Peter Strempel, 21 May 2026
James Ley’s reflections on the decline of literary studies and critique (The Monthly, May 2026) aren’t entirely wrong, but illustrate a blind spot, or even astonishing ignorance, that makes the academics and practitioners of literary appreciation and critique as guilty of the discipline’s decline as the pseudo-religious technocrat cultural vandals driving neoliberal political economy.Ley’s introduction to his topic is his vaguely sarcastic review of some recent literary and literacy doom-and-gloom press in the USA, but he observes ‘separate surveys in the United States and United Kingdom have found that, over the course of a year, 40 per cent of their populations will not read a single book’, and that ‘a recent study by researchers at Monash University’ found
around a quarter of Australians will neither read nor listen to a book in a given year. Recreational reading is in decline and the trend is more pronounced among the young. Local book sales are soft. In 2024, they went backwards. The institutions that have traditionally provided material support and professional opportunities for writers and thinkers – universities, journalism, publishing – are all in parlous states.
Ley points to social media as culprits in promoting a kind of digital ADHD, promoting the gamut of disinformation, misinformation, and outright lies. No great insight there. It’s just chorus these days.
From there, Ley engages in some introspection about the literary canon, about who determines what is of value, and what is not, and about the debates around worthiness among gatekeepers in the academy. And here Ley seems to ignore reality as much as anyone posting on X.
Missing from his perspective is the critical turning point in modern philosophy, the emergence of the post-modern, that likely began when Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time, and its claims about a fundamental ontology, dissolved metaphysics. Heidegger’s claim was that a study of what exists is necessarily a study of ‘being’ in its form of human existence, and that this fundamental ontology is central to all other knowledge domains, strengthening Nietzsche’s critique of bourgeois values by implying they are likely only arbitrary ‘chatter’.
Why does that matter to literary critique? Because there is a strong argument that the advent of the novel was the expression of bourgeois self-assertion against the power of the old hierarchies of moneyed or institutional power: aristocracy, capitalists, and the church. Those values appear now to be self-indulgent, pompous, and boring. Being boring is the worst possible attribute of literature, and yet the academy keeps promoting such works as part of the Western canon, and critics keep using them as yardsticks of literary worth.
So, for example, unlike many others I see little instructive value in the moral pedantry of writers like Sterne, Defoe, Scott, Dickens, Hardy, the Brontës, Zola, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Melville, Kipling, Conrad, and an apparently lengthy list of others considered part of the literary canon. But I do see value in knowing of their stylistic devices and diction, and especially their place in the history of literature. I come to my conclusions by having read some works by all of the mentioned authors, and having been alienated by what I thought of as quite boring prose with plots and characters of little direct relevance to my own life or times, and then being doubly alienated by the fawning admiration of those authors by academics and critics who seemed to be promoting the idea of objective and timeless standards that invalidate all other perspectives.
I see that model of critique as a kind of pseudo-religious tyranny of imposed meaning. Not at all unlike Ley’s definition of culture wars ‘as struggles for institutional dominance framed as issues of morality’. I would have rephrased that as ‘institutional hegemony based on arguments proposed as absolute certainty about supposedly objective standards that are in fact purely subjective ideological assertions’. Which is essentially the same as my definition of political correctness, whether coming from the ideological left or right.
I see that kind of intellectual tyranny as reactionary in light of the post-Heideggerian development of a continental European hybrid of what is often misnamed ‘cultural studies’ — an ugly formulation with unfortunate armchair left wing connotations in the Anglophone world — but which does combine aspects of literary critique with post-metaphysical philosophy and other humanities disciplines, especially history, historiography, and sociology.
In the USA this still unfinished experiment was hijacked in the 1960s by idiot professors and their student acolytes as a call to arms for some sort new left militancy, as if intellectual inquiry demanded simple-minded ideological alignment. There has never been a requirement to adopt any or all ideas of any thinker as consequence of reading or understanding that thinker.
Nevertheless, thus discredited, the body of work labelled post-modernism didn’t establish itself as an academic discipline in its own right, and even in the more class conscious Britain, the post Marxist dominance in cultural studies robbed it of the power of pluralism, intellectual tolerance, and the possibility of synthesis between opposing views, or at least an intellectual debate rather than the infantile culture wars posturing the Western world has been cursed with since at least the 17th century (via the English, Scottish, and continental European reformations, and in the Anglophone world, especially through James I’s and Charles I’s political blundering. Vainglorious mismanagement of their parliaments that led to the English civil war, and more importantly in hindsight, the settlement of the new world by bloody-minded, authoritarian Protestants).
However, the controversy around post-modernism, perhaps more accurately labelled ‘cultural studies’, is no reason to maintain an allegiance to a dated, sterile canon, with dated and sterile theories in literary critique. It will just kill off the entire field, the way philosophy has died as a vibrant centre of debate since all that remained was the desert of ‘analytical’ philosophy, trying to establish credibility by emulating mathematics and claiming affiliation to the hard sciences.
In the spirit of the lifelong learning that was a catchphrase during my undergraduate years, it seems fair to ask why literary studies as well as philosophy have not embraced a more eclectic curricular range, making electives and even majors available from other schools, departments or faculties. Both literary critics and philosophers could benefit , for example, from the journalistic techniques for clarity in writing, and a grounding in modern history and prominent cultural ideas. Among many other knowledge domains.
If pushed to the question what the future of literary critique should look like, I honestly don’t know, but I have an idea about a possible direction. One of the most notable, relatively recent developments in US philosophy was the defection in the 1990s of Pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty from academic philosophy departments to faculties teaching comparative literature. He argued the ascendancy in campus politics of the stale and scholastically irrelevant ‘analytic’ philosophy professors made no room for embracing continental European ideas in philosophy, which were best discussed not in the pseudo-mathematical cum scientific blather of atomism, logical positivism, and a revived metaphysics, but in terms of literary critique of the texts and the cultural developments engraming them. Rorty was particularly intrigued by the continuity or development of thought traceable through Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Michel Foucault, Jean-François Lyotard and Jacques Derrida, taken as a gestalt rather than any specific aspect of the individual thinkers. Gaining an insight to the gestalt inevitably recommends some familiarity with the works of Parmenides, Aristotle, Scotus, Kant, Hegel, Husserl, Gadamer, the fictions regarded as literature proper, and political philosphy since the Enlightenment. Read as literary works rather than just academic philosophy, and revealed as such by understanding the socio-political and economic frameworks in which their authors operated.
In that way, literary critique could embrace the ideas shut out of philosophy departments and through alliances with other departments or crossover electives, rebuild itself more generally as the new must-have foundation in liberal arts and humanities that really ought to be required in all degree studies.
Ley is probably right about the nihilism of consumer technology, especially in mass communication, but the engagement with the nihilistic effects is still a personal choice, and before pointing the stink-finger at only the young (under 40s), as American right wing culture wars crusaders tend to do, it might be quite instructive to gather evidence of exactly how that cohort consumes and generates meanings. I’m betting the ‘young’ see little value in stale, deprecated bourgeois values embedded in bloviating prose fiction. But they might appreciate an insight into how the world developed into the place they inhabit today.
I think there is an argument to be made that maintaining a dated canon is a reactionary rearguard action by professors who’ve made careers of them, but are frightened by the historical cultural developments of the 20th and 21st centuries. There is no such thing as an objective reason why literary studies and critique should be stuck in paradigms and values of the past. Not that study of the cultural past should be abandoned entirely. It just needs to be presented to highlight its relevance today, after the humiliating surrender of bourgeois values to the arid monetization of everything under the yoke of neoliberal political economy; as a guide to the historical development of literary appreciation and critique, not as its sum total.
A field of study based on principles of fundamental ontology and human meaning creation might well be the only viable counterweight to neoliberal political economy and its corrosion of democracy, humanism, and the academy itself. An elevation of the immaterial as the legitimate master and guide of political economy; Ley called it ‘forms of intellectual inquiry that are essential precisely because they have no specific application, no predictable or quantifiable effect, and no obvious end’.
It’s true that a hybrid discipline combining elements of multiple humanities disciplines need not be confined to undergraduate attempts at sounding clever by stuffing essays with abstract and often meaningless academic jargon. Clear language can and does often use a lexicon that doesn’t assume audiences are all ill-educated louts, but it is the subject matter that dictates diction. And that subject matter would be much more interesting if a literary critique enlightened us about the particular political and economic circumstances of an artist’s work: what clique of patronage and funding did she belong to; what politics and social orientation did he promote; can it be discerned what influences they reveal in style and themes; what are the contrasts with related low-brow culture; and why should someone who is not interested in academic theory or narrow literary circles bother ‘consuming’ the text? In other words, address a wider audience to prevent senile decay or extinction of literary studies and its extra-academic practice in critique.
I’m not proposing this as some innovative new approach, but rather as the logical extension of my own 1980s English degree, from which I graduated with a journalism major and politics minor. What I propose here is a retreat from the hyper specialization of humanities to an eclectic consolidation and survival of the humanities overall, in which critical thinking is the key to all other considerations, because that’s what’s been vanquished most notably from tertiary education, and what might be most commercially saleable in the era of AI slop.
Most interestingly for me is the possibility of extending a literary style and eclectic analytical framework to topics outside the arts. Why should political and economic analyses in media, which no longer deserve the rubric ‘news’, not be arresting and inviting prose? Narration offering contrasts, comparisons, and a breadth of knowledge to eclipse the mortifyingly boring he-said-she-said stenography of rehearsed statements by politicians, and engaging conversational prose laced with insights offered by the humanities rather than the rather idiotic, ignorant commentary of ‘editorialists’, who are today mostly piss poor propagandists paid to disseminate plutocrat media owners’ simple-minded prescriptions for plutocrat-controlled kleptocracies. People who devise low-brow narratives normalizing political systems in which the sham of democracy is kept on life support by the same plutocrat thieves owning and operating idiots posing as politicians?
If we have to suffer that kind of neoliberal playground for robber barons and their cut-throat mercenaries, we might at least expect and support critique of all kinds that isn’t just predictably boring, irrelevant to the realities we face, and too timid to call out the lies sold to us by mass media.