G iven the current climate of higher education, the question of the usefulness of literature is pressing. As the United States moves inexorably toward a practical notion of the university's mission, all of the humanities, and perhaps most particularly arts-centered disciplines in state-funded systems, have to fight for their survival. Without doubt, this is, at present, a losing battle. However, the urgency of this matter may obscure the fact that conceptions of literature's use have varied

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... iderably, not only over several thousand years of aesthetic theory, but within the much shorter span-about a hundred and fifty years-of the institutionalization of literary studies. According to Gerald Graff, "The typical American college [in the early nineteenth-century] was a quasimonastic institution where 'the preparation of individuals for Christian leadership and the ministry' . . . was considered a more important goal than the advancement of knowledge." 1 If university education in the first half of the nineteenth century functioned primarily to cultivate a male social elite, and if language and literary study thus came to serve a central role in reproducing a patriarchal, classist hierarchy, those values have, most assuredly, lost luster over time. Understandably, literary scholars are dismayed by the narrow instrumentalism now organizing the agenda of higher education. At the same time, glancing back over the formation of English studies, one observes that values often utterly divorced from intellectual objectives have driven the formation of the field. As values shifted considerably in the twentieth century, they formed a catalyst-or are perceived to form a catalyst-for the main theoretical movements influencing American literary scholarship. Although New Critical methodology was quasiscientific, introducing a focus on the literary object through the method of close reading, its theoretical expressions encouraged severing the text from life and history, in the process reifying nineteenth-century spiritual values through insistence on the irreducibility of the organically unified work. In reaction to New Criticism's isolationism, approaches in the seventies were influenced by sociopolitical movements, including