America has enjoyed real gains and suffered real losses as the result of opening up its English departments to non-WASPs.<\/p>\n
The gains are easy to talk about, the losses not so much.<\/p>\n
Who has had the courage to note the losses?<\/p>\n
Several writers have circled this question but nobody has quite centered it directly. The closest attempts come from different angles.<\/p>\n
Joseph Epstein<\/a> (b. 1937) has written most explicitly and nostalgically about the WASP dispensation in literary culture \u2014 what it meant to have a class of people who regarded stewardship of letters as a social obligation rather than a career. His essays in Commentary and The Weekly Standard over decades return to this theme. He is sentimental about it in ways that limit his analytical precision, but he names the loss more directly than most.<\/p>\n Christopher Caldwell’s<\/a> (b. 1962) Reflections on the Revolution in Europe<\/a> (2009) and his essays touch on the broader custodianship question \u2014 who holds a culture and what happens when that class loses confidence in its right to hold it. He is sharper analytically than Epstein but focuses more on politics than literary culture specifically.<\/p>\n Sam Tanenhaus<\/a> wrote about this obliquely in his work on the decline of American conservatism<\/a> \u2014 the old WASP conservative establishment that felt genuine obligation to the common culture, distinct from both the religious right and the libertarian right that replaced it.<\/p>\n David Brooks<\/a> in Bobos in Paradise<\/a> (2000) described the transition from WASP meritocracy to Bobo meritocracy with great artistic license \u2014 the old establishment selected on lineage and character, the new one on credentials and cleverness, and something was lost in the exchange even if much was gained. He is too cheerful about the outcome to pursue the loss seriously.<\/p>\n Andrew Delblanco<\/a> at Columbia has written about the university as a custodial institution and what it means when that custodial function erodes, though he tends to frame it in terms of class rather than ethnic succession.<\/p>\n David Bromwich’s<\/a> critique of the theory turn is in part a critique of what replaced WASP literary stewardship \u2014 not an ethnic argument but a cultural one. The old custodians, whatever their limitations, had a relationship to the tradition that was protective rather than prosecutorial. They read Shakespeare and Milton as an inheritance to be transmitted. The successor culture read them as a crime scene.<\/p>\n The most analytically rigorous treatment may actually be in sociological work rather than literary criticism. Robert Christopher’s<\/a> Crashing the Gates: the de-WASPing of American’s Power Elite<\/a> (1989) traced the WASP exit from institutional custodianship<\/a> across law, banking, universities, and media with real empirical care. It is underread.<\/p>\n E. Digby Baltzell, the Philadelphia sociologist who coined the term WASP, is the foundational figure. His The Protestant Establishment (1964) argued that a ruling class that refuses to absorb talent from outside itself becomes a caste and loses legitimacy \u2014 but he also argued that the absorption has to happen on the establishment’s terms, transmitting its values, not simply replacing them. That second half of his argument got lost. Most people took from Baltzell only the critique of exclusion, not his equally strong argument that the solution was inclusion into a continuous tradition rather than dissolution of the tradition itself.<\/p>\n Rony Guldmann’s work comes perhaps closest to a theoretical framework for understanding what was lost \u2014 the transmutation of Protestant cultural seriousness into secular liberal virtuecracy, which retained the moral energy while losing the specific content that gave it ballast. That is a more precise account of the mechanism than anyone else has offered, even if Guldmann does not frame it primarily as a story about WASPs and English departments.<\/p>\n The gap in the literature is real. Nobody has written the book that combines Baltzell’s sociology, Guldmann’s cultural analysis, and Bromwich’s literary criticism into a unified account of what WASP custodianship of American letters was, why it collapsed when it did, and what specifically was lost when it went.<\/p>\n A book on this topic might go like this:<\/p>\n Chapter One: Custodianship as a Sociological Category. This chapter establishes the book’s central analytical concept. Drawing on E. Digby Baltzell’s distinction between establishment and caste, it argues that custodianship designates a specific relationship between a dominant group and a common inheritance \u2014 one characterized by felt obligation, transmitted standards, and the subordination of group interest to institutional perpetuation. The chapter distinguishes custodianship from mere domination, from philanthropic noblesse oblige, and from the credentialed meritocracy that succeeded it. It draws on Talcott Parsons’s pattern variables and Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory to specify what made WASP custodianship a distinctive sociological formation rather than simply the self-interest of a dominant class.<\/p>\n Chapter Two: The Protestant Dispensation and the Formation of Literary Culture. This chapter traces the theological roots of WASP custodianship in the Reformed Protestant tradition \u2014 the Calvinist sense of vocation, the Puritan conviction that culture required active stewardship, and the nineteenth-century transmission of these impulses into secular institutional form. It follows the argument Charles Taylor develops in A Secular Age regarding the buffered self and the disenchantment of the world, arguing that the WASP literary establishment represented a partially re-enchanted secularism: a class that retained Protestant seriousness about culture while largely abandoning Protestant theology. Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy functions here as a pivotal document \u2014 the explicit reformulation of Protestant custodianship as cultural mission.<\/p>\n Chapter Three: The Institutional Architecture, 1880\u20131940. This chapter maps the specific institutions through which WASP literary custodianship operated: the research university, the little magazine, the trade publishing house, the reviewing culture of the serious newspapers and quarterlies, and the informal networks connecting them. It argues that these institutions formed a coherent ecology with shared standards of taste, shared assumptions about the relationship between literature and civic life, and shared mechanisms for transmitting those standards across generations. The chapter draws on historical sociology and institutional theory to characterize this ecology without idealizing it, attending equally to what it excluded and what it sustained.<\/p>\n Chapter Four: The Canon as Custodial Technology. This chapter analyzes the literary canon not as a neutral ranking of aesthetic achievement but as a custodial instrument \u2014 a selection of texts through which a particular formation of character and civic sensibility was transmitted. It argues that the canon performed three functions simultaneously: aesthetic (identifying works of the highest imaginative achievement), pedagogical (forming readers capable of sustaining democratic self-governance), and social (reproducing the class of people equipped to maintain the institutions through which that formation continued). The chapter draws on the sociology of knowledge and on Bromwich’s work on moral imagination to characterize what canon transmission was actually doing, before turning to the conditions that made it vulnerable.<\/p>\n Chapter Five: Inclusion and Its Discontents, 1945\u20131965. This chapter examines the postwar opening of elite institutions to previously excluded groups \u2014 Jews, Catholics, and to a limited extent Black Americans \u2014 through the lens of Baltzell’s central argument. It contends that the question was never whether to include but on what terms: whether inclusion meant absorption into a continuous tradition or the beginning of that tradition’s dissolution. The chapter traces the difference between figures who entered the WASP literary establishment and transmitted its values with new energy \u2014 Lionel Trilling is the central case \u2014 and those whose entry initiated a renegotiation of the establishment’s foundational premises. It applies the same analytical framework symmetrically across groups, attending to the internal diversity of each.<\/p>\n Chapter Six: The Theory Turn as Institutional Revolution. This chapter treats the rise of literary theory in American universities from the late 1960s onward not primarily as an intellectual development but as an institutional revolution \u2014 a reorganization of the criteria for legitimate authority within the literary field. Drawing on Bourdieu’s account of field dynamics and David Pinsof’s alliance theory, it argues that Theory functioned as a coalition technology enabling new entrants to delegitimize the tacit standards of the existing establishment while establishing new criteria for authority on which they held a competitive advantage. The chapter is careful to acknowledge Theory’s genuine intellectual contributions while analyzing its institutional function, applying the same analytical tools it would use to analyze any other bid for institutional power.<\/p>\n Chapter Seven: What the Custodians Knew \u2014 and Could Not Say. This chapter reconstructs the tacit knowledge that WASP literary custodianship carried and transmitted: judgments about tone, seriousness, the relationship between form and moral content, the difference between a text that enlarges sympathy and one that merely performs it. Drawing on Michael Polanyi’s account of tacit knowledge and Stephen Turner’s critique of its transmission, it argues that this knowledge was real \u2014 that it tracked genuine features of literary achievement \u2014 but that it was embedded in social practices and institutional forms that could not survive the conditions of their own reproduction. The chapter asks what is lost when tacit knowledge of this kind cannot be articulated in terms that survive institutional transformation.<\/p>\n Chapter Eight: The Successor Culture and Its Characteristic Anxieties. This chapter characterizes the formation that replaced WASP literary custodianship \u2014 what might be called the professional-managerial humanities \u2014 through the same sociological lens applied to its predecessor. It identifies the successor culture’s characteristic strengths (genuine expansion of the canon, recovery of suppressed voices, methodological self-consciousness) and its characteristic pathologies (the substitution of political legibility for aesthetic judgment, the replacement of transmission with critique, the conversion of tacit standards into explicit ideological checkpoints). Drawing on Rony Guldmann’s analysis of the transmutation of Protestant moral seriousness into secular liberal virtuecracy, it argues that the successor culture retained the custodial impulse while transforming its object from a literary tradition to a set of political commitments.<\/p>\n Chapter Nine: Comparative Custodianships \u2014 England, France, Germany. This chapter tests the book’s central argument against comparative cases, asking whether the pattern identified in American literary culture \u2014 custodial formation, challenge, transition, and aftermath \u2014 appears in analogous institutions elsewhere. It examines the decline of the English man-of-letters tradition, the transformation of the French grandes \u00e9coles literary culture, and the fate of the German Bildung ideal in the postwar university. The comparison serves two purposes: it establishes that the American case is not unique but part of a broader transformation of Western literary institutions, and it identifies what is specifically American about the form the transition took.<\/p>\n Chapter Ten: The Porous and the Buffered Reader. This chapter applies Taylor’s distinction between the porous and the buffered self to the question of literary reception, arguing that the transformation of the literary academy represents in part a shift from a culture that cultivated porousness toward texts \u2014 openness to being addressed, changed, and obligated by what one reads \u2014 to one that cultivated systematic buffering, the maintenance of critical distance as a professional and moral norm. It traces this shift through the careers of figures who resisted it \u2014 George Steiner, Harold Bloom, Denis Donoghue, David Bromwich \u2014 and asks what institutional conditions made their resistance possible and what conditions have made it increasingly difficult to sustain.<\/p>\n Chapter Eleven: The Meritocratic Transition and the Problem of Legitimacy. This chapter addresses the central normative question the book raises without being able to avoid: was the transition from custodial to meritocratic literary culture a gain, a loss, or an exchange of incommensurable goods? It argues that the question cannot be answered without disaggregating what was lost from what was gained, and that both the nostalgic and the progressive accounts of the transition are analytically incomplete. The losses were real: the dissolution of a formation that transmitted genuine literary knowledge, the replacement of tacit standards with explicit ideological criteria, the loss of the sense of cultural obligation that custodianship at its best entailed. The gains were also real: the expansion of the literary conversation to include previously excluded voices and traditions, the development of new methods for analyzing what literature does and how it does it. The chapter proposes a framework for holding both assessments simultaneously without collapsing into either the conservative elegy or the progressive triumphalism that have dominated discussion of these questions.<\/p>\n Chapter Twelve: Prospects for Custodianship After the Transition. The concluding chapter asks whether the custodial function in literary culture can be recovered, reinvented, or replaced, and by whom. It examines several candidates: the digital public intellectual, the literary journalist, the interdisciplinary humanist, the community college teacher working without institutional prestige but with direct student contact. It argues that custodianship is not inherently the property of any particular group but is a functional requirement of any literary culture that wishes to transmit rather than merely critique its inheritance \u2014 and that the question of who performs that function, and on what terms, remains genuinely open. The chapter closes by returning to Baltzell’s original insight: the problem was never inclusion versus exclusion but whether inclusion could be accomplished in a way that strengthened rather than dissolved the tradition into which the newly included were being absorbed. That question, he argued in 1964, had not yet been answered. It has still not been answered.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" America has enjoyed real gains and suffered real losses as the result of opening up its English departments to non-WASPs. The gains are easy to talk about, the losses not so much. Who has had the courage to note the … Continue reading