I

One of the fiercest attacks on the current state of literary studies of the past few years occurs in George Steiner's Real Presences. “At the level of critical-academic interpretation and evaluation,” he states, “the volume of secondary discourse defies inventory… The mass of books and critical essays, of scholarly articles, of acta and dissertations produced each day in Europe and the United States, has the blind weight of a tidal wave” (24). As this last (somewhat mixed) metaphor suggests, Steiner sees this proliferation as highly damaging: “A mandarin madness of secondary discourse infects thought and sensibility” (26). Nor is his rage directed only at the quantity of critical and scholarly productions: “In truth, the bulk of doctoral and post-doctoral ‘research’ into literature, and the publications which it spawns, are nothing more than a grey morass” (35).

While there is much to dislike about Steiner's tone here, I suspect that many of us who have been engaged in the study and teaching of literature over several decades feel at least a twinge of recognition at the picture he paints. To experience something like fellow-feeling in reading a book that seems so badly wrong in its basic thesis – that everything of value in art has a “religious reference or inspiration” (216) – came as something of a surprise to me, and that doubleness of response did not end there. I also found it hard to disagree with Steiner's diagnosis of the causes of what he characterises as “the dilution, the trivialization of the concept of research in the humanities”: first, the “professionalization of the academic pursuit and appropriation of the liberal arts,” and, second, “the humanistic imitation of the scientific” (35). The establishment of a career structure for huge numbers of university employees dependent upon publication of “research” in the humanities, and the modelling of that research upon the sciences, has resulted in a massive increase in the number of articles, reviews, and notes appearing annually in journals, edited collections, annotated editions, online comments, and academic talks. The introduction in certain countries of national assessments of the research produced in specific subjects, on which crucial funding decisions depend, has further increased the quantity of what we have learned to call “outputs.”