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'To think about the study of literature as possessing “values” is, I think, already to skew things. In the Anglophone tradition, something has “value” if it can be measured in external units. Adam Smith famously argued that a value of a thing is measured either in terms of what might be substituted for it (its exchange value) or in terms of its quanti able utilities (its use value). In this framework, value is primarily an economic concept, but, at least from Jeremy Bentham on, it has also been a governmental one. Although earlier philosophers like John Locke or David Hume did not deploy the term, Bentham introduced it precisely to advise those he calls “legislators” on how to manage a population’s happiness. As such, it quickly came under attack: “ Worth was degraded into a lazy synonyme of value ; and value was exclusively attached to the interests of the senses” as Samuel Coleridge put it. (Introduction)
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Works about this Work
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Not by Bread Alone : Authority, Meaning-Making and Value in Australian Literary Studies
2017
single work
criticism
— Appears in: JASAL , vol. 17 no. 1 2017;'As scholars, critics, reviewers and students of Australian literature, what are our values and our impact? Does what we research and write make any difference, make anything happen, anywhere? That is what the funders of our discipline are asking, but also what we need to ask of ourselves. This is not going to be a self-aggrandizing article, nor a nihilistic, hands-thrownup kind of essay—Whence the Humanities? Whence Literary Studies? Whence literature?— although there may be something of that along the way. The most recent, 2018 round of Australian Research Council (ARC) grants is one arguably gloomy indicator that Literary Studies and its sister disciplines of Cultural Studies and Creative Writing are not doing well, and not being seen, in the national fields of research. Of course Literary Studies may have migrated into interdisciplinary locations, and is in now ‘in competition’ with other language disciplines, so is it becoming almost invisible on ARC platforms? This paper, generously given the mantle of the 2016 Dorothy Green Lecture in its first iteration, explores authority and the making of meaning in Literary Studies as interlocking questions. However, for many within the discipline and beyond, even the notion of meaning is under fire. This paper will defend the categories of value and of meaning-making in the Humanities, and ask where Literary Studies might be going.' (Introduction)
-
Not by Bread Alone : Authority, Meaning-Making and Value in Australian Literary Studies
2017
single work
criticism
— Appears in: JASAL , vol. 17 no. 1 2017;'As scholars, critics, reviewers and students of Australian literature, what are our values and our impact? Does what we research and write make any difference, make anything happen, anywhere? That is what the funders of our discipline are asking, but also what we need to ask of ourselves. This is not going to be a self-aggrandizing article, nor a nihilistic, hands-thrownup kind of essay—Whence the Humanities? Whence Literary Studies? Whence literature?— although there may be something of that along the way. The most recent, 2018 round of Australian Research Council (ARC) grants is one arguably gloomy indicator that Literary Studies and its sister disciplines of Cultural Studies and Creative Writing are not doing well, and not being seen, in the national fields of research. Of course Literary Studies may have migrated into interdisciplinary locations, and is in now ‘in competition’ with other language disciplines, so is it becoming almost invisible on ARC platforms? This paper, generously given the mantle of the 2016 Dorothy Green Lecture in its first iteration, explores authority and the making of meaning in Literary Studies as interlocking questions. However, for many within the discipline and beyond, even the notion of meaning is under fire. This paper will defend the categories of value and of meaning-making in the Humanities, and ask where Literary Studies might be going.' (Introduction)
