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Literary scholars today will readily recognize the idea that reading, and instruction in aesthetics generally, is a form of social discipline, at least as we understand that term from the work of Michel Foucault. By the term discipline Foucault means that the subject, rather than being some autonomous, a priori being, is formed through subjectivization, though "procedures of individualization," the "modes by which . . . human beings are made subjects." However we may feel about the fact that subjectivity emerges through disciplinary procedures, reading (stories, history books, and the like) is manifestly central to this process. The question many contemporary literary scholars ask therefore concerns the nature and effects of what we might call literary discipline: What kind of subjects are produced through reading, and especially through formal literary study? This is not a new question. Indeed, our discipline became professionalized under its auspices. In the closing decades of the nineteenth century, advocates of so-called modern, scientific literary study, who succeeded in forming the MLA in 1883, proclaimed that their main objective was to produce a particular kind of reader; they would cultivate in students what they called mental discipline or literary discipline. We tend nowadays to associate discipline with normalization, with constraints upon the individual, and with the circumscription of dissent. Early literary scholars defined discipline differently. For them, discipline is the condition of agency rather than a constraint upon the self. The disciplined reader purportedly would be able to apply internalized principles of conduct in new contexts and therefore be able to modify circumstances. At key moments, however, early literary scholars idealized discipline as freeing the subject from the dominion of habit and culture, until it becomes autonomous, not a disciplined subject at all. These idealizations involved a logical fallacy, but in their view they were necessary to imagine what they called a cosmopolitan culture.

Richard Ohmann, Michael Warner, Wallace Douglas, and especially David Shumway and Gerald Graff have astutely examined the emergence since about 1860 of our discipline. Though, as Graff details, generalists and classicists resisted modern language and literary studies, nevertheless both camps proclaimed similar goals: to develop through their rival methods what they called "mental discipline," a term that appears in every methodological essay and literary textbook of the period. Wallace Douglas derides this idea as an advertising effort to "create an academic reputation" (52). Yet "mental discipline" was no promotional coinage; it derived from the classical Greek idea of mental gymnastic and had long been the aim of education in rhetoric and the classics. The term encapsulates the reasons that humanists (and academics generally) came to call their fields disciplines rather than, say, guilds. The ideals attending the idea of mental discipline allowed scholars to contend, as Horace Scudder wrote, that literary study helps "make good American citizens."
Exponents of modern literary study believed that classical pedagogy, with its emphasis on memorization and recitation, and whose tedium was well documented, produced inadequate discipline in students. Memorizing vocabulary and rules of grammar affords what James Garnett of the University of Virginia called "formal discipline," little more than obedience to rules. Mark Twain parodied this aspect of traditional pedagogy in an 1887 essay, "English as She Is Taught," which purports to reprint student writing. Students seem adept at memorizing passages or rules but utterly unable to apply them. Here's one example: "A circle is a round straight line with a hole in the middle." This definition is technically correct, but contextually absurd. Other examples work in similar fashion. "Parallel lines are lines that can never meet until they run together"; "Russia is very cold and tyrannical." Mark Twain concludes that students are "as glib as parrots with the 'rules,' but [cannot] reason out a single rule or explain the principle underlying it. Their memories had been stocked, but not their understandings" (Ibid., 47).

Defenders of the classical method viewed recitation as a means to mental discipline; they did not of course aim to produce what Mark Twain calls here "brickbat culture" (Ibid., 47), whose members cannot fathom the rationale for their actions and preferences. The "scientific" camp objected that merely formal discipline could scarcely produce anything else. Traditional study of rhetoric and classical languages, according to Richard G. Moulton, Professor of Literary Theory and Interpretation at the University of Chicago, made literary materials "studies of fact, rather than disciplinary stimulus to the imagination." With literary study competing for funding with other disciplines, promulgators of what Moulton called "scientific criticism" and what the president of the MLA in 1896 called "literary science" extended their criticism to mathematics and the natural sciences. The president of Williams College, Franklin Carter, told the MLA in 1885 that "In processes of mathematics and science it is too often fixed rules that [students] follow." F. V. N. Painter of Roanoke College charged that as presently pursued "the study of natural science consists chiefly in memorizing facts laid down in text-books, and possesses but little value as a disciplinary exercise. It does not give the manifold discipline" afforded by what Theodore Hunt of Princeton called "critical study" of literature.

"Literary discipline" uniquely trains "reasoning, judgement, and taste," Garnett of Virginia asserted, because, as a professor of education at the University of Michigan declared, unlike "studies of the scientific type," studies of literature and other humanistic fields "affect the mind as a whole, involving both thinking and feeling, calling into play several distinct modes of intellectual activity, and so producing what is known as culture." Literary discipline "bring[s] into action almost every faculty of our minds" precisely for the reason that literature might seem an unlikely arena for scientific method: its manifestly impressionistic quality, which impedes its quantification. This aspect of literature was not an obstacle to systematic study but furnished its occasion. Under the influence of Hippolyte Taine's 1863 History of English Literature, Anglo-American literary scholars adopted an evolutionary view of literature. The evolutionists viewed literature as the expression not of individual genius (or at least not solely of genius), but of the character or spirit of a race or nation (with these two terms, as was typical of the period, used almost interchangeably). They thus conceived literary study as a form of social science. What Moulton of Chicago called "literary morphology," "inquiry into the foundation of the forms of literature" could analyze the evolution of national, racial character, and help to improve that character by producing the right kind of readers, those possessed of mental discipline.

Evolutionists in the social sciences sought the "type" of the nation and race. Likewise, literary scholars liked to say that an author like Shakespeare "stands for England and the English type." Scholars resisted the "strict determinism," rendering the individual a reflection of national or racial character, that such a view arguably implied. Individuals are not mere "types and symbols," remarked George Lyman Kittredge of Harvard, the renowned editor of Shakespeare, because persons do not receive impressions "uniformly" and "mechanically." The variety of literature proves the existence of what the president of the MLA in 1896 called "incalculable" personality. The distinguishing property of personality was the imagination, the faculty that both produces and interprets literature. As evolutionists, literary scholars defined the imagination not as some sui generis phenomenon but as a principle of variation and differentiation, analogous to "idiom" in language, inflecting the materials treated in literature and prior forms of expression. Moulton wrote that the imagination is neither mimetic of objects nor self-engendering. It "select[s among] conditions of life"; "the creative faculty is . . . a sort of lens, focusing human phenomena for better observation." The imagination focuses phenomena by modifying "elements of nature," wrote Charles Mills Gayley, long-time department chair at the University of California, Berkeley. The artist thereby "liberates, emphasizes, and adjusts the properties of his material."

The operation of the imagination parallels that of linguistic signification-the fundamental mode of literature-which is the real reason that literary study exercises all mental faculties. Scholars made a virtue of the fact that literature is not an object found in nature. Without invoking their contemporary C. S. Pierce and his work on signs, scholars like Barrett Wendell of Harvard celebrated the fact that literature exemplifies the way language consists of "arbitrary symbols," "purely arbitrary" "black marks," meaningful only conventionally. "Words are conventional signs," wrote Kittredge, with "no natural and essential meaning," "no character in themselves." Since, as Garnett of Virginia put it, letters are simply signs of sounds, linked to them conventionally rather than necessarily, words do not imitate the objects or mental states they represent.

We nowadays associate such a view with the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. This generation of scholars adapted it from Hugh Blair's 1783 Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres and George Campbell's probably more current Philosophy of Rhetoric (1776). Blair wrote that "the connexion between words and ideas may, in general, be considered as arbitrary and conventional." Campbell observed, similarly, that "not a natural and necessary, but an artificial and arbitrary connexion" "subsisteth between words and things." Both Blair and Campbell believed that words are to some degree consolidated with ideas and objects. Blair felt that language is ideally mimetic: names for objects "imitat[e] . . . the nature of the object" (1: 128); "words [are] copies of our ideas" (2: 7). Without speculating on the origins of words (140), Campbell declared that the "habit of associating the sign with the thing signified" leads persons to imbue this association with "a relation additional," as if signs and ideas are "naturally related to one another," related axiomatically, perhaps causally or by "resemblance" (258, 259). Probably following Locke's view more, American scholars insisted upon, and celebrated, the non-mimetic nature of language. "Words . . . are neither imitative . . . nor inevitable," asserted Wendell. Moulton urged scholars to emphasize the way words are "associated images."

With their emphasis on the arbitrary, figurative character of language, these literary scientists sound quite contemporary. We might think that their view of signification undermines their evident positivism, as they strove to develop morphologies and taxonomies of types of literature. It did not. This view of signification constituted their positivism, with its primary goal of inducing mental discipline. The non-mimetic, figurative character of language and literature is what made literary discipline "a higher discipline," exercising all mental faculties, for it requires students to determine the relations among disparate terms. Since words do not point to or imitate their referents, E. H. Babbitt of Columbia explained, we learn about things "by their relations": "two things which look just exactly alike may be quite different if they stand in different relations to other things." Readers are therefore continually "reasoning out the meaning of words from the context." "The pupil is constantly called upon to form an opinion of the meaning of a word which he would not know if it stood alone, but which he has help to understand . . . from the context."

Literary discipline does not teach "doctrine," then, but cultivates competence in symbolization, with its shifting among contexts. Literature is the optimal course of study because it exemplifies this process. "Representing life," James Russell Lowell wrote, literature "teaches, like life, by indirection, by . . . nods and winks." By training us to adapt to new contexts, literary discipline enables us to grasp the subtlest nod or wink. It thus cultivated "discrimination," training faculties in "recombination of the proximate parts" of an "aggregate." Note that discrimination, like its cousin term judgment, is here a resolutely practical rather than metaphysical idea. Recombining elements and reapplying ideas to diverse contexts, the critical faculty remains indebted to but does not merely recycle prior forms and traditions.

The effect of literary discipline is to "liberalize us," as Lowell put it in his president's address to the MLA. By sensitizing readers to the "diversity" of experience and men's minds, it effects an "enlargement of ourselves," with literary study a kind of "foreign travel" that broadens sympathy. "The ability to assume the others' point of view is the most valuable equipment that an education can give you," declared Benjamin Ide Wheeler, president of the University of California at Berkeley, in his 1907 commencement address. The sheer content of literature accustoms readers to the experience of diverse characters. Perhaps more fundamentally, sympathy is a structural byproduct of disciplined reading, which involves discerning the connections between experience and formal signs. The disciplined reader was therefore "cosmopolitan," because possessing what James Russell Lowell and Franklin Carter called in their respective MLA president's addresses "manysidedness."

Manysidedness was felt to vanquish habit and prejudice, and this assault on prejudice, long a staple of a certain (Cartesian) strain of western philosophy, introduced a metaphysical idealism into the discourse of modern literary science. The prominent critic Edmund Clarence Stedman maintained that criticism should not "be tainted by private dislike, or by partisanship." Surely, however, the disciplined reader is partisan, in the sense of having values and preferences. One of the main goals of mental discipline was precisely for persons to be able to articulate the rationale for their values. But the disciplined "habit of mind" should not be static, Moulton clarified. While the disciplined thinker tries to differentiate among types of experience and expression, the "static thinker," "possessed by fixed ideas, or fixed standards," rigidly assimilates "varied types . . . to his own conceptions."

Therefore, wrote Brander Matthews of Columbia, we must "strive to master our prejudices." The problem, however, as Wendell of Harvard lamented, is that "creeds long survive experience." To compensate, literary discipline was often imagined to release readers from ordinary habits of thought, which scholars virtually equated with the narrower category of prejudice. It seems fair to say that literary discipline, because it enhances readers' skill at recombining elements of experience, promotes "open-mindedness" or "keeps the mind flexible," or even that it amounts to "self-discipline," with persons practiced at curtailing automatic responses to unfamiliar phenomena. The idea that the disciplined subject, no longer slave to dogma, has been "delivered from all narrowness" is surely melodramatic but perhaps does not idealize the effect of mental discipline upon habit. But the ability to curtail prejudice is not the same as "complete emancipation from the past." The disciplined subject can be said to be "unfettered by tradition" only if the imagination and critical faculty transcend habitual patterns of thought rather than recombine them.

If discipline involves eschewing the very qualities that constitute a cultured self-having a specific (disciplined or imaginative) relation to phenomena, the past, and tradition-then the disciplined subject can exist only by not being a subject at all. Yet a good number of scholars deemed this idealized mode of being the precondition for citizenship. Benjamin Ide Wheeler reminded audiences that the term liberal education derives from "freemen's training" in Attica. Liberal education will "free [students] from the bondage of prejudice [and] routine," and thus "rescue men from slavery and make them free." Liberal studies thus yields "American freemen," who "initiate" and are "independent." Mental discipline produces what Wendell called "sovereign man" and others called "a manhood true, free, brave."

Perhaps the need to compete with other human science disciplines proliferating in the era led scholars to hyperbole. A few scholars consistently termed the ability to exercise faculties and negotiate contexts "the discipline of an ordered liberty." Most others, however, viewed discipline as "self-activity" exempt from the limits of context and transcending convention. The well-trained reader inhabits "more ethereal air," Lowell writes, as if the disciplined reader is so elevated, that it no longer inhabits a body. This logic suits the idea that the trained reader is freed from prejudice, conceived, finally, as any subjective belief. So conceived, the disciplined reader is freed from being oneself.

This idealization of mental discipline was inconsistent with literary scholars' basic definition of the term. Yet this logical transformation seemed necessary for mental discipline not only to liberalize us but to undo (or at least render impalpable) fundamental hierarchies of American social life, most prominently those based on racial differentiations. I mentioned earlier that these scholars, typically for the period, believed that individual and national character were racial. They were hereditarians. In one concise example, George Kittredge attributed the "dismal" "seriousness" of British Romantics to "the Anglo-Saxon temper." Or, in his president's address to the MLA, Thomas Price of Columbia asserted without feeling the need to argue the point that persons' "judgment of literature" is "deeply modified by the sympathies and traditions of race," or "race affinities." Even Richard Moulton of Chicago, who criticized the study of national literatures (which inclines students to jingoism), made his case in racialist terms. Study of "World Literature" would best "secur[e] the aims of literary culture" by "broadening human sympathies, as travel broadens them by bringing us into contact with racial ideas different from our own."

Though hereditarians, these scholars were not generally nativist, as we understand the term from John Higham's seminal work. Far from seeking to purify the American race (whatever that term could mean), they celebrated the way the American race or American type was "composite." In his influential history of American literature, Moses Coit Tyler located the vitality of the American people in its "multitudinous, variegated" composition. E. C. Stedman was enthused that "the traits of many lands" "commingle" in our "national admixture," making "our civilization assume the composite type." Wendell of Harvard and Matthews of Columbia often stressed the mixed composition of the American type. Wendell advised teachers not to lament, at seeing many immigrants in their classrooms, that "we of the elder tradition are a race peacefully conquered,-overwhelmed." Instead, the teacher should be reassured that immigrants make our "national character . . . composite." Matthews wrote that "there is no basis for the prevalent belief that the people of the United States were once almost purely English in descent, and that they have been diluted by foreign admixture." "Abundant" admixture, "the commingling of . . . many bloods," has constituted this culture from the start. Americans should indeed appreciate their "enrichment by alien stocks"; "vigorous foreign blood" makes us "cosmopolitan."

In sum, literary scholars claimed that mental discipline would alter basic notions of how to organize society, broadening Americans' definition of national identity to include and even welcome foreign and minority influences. A few scholars went further, disjoining the idea of national identity from race. In a textbook that went through eight editions between 1900 and 1924, Wendell asserted that language and the ideals it bears are "more potent in binding men together than any physical tie," like that of blood. What makes immigrants "Yankees" is not their blood but their ideals and their refusal to "cherish" ancestral traditions. Benjamin Wheeler of UC Berkeley was yet more direct, asserting, in a rare sentiment for the period, that because of the "mingling [of] bloods and temperaments" in the U. S., "American . . . is not at all a word of race." The most fundamental liberalizing effect of literary discipline, therefore, would be to supersede the idea that society should be organized around divisions of caste or race.

Nonetheless, as hereditarians scientific literary scholars envisioned achieving this transformation through what we might call racial idealism. It derives from the way readers apprehend signs. By recognizing that diverse phenomena are interdependent, readers come to understand not just others' perspectives but the way any experience involves relations among disparate elements. Scholars like Edwin Greenlaw and James Hanford called this phenomenon "the essential unity of human thought." Unity of thought does not mean that everyone's experience is identical, but that diverse experiences belong to one "universal" phenomenon, and are indispensable to it. To maximize this effect, many scholars, though viewing individual character as a "type" of national, racial character, recommended that literary study be comparative, a study of world literature, not conceived or organized around nationalist categories, since these were truly artificial, restrictive categories, obstructing readers' experience of the "unity of all literature."

Advocates of "World Literature" did not abandon the category of race; they idealized it. Greenlaw and Hanford, for example, promptly link (in a melodramatic fragment sentence) the idea of unity of thought to that of racial inheritance: "The unity of human thought, and the enormous, silent power of forces inherited and written in our blood." Unity of thought, here, does not simply involve the human race rather than national races. It encompasses national races. Persons begin in this model as national types. Brander Matthews, who celebrated the cosmopolitan commingling of blood in all races, urged the critic to "perceive the race behind the individual and . . . force it to help explain him." Perhaps the ultimate task of the critic, then, is to realize the contribution of specific races to the "resulting race," the cosmopolitan American type. Even Benjamin Wheeler, who with scarcely any precedent denied that "American" "is a word of race" and declared that education should enable students "to rise as individual creations out of the disease and thralldom of their parentage and the limitations of class and craft and caste," finally imagined these self creations as racial types. In America "all the races of Europe are mingling their bloods and tempers to bring into being the new Occidental man. . . ."

The notion of "the new Occidental man," and the idea of commingling races generally, at once subsumes specific racial types and embodies their specific contribution to cosmopolitan character. A sublime economy of race is at work here. The human race to which all individuals, most notably Americans, belong both transcends and transmits racial types. "Unity of thought," best expressed and studied in World Literature, supersedes individual racial types by preserving and distilling their best characteristics. Lowell named this effect "idealism," and deemed it the characteristic activity of the imagination, by means of which persons can be understood as at once types and distinctive. "The imagination always idealizes," Lowell wrote; "in the representation of character, it goes behind the species to the genus, presenting us with everlasting types of human nature." The "type" here is not a reduction of individual characteristics but their refinement.
The office of the imagination is to disengage what is essential from the crowd of accessories which is apt to confuse the vision of ordinary minds. For our perceptions of things are gregarious, and are wont to huddle together and jostle one another. It is only those who have been long trained to shepherd their thoughts that can at once single out each member of the flock by something peculiar to itself.
When Lowell writes that "idealized" objects and persons have been "stripped of all unessential particulars," he means that in becoming typified, with unessential particulars purged, the individual entity becomes more itself, "peculiar to itself," as if refined or smelted. This racial idealism underlies literary scholars' imagination of persons as "sovereign," achieving through discipline self-mastery and absolute freedom from tradition and convention.

This idealism explains a curious remark by Wendell when he surveys the immigrants in his imaginary classroom. Seeking to credit their contribution to the American race without reducing them to exotic "strangers," Wendell declares that "these boys themselves are not diverse." How can denying their so-called diversity respect their difference and thus individuality? If the boys merely add diversity to American culture, then that culture remains organized around categories of caste. Wendell must imagine, therefore, that their racial specificity is visible yet unaccountable. Wendell's paradoxical remark bespeaks the precariousness of the sublime economy of race by which he conceives the composite, cosmopolitan race and Lowell idealizes persons as at once types and peculiar to themselves. Cosmopolitanism does indeed retain (in order to overcome) the category of caste as an organizing principle. The idealism that Lowell defined was scholars' methodological attempt to preserve the category, with its implied hierarchization, yet negate its consequences.

The idealism I have been tracking here expresses a desire for subjectivity without disciplining, without subjectivization. Such idealism is misguided and unnecessary. Its initial assumption is that subjectivity is compromised by the sheer fact that it arises through disciplining structures. This premise is self-negating, of course. Only within formative structures does the subject possess a frame of reference in which to act. Yet early literary scholars, although making this logic the basis of literary studies, also harbored a fear of disciplining, imagining it in these moments as a threat to rather than the condition of identity. Much contemporary scholarly work continues the idea that disciplinary structures merely restrict subjectivity. This position finds authority in some of Foucault's phrasing. The "procedures of individualization" by which "human beings are made subjects" very quickly can become "mechanisms of normalization." Individualization thus negates the individual, and we can read in many venues today that disciplining mechanisms are forms of policing, most profoundly forms of self-policing. In his late writing, Foucault dissented from this "carceral" reading of his work. He tried to clarify that subjectivization, while an "invigilated process" in which the subject comes to monitor itself, involves an "ensemble of actions" or "field of possibilities" rather than merely a set of regulations and restrictions. That is, "practices of subjection" through which the subject comes to experience itself may be in fact "practices of liberation." Founders of literary studies employed a similar logic in touting literary discipline as potentially emancipatory, since discipline, as they defined it, involves not just the internalization (and then rote repetition) of principles but their recombination in different contexts.

Rather than being sheer subjection, then, discipline makes possible the modification of context. Nonetheless, in service to what at the time was a progressive, if idealistic, political vision, scientific literary scholars retreated from their definition of mental discipline, for they retained as their most basic premise the idea that subjectivization, since it cannot amount to autonomy, is a form of constraint dooming subjects to repeat precepts they have internalized. No liberalizing is possible, on this account, no recombination of extant principles in new formations; nor, therefore, can there be meaningful critique of either values or identity. The alternative, idealized imagination of self, however, is only the illusion of freedom.

NOTES

Those wishing to see footnotes, please e-mail request to h.horwitz@mail.hum.utah.edu.

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