The Division of Literature: Or the University in Deconstruction

The inclusion of literary study is a distinctive trait of the modern, scientific university. But this legitimation of a division of literature has been from the beginning a tenuous, ambivalent, and divisive affair. Why and to what effect? These questions guide Peggy Kamuf's analysis of the complex history of literary study in the modern university and orient her critical reading of developments from the French Revolution through the nineteenth century and beyond in Europe. She then turns to one of the most troubling works in the American literary canon - Melville's The Confidence-Man - to show how academic literary history has avoided confronting the implications of works in which meaning is never solely confined within a past. By engaging a future readership to which it applies for credit, Kamuf argues, literature cannot serve as a stable object of study. It locates, rather, a site of the university in deconstruction.