Apologies not Accepted! The Prospect of English Studies and a Postmodern Apology of Literature

Ever since its establishment as an independent academic discipline in the early twentieth century England, literary studies (English in particular) has been facing a “legitimacy crisis”: within the ever-expanding logic of the market capitalism, literary studies had and have to justify their contributive existence in the now academic marketplace. The history of “apologies” written in defense of the institution of literature, nonetheless, well predates the coming into being of literary studies in modern academia. The perennial charge of “impracticality” has been taking its toll on literature as an academic discipline, as evidenced by budget cuts and declining financial aids in literature departments all over the Anglo-Saxon world. Having explored landmark apologies of literature—starting from Aristotle’s Poetics up to Matthew Arnold’s “Literature and Science”--, the present paper sets out to demonstrate the philosophical inadequacy of literally all such apologies in terms of their attempts to attribute some grandiose non-literary qualities (and values) to literature. A new attempt then is made to define the essentially literary qualities and pragmatic value of literature, one which would only be dialectically possible within the condition of postmodernity. In doing so, after restating Jean Francois Lyotard’s exploration of the origin of humanities’ “legitimation crisis”, Richard Rorty’ “The decline of Redemptive Truth and the Rise of the Literary Culture” is hailed as the postmodern apology of literature—one which eventually captures the indispensable “essence” of literature. Finally, it is concluded that the very future of humanity might inextricably lie in a redemptive “acquaintance” which only literature can promise.