Literary Culture in a World Transformed: A Future for the Humanities (review)

Literary Culture in a World Transformed is a heartfelt, well-meaning, and profoundly confused book. Though William Paulson wants desperately to define a mission for the humanities and to preserve literary culture from all that encroaches upon it, the terms in which he sets forth the task wind up undermining the task at almost every turn.

Almost every turn: for along the way, Paulson delivers a bracing and judicious critique of the guild mentality in the academic humanities, in which hyperspecialists write chiefly for each other in an extremely restricted field of cultural production. (One wonders whether, despite Paulson’s general antipathy to the Internet, he would approve of the profusion of web logs created by younger humanities scholars over the past few years.) And who in his or her right mind would want to take issue with Paulson’s desire to find a salient role for the humanities in the face of genomics, global ecological devastation, and the instrumentalization of higher education? Though there are severe problems with this book, they are not problems of the spirit; they are, paradoxically enough, problems with the way Paulson conceives of letters.