Reading Literature within the Educational Apparatus

For Morgan Day Frank, the teaching of literature made possible “[t]he expansion and elaboration of the [US] educational system . . . over the last two centuries” (vi). At a moment when both the teaching of literature in particular and the higher-educational sector in general are under attack, declining in popularity, and increasingly precarious, it is worth spending some time pondering, as Frank does, how this state of affairs was not inevitable, but was profoundly historically contingent, even “something of a miracle” (xv).Frank's main argument, in Schools of Fiction: Literature and the Making of the American Educational System, is that “literature as an object of academic study—not psychology, biology, chemistry, physics, or mathematics—ensured the reproduction of the modern educational system after the Civil War. Literature proved indispensable to the project of modern education because it helped the school system identify itself with real social experience” (2). It's a striking and important claim, and one Frank elaborates in a manner that is pretty idiosyncratic. For what would we expect from a book that sets out to prove such a claim? Perhaps we'd expect the story of the rise of English departments in American universities, and/or the rise of the teaching of literature in English in what came to be the K–12 school system; perhaps an account of how the rise of such things correlated with the increasing standardization and social hegemony of the school system in US life; perhaps some account of how the rise of the teaching of other subjects (“psychology, biology, chemistry, physics, or mathematics” [2]) did not correlate with that increasing hegemony in the same way; and perhaps a rationale for why all this occurred.Frank gives us bits and pieces of this material in Schools of Fiction, especially in his strong introduction and first chapter, although, he points out, he is not going to focus overmuch on historical data, for example, “[e]nrollment numbers in English and American literature classes,” because such things are “well-established in disciplinary history and the historiography of US education” (xiii). Instead, Frank tells his readers, he is going to focus on something that might be of “surprise” to “[s]ome readers”: “[T]he content and form of actual literary works,” or close readings of literary texts (xiii).This is a curious decision, and one that makes for something of a frustrating read. I come away from Schools of Fiction convinced by some of Frank's interventions, but less so by others. For example, a key claim in the book is that “[w]hen literature appeared in classrooms, it had a transformative effect on the school. Administrators and instructors restructured the curriculum around it” (vi). Yet there is very little discussion of curricular reforms in the monograph, literature-driven or otherwise—I could have done with more of the straightforward literary-historical material Frank chooses to eschew, and less of the close reading.At its best, the book works very well in two ways. The first is that Frank is very good at elaborating the high stakes of claims that might not initially appear to have such stakes. So, one of the fairly obvious interventions of the book is that—given our present narrative about the rise of STEM and the decline of the humanities—it should have been literature, and “not psychology, biology, chemistry, physics, or mathematics” that “ensured the reproduction of the modern educational system after the Civil War.” But, less obviously, Frank shows us that it is also of note that the US educational system needed help to ensure its own reproduction. Frank opens his introduction with the story of the near-collapse of Clark University in 1892 in order to emphasize a key point about the relative weakness of the US educational system in the nineteenth century. It is tempting, he notes, following Louis Althusser, Pierre Bourdieu, and others, to imagine the school system as powerful and monolithic—in Althusser's terms, “the dominant Ideological State Apparatus . . . under capitalism's mature phase” (15). But Frank's account shows us how the school system in the United States in the nineteenth century was anything but such an institution; instead, it was weak, chaotic, and disorganized. Participants in the educational enterprise wrangled over discipline, and stories abounded of students exercising physical violence on their teachers. Many students went to school only intermittently and vast numbers did not care to graduate. Reformers struggled to standardize a system based on one-room schoolhouses, and universities struggled to make themselves relevant to a public with little time for or understanding of the value of higher education. Thus, rather than seeing the school system as critical theory has, as an “autonomous” propagator of state ideology, Frank paints “[t]he history of the modern school system” as “one prolonged struggle to achieve social relevance and maintain it,” a struggle that persists to the present day (15).Early on, Frank writes that “we can't understand educational history in isolation from literary history . . . [and] the two histories are entangled with one another” (xv). The second way in which the book works well is when Frank does indeed entangle educational and literary history to powerful effect. His opening chapter reads Washington Irving's writing against the history of Irving's own canonization and the rise of the teaching of English in schools in order to argue convincingly that teachers solidified the social capital of schools themselves, counterintuitively, by exploiting, in the classroom, the antischolastic strain in American literature. American authors were taken up for canonization in the US school system in direct proportion to the degree to which they denounced schooling as miserable and pointless. Authors’ antischolasticism paradoxically allowed educators to claim that the books they were teaching allowed students a more authentic and direct access to life, thus, equally paradoxically, boosting the perceived value of the school system.But if the book is good at amplifying its stakes, the flip side of this is that it sometimes significantly overstates its claims, in ways that go so far as to distort the structure of the monograph as a whole. For example, Frank justifies his frequent close readings of literary texts as “[b]y no means a simple methodological reflex,” but instead an attempt “to apprehend literature's institutional agency, to understand how it licenses and provokes its own institutional reception” (xiii). This justification is not borne out by Frank's actual analyses. Now, doing history by reading literary texts is not in and of itself a controversial practice—New Historicists, cultural studies, and American studies scholars have been doing so for many years, on the grounds that cultural artifacts are vessels (albeit complex ones) for social ideology and that we can read the ideology by reading the artifacts. Frank, by contrast, wants to distance himself from such approaches, on the grounds that he wants to challenge the scholarly assumption that literature is a “product of material practices and institutions” (7). (Indeed, while this book began life as a dissertation with Mark McGurl on its committee, Frank is critical of McGurl's influential Program Era as exemplifying such a paradigm [8].) Instead, Frank wants to insist that literature was, at minimum during the period under review (1861–1918), sometimes an “autonomous cultural phenomenon” (7) with the power to influence scholastic institutions (indeed, to “perform . . . a tremendous service for the educational system” [118]) rather than being influenced by them, and thus possessing an “agency” of its own (28). In short, we should close-read literary texts because literary texts influenced scholastic institutions, and if we want to know exactly how they did so, paying attention to the inner workings of the texts themselves will tell us.Furthermore, Frank justifies the inclusion of two whole chapters of the book on the grounds that they exemplify this kind of close reading: “Chapters 3 and 4, for example, are about literature's specific influence on, respectively, the temporality and feeling of scholastic life. The coordination of academic time and the emotional experience of the classroom presented problems that the architects of the modern educational system expended a great deal of energy to resolve, and the writers I discuss—Stein, Adams, Norris, and Sinclair—formalized specific solutions to these problems in their work that were later incorporated back into the school through the curriculum” (28). The claim is that writers like Henry Adams and others developed “specific solutions” to dissatisfactions students had in ways that schools themselves have subsequently acted on, demonstrating the “agency” of literary texts in a way that challenges scholars’ assumptions about both the power of literature and the value of close reading. In these middle chapters, literature is supposed to demonstrate how it influenced the shape of the educational establishment.But if we look at the example of Henry Adams, we can see that Frank's analysis is underwhelming. The argument with regard to Adams goes as follows: “Adams's critique of modernity has also proved uniquely useful for modern institutions. The Education's failure to periodize is precisely what has allowed the modern school system to periodize it: for so many scholars and teachers, Adams's failure has come to mark the emergence of something distinct from what came before it, the rise of a ‘modern consciousness’ or simply modernism”—that is to say, the failure of periodization in The Education of Henry Adams is one of a number of factors that have caused many scholars to periodize it as being on the border of the modernist period (125). This fact about Adams's reception is supposed to show that “[b]y teaching The Education—by constructing historical periods around Adams's writing—educators have helped synchronize the student experience. They have imposed some measure of uniformity on the overwhelmingly non-uniform temporality of twentieth- and twenty-first-century life. The academic reception of The Education therefore reflects the fundamental reciprocity between a literary work and its institutional environment. Just as schools have sought to periodize literature, literature has sought to periodize schools” (126). In the first place, I'm not sure how scholars’ decision to make Adams a modernist on the grounds that, within his work, he resists orderly schemes of periodization is an example of “literature” seeking “to periodize schools.” And in the second place, even if it were, I'm not sure how this fact requires a substantial close reading of Adams's text in order to justify it. In any case, this intervention is a far cry from Frank's original claim that Adams's literary text has “formalized” a “specific solution” to its own anxieties about time (28), or, even further, that Adams “performed a tremendous service for the educational system whose administrative apparatus [he] felt was inadequate” (118). Now, it is true that Frank downplays the significance of this intervention, writing at one point that “Schools of Fiction at bottom . . . remains interested less in recuperating the agency of literary form than in exposing the vulnerability of the educational system” (37). But to write two chapters justifying a theoretical insight about the autonomy of literary texts whose payoffs are squibs such as this, while at the same time, elsewhere in the text, disclaiming the need to do ordinary literary-historical work in the service of one's primary thesis, makes Frank's decision to spend as much time close reading literary texts as he does feel like the “methodological reflex” he denies its being.Overall, then, Schools of Fiction is a compelling, if frustrating, account of the parallel rises of the educational system in the United States and the institutional teaching of literature. Frank certainly challenges us to reframe our accounts of the American educational system, as well as making the emphatic point that literary history and educational history are necessarily entwined. As Frank notes, at our current moment, when literary studies are a weakened force within a weakening higher-education industry as a whole, we can learn much from the insight that higher education has never been as monolithic or as strong as it has sometimes seemed. I wish, however, that there were more in the way of both literary and educational history in the text, in place of a focus on close readings that promise more than they deliver.