Literary Culture ‘A further significant shift takes place in the understanding of culture through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: the move from phi- losophy to literary studies as the major discipline entrusted by the na- tion-state with the task of reflecting on cultural identity. From being philosophical, culture becomes literary. As we shall see, itis the inven tion of the category of literature that causes the split C. P. Snow noted between sciemtific and literary culture. For the literary is opposed to the scientific in a way philosophy is not, and this is particularly peo- ed in English-speaking nations. Of course, the role of the literary had been clearly acknowledged by Schlegel, who claims in his Lectures on the History of Literature that it is literature rather than philosophy that binds together a people into * nation, since philosophy tends to be both less nationally rovted (be- cause the question of language is not posed) and more clitist: ‘There is nothing so necessary... 10 the whole intellectual existence af a nation, 35 the possession of plentifl store of those rational reclletions and associations, which are lst in great measure during the dark ages of infant society, but which it forms the great abject of the poetical art to perpetuate and adora ... when a people are exalted in their tings and ennobled in their ow estimation, by the consciousness that they have been illustrious im ages that are gone by... in a word, that they have a nations poetry of thee own, we ate willing to acknowledge thst Literary Culture their pride is reasonable, and they are raised in our eyes by the same circumstances which give them elevation in their own. Although it would be possible to look at the rise of national literature in Germany, and others have certainly done so,* I want to argue that a notion of national literature has had particularly pronounced effects on the University in English-speaking nations. | will trace these effects in some detail in this chapter. First ofall, however, it is hard to realize that the category of literature has a rather recent history. It emerges in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and “literature” is the primary (although not exclusive) ame of the anglophone cultural project. This is something of which Goethe kept reminding Eckermann. Aristotle’s Poetics, for example, does not havea theory of iterature; indeed, Aristotle doesn’t even havea concept of literature as 2 unifying notion that would tie together different prac- tices of writing, Aristotle sees poesis as a process of making with words that is essentially artisanal. That is to say, the technology of mimesis is not a general science but is specific to each activity. Hence a dramatist and a prose writer have ao mote in common than do a weaver and a sailmaker, Both work with cloth, but their arts are structurally heter- ogencous. It is this kind of thinking that runs through the system of medieval guilds and governs the various fields of what we might be inclined to group as cultural production. Indeed, it is fundamentally anachronistic to speak of medieval art at all, if by art we mean some kind of romantic notion of an essential activity of the soul that might Set the glassblower and cooper apart, while linking the activity of the rant stonemason with that of the manuscript copyist and that of the trainee painter trying to learn the correct combination of colors to make the blue of the Medonna’s cloak. This is not to say that there is no idea ofa general science in ancient and medieval times, Plato clearly has one, and he dedicates the Gorgias and the fon to the question. These two dialogues contrast Socrates the Philosopher with Gorgias the rhetorician and Ion the rhapsode. The Iwo practice arts of language that we might be inclined to call “literary” today. lon specializes in dramatic readings and commentary on texts aSy The University in Ruans (a kind of effusive performance that we might now assign to belletristic literary criticism), while Gorgias is a public orator who argues in the courts and the polis. Socrates is concerned to prove that philosophy, not the language arts of oratory or thapsody, constitutes the only true general science. It is ‘on this basis that he banishes poets from the republic, not because they engage in mimesis (after all, he thinks that the world is merely the mimesis of Forms) but because they perform am act of se-majesté in promulgating linguistic mimesis as a potential general science, in the place of philosophy. The Socratic philosopher shares with the orator and the rhapsode the pretension to talk about everything, from cookery to medicine. The first, however, does so on philosophical terms, the others in terms that we might wane to cal! more or less “literary” (though we would be wrong to give in to this temptation). The differ- ence between the two has to do with the metonymic chain of signifiers in which the rhapsode or rhetor practices-he follows along without understanding. The philosopher, by contrast, does not imitate at the level of the signifier but performs a metaphoric leap to the level of the signified. He understands the meaning of other arts but does not pra tice them, Hence philusophy is an autonomous general art (which is to say, a science), while the language arts are not arts at all, since they are heteronomous or dependent, mete imitations of other arts, inca~ pable of self-understanding, For Aristotle, then, there is no general art whatsoever, while for Plato there is no general literary art, since phi osophy is the only true general science, and the language arts offer merely 2 false generality. ‘The eventual emergence ofliterature asa unifying term is thus Plato's fault, like so much else, since it occurs as an explicit revaluation of Platonic criticisms. And the notion of literature emerges when writin, is analyzed in terms that leave public oratory behind, a rephrasing uf textual production that is intimately linked to the rise of the bourgeois, public sphere, Whatever people may have said, Sir Philip Sidney is nct quite talking about literature in terms of a general art of imitation when in The Defence of Poetry he calls for “speaking pictures.” Sidney's ac~ count of mimetic practice is still Aristotelian, a matter of making (poiein) according to the rules of rhetoric rather than of illusion, Mi- 2 Literary Culture esis does not seek to deluvde an individual into taking an imitation as real but seeks rhetorically to persuade a public. Painting and poetry share the task of providing the objects around which communities of ‘understanding form and sustain themselves. It is important to remem ber, then, that when Sidney cals the poem a “speaking picture” he thinks of it as fonctioning like a rhetorical exemplum rather than as an illustration of an absolute law." This is very different from the way in which exemplary illustrations from literature function in modernity. Each example illustrates @ uni versal law, each speaking picture holds down a unique place within the extended and non-conttadictory muse or casionical space of rational historical understanding, To call this space—wshich is also the space of the Norton Antholog—auseal is to refer to the way in which the ground plan of the modern museum is already a lineat map of a par. ticular account of a history of art, offering a unified account of linese development and a generalized system of classification. Only when it 3 inscribed within this kind of epistemological space can literature become a University discipline The institutionalization of literature as hearer of the cultural task of the University has been described in the case of Germany by Peter Uwe Hohendahl, in Britain by Chris Baldick and Franklin Court, in the United States by Gerald Graff, and in Spain by Wlad Godrich and Nicholas Spadaccini” Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, in La Fiction du pol tique, has situated the “national aestheticism” of the National Socialist movement in Germany as the convulsive symptom of this link between ational identity and organic culture. As these examples indicate, the history of the entrusting of literature witha social mission is extant and ‘writen in the best English, For the Anglo-American University, itis Senerally called the function of criticism and bears fist ofall the mame Of Matthew Amold. The specificity of the English response owes much {0 the fasion of church and state, which snakes it impossible to oppose discourse of an objective cultural knowledge, a state Wissenschaft, fDithe church as bearer of cultural unity. Instead, it is in opposition to technology, to “science” in the English sense, that the idea of culture is Understood. The growth of technology through the nineteenth century witches the question of social unification. Fragmentation is no longer 73