Abstract
What is the place of literary studies in the history of its own decline?
In this paper, I will explore three issues: (1) the idioms in which
theory emerged in literary studies in Australasia from the 1980s, (2)
how that emergence has been historicised and how it is described today
by those involved and (3) paradigms for conceiving of the value of
literary studies beyond political equality or transgression for its own
sake. To motivate these aims, the paper will think with the work of
influential critic Simon During. His earliest publications, especially a
1983 reading of Frank Sargeson’s ‘The Hole that Jack Dug’, were central
to launching theory in literary studies in New Zealand. Later, his The
Cultural Studies Reader (1993) helped to transform the discipline in
Australasia. As he notes, disciplinary changes were coeval with
administrative shifts. (As Head of Department at Melbourne University in
the 1990s, as he notes, he ‘spent a great deal of energy restructuring
the department’, and set up a ‘media program, aimed primarily at
overseas students, as well as creative writing and publishing and
editing programs, all for commercial reasons’.) More recently, During
has returned to an interest in F. R. Leavis (familiar from his student
days). A recent essay promoted what he is calling a ‘left conservatism’.
Underlying the larger intellectual trajectory of the period, I will
suggest, is an attempt to address, albeit often in deflected ways, the
vexed relationship between aesthetic judgement and political equality.
These terms have further been shaped by background political shifts that
have fundamentally changed the funding model and pedagogy in
Australasian universities (although this will not be my focus). My paper
will conclude by suggesting that there is now an opportunity to
rearticulate what we understand the value of literary studies to be.
This will not be in the first instance as a form of politics or ethics,
but instead as a distinctive enterprise of judgement.