Curricular trauma? Producing converts?: A conversation between Caroline Levine and Len Gutkin

The decline of the humanities has never been more topical. Proponents of the humanities of all political stripes have mounted defences, some more convincing than others, but for the most part, numbers continue to go down. In an article that appeared in Liberties and more widely in The Chronicle of Higher Education (12 July 2024), Len Gutkin broaches this issue. ‘Are the causes of the crisis external to the humanities’, he asks, ‘or do they reflect something gone awry in humanistic study itself?’ For Gutkin, we scholars should take some responsibility for the decline: the rise of subfields in English, for instance, has led to a dramatic contraction of the field in general. Critical race studies, for instance, may lead us to read Shakespeare too narrowly, and so on. Gutkin takes issue with the work of formalist scholar Caroline Levine. In this conversation, Levine responds to Gutkin, drawing on her decades of work both in the humanities classroom and in activism, and Gutkin to Levine. This dialogue informs our understanding of not only the classroom but also formalism and its applications.