Steele’s review draws attention to a recent survey by Oxford University demonstrating the success of their humanities graduates in a very wide range of commercial careers, a vital finding that Professor Small seems uninterested in. Instead, she dismisses the typical claims of the educational benefits of the humanities by noting that the social sciences make the same claims.

Perhaps she would have done better to explore why a massive increase in social science degrees has been accompanied by a crescendo of complaints from senior business leaders that they cannot find staff who can think, write, or express themselves clearly or have much understanding of how to deal with other people.

As long as apologists for the humanities continue to treat the very real contribution they can make to commerce as an embarrassing footnote to encomiums on their moral worth, they must expect to continue to be starved of resources.

Peter Acton, President, Humanities 21

Literary culture

Dear Editor,

There are several points in ABR’s review of my book Always Almost Modern (May 2014) that I can’t let pass, less for the sake of the book than for the larger issues they raise.

Susan Lever cites my observation that Vincent Buckley’s 1959 notion that ‘literature was not really a university subject sufficient to itself has been proven correct’, adding that this ‘appears a remarkably detached, even complacent, view for a professor of Australian literature. Surely, he cares about the likely disappearance from the academy of the subject he professes.’ But the point has nothing at all to do with the strength or weakness of (Australian) literary studies in the university today. Believe me, I know about the increased pressures on the humanities, literary studies, and Australian literary studies. I am proud we have fought successfully to keep our Australian literature courses intact at the University of Queensland.

Instead, as the chapter makes clear, the point is about the wide range of projects to which literary studies has attached itself over the last two or three decades: feminism, post-colonialism, Aboriginal studies, book history, media studies, ethics, ecology, and more. We might celebrate or bemoan the fact, but any survey of recent books and articles will confirm it.

More seriously, the fact that I’ve written a ‘professorial’ book – let’s say a ‘scholarly’ book – is presented as if I’m somehow letting the team down, not doing my job, betraying the cause. This is an extremely curious argument, reinforced by the title that ABR gives the review – ‘Professorial talk’.

While I wouldn’t presume to claim that the book will halt the decline of ‘our literary culture’, I trust I don’t have to apologise for the fact that the book is a work of scholarship. As such, it gives extremely close attention to ‘our literary culture’.

Is the problem, then, that it’s the wrong kind of book, more about ‘the culture around literature’ than about literature itself; that it should have been ‘lit crit’? But surely we need more work, not less, on this culture, work of the kind that ‘book reviewers, school teachers, and publishers’ are unlikely to do. The opposition between ‘the professors’ and these other good folk in terms of levels of commitment to Australian literature seems way off beam. Surely there is a wide range of ways of engaging in the task, a wide range of audiences.

Always Almost Modern is one book about one aspect of Australia’s literary culture, its engagements with modernity; but it is read here, curiously, as if it represents the academy’s turning away from a commitment to our literature. Rather it represents one aspect of a diverse commitment to ‘our literary culture’.

There is more than one way of paying close attention to our literary culture – some scholarly, some not, some ‘literary’, some ‘cultural’ – and most of us are committed in more than one way.

David Carter, St Lucia, Qld

Susan Lever replies:

I understand David Carter’s irritation that I took the opportunity in my review of his book to comment on the way that the few professors of Australian literature appear to be more interested in cultural studies than Australian literature – but he gave me that opportunity by including his survey of literary studies in the academy up to 2000.

I referred to the Buckley quote because I was surprised that Carter had made only minor revisions to that chapter, especially in the light of the diminishing of literary studies (not just Australian literature) in Australian universities since then and his own subsequent career. As I commented in the review, the chapter reads rather differently in 2014 than it did in 2000.

I didn’t use the term ‘professorial’ in my review, though it appears in the ABR heading. I referred to the book’s unashamed academic perspective, a perspective explicitly invoked by Carter several times in the book.