Lionell Hardy
In “Should Studying Literature Be Fun? ‘No’ Is Too Often the Answer,” Timothy Aubry examines the long-standing discomfort within academic literary studies toward aesthetic pleasure and argues that this suspicion has impoverished both scholarship and teaching. Aubry’s central claim is that while political criticism has yielded important insights, the near-erasure of aesthetic judgment from the discipline has produced an incoherent critical culture, one that continues to rely on aesthetic pleasure while refusing to acknowledge or theorize it.
Aubry situates his argument historically, noting that since the late 1960s, literary studies have increasingly emphasized literature’s political and ideological functions. This shift intensified during the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s, when canonical texts were frequently evaluated or rejected based on their authors’ political failings. As a result, aesthetic appreciation became suspect, associated with elitism and ideological blindness. Aubry illustrates this atmosphere through his own graduate-school experience, where expressions of pleasure or enjoyment were treated as markers of intellectual naïveté rather than scholarly seriousness.
Despite this formal rejection of aesthetics, Aubry argues that aesthetic judgment never truly disappeared. Instead, it persisted covertly within political criticism itself. Critics continued to privilege certain texts, styles, and theorists, even while denying the legitimacy of explaining why those works were more compelling or rewarding. This paradox, Aubry suggests, resulted in a quasi-aristocratic model of taste: students were expected to “get it” without being allowed to ask what made a work beautiful or powerful (Aubry).
Aubry also addresses contemporary debates shaped by movements such as #MeToo and Black Lives Matter. While he affirms the importance of confronting misogyny and racism in literature, he cautions against collapsing aesthetic value entirely into political virtue. Not all politically enlightened writing is aesthetically strong, nor does politically troubling content automatically negate a work’s formal or experiential complexity (Aubry).
Ultimately, Aubry contends that literature matters not only because of its political effects but because of the experiences it creates during the act of reading. Aesthetic pleasure, he concludes, deserves explicit recognition and critical scrutiny, as it represents a distinctive form of human fulfillment that cannot be reduced to ideological utility by readers.
One of the strongest features of Aubry’s argument is his exposure of a contradiction at the heart of contemporary literary criticism: the discipline’s reliance on aesthetic judgment while simultaneously denying its legitimacy. This insight aligns closely with the concerns raised in critical theory surveys such as Lois Tyson’s Critical Theory Today, which emphasizes that no critical approach operates in a vacuum and that each foregrounds certain values while marginalizing others. Aubry’s essay demonstrates that, despite its claims to demystification, political criticism often reproduces unexamined hierarchies of taste.
From the perspective of Tyson’s discussion of Marxist and cultural criticism, Aubry’s critique is particularly compelling. Tyson notes that Marxist criticism is at its strongest when it reveals how texts participate in ideological systems. Still, she also cautions that reducing literature solely to its political function risks ignoring its formal complexity and affective power. Aubry identifies precisely this risk in the contemporary classroom. When literature is valued only for its capacity to support or resist political agendas, its aesthetic dimensions become either invisible or instrumentalized. The result is a mode of reading that presupposes significance rather than discovering it (Tyson).
Aubry’s insistence that aesthetic pleasure persisted “in disguised form” within political criticism is an especially productive contribution. This claim suggests that critics never stopped caring about beauty, irony, or complexity; they stopped admitting it. In Tyson’s terms, this amounts to an unacknowledged theoretical bias. Rather than making evaluative criteria explicit and open to debate, scholars often smuggle them in under the cover of ideological critique. Aubry persuasively argues that such practices undermine the intellectual transparency that critical theory seeks to promote (Aubry).
At the same time, a potential weakness of Aubry’s argument lies in the relative underdevelopment of his pedagogical prescriptions. While he convincingly diagnoses the problem, he offers fewer concrete strategies for reintegrating aesthetics into literary study without reverting to naïve formalism or exclusionary canons. Tyson emphasizes that critical approaches work best when used in dialogue rather than in isolation. From this standpoint, Aubry’s essay would benefit from a clearer account of how aesthetic analysis might coexist with feminist, Marxist, or postcolonial readings in the classroom.
Nevertheless, Aubry’s core contention that aesthetic experience has intrinsic value raises an important challenge to theory-driven pedagogy. Tyson repeatedly stresses that theory should enhance, not replace, engagement with literary texts. Aubry’s argument reinforces this principle by reminding readers that literature’s power lies partly in its capacity to shape perception, emotion, and thought in ways that cannot be fully captured by political analysis alone. When students are taught to treat enjoyment as suspect, they may learn how to decode ideology but fail to understand why literature has mattered so deeply across cultures and historical periods (Aubry).
The implications for the study of literature are significant. Aubry does not call for abandoning political criticism, nor does he deny the ethical stakes of teaching problematic texts. Instead, he argues for a more honest critical culture, one that acknowledges aesthetic pleasure as both a source of insight and an object of scrutiny. In this sense, his position complements Tyson’s broader framework, which presents critical theory as a set of tools rather than a totalizing worldview.
Ultimately, Aubry’s essay succeeds because it reframes “fun” not as frivolity but as a serious intellectual and experiential category. By urging scholars to confront rather than suppress their aesthetic responses, Aubry opens space for a more balanced, self-aware literary study, one capable of integrating political responsibility with the lived experience of reading.
Works Cited
Aubry, Timothy. Should Studying Literature Be Fun? The Chronicle of Higher Education, 22 July 2020, www.chronicle.com/article/should-studying-literature-be-fun/.
Tyson, Lois. Using Critical Theory How to Read and Write About Literature. 2nd ed., Routledge, 2011, p. 348.