form.