The Columbia History of the American Novel

academics and artists that such self-governance depends on establishing 'the experts' monopoly of knowledge.' Seen in this light, 'Art for Art's sake' is a paradigmatically professional credo, since every profession

aggrandizes itself most effectively by identifying with a higher standard than self-interest. This double motive is reflected in the argument all professions offer as their justification, the argument that in order to serve the needs of others properly, professions must be accountable only to themselves.

In the words of Eliot himself, 'professionalism in art [is]…hard work on style with singleness of purpose' — in short, literary professionalism manifests itself in artistic formalism and New Criticism, both based on the doctrine of aesthetic autonomy. Discussing this same 'autonomy aesthetic,' Peter Burger points out that it 'contains a definition of the function of art: it is conceived as a social realm that is set apart from the means-end rationality of daily bourgeois existence. Precisely for this reason, it can criticize such an existence.' And, in fact, the service that both art and criticism have offered the -691- twentieth century has been a constitutively professional one: the analysis of culture from an allegedly disinterested and uninvolved perspective.

The claim to an aloofness from the marketplace is a dubious one at best, not least because the professionalization of 'serious' literature has coincided with the movement of the writers of that literature into the academy. As the founding editor of Perspective magazine recalls,

The generation of writers that shaped twentieth century literature (Eliot, Pound, Hemingway, Faulkner, etc.) earned their livings outside of Academia. In the forties, there was a mass migration of writers into the universities as teachers of courses in 'creative writing.'

This dating of the professionalization of creative writing coincides with a marked growth in academic publication: sociologist Diana Crane's 'analysis of the growth of publications in English literature from 1923 to 1967 reveals a linear pattern of growth until 1939, followed by a very slow rate of exponential growth (doubling every seventeen years rather than every ten years as in the basic science literature).' Some would say, as Per Gedin does, that the result of this coincidence has been 'the development of a literary activity which in many cases exists only for the critics.'

In 'The Shaping of a Canon: U.S. Fiction, 1960–1975' (Politics of Letters [1987]), Richard Ohmann argues that, in addition to sales and major reviews, attention from intellectuals (who in twentiethcentury America tend to be academics) and inclusion on the college syllabus also play a crucial role in establishing literary merit. A book must sell well in order to survive in the short run, regardless of its merit, but a book must also receive the imprimatur of academia if it is to survive in the long run. Ohmann sees inclusion on the college syllabus as the 'all but necessary' form of that imprimatur: 'the college classroom and its counterpart, the academic journal, have become in our society the final arbiters of literary merit, and even of survival [for literature].'

According to Gerald Graff, there was no such thing as a course in the modern novel until the very end of the nineteenth century, and it was not until the middle of our own century that even 'serious' contemporary fiction would have been considered an acceptable sub-692- ject for academic study. It has only been in the last twenty years that English departments have routinely offered courses in contemporary literature, and only in the last ten that this has established itself as a field in its own right within the discipline. New Direction's James Laughlin corroborates Graff's account when he recalls:

At Harvard in '33, believe it or not, there still were no courses being given in [Eliot, Pound, Yeats, and Joyce]. They were not yet accepted….in those days, the Professor of Rhetoric…would get so angry if the name of Eliot or Pound were mentioned in his course that he would ask the student to leave the room.

Laughlin and Graff (and many others) again point to World War II as the turning point: after the war, Graff says, 'an institution that had once seen itself as the bulwark of tradition against vulgar and immoral contemporaneity [became] the disseminator and explainer of the most recent trends.' Harold Rosenberg, in a 1960 essay entitled 'Everyman a Professional' (The Tradition of the New [1982]), offers the broadest cultural explanation for this shift when he says that in an age of specialization teaching has become a matter of

popularization, which acts as journalistic or educational intercessor between the isolated mind of the theorist-technician and the fragmented psyche of the public, [and] is the most powerful profession of our time… gaining daily in numbers, importance and finesse.

In his essay 'After the Book?' from On Difficulty, and Other Essays (1978), George Steiner goes so far as to suggest that reading itself is splitting into real and pseudo literacy, the former practiced by a small elite mostly consisting of academics, the latter describing the limits of the practice of reading in the culture at large. In Steiner's view, there is nothing wrong with this, except that the elite today no longer has the power or receives the respect that it deserves. On the substance of Steiner's point, Ted Solotaroff agrees, remarking with regret on 'the widening gulf between the publishing culture and the literary or even literate one. For if the former is advancing steadily into the mass culture, the latter is retreating to a significant extent from it into the confines of the university.' Solataroff does cite the influx of writers into academia as a solution of sorts to the 'age-old' problem of the starving artist, but he sees a danger in the increasingly -693- common career-path of the writer from MFA student to teacher of writing, with little adult experience outside the university.

Indeed, many of the authors discussed by these critics have, like the 36 percent of the writers surveyed by Kingston and Cole, spent all or most of their adult lives in the academy. They are also mostly male: though he doesn't point it out, less than 20 percent of the authors whom Ohmann calculates to have made it into the 'intermediate stage in canon formation' are women. Moreover, as the discussion of professionalism in literature might lead us to expect, the authors named are frequently those whose fiction emphasizes formal elements, sometimes at the expense of narrative.

In Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1984), Pierre Bourdieu argues that 'to assert the autonomy of production is to give primacy to that of which the artist is master, i.e., form, manner, style, rather than the 'subject', the external referent, which involves subordination to functions — even if only the most elementary one, that of representing, signifying, saying something'; this attitude of detachment from function is, he suggests, 'the paradoxical product of conditioning by negative economic necessities — a life of ease — that tends to induce an active distance from necessity.' By contrast, those who cannot afford this distance tend to require representationalism and apply 'the schemes of the ethos, which pertain in the ordinary circumstances of life, to legitimate works of art, [resulting in] a systematic reduction of the things of art to the things of life.' In short, Bourdieu contends that our hierarchy of taste, which values formalist sublimation and detachment more highly than 'vulgar' and unselfconscious realism, serves to reproduce the hierarchy of class.

It also reproduces a hierarchy of gender, and perpetuates the association of the popular (instinctive, unreflective) with the feminine, and the difficult (deliberate, conscious) with the masculine. In his essay 'The Publishing Culture and the Literary Culture' (1984) bemoaning the increasing distance between what is commercially viable and what is artistically valuable, Ted Solotaroff finds hope in the fact that

women writers today have a genuine subject and a passionate constituency, and a really gifted writer — an Alice Walker, Alice Munro, or Anne Tyler, a Lynne Schwartz or a Marilynne Robinson — is able to surmount the obstacles -694- that the conglomerates and the bookstore chains and the mass culture itself place between her and her readers.

Solotaroff's remarks, and his examples, suggest that in order to overcome the barrier between literary merit and marketability, even 'really gifted writers' must still be realists, and must appeal to 'a passionate constituency' — code for 'women readers,' as they are perceived in publishing. This reading may seem to infer too much about the role of gender stereotypes in the literary marketplace, but a prominent woman editor with whom I spoke suggested that 'difficult' fiction is generally written by men and for men, while women writers reach a larger audience (of women) by addressing themselves more directly to spiritual concerns. The flip side of this essentialism is that women who write experimental fiction are likely to be told by editors that their work is not what women