What Ought Humanists To Do? - Ricerca sull'intelligenza artificiale specializzata al MIT

What Ought Humanists To Do?

J. Hillis Miller

I am honored to contribute to this issue of Dædalus,
“What Humanists Do.”1 Each contributor was asked
by guest editor Denis Donoghue to identify a text
that has meant much to her or him, then discuss it.
This assignment presupposes that humanists spend
much of their time interpreting texts and promoting
their circulation among their students, readers of
their scholarship, and the general public. It is as
though we contributors were asked, “Come on now,
account for your activities as humanists. Tell us what
you do. Tell us why what humanists do contributes
to the public good!” I promise further on to give
such an accounting for my own work. Primo, Tuttavia,
I need to make a few preliminary remarks.

1) Such an issue of Dædalus would not be needed
if the social utility of what humanists do were not the
subject of widespread doubt. That utility used to be
taken for granted. It is hardly necessary to rehearse
the evidence for this doubt. A high-level adminis-
trator at Harvard is reported to have said a few years
ago, “The humanities are a lost cause.” Humanities
departments around the country are being either
abolished or amalgamated, for example into a single
department of “Literature and Cultural Studies,” or
into a single department of “Foreign Languages.”
President Obama, in his eloquent speeches about
the need for increased support for education in the
stati Uniti, always speaks about science and math,
never once, to my knowledge, about the need for
more and better humanities teaching.

J. HILLIS MILLER, a Fellow of the
American Academy since 1970, È
Distinguished Research Professor
Emeritus of Comparative Literature
and of English at the University of
California, Irvine. His books include
Reading for Our Time: Adam Bede
and Middlemarch Revisited (2012),
The Conflagration of Community: Fic-
tion Before and After Auschwitz (2011),
For Derrida (2009), and Literature as
Conduct: Speech Acts in Henry James
(2005).

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Che cosa
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At the same time, literary studies (my
½eld) paradoxically remain extremely
active. The large number of dissertations,
books, essays, new journals, and confer-
ences worldwide in the ½eld is evidence
of that. A newly advertised university po –
sition in literary studies typically has hun –
dreds of highly quali½ed applicants. Most
of these, ahimè, will remain unemployed,
or employed as adjuncts typically teaching
three or four composition courses a semes-
ter, often at several different colleges, for
a poverty wage and often no bene½ts.

2) A somewhat different answer would
need to be given if instead of asking, “What
do humanists do?” we humanists were
asked, “What did humanists use to do?"
or “What should humanists do now?” The
latter question is perhaps the most chal-
lenging. I have therefore called my essay
“What Ought Humanists To Do?"

3) It would be seriously misleading to
suggest that a literary scholar spends most
of her or his time reading good poems,
novels, and plays and then teaching them
and writing about them. Relatively little
of a literary scholar’s time is spent doing
the sort of work I think Denis Donoghue
has in mind when he asks, “What do hu –
manists do?” From graduate school until
achieving status as a senior professor, lit-
erary scholars, like those in most academic
½elds, spend a great deal of time these days
sending and answering email messages;
serving on time-consuming departmental
and university- or college-wide commit-
tees; writing seemingly innumerable let-
ters of recommendation; serving as a de –
partmental or program administrator;
participating in reading groups; preparing
and giving a multitude of conference pa pers
at home, in the United States, and around
the world; hearing and responding to pa –
pers given by colleagues or campus visitors;
applying for fellowships and post docs;
plan ning new programs and curricula;
eval uating students’ and colleagues’ pa pers

and book manuscripts; meeting students
and colleagues during of½ce hours and in
the halls; responding to requests for sub-
missions of essays for special issues of the
proliferating multitude of journals around
the world, many of which are now online
journals; reading the geometrically in –
creas ing number of books and essays in
one’s ½elds; not to speak of trying, al ways
unsuccessfully, to keep up with the innu-
merable (and to a considerable degree
incompatible) books on theory; writing
commissioned essays like this one that try
to justify literary studies as an important
part of the humanities divisions in colleges
and universities; answering requests to
be interviewed, sometimes for podcasts;
and yes, looking something up on Wiki –
pedia, blogging or using Twitter or Face-
book (the latter two I do not yet do), watch –
ing ½lms or television shows, playing video
games, listening to any one of the innu-
merable forms and subforms of popular
music by way of CDs or iTunes, sur½ng
the Web, and using iPhones or iPads–in
short, doing everything but what many
people assume is the main justi½cation of
a literary scholar’s existence: reading, In –
terpreting, teaching, and writing about pri-
mary literary texts. I forbear even to men-
tion family responsibilities.

No book in literary studies was ever
completed and published except in the face
of multitudinous professional and personal
demands that conspire to keep literary
scholars from doing what is, or what it
seems ought to be, their primary vocation.
Most such work is done in the brief mo –
ments snatched from other duties. For a
number of years, especially while I was a
department chair, I used to get up at ½ve
(modeling myself somewhat laughably on
Anthony Trollope and Paul Valéry) and do
serious writing work until 8 a.m., at which
point my time for “literary studies” was
over for the day. Others work late at night,
when much of the world is sleeping.

Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Scienze

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I am not saying the other work I have
listed is not important. It is essential to the
collective work of sustaining that complex
bureaucracy we call a “college” or a “uni-
versity,” or to keeping a given discipline or
subdiscipline alive. I mean, Tuttavia, Quello
you cannot be sitting in a committee meet-
ing evaluating a colleague for tenure and at
the same time, as the letter from Dædalus
requesting this essay put it, be returning
yet once more to “a text . . . that inspired
and continues to inspire the work [you]
do,” or asking yourself, “What text would
you want to see passed on to the next gen-
eration of scholars and why?"

I turn now to ful½lling my commission
to choose a text and to answer the stated
questions about it. I have found it impos-
sible, Tuttavia, to stick to a single text. My
work has gone through several phases over
the decades. (I don’t mean several theoret-
ical orientations.) I therefore must briefly
discuss two texts, not just one, with some
other citations thrown in.

Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,
Tears from the depth of some divine despair
Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes,
In looking on the happy autumn-½elds,
And thinking of the days that are no more.

Fresh as the ½rst beam glittering on a sail,
That brings our friends up from the

underworld,

Sad as the last which reddens over one
That sinks with all we love below the verge;
So sad, so fresh, the days that are no more.

Ah, sad and strange as in dark summer

dawns

The earliest pipe of half-awaken’d birds
To dying ears, when unto dying eyes

The casement slowly grows a glimmering

square;

J. Hillis
Mugnaio

So sad, so strange, the days that are no more.

Dear as remembered kisses after death,
And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feign’d
On lips that are for others; deep as love,
Deep as ½rst love, and wild with all regret;
O Death in Life, the days that are no more!

–Alfred, Lord Tennyson,
“Tears, Idle Tears” (1847)2

This is one of the songs from Tennyson’s

long narrative poem, The Princess, an early
poem about women’s liberation. (I have,
by the way, downloaded Tennyson’s song
from Wikipedia, to save the bother of typ-
ing it out and to hint at the way the Inter-
net has transformed literary study.) In The
Princess, a group of women have withdrawn
from men’s society to form a new species
of gynæceum, a women’s university where
men are forbidden to enter. The poem is
sung by one of Princess Ida’s maids, in the
presence of the male narrator, who, con
two friends, has invaded the Princess’s do –
main. They disguise themselves in drag.
(I kid you not! Victorian literature con-
tains many unexpected things.) Tennyson
asserted that: “This song came to me on
the yellowing autumn-tide at Tintern Ab –
bey, full for me of its bygone memories. È
the sense of the abiding in the transient.”3
You will probably not be surprised to learn
that in the end, the Princess and the in –
vading Prince marry and live happily ever
after, though the Prince promises to treat
his wife as an equal. So much for the limits
of women’s liberation in Tennyson’s imag –
ination!

I did not know any of this when I ½rst
encountered the poem as a freshman or
sophomore at Oberlin College in 1944 O
1945. It was simply given to me, if I remem-

143 (1) Inverno 2014

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Che cosa
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ber correctly, as one among many poems
to read for an introductory course, without
any context or background information. Or
perhaps I just somehow encountered it.
Ser endipity plays a big role in anyone’s
intellectual development. I was at that
point a physics major. “Tears, Idle Tears”
played a crucial role in my discovery that
my true vocation or calling was for literary
study.4 This was a major turning point in
my life. I shifted from physics to English
as my major in the middle of my sopho-
more year, in part so I could follow up the
questions posed to me by this poem. IO
found, and still ½nd, the poem extremely
moving and beautiful. I wanted to go on
having such pleasures and puzzlements as
reading this poem gave me. I wanted, E
still want, others to have similar pleasures
and to be as puzzled as I was by the ques-
tion of what the poem “really means,” and
why it is a good thing to read it interroga-
tively.

In spite of the good training in English
literature I received at Oberlin and there-
after in graduate school at Harvard, I re –
main to this day puzzled by literary works,
including this one. “Tears, Idle Tears” is a
wonderful poem. I found it, Tuttavia, an
exceedingly strange, even scandalous, use
of language. The word “strange” is, it hap –
pens, a key word in Tennyson’s poem. In
my science courses, I was taught to say the
truth straightforwardly, to explain anom-
alies, and to use language in as uncompli-
cated a way as possible. Tennyson seemed
to me to do no such things. Let me cite
again just the ½rst stanza. To do a full read-
ing of the whole poem would take a great
many pages:

I asked myself, “What in the world does
this mean?” I knew nothing of Ogden
and Richards’s The Meaning of Meaning.5 I
did not mean anything “theoretical” by the
question. I just wanted to be able to iden-
tify a straightforward rational meaning.
My model was data from the stars that are
read to “mean,” for example, that such
and such a star has a surface temperature
of so and so. This assumption was based,
by the way, on an incomplete understand-
ing of the relations among hypothesis, dati
collection, and veri½cation in scienti½c
method. I took for granted, Tuttavia, E
still do, that Tennyson’s words and ½gures
are not just emotive blather, but that they
have precise meaning that can be iden-
ti½ed. I also took for granted, and still do,
that the poem cannot be fully explained
either by its function in The Princess or by
other extrinsic factors, such as Tennyson’s
grief over his friend Arthur Hallam’s
early death. Hallam is buried near Tintern
Abbey, where “Tears, Idle Tears,” “came
to” Tennyson. What does Tennyson mean
by calling his tears idle? In what sense are
these tears, or any other tears, idle? Why
did he write, “I know not what they
mean”? I did not know what they mean
either. The poem is very beautiful. There
is no doubt about that, but so what? E
“tears from the depth of some divine
despair”? What does “divine despair”
mean? It must mean despair of some god.
What god? Gods are not supposed to de –
spair. What is this god in despair about?
How could tears from the depth of some
di vine despair get into the poet’s heart
anyhow, and how could those tears get
from his heart to his eyes? Up the aorta
and so on, by a devious route? Why are
the autumn-½elds paradoxically “happy”?
I thought they were just inhuman matter.
Why personify them in this contrary-to-
fact way?

In short, I had dozens of interrelated
questions about just these few lines. Ten-

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nyson’s own comments, by the way, do
not seem to me all that helpful. Just to say,
as he did say, that the poem is about what
he as a boy called “the passion of the past”
and to add, “it is the distance that charms
me in the landscape, the picture and the
past, and not the immediate to-day in
which I move,”6 evades more than it
explains the question of what Tennyson
meant, Per esempio, by “the depth of some
divine despair.” It seems to me, Inoltre,
that simply to read the poem out loud to
students, as teachers often used to do, E
to say how beautiful it is, is not enough.
Yes, I agree. It is beautiful. But what does
it mean? I think we are justi½ed in de –
manding a high degree of “explicability”
from literary works and in demanding
that our teachers help students in this her –
meneutic work. The poem can only cor-
rectly “do,” performatively,7 if we know
what it “means.” Why, I continued to won-
der, should it matter whether I read and
understood this poem or not?

I wanted to ½gure out answers to these
questions, to account for the poem in the
way astrophysicists account for data from
outer space. Decades after my shift from
physics to literature, I wrote an essay try-
ing, belatedly, to answer those questions I
had about “Tears, Idle Tears.”8 I say briefly
below how I would answer those questions
now.

What was wrongheaded about my orig –
inal project took me some years to dis-
cover. I am still discovering it; questo è, still
trying to come to terms with the irrecon-
cilability, as Paul de Man puts it, of her –
meneutics and poetics, meaning and the
way meaning is expressed.9 A shorthand
description of my mistake would be to
say that data from the stars and the linguis-
tic “matter” that makes up poems require
fundamentally different methodologies of
“accounting for.” Without intending to
do so I had encountered the challenges of
interpreting ½gurative language as used

in literature. I have spent my whole life
since that fall of 1945 trying to account for
this aspect of various presumptively liter-
ary works. That is what I most like to do:
reading, teaching, lecturing, and writing
about print literature, trying to ½gure out
what a given text or poem really says, E
passing that accounting-for to students
in my courses and to readers of essays and
books that I write. Though I have long been
interested in theory, theory is, for me at
least, not an end in itself. Theory is ancil-
lary, a handmaid to reading literature. IO
need just as much theory as is necessary
for that, and no more. Writing books and
essays has for me, I add, always been
indissolubly related to teaching and lec-
turing. Nothing beats trying out on a class
a way of reading a given poem for ½nding
out whether that reading “flies” or not.

I would say now that the ½rst stanza of
“Tears, Idle Tears” is a complex but en –
tirely comprehensible extended ½gure of
speech. Tears tend to arise spontaneously,
often in ways that forbid knowing their
meaning or expressing it rationally. In this
case, the speaker of the poem weeps in
looking at the happy autumn-½elds and
thinking of the days that are no more. An
oxymoronic combination of presence and
absence characterizes both autumn ½elds
(which are still happily verdant but about
to die) and the past as remembered. IL
past is vividly present to memory but is
remembered as lost forever, just as the
happy autumn-½elds will soon be wintry.
Both of these are something to weep about,
partly because they imply my own mor-
tality. In an analogous way, Gerard Manley
Hopkins ends “Spring and Fall: to a young
child,” a poem about a little girl who weeps
at the sight of “Goldengrove unleaving,"
by asserting that Margaret is, without
knowing it or meaning it, weeping for her
own mortality and for her share in origi-
nal sin. The Fall of Adam and Eve was the
cause of seasonal changes in the ½rst place.

J. Hillis
Mugnaio

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143 (1) Inverno 2014

Che cosa
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To Do?

No seasons pass in the Garden of Eden
before the Fall. The resonances between
Tennyson’s poem and Hopkins’s are evi-
dent, as well as the differences. Tennyson,
Per esempio, says nothing so overtly about
original sin as Hopkins does:

Sórrows spríngs áre the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.10

Like the leaves in autumn, Margaret too
will die, as will the speaker of “Tears, Idle
Tears.” The conflicted internal state of the
latter is projected spontaneously as an oxy –
moronic personi½cation into the “happy
autumn-½elds.” The tears are “idle,” the
poem implies, because they are ineffective.
Nothing will keep those leaves from fal –
ling, nor me from dying.

The most dif½cult part of Tennyson’s
extended image is those lines that describe
the “idle tears” as coming from “the depth
of some divine despair” rising in the heart
and gathering to the eyes. This beautiful
spatial trope is a version of the basic
Christian assumption, going back to St.
Augustine, and before that to the Bible,
that at its depths the human self is ground-
ed in God and continuous with Him. IL
speaker’s tears come from God and move
upward through his or her heart, the lo –
cation of emotions, to his or her eyes. Noi
weep only when we are deeply moved.

Tennyson’s twist on this ancient theo-
logical trope is to think of God not as a
solid rock, ground of the self, but as Him-
self divided, in a state of despair. God’s
despair, the rest of the poem makes clear,
is over the impossibility, in the created
human and natural worlds at least, since
the Fall, of healing the ½ssure of presence
and absence in the landscape and in
memory. The latter is what Tennyson
calls “the passion of the past” as that past
is visibly embodied, for example, In

autumn-½elds, O, later in the poem, in un
ship disappearing below the horizon or
rising above it once more.

The ½gurative interplay in the ½rst ½ve
lines of “Tears, Idle Tears” is “complex”
because it expresses triple substitutions
among three regions: the landscape, IL
speaker’s mind and feelings, and the rela-
tion between subjectivity and God. Each
de½ned in terms of the others, in a per-
petually shifting reciprocal interchange.
If you set your mind to it, with minimal
knowledge of the Western tradition and
of the way ½gurative language works, it is
not all that dif½cult to “½gure out” what
Tennyson’s poem “means.” What is re –
markable, Tuttavia, is the complexity of
the poetic or tropological thought that is
compressed within these ½ve lines that are
so beautiful in rhythm, diction, and allit-
eration (“depth of some divine de spair”).
That beauty is evident even be fore you be –
gin asking yourself what the words mean.
If they were not so beautiful, who would
care so much what they mean? Figuring
out that meaning adds a strong surplus of
pleasure, an “aha! moment” of compre-
hension or illumination, to the initial plea –
sure of the words’ “music,” as one might
call it. My vocation or calling has re –
mained, ever since those long ago days at
Oberlin, to pass, as best I can, that double
pleasure on to my students and readers.

Suddenly I saw the cold and rook-delighting

heaven

That seemed as though ice burned and was

but the more ice,

And thereupon imagination and heart were

guidato

So wild that every casual thought of that

and this

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Vanished, and left but memories, Quello

should be out of season

With the hot blood of youth, of love crossed

long ago;

And I took all the blame out of all sense and

reason,

Until I cried and trembled and rocked to

and fro,

Riddled with light. Ah! when the ghost

begins to quicken,

Confusion of the death-bed over, is it sent
Out naked on the roads, as the books say,

and stricken

By the injustice of the skies for punishment?

–W. B. Yeats, “The Cold Heaven” (1916)11

More and more, as the years have gone

by, and though my vocation for literary
study has remained steadfast, I have found
myself, in rapidly changing university con –
ditions, including the increasing global-
ization of literary study (study of so-called
World Literature), being invited to con-
ferences all over the world where I am
asked to give lectures defending literary
study.12 One example is the International
Conference on Literature Reading and
Research that I attended in Guangzhou
(once called Canton), China, nel mese di settembre
2010, held at the Guangdong University
of Foreign Studies. (Guangdong is the
name of the province.) I chose in my lec-
ture to take Yeats’s “The Cold Heaven” as
a paradigmatic example of the dif½culties
of deciding whether or not we should read
or teach literature now. The poem also ex –
empli½es the dif½culties of explaining such
a text to students at home and globally.
The poem comes from Yeats’s volume of
1916, Responsibilities.

I greatly admire this poem. It moves me
immensely. It moves me so much that I
want not only to read it but also to teach
it and talk about it to anyone who will lis-
ten. I wish I could read it out loud now to

all my readers, with special stresses on
“Suddenly” at the beginning and on the
extraordinary long drawn-out “Ah!” that
is the turning point of the poem. Poetry,
after all, is an oral art, or should still be.
Well, should I read or teach this poem
now, or not? I answer initially that there
is no should about it, no compelling obli-
gation or responsibility. I can read or teach
it if I like, but that decision cannot easily
be justi½ed by anything beyond the call
the poem itself makes on me to read it and
to teach it. Least of all do I think I can tell
students, colleagues, or administrators
with a straight face that reading the poem
or hearing me teach it is going to help
them ½nd a job, or help them mitigate cli-
mate change. Reading the poem with care
might possibly, Tuttavia, help students re –
sist the lies told by the media, as I shall
argue for literature in general below.

Reading “The Cold Heaven” or teaching
it is, ½rst and foremost, a good in itself, an
end in itself, as Kant said all art is. IL
mystical poet Angelus Silesius (1624–1677)
af½rmed, in The Cherubinic Wanderer, Quello
“The rose is without why; it blooms be –
cause it blooms.”13 Like that rose, "IL
Cold Heaven” is without why. The poem,
like a rose, has no reason for being beyond
itself. You can read it or not read it, as you
like. It is its own end. Young people these
days who watch ½lms or television shows,
or play video games, or listen to popular
music do not, for the most part, attempt
to justify what they do. They do it because
they like to do it and because it gives them
pleasure. An academic friend of mine
from Bergen in Norway did not try to jus-
tify his pleasure and excitement in hearing
at great expense the same Stevie Wonder
concert twice, once in Rotterdam and once
again in Bergen. He just emailed me his
enthusiasm about the experience. It was a
big deal for him, just as reading, talking, O
writing about Yeats’s “The Cold Heaven” is
a big deal for me. That importance, how-

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143 (1) Inverno 2014

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ever, is something I should not try to justify
primarily by its practical or social utility.
A natural response when I see a ½lm I
like or hear a concert that moves me is to
want to tell other people about it, as my
correspondent in Bergen wanted to tell
everybody about those Stevie Wonder
concerts. These tellings most often take
the form, “Wow! I saw a wonderful movie
last night. Let me tell you about it.” I sug-
gest that my desire to teach Yeats’s “The
Cold Heaven” takes much the same form:
“Wow! I have just read a wonderful poem
by Yeats. Let me read it to you and tell you
about it.” That telling, naturally enough,
takes the form of wanting to pass on what
I think other readers might ½nd helpful to
lead them to respond to the poem as en –
thusiastically as I do.

I list, in an order following that of the
poem, some of the things that might need
to be explained not only, Per esempio, ad a
young Chinese reader, but also, no doubt,
to a video-game-playing Western young
person ignorant of European poetry. Lit-
erary scholar David Damrosch, in his book
on world literature, presupposes with
equanimity, as do I, that when a given piece
of literature circulates into a different
culture from that of its origin, it will be
read differently.14 I am not talking here,
Tuttavia, about a high-level culturally
embedded reading, but just about mak-
ing sense of Yeats’s poem. This need to
make sense might arise, for example, In
trying to decide how to translate this or
that phrase into Chinese or some other
non-English language.

Here are some things, in the form of
truncated notations, that it might be
good to know when trying to understand
“The Cold Heaven”:

1) Something about Yeats’s life and

works.

2) An explanation of the verse form
used: three iambic hexameter quatrains
rhyming abab. Is it an odd sort of sonnet

in hexameters rather than pentameters,
and missing the last couplet? How does
this form contribute to the poem’s force
and meaning?

3) Knowledge of the recurrent use of
“sudden” or “suddenly” in Yeats’s lyrics, COME
in the opening of “Leda and the Swan”–
“A sudden blow . . ." (VP, 441)–or in the
fourth section of “Vacillation”: “While on
the shop and street I gazed / My body of a
sudden blazed; / And twenty minutes
more or less / It seemed, so great my hap-
piness, / That I was blessèd and could
bless” (VP, 501). In Yeats’s poetry, insight
tends to happen abruptly, unforeseeably,
making a sharp break between before
and after.

4) What sort of bird a rook is and why

rooks are delighted by cold weather.

5) The double meaning of “heaven,” as
“skies” and as the supernatural realm be –
yond the skies, as in the opening of the
Lord’s Prayer, said daily by millions of
Christians: “Our Father who art in heav-
en”; compare “skies” at the end of “The
Cold Heaven”: “the injustice of the skies
for punishment.”

6) An explanation of oxymorons (burn –
ing ice) and of the history in Western
poetry of this particular one.

7) Attempt to explain the semantic
difference between “imagination” and
“heart,” as well as the nuances of each
word.

8) Explanation of “crossed” in “mem –
ories . . . of love crossed long ago,” both
the allusion to Shakespeare’s Romeo and
Juliet as “star-crossed lovers,” that is, COME
fated by the stars to disaster in love, E
the reference to the biographical fact of
Yeats’s disastrous love for Maud Gonne.
She rejected his proposals of marriage re –
peatedly, though they had slept together
twice, so it is to some degree absurd for
him to take responsibility for the failure
of their love. He did his best to persuade
her to marry him.

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9) Account of the difference between
“sense” and “reason” in “I took the blame
out of all sense and reason,” or is this just
tautological? Yeats scholar A. Norman
Jeffares cites T. R. Henn’s explanation that
“‘out of all sense’ is an Irish (and ambigu-
ous) expression meaning both ‘to an extent
far beyond what common sense could
justify’ and ‘beyond the reach of sensa-
tion.’”15

10) Explanation of the double meaning
of the verb “riddle” in the marvelous
phrase, “riddled with light”: “riddle”
meaning punctured with holes, and “rid-
dle” as having a perhaps unanswered riddle
or conundrum posed to one. Being riddled
with light is paradoxical because light is
supposed to be illuminating, not obscuring.
11) Unsnarling of the lines centering on
“quicken” in “when the ghost [Senso
disembodied soul] begins to quicken, /
Confusion of the death bed over.” “Quick –
en” usually refers to the coming to life of
the fertilized egg in the womb. An erotic
love-bed scene is superimposed on the
death-bed one.

12) “As the books say”: which books?
Those books in esoteric philosophy and
folklore that Yeats read.

13) Relate “injustice of the skies for
punishment” to the usual assumption that
heaven only punishes justly, gives us our
just deserts after death. Why and how can
the skies be unjust? By blaming him for
something that was not his fault? Connect
this to Greek and later tragedy. It is not
Oedipus’s fault that he has killed his fa –
ther and fathered children with his mother,
or is it? After all, he did commit parricide
and incest, even though unintentionally.
14) Why is the last sentence a question?
Is it a real question or a merely rhetorical
one? Would the answer ½nd its place if the
blank that follows the twelve lines of this
defective sonnet were ½lled? The poem
seems both too much in line lengths and
too little in number of lines.

15) Finalmente, Chinese readers, as well as
Western ones, might like to know, or might
even observe on their own, that Yeats, like
other European poets of his generation,
was influenced in this poem and elsewhere
by what he knew, or thought he knew,
through translations, of Chinese poetry
and Chinese ways of thinking. The volume
Responsibilities, which contains “The Cold
Heaven,” has an epigraph from someone
Yeats calls, somewhat pretentiously,
“Khoung-Fou-Tseu,” presumably Confu-
cius: “How am I fallen from myself, for a
long time now / I have not seen the Prince
of Chang in my dreams” (VP, 269). Chi-
nese readers and readers generally might
have a lot to say about this Chinese con-
nection and about how it makes “The Cold
Heaven” a work of world literature.

All this information would be given to
my hearers or readers, Tuttavia, not to
“expand their minds,” but in the hope that
it might help them admire the poem as
much as I do and be moved by it as much
as I am. Being moved in the right way, IO
argue, depends on understanding, O
should do so. The affect is a performative
effect of comprehending the words rightly.
Yeats’s poem can hardly be described as
“uplifting,” since its thematic climax is a
claim that the skies are unjust and punish
people for things of which they are not
guilty. That is a terrifying wisdom. Telling
others about this poem is not something I
should do but something I cannot help
doing, something the poem urgently calls
on me to do.

I end by asserting the irreplaceable value

of literature and literary studies. First the
bad news, then the good. Most people
know that enrollments in literature courses
have gone down and that people nowa-
days read less print literature. This dimin –
ishing of literary studies has been brought
about partly by the gradual turning of our
colleges and universities in the direction

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of becoming trade schools, preparation
for getting a job. Such institutions have
less and less place for the humanities in
the old sense of their essential role in a
liberal arts education.16

Perhaps even more threatening to old-
fashioned literary studies, Tuttavia, ha
been the amazingly rapid development of
new teletechnologies that are fast making
printed book literature obsolete, a thing
of the past. Even many of those who could
teach literature, who were hired to do so,
choose rather, for good reasons, to teach
other topics instead: the history of West-
ern imperialism, or ½lm, or video games,
or some one among the multitude of race,
genere, or performance studies, or another
of those myriad and still-proliferating
other interests that have replaced or sub-
ordinated literature for many humanists.
More and more courses are being offered
not in a classroom, but as moocs, massive
open online courses, circulating on the
Internet. A large proportion of these are in
math, science, and economics, but some
are in the humanities.17 Millions of stu-
dents already use them. moocs are on the
face of it problematic and controversial,
but I doubt if that will stop their prolifer-
ation, nor their rapid transformation of
higher education. If a new telecommuni-
cation technology exists, its widespread
use seems for some reason irresistible.
Who would have thought that iPhones,
Google, Facebook, and Twitter would so
quickly become indispensable to so many
millions worldwide?

Our present-day humanists can hardly
be blamed for wanting to teach what in –
terests them, what has shaped their lives
and those of their students. Though an
immense number of books, essays, E
courses about print literature are still being
produced or taught each year, enrollment
in courses on such old-fashioned topics
as “The Victorian Novel” is considerably
down in most colleges and universities.

New monographs about print literature,
however sophisticated they may be about
narrative theory and literary history, typ-
ically sell only a few hundred copies at
most, whereas a successful video game
sells millions of copies and does really have
a big cultural effect on a lot of people, for
better or worse. If Shakespeare were to
return today, he would most likely not
write plays but ½lm or television scripts
O, perhaps, employ the latest technology
and “write” video games.

The new digital devices–computers,
iPhones, iPads, Facebook, Twitter, video
games, and the like–are rapidly dimin-
ishing the role literature plays in many
people’s lives. A lot of people these days
play video games or watch ½lms on Netflix
or surf the net instead of reading printed
literature. That is a big loss, but it is not
the end of civilization, any more than was
the shift from manuscript culture to print
culture.

Now the good news: The reading, study,
and teaching of literature is surviving more
strongly than one might expect even in
the midst of an exceedingly rapid and no
doubt irreversible global change from
one dominant medium (print) to another
(digital). A lot of people continue to read
literature, but in digital form–on Kindles
and the like. I walked down an airplane
aisle not long ago and spotted ten people
reading what looked like novels, but eight
of them were doing that on an e-reader.
At least they were reading literature, non
playing video games. An amazing number
of literary works (in the old-fashioned
sense of printed novels, poems, and plays)
are now available online either for free or
for a few dollars. These digital versions
are usually searchable, which is a great
help in certain kinds of literary study. È
no longer necessary to be near a big uni-
versity library to have access to a vast
array of literary works. That is a strong
force for democracy. I was able not long

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ago to see for the ½rst time, in its Kindle
version, the ½rst edition of Trollope’s The
Last Chronicle of Barset, complete with the
illustrations. Few libraries have that book,
and the illustrations, so far as I know, Avere
not been reprinted. Through the Internet
I was granted access to the original multi-
media version of Trollope’s novel. Wiki –
pedia, used with the skepticism any ency-
clopedia requires, puts a huge amount of
factual information at one’s ½ngertips.
“Digitalization” has transformed the way
I do literary study: questo è, read literature,
write about it, and talk about it.

Multitudes of teachers in the United
States and globally, Inoltre, both young
ones and old ones, are every day quietly
teaching their students as best they can a
love of literature and how best to read it.
Many of these are brilliant teachers of lit-
erature. They are my unsung heroes and
heroines. Though the “one size ½ts all”
aspect of the Common Core in math, sci-
ence, writing, and reading that is now
being of½cially adopted by many U.S.
states makes me a little anxious, neverthe-
less the actual Common Core document
does include learning to read literature,
and it shows some flexibility in identify-
ing what sorts of literary works should be
taught, and how.

In addition, an increasing number of
thoughtful books and essays asking “Why
Letteratura?” are beginning to appear
these days. These are quite different from
those hand-wringing books and essays
about the “corporatization” of the uni-
versity and the decline of the humanities,
useful as such works are. The works I have
in mind also differ from the studies based
on cognitive science that report what part
of my brain lights up when I read “Tears,
Idle Tears,” “The Cold Heaven,” or Middle –
march–something also useful to know.

I shall identify ½ve works in the “Why
Letteratura?” genre. They are based on
hands-on experience in the classroom.

Teachers with such experience are perhaps
a more trustworthy source of information,
along with students themselves, about why
we should read literature and how best to
teach it than department chairs, deans,
and administrators, anxious as the latter
often are to preserve literature as a social
and personal force. The books and essays
I have in mind are, signi½cantly, written
by teachers at both ends of the spectrum
of academic status. One of the best of
these, Cristina Vischer Bruns’s Why Liter-
ature? The Value of Literary Reading and
What It Means for Teaching,18 is by a brilliant
and dedicated young scholar-teacher. She
has nevertheless remained in adjunct status
at a good but less well-known university,
Chapman University, in Orange County,
California. Bruns speaks eloquently, on the
basis of what it is like to teach literature
at Chapman, in favor of what she calls “im –
mersive” reading. Such reading, she holds,
should only later on be augmented by theo –
retical reflection.

Two additional examples of such books
are by Mark Edmundson, a University Pro-
fessor at the University of Virginia. His is
a very different life-situation from Bruns’s.
One of Edmundson’s books is called Why
Teach? In Defense of a Real Education, IL
other is Why Read?19

My fourth example is another brilliant
young scholar who has published a num-
ber of excellent books and articles but has
yet to ½nd a permanent university teach-
ing position. He is Éamonn Dunne, an
Irishman and schoolteacher whose ½rst
doctorate was from University College
Dublin. Dunne is now returning to Trinity
College Dublin to earn a second doctorate
in education. His thesis proposal, “Un –
learning to Read: Towards a New Peda-
gogy of Ignorance,” is a fascinating pro-
posal throughout; but for my purposes
here it is important because of Dunne’s
intention to undertake empirical studies,
using his own students, about what actu-

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ally goes on in the classroom and in the
minds and feelings of students when they
read literature.

My ½nal example is a forthcoming special
issue of the journal SubStance, edited by
Ranjan Ghosh of the University of North
Bengal.20 Under the title “Does Litera-
ture Matter?” the issue gathers essays on
this topic by a wide range of scholars.

I cite these ½ve titles to indicate that
those who love literature and want to teach
it are turning thoughtfully to its defense
in the context of the global shift to digital
media and on the basis of their actual
teaching experience.

I end now by naming several uses read-
ing literature and teaching it can have even
in our radically new social, cultural, E
technological situation.

No doubt the real world is transformed
by being turned into literature, but I see no
reason to deny that we learn a lot about
that real world now and in the past by
reading literature. Two examples among
almost innumerable ones are: 1) we can
learn about Victorian class structure and
courtship/marriage conventions by read –
ing Anthony Trollope’s novels; E 2) we
can learn a lot about the nineteenth-cen-
tury city of London by reading Dickens’s
novels. Such learning is of great value.

Inoltre, we can learn from literary
works the way what might be called “ideo –
logical mistakes” often come to be made,
namely by taking ½gurative language lit-
erally. “We all of us, grave or light, get our
thoughts entangled in metaphors, and act
fatally on the strength of them,” says
George Eliot’s narrator in Middlemarch.21
The novel gives a striking example of this
in the way the intelligent and sensitive
heroine, Dorothea Brooke, thinks the dry-
as-dust scholar, Edward Casaubon, is like
Augustine, Milton, Bossuet, Oberlin, O
Pascal. Therefore, marrying Casaubon
would be like marrying one or another of
these worthies. I do not think George Eliot

makes in this section of Middlemarch, O
in the novel generally, a sharp distinction
between metaphorical identity and the
comparisons of simile. “Metaphor” is for
her a generic term for tropological dis-
placements. Much ½ction deals themati-
cally with imaginary characters who, like
Dorothea Brooke, are wrong in their read-
ings of others: Per esempio, Elizabeth Ben –
nett in her misreading of Darcy in Jane
Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, or Isabel
Archer’s misreading of Gilbert Osmond
in Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady, O
the disastrous effect on Conrad’s Lord
Jim of reading too many adventure stories.
Flaubert’s Emma Bovary and Cervantes’s
Don Quixote are Jim’s predecessors in
making that mistake. All three think life
is really going to be like the romances
they have read.

Getting students to see this aspect of
½ctions might possibly lead them to keep
a sharper eye out for the lies politicians,
advertising, and mass media tell by ma –
nipulation of false ½gurative transfers.
Paul de Man’s claim, in “The Resistance to
Theory,” that “the linguistics of literari-
ness is a powerful and indispensable tool
in the unmasking of ideological aberra-
zioni, as well as a determining factor in
accounting for their occurrence,”22 seems
blatantly counterintuitive. What de Man
says might seem more plausible if we
understand that what he means by “the
linguistics of literariness” is not some-
thing unique to literature as such but a
dismaying feature of language in general,
including the language of politicians and
admen. Those admirable op-ed writers for
The New York Times, Paul Krugman and
Maureen Dowd, use “the linguistics of
literariness” as one of their major tools in
the unmasking of ideological aberrations.
Dowd uses irony to devastating effect in
her unmasking, and Krugman has repeat-
edly pointed out that conservatives’ pro –
paganda for austerity depends on a false

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J. Hillis
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of literature to carry over into the new
media. Films, video games, and television
sitcoms are no doubt also alternative
worlds, but they cannot easily match the
pleasurable linguistic complexity of liter-
ary works, as the relative thinness of lan-
guage in ½lms made from classic novels
attests. The narrative voice and the charac-
ters’ interior thoughts and feelings vanish,
to be replaced by faces on the screen and
dialogue. Those faces and their talk have
their own power, but it is a different sort
of power from the words on the page. È
only partly linguistic. One often waits in
vain to hear in a ½lm version some piece
of wordplay that has caused jouissance in
reading the print text original.

Helping students share in my joy of the
text is what I do as a humanist and feel I
ought to do. As you can see, I have not
come all that far from my initial desire to
account, to myself and to others, for the
strange ways Tennyson uses language and
for my delight in this strangeness. IL
contexts in which I go on performing that
work have, Tuttavia, changed consider-
ably, to say the least.

analogy between household ½nances and
spending by the federal government. Essere –
lieving that is like Dorothea believing that
Casaubon is like Milton or Pascal. Politi-
cians whose policies are modeled on Ayn
Rand’s Atlas Shrugged are making the same
mistake Lord Jim did when he thought
reality was going to be like (or ought to be
like) the children’s romances he had read.
If we learn about the real world by read-
ing literature, the danger of taking ½gures
of speech literally is one of the major things
we can learn.

Even more important, as an indispens –
able function of reading literary works, È
the sheer pleasure of entering an alterna-
tive imaginary world. We do this by way of
the words on the page. Every work opens a
different and unique world. This pleasure
of entering a new world is a good in itself,
as I have claimed for my pleasure in read-
ing Yeats’s “The Cold Heaven.” It needs
no further justi½cation. The need for the
imaginary seems to be a basic feature of
human nature. A slow immersive reading
of Middlemarch does not just teach you
about “the linguistics of literariness.” It
also allows you to dwell for a prolonged
period in a wonderfully vivid ½ctitious
world peopled by characters that seem as
real as real people and are better known
than our real neighbors.

The other pleasure of dwelling in an
imag inary world is a kind of surplus joy.
This is the sheer delight of felicitous and
unexpected language. Roland Barthes, In
The Pleasure of the Text, named this pleasure
with the more or less untranslatable
French word jouissance.23 The word means
“joy,” but also has an erotic overtone. Questo
bodily and mental delight is usually caused
by some shimmering of word play, as in
George Eliot’s image of thoughts entangled
in metaphors or Yeats’s marvelous phrase,
“riddled with light.”

The pleasure caused by felicitous and
surprising language is the hardest aspect

143 (1) Inverno 2014

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Che cosa
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Humanists
To Do?

endnotes
1 Sections of this essay have been given in earlier form as lectures in the United States, Europe,

and China.

2 Text copied from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tears,_Idle_Tears (accessed December 27,

2012).

3 Cited in The Poems of Tennyson, 3 vols., ed. Christopher Ricks, 2nd ed. (Berkeley: Università

of California Press, 1987), vol. 2, 232.

4 I might also have cited in this essay Dostoyevsky’s Notes from the Underground, which I read
at about that time, with its striking opening lines: “I am a sick man. . . . I am a spiteful man.
I am an unattractive man. I believe my liver is diseased.” (I quote the Project Gutenberg e-
text.) This novel, pure, is “a text . . . that inspired and continues to inspire the work [IO] do.”
When I read those opening words, I said to myself (remember, I was a sophomore), “Aha!
Here at last is someone like me.” The recognition of such kinships is one of the important
things that reading literature can do.

5 C. K. Ogden, IO. UN. Richards, et al., The Meaning of Meaning: A Study of the Influence of Language
upon Thought and of the Science of Symbolism (London: K. Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co.; Nuovo
York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1923).

6 Cited in The Poems of Tennyson, ed. Ricks, vol. 2, 232.
7 See J. l. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, ed. J. O. Urmson and Marina Sbisà, 2nd ed.
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980). See also J. Hillis Miller, Speech Acts in Literature
(Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2001).

8 J. Hillis Miller, “Temporal Topographies: Tennyson’s Tears,” Victorian Poetry 30 (3–4)
(Autumn/Winter 1992): 277–289; also included in J. Hillis Miller, Topographies (Stanford,
Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995), 134–149.

9 Paul de Man, “The Task of the Translator,” in The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: Università

of Minnesota Press, 1986), 87–88.

10 Gerard Manley Hopkins, Poems, ed. W. H. Gardner and N. H. Mackenzie, 4th ed. (London:

Oxford University Press, 1967), 88–89.

11 W. B. Yeats, The Variorum Edition of the Poems, ed. Peter Allt and Russell K. Alspach (Nuovo
York: Macmillan, 1977), 316; henceforth noted parenthetically as VP, followed by the page
number. “The Cold Heaven” was ½rst published in The Green Helmet and Other Poems (1912).
The poem is available online at, among other sites, http://www.poetryfoundation.org/
poem/172059 (accessed January 15, 2013). Poem reprinted here by permission of United
Agents on behalf of Grainne Yeats.

12 Denis Donoghue reminds me that literary scholar Kathleen Woodward, in un 2009 issue of
Dædalus devoted to “Reflecting on the Humanities,” asserted that although in 1990 the acls’s
Report from the National Task Force on Scholarship and the Public Humanities could con½dently
af½rm that the humanities “are valuable for their own sake and that the nation must assert
and sustain scholarship because that enriches the common fund of knowledge,” “today,” in
Woodward’s words, “the notion of the intrinsic good of the humanities is de½nitely not a
part of what is generally referred to as ‘making the case’ for the humanities”; see Kathleen
Woodward, “The Future of the Humanities–in the Present & in Public,” Dædalus 138 (1)
(Inverno 2009): 110–111. Professor Woodward ought to know, since she has served as pres-
ident of the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes (1995–2001) and has organized
or attended innumerable humanities conferences, as well as helping write many “reports”
about the humanities. Because her essay is about the need for what she calls “public schol-
arship,” I suppose she means that the humanities must justify themselves nowadays by their
public utility, not as ends in themselves. At one point in her essay, Woodward laments that
literary scholars are more or less out of the loop of such discussions: “it is a fact that literary
criticism is read virtually only by other literary critics (and perhaps not that many). . . . Che cosa

Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Scienze

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would public literary criticism look like?" (120). I would hardly dare to claim that this present
essay is an example of “public literary criticism,” but it is an attempt to write as plainly as I
can about two actual examples of literature. Another essay in that same issue of Dædalus, lit-
erary critic Michael Wood’s “A World without Literature?" (pag. 58–67), is an eloquent defense
of reading literature and of writing and reading criticism of literary works. Citing Coetzee
and Calvino, Wood asserts that a “classic” is “the work or story through which we think our
lives, and without which our lives are not quite thinkable. Both writers [Coetzee and Calvino],
notably, associate thought and endurance with criticism” (65).

13 See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angelus_Silesius (accessed January 15, 2013), where the
saying is cited from an essay by Jorge Luis Borges, Die Rose ist ohne warum; sie blühet weil sie
blühet. See http://www.amazon.com/Angelus-Silesius-Cherubinic…/dp/0809127687 (avuto accesso
Giugno 6, 2013) for a reference to an English translation of The Cherubinic Wanderer.

14 See David Damrosch, What is World Literature? (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press,

2003).

15 UN. Norman Jeffares, A Commentary on the Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford

Stampa universitaria, 1968), 146.

16 Recent articles have put forth more information and opinion about the current state of the
humanities and of literary study within the humanities. David Brooks, in an op-ed piece in
The New York Times, laments–I think to some degree wrongheadedly–the growing failure in
humanities teaching “to cultivate the human core, the part of the person we might call the
spirit, the soul, O, in D. H. Lawrence’s phrase, ‘the dark vast forest’”; see David Brooks,
“The Humanist Vocation,” The New York Times, Giugno 20, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/
2013/06/21/opinion/brooks-the-humanist-vocation.html?hp&_r=2&. These days the humani-
ties, says Brooks, are “less about the old notions of truth, beauty and goodness and more
about political and social categories like race, class and gender.” I think a lot of truth, beauty,
and goodness is still taught in courses that may nevertheless be about race, class, and gender.
The two sets of categories are not incompatible. As for declining enrollments in humanities
courses, a forceful essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education by Michael Bérubé, who has just
½nished his term as president of the Modern Language Association, demonstrates, with a lot
of statistics, that enrollments in humanities courses have remained at a steady 7 percent for
decades; see Michael Bérubé, “The Humanities Declining? Not According to the Numbers,"
The Chronicle of Higher Education, Luglio 1, 2013, http://chronicle.com/article/The-Humanities
-Declining-Not/140093/?utm_content=buffer19e54&utm_source=buffer&utm_medium=
twitter&utm_campaign=Buffer. My topic, Tuttavia, is literary study, not the humanities in
general. Statistics con½rm that studying literature has declined substantially, at least in some
colleges and universities. This has perhaps happened to some degree not by an increase in
business and science majors but by a migration of students from literature courses to ½lm
studies, creative writing, women’s studies, cultural studies, media studies, visual and per-
forming arts, and so on. These are all worthy subjects of study, but they are not the same as
literary study. According to writer Verlyn Klinkenborg, “In 1991, 165 students graduated from
Yale with a B.A. in English literature. By 2012, that number was 62”; see Verlyn Klinkenborg,
“The Decline and Fall of the English Major," Il New York Times, Giugno 22, 2013. That is an
amazing reduction, even if the average percentage of English majors nationwide has remained
approximately the same (1.1 percent of the college-age population in 2011, as against 1.3 per-
cent in 1991). Since this essay was ½rst drafted, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences has
published a forceful defense of the humanities and social sciences developed by its Com-
mission on the Humanities and Social Sciences, a group of more than ½fty distinguished
experts from university administration, the professoriate, the performing arts, public and cul-
tural institutions, and private corporations; see The Heart of the Matter: The Humanities and
Social Sciences for a Vibrant, Competitive, and Secure Nation (Cambridge, Massa.: American
Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2013). This cogent and detailed report suggests that the Academy
believes the humanities are at present in need of stronger defense and more support, including
½nancial support as well as legitimation support.

J. Hillis
Mugnaio

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143 (1) Inverno 2014

Che cosa
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Humanists
To Do?

17 For two recent discussions of moocs, see Ramin Rahimian, “Virtual U.,” The New York Times,
Gennaio 6, 2013; and Nathan Heller, “Laptop U: Has the Future of College Moved Online?"
The New Yorker, May 20, 2013, 80–91.

18 Cristina Vischer Bruns, Why Literature? The Value of Literary Reading and What It Means for

Teaching (New York: Continuum, 2011).

19 Mark Edmundson, Why Read? (New York: Bloomsbury, 2004); and Mark Edmundson, Why

Teach? In Defense of a Real Education (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013).

20 Special issue of SubStance, “Does Literature Matter?” ed. Ranjan Ghosh, 42 (2) (2013).
21 George Eliot, Middlemarch, ed. Rosemary Ashton (London: Penguin, 1994), 85.
22 Paul de Man, “The Resistance to Theory,” in The Resistance to Theory, 11.
23 Roland Barthes, Le plaisir du texte (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1973); The Pleasure of the Text,
trans. Richard Miller, with a note by Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975).
Though I have great respect for Barthes’s influential book, I cannot follow him in the sharp
distinction he makes between literary texts that give pleasure by reaf½rming ideological pre-
suppositions we already have (Proust) and those that give the jouissance of something that
upsets those presuppositions (Robbe-Grillet). Proust’s ways with language, like Dickens’s
and Trollope’s, Per esempio, give me ideology-challenging jouissance even more than does
Robbe-Grillet, who seems a little old hat and arti½cial these days, in spite of his striking nar-
rative innovations.

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