So do the several writers who address, in imaginative and complementary ways, the historical background of our predicament. Both suggest that struggles for resources and for a place in the curriculum will continue, perhaps made even more bitter by worsening economic conditions. But both inject a welcome precision into the discussion, and both, in different ways, help us to understand that recent debates about the humanities have their cause, at least in part, in the social and economic, as well as the intellectual, history of the American university. Carla Hesse uses different data to make a similar point. Like Sabin and Oakley, however, she also cautions against apocalyptic prophecies, and shows that the book is likely to survive, alongside the terminal, for the foreseeable future.
Intellectual history sheds a different kind of light on our dilemmas.
In a compelling essay, Louis Menand reconstructs the ways in which the study of literature became a modern profession in the course of the twentieth century, as formalist art and literature demanded formalist response. Interdisciplinary cultural studies bloomed where the New Critics once scrutinized. Literary study has never been more rigorously hierarchical, technical, and credential-bound in its forms of organization, or less so in its methods, than it is now. In this paradox, Menand argues, lie the roots of a fundamental crisis in literary studies, one which traditional means cannot resolve. David Bromwich subtly investigates the ways in which, after the collapse of liberalism in the sixties, a new didacticism infiltrated the American academy.