The writer, John Harwood, who is Reader in English at Flinders University, clearly sees an almost absolute divorce between the two, and equally clearly he deplores the disjunction. For him the culprit is the academy’s flirtation with the obscurantist tendencies of modern critical theory. ‘According to the standard hierarchical models of literary studies’, Harwood writes, literary theory and interpretative criticism are the raison d’être of the profession’. Older, more conventional academic pursuits such as editing, biography, bibliography, and historical studies ‘are still regarded as service industries’, even though, ‘while theorists have been celebrating the death of the author, biographical and historical scholarship has become increasingly rigorous and wide-ranging’.

Harwood’s essay is likely to raise agonised protests from the academy. It might also provoke the response from the writing community that it can get on very well without the academy, thank you very much. Nevertheless, if our literary culture is to flourish and prosper it must achieve some accommodation with the aspirations and traditions of academic scholarship. There remains, at present, some cross-over, some measure of mutuality (especially in the area of Australian studies), though it is difficult to disagree with Harwood’ s contention that they are threatened and compromised by the academy’s headlong rush into the arms of ‘Theory’.

Thirty years ago, when I returned to Australia to take up my first appointment in a university, the historical, biographical, and expository (as opposed to interpretative) aspects of literary study received much greater emphasis both in curricula and in the ‘research’ interests of the academic community. Implicit in most academic philosophies of the time – even though universities were just as prone to ideological disputes as they are today – were two aspirations which are much less central to contemporary literary studies, except perhaps as minor pedagogical tools to be employed in the early undergraduate years. These are (or were) conservation and elucidation. The tendency of academic study was to make the inaccessible at least partially accessible, to prevent certain works of literature from atrophying because of changes in language, and in social, ethical, and religious attitudes. None of us sought, of course, to turn our students into sixteenth-century English people when we taught The Faerie Queene, as the devotees of ‘Theory’ claim we tried, yet we did believe – as I still believe passionately – that a difficult and daunting work such as Spenser’s epic may be made partially accessible, as well as enriching and pleasurable, by an attempt to understand how Spenser’s contemporaries would have read it.

Moreover, despite the rhetoric of contemporary literary theory, none of us, except perhaps those incompetents who exist in any society or institution, imagined or suggested that Spenser’s audience (or Shakespeare’s or Milton’s for that matter) would have responded with the programmed predictability of Pavlov’s dogs. We too realised that complex cultures are fraught with contradictions, that the most significant works of literary art often deal with conflicts and with clashes of beliefs, attitudes, and allegiances. We knew that King Lear agonised about the limitations of regal authority almost half a century before a powerful section of English society decided the issue by chopping off Charles I’s head.

The difference was that we thought Shakespeare was also exercised by those issues, and that he embodied his alarms and perplexities in his retelling of the old story of King Lear and his daughters. And yes, many of us also thought he was aware of the world’s punitive attitude towards high-spirited and ambitious women like Goneril.

Nevertheless conventional literary study served, on the whole, the interests of readers. This did not imply (as the mythology of modern literary theory would have it) that our aspirations were populist, that we attempted to iron out the difficulties, contradictions, and obscurities of literary texts. We did not strive to ‘explain’ Finnegans Wake. Most of us, however, tried to provide our ‘customers’ – students, colleagues, non-specialist readers – with tools to make the reading of such notoriously opaque texts more informed and, ideally at least, more satisfying. We did not set up barriers against the uninitiated, as Harwood claims contemporary literary theory strives to do, though we acknowledged, of course, that such barriers always existed. Our aims were integrative – perhaps even to put ourselves out of business by dismantling as many barriers as possible.

Looking back at those discredited days, it seems that such a literary philosophy was capable of finding a place within a general literary culture. The trouble was that thirty years ago – the last days of those ‘old-fashioned’ critical and scholarly aspirations – literary culture did not exist in this country. There were no writers’ festivals, few if any journals like Island that strove to bring together the interests of readers and specialists. Even the study of Australian literature was in its infancy – the year of my return to Australia was the year in which the first Professor of Australian Literature took up his appointment. We were forced by circumstances to conduct our scholarly and critical activities abroad, in journals published in the northern hemisphere and devoted to the professional interests of very different intellectual and scholarly milieux. The tragedy of contemporary literary life is that we persist in those habits despite the existence of a literary culture – which is larger than the much more specific and inevitably restricted area of an interest in Australian literature – on which we have turned our backs.

That is the element I find missing from Harwood’s lucid and provocative essay. I cannot disagree with his scathing comment about the obscurantist, mandarin aspirations of contemporary literary study and about the way in which the structures of the academy have enshrined these regrettable tendencies:

As a rule of thumb, it seems as if the importance claimed for any form of critical or scholarly publication is inversely proportional to its evident value. It is widely acknowledged, even within the profession, that ninety to ninety-five per cent of the specialist critical output is worthless. This is generally taken as evidence that most academic critics are unable to meet the standards expected of them. I believe that mediocrity and triviality are the result of success, not failure, in meeting the highest professional standards.

What needs to be added, it seems to me, is that those deplorable ‘highest professional standards’ are often determined by different societies, different cultures, and political climates.

Take for instance the case of Deconstruction against which Harwood delivers several well-aimed broadsides. Few academics involved in literary theory (apart from those who are members of French departments) have sufficient skills to read Derrida (or even the somewhat less daunting Barthes) in the original. Most it seems to me are participating not in the quintessentially French intellectual traditions that emerged after 1969, but in North American translations and parodies of those subtle, sophisticated, and often deliberately playful onslaughts against the hidebound rigidity of official French culture. In a world, without an Académie française much of Barthes’s irreverence becomes largely meaningless.

Nevertheless, Australian scholars persist in manufacturing imitations of imitations – without, it is true, producing a fundamentally Platonic culture. If the current flirtation with ‘Theory’ had something of an Australian accent, the intellectual treason identified by Harwood in his essay would be a little less damaging. As things stand, too many academic critics – even those working in ‘Austlit’ – speak with the accents of Yale and UCLA, Essex and York.

That they do is intimately connected with a state of affairs that seems to me to be responsible for isolating the academy from our emerging and in many ways, healthy literary culture. We in the profession are increasingly called upon to justify our existence by a steady stream of publications, and not merely for reasons of promotion or advancement but often in order to keep our poorly paid and insecure jobs. It would no longer be possible to spend one’s life preparing an editio maior in the way that scholars of the past were able to do.

Moreover, unless we choose to restrict ourselves to the field of Australian studies, we are required, almost as a matter of course, to publish abroad. Selection and promotion committees, reviews of departments of English and of individual academics consistently concern themselves with the geographical provenance of an academic’s publications, rather than with their quality or their contribution to the subject – let alone to Australian literary culture. ‘Don’t publish in Australia’ would be my advice to any young academic, even though it is becoming increasingly difficult for those not connected with the cabals and cadres of overseas journals to get a foot in various prestigious doors. Too many people have been disadvantaged by the often contemptuous sneer: ‘Oh, it’s a journal published in Melbourne, is it?’

The cultural cringe is alive and well behind the closed doors of the many bureaucratic committees that have come into being in the heady new world of end-of-the-century academic life. They are self-preserving bodies with their sights firmly set on what they see as the only true measure of academic worth, the holy grail of all our aspirations: international recognition. Meanwhile, we turn our backs on the vital literary culture all around us – at writers’ festivals, at literary evenings, and in the pages of those journals that are catering for a public that does not wish to restrict its interests to local writing, the only area where it is acceptable for an academic to publish ‘at home’ without running the danger of being written off as second-rate.