Sitting in his quiet, book-lined office, Michel Chaouli, assistant professor of German and of Comparative Literature, doesn't seem like the type to start a fight.

But this mild-mannered scholar has recently entered the forefront of one of academia's most heated and prolonged debates, a debate about the very nature of literature and the reasons for studying it.

"The idea of a crisis in literary studies," Chaouli says, "has been around for at least the last 100 years, since the study of literature became institutionalized."

An Existential Crisis

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The current "crisis" concerns literary studies' failure to fit the definition of what constitutes a proper academic discipline.

"In the university system," Chaouli claims, "a field usually becomes a discipline through a process of increased quantification."

After significant study, Chaouli continues, certain laws and properties are discovered that can lead to a more advanced understanding of a given field. When a scholar makes a contribution to a field, others are supposed to be able to use it to progress to still more advanced principles.

Unlike a discipline like physics or even political science, however, there is no steady body of knowledge or constant sense of progress in the study

of literature.