Richard M. Ohmann (1931–2021)

The “forms” of institutions that are most responsible for the transmission of literacy and culture [‘the folkways of teachers, ‘English departments, ‘freshman composition textbooks,’ the MLA, and the AP system]…often reveal more about culture than do public pronouncements on the humanities, art and society, audiences and interpretation.”
The “activities of research and publication” in literature departments imitate those of the sciences, whose effort is toward the abstract and impersonal. The model is a bad one for us, since our inquiries point ultimately toward the concrete and personal. A critical book or article does not simply record a finding; it demands to be felt, argued, and assimilated into the moral lives of its audience, and it admits of no guild limitations on that audience.” “We are not growing because the field needs growth, but because the population of the world is growing. Our machinery of publication scarcely permits that kind of response, and, as the field grows, will forbid it entirely, and make our enterprise increasingly irrelevant to the business of being human….Given the present structure of the discipline and the present curve of growth, we can look forward with confidence, if not with pleasure, to more research, more unread articles, less relevance of literature to life, more seeking out of neglected works, more coverage for coverage’s sake, more minute specialization, more time-serving and ambition, less and worse teaching, less theory, less community.”… (mer)