What happens to the social function of criticism, which has been to legitimize literature as an important activity and social enterprise, when the literary institution falls on hard times? When the old literary order collapses in on itself in a time of radical change and the shift from a print to an electronic culture. Television and other forms of electronic communication have replaced the printed book, especially its idealized form, literature, as more enticing, efficient, and authoritative sources of knowledge.

J. Hillis Miller concludes this text in Surfaces(vol.4) symposium on humanistic discourse thus:

This crisis in representation for literature departments accompanies a larger crisis of representation for the university as a whole, in particular for the humanities as an element in a new kind of university in a different world of global economy and global communication. The old American paradigm for the research university was borrowed from the Humboldtian model of the University of Berlin. This was widely influential in the United States, for example, in the founding of The Johns Hopkins University in 1876. The professionalization of the disciplines of English and other modern European literatures began at Hopkins with the establishing of the Modern Language Association in 1883. Partly under the influence of Matthew Arnold, the study of one national literature, namely English literature, replaced in England and America the role given to philosophy in the original Humboldtian university. This original role for philosophy is enshrined still in the fact that we are all doctors of philosophy, whatever our discipline. The presumption was that the university's function was to serve a single unified nation-state by preserving and passing on its values and ideals. English Departments played a central role in fulfilling that function.

In this review of Alvin Kernan's The Death of Literature, Paul Trout says that literature as a socially constructed category has always been peculiarly fragile and vulnerable.

It has failed to get as deeply inscribed within society as other institutions for two reasons.
First, since the early eighteenth century, and certainly since the Romantic age, the self-proclaimed mission of literature has been to ridicule and oppose the scientific, philosophical, social, political, and moral values of the surrounding society. High literature, especially, has resisted doing what it is the primary job of social institutions to do: legitimizing social values, making a factitious social reality appear natural.Even today, literary people at all levels continue to express hostility toward the main line of modern society, as if criticism of the social order, of politicians and business people, were sufficient justification of the arts.

Literature, as even those who live off it will confess, is impossible to define. No two people agree precisely or altogether on what it is, no two people think about it without murkiness and contradiction. As a result, literature lacks a theoretical basis, a systematic organization of its parts that would make it real and meaningful to others in the larger social world... Troubled by inexact, murky terms and a general lack of theoretical rigor, the institution of literature was ill prepared to withstand the attacks directed at it by the social activists and skeptical theorists of the 1960s, '70s, and '80s.

For many people the old mission of the university no longer has persuasive force. We have not yet, however, invented a new paradigm for the nature and function of the university. The loss of this special role for the study of English literature puts English departments especially under stress in the new post-national, post-modern university. Those of us who are Professors of English have been deprived of our traditional role as preservers and transmitters of the unified values of a homogeneous nation-state.

Hiller then asks: 'What alternative would be best?' He responds along these lines :

William Readings of the University of Montréal has done brilliant work in thinking through the problems of what he calls the "postmodern university." A major theoretical and practical challenge confronts departments of English now to redefine their role in the new kind of university and the new kind of non-unified national culture. If we do not find this new role we shall end up serving a purely ancillary function as teachers of communication skills for a predominantly technological university. I agree not only with Readings, but also with Derrida, Lyotard, Diane Elam, Gerald Graff, and many others who have in different ways called for the creation of a university of dissensus, that is, one in which the impossibility of reconciling differences by dialogue or by increased knowledge would be openly recognized and institutionalized.