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Some notes on Simon During's talk this past week at Cornell University. Dr. During is professor of literature at Johns Hopkins University.

During's talk began with a move to reconsider the project of literary criticism as a response to pressures on the humanities under the corporate-style regimes of modern university. During explained that such moves, which he described as a return to the primitive questions of a discipline, have proven regenerative for a number of other fields. During surveyed the history of literary criticism and its role in the formation and institutionalization of English departments as distinct from rhetoric, history, or philology.

During traces the development of literary criticism through the work of Eliot, Richards, and Leavis. With some variation between these three, this version of literary criticism is defined by its emphases on the transmission of experience over meaning, the importance of form over content, and on its devaluation of interpretation in favor of aesthetic appreciation. In this form, literary criticism enabled a stance against the fragmenting forces of modernism and and the vulgar tide of popular culture; it was, During argues, a force both anti-capitalist (in positing experience as something unique and noncommodifiable) and yet also anti-democratic (in its insistence that not all experiences were equal).

Given this history, During sees literary criticism as facing a fundamental crisis of purpose in the managed university. Although he argues that it cannot return to its origins, he insists that it needs to reanoint its goals as an intellectual project: the preservation of the value of experience through literature, an investigation of the metaphysics of immanence, an insistence that literature exists both inside and outside of history, and the use of criticism to oppose capital's effects on experience.

It was a wide-ranging and provocative talk, and raised a lot of questions I'm not sure I can fully articulate yet. In case this isn't clear from my notes above, During isn't calling for the end of cultural studies or of other intellectual approaches to texts and textuality so much as he is urging a reconsideration of the value of literature and literary criticism within the managed university. I'll be interested in reading any one's questions or responses, as this topic (in slightly different form) is one very close to my own interests.

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