Film Studies / Literary Studies: Parallel Evolution

Maltby, Hollywood Cinema (2^nd ed., 2003)

This chapter seeks to trace the main current of academic theorization of cinema since the mid-1960s, and considers why particular directions were taken. The explanation is as often a matter of context as of the power of an argument, and the prevailing context for the efflorescence of film theory has been its entry into the academy as a discipline in universities in Europe, the United States, and elsewhere.

The growth of universities after 1960 provided opportunities for the broadening and loosening of the academic curriculum, allowing for the introduction of new fields of study, particularly in the humanities. Cinema was an obvious candidate, once a way was found to overcome the critical disdain in which it was held. Film theory was instrumental in legitimating the academic study of cinema through its insistence on the intellectual complexity of its own activity (rather than, necessarily, the intellectual complexity of the objects about which it theorized). The struggle to legitimate cinema studies as an academic activity was a real one, contested in curriculum and appointment committees in universities across the world, and formed part - often a leading part - of a more general interdisciplinary revision of humanities programs. For radical scholars in the 1960s and 1970s, cinema study provided an opportunity to introduce subjects that challenged the conventional curriculum in both their content and their method: cinema presented "an open set of texts where new theories appeared even newer, and where there were as yet no traditional ways of dealing with the subject.” Studying cinema was popular among the expanding student population of the 1970s and 1980s. Film theory made cinema studies sufficiently complex and difficult to justify it as an academic activity in the humanities, by providing the means by which movies could be analyzed as texts according to the protocols of the usual institutional landlords, departments of literature. Initially, at least, theory also distanced academic cinema studies from any concern with the economic and industrial issues that have framed much of this book's consideration of Hollywood. (527)

Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (2^nd ed., 1996)

It took rather longer for English, a subject fit for women, workers and those wishing to impress the natives, to penetrate the bastions of ruling-class power in Oxford and Cambridge. English was an upstart, amateurish affair as academic subjects went, hardly able to compete on equal terms with the rigours of Greats or philology; since every English gentleman read his own literature in his spare time anyway, what was the point of submitting it to systematic study? Fierce rearguard actions were fought by both ancient Universities against this distressingly dilettante subject: the definition of an academic subject was what could be examined, and since English was no more than idle gossip about literary taste it was difficult to know how to make it unpleasant enough to qualify as a proper academic pursuit. This, it might be said, is one of the few problems associated with the study of English which have since been effectively resolved. (25)

New Criticism, moreover, evolved in the years when literary criticism in North America was struggling to become 'professionalized', acceptable as a respectable academic discipline. Its battery of critical instruments was a way of competing with the hard sciences on their own terms, in a society where such science was the dominant criterion of knowledge. Having begun life as a humanistic supplement or alternative to technocratic society, the movement thus found itself reproducing such technocracy in its own methods. The rebel merged into the image of his master, and as the 1940s and 1950s drew on was fairly quickly coopted by the academic Establishment. Before long, New Criticism seemed the most natural thing in the literary critical world; indeed it was difficult to imagine that there had ever been anything else. …. There were at least two good reasons why New Criticism went down well in the academies. First, it provided a convenient pedagogical method of coping with a growing student population. (43)