A Categorical Terminological Imperative

I’ve recently dabbled some in AI discussions, for a writing project, and here’s a thing I’ve found out: lots of people really aren’t very careful about the concepts they use. I’ve two related things to say here. The first is: I think we’ll have a really tough time dealing with how we think about AI because our language seems tailor-made to confuse us. The second is: I’m hereby prescribing to everyone writing on AI the use of the categorical terminological imperative, which is:

Use only those concepts whereby you can at the same time will that they apply everywhere.

Hey, have I lost you already? Sorry. I mean to say the following: if you trawl especially the more optimistic writing on AI, you’ll very frequently encounter the use of such really complicated concepts such as “know,” “understand,” “intelligence,” “better,” “feel,” and so on used as though it were self-evidently correct to say that, for instance “ChatGTP-4 knows what you ask it.” On the one hand, I think that’s an artifact of the deficiencies of our languages to pithily name what it is that a LLM is and does. We recur to “know” because it’s a short descriptor of internal processes we are familiar with: correct response to stimulus, where even “correct” often merely designates “plausible,” rather than “true.” We say “understand” because we’d like to put a name to the automatism of inputàoutput that names the process by which input is translated into output. But, not to put too fine a point to it, none of these terms really grasp the algorithmic nature of AI, unless you really want to say “understand” is purely pattern recognition and “knowledge” is a good name for millions of data manipulations that translate the input “Who was the 45^th President of the United States” into “Donald Trump,” or indeed the question “what color jacket would suit me” to  “brown.” The issue here is less that AI does not know, or does not understand, or indeed, that it does not feel: the issue, rather, is that the easy equivalencies these terms draw between what happens in the black box of AI and what happens, for instance, in the far less black box of my own brain is too facile.

So: we need a categorical terminological imperative. You only get to say “AI knows” when you’re actually willing to say when you know, and when AI knows, there’s really no difference. If you say “AI knows,” you must be okay with genuinely understanding the processes of AI knowledge and your knowledge as the same; in simple terms, you must be okay with understanding all knowledge as stochastically computational, or conversely, to misunderstand AI’s “knowledge” as not. Both of these conceptions are, it seems to me, at least difficult to sustain.

In simple terms: when you say “know” in relation to entities which may not be adequately described as “knowing” anything, then explain what you mean when you say know. If you mean “know” in a specific way, not easily covered by our more common ways of understanding the term—then define it for your purposes. I realize that sometimes, when writing for one of those flimsy little popular surveys, there’s not the space to do so—or so you think. But those are the most important cases for being careful with your concepts. If you throw the idea that “AI knows stuff” and “understands what you want” at an audience often enough, that audience might not realize anymore how these words may not really apply. The categorical terminological imperative, like that other imperative, is most useful in the everyday.

On Jonathan Kramnick’s Criticism and Truth

I’ve finished reading the book version of one of my favorite essays of the past couple of years, Jonathan Kramnick’s Criticism & Truth. It’s got a lot of things in it that are very helpful to my ongoing work, including, well, on the work of literary studies, on the question of method, on the question of what counts as knowledge in literary studies and why, and for an essay I’m writing that tries to think through what we think we’re doing when we’re doing interpretation. So I’ve got a stake in this. Let me use this space to work through my thoughts.

Start with this: I’m on board with a lot of it, and even more of it I find fascinating to think with. My copy of the book is littered with little flags and marginal annotations, and I’ve already copied a few lines into ongoing projects here and there. So that’s good! On the other hand, I find myself uncompelled to assent to at least two of the largest theses Kramnick raises, although I’m sympathetic to where he comes from. That’s less good! Some of things I’ve read I don’t understand. Those are the worst!

Start with the good stuff, before I get to my quibbles and the places where I think I’m not getting it. Of the things I like, perhaps most importantly, like Kramnick, I think we need to champion close reading as a method. I’ve written about this before in a number of actually published, peer-reviewed things: as literary scholars, I think we kinda need to lean into close reading as our one and only method, not just because it works (for given values of that), but also because it is institutionally-politically useful and eminently teachable. Like Kramnick, too, I think we produce knowledge. Like Kramnick, finally, I think that there is a strong connection between our method, our claim to knowledge, and our institutional futures, indeed our justification as a discipline. So all of that’s good, to my mind, and Kramnick’s putting his points with exceptional economy and clarity. Quite the prose stylist!

I’m not sure how major my disagreement here will end up being. My quibbles may just be quibbles, but potentially they are more significant disagreements, or elsewise they’re moments where I’ve misunderstood him. I’ll basically interweave all of these below. Let me start with the first of my concerns, the idea that we’ve misunderstood the meaning of close reading. Of my initial quibbles, then, the most important may be that unlike Kramnick, I don’t think close reading is a version of writing. It certainly cannot only be a method of writing, much as it cannot only be a method of reading. Suggesting as Kramnick does that “Close reading isn’t reading. It’s writing” (22) is certainly an interesting, and I might even say useful, corrective to other takes that take more literally the idea of close reading. But it’s also far too absolute. “A close reading,” I would be tempted to agree, is a written thing, as anybody who’s ever tried to make their prose-making organs work in the classroom or discussion will know. But this written thing entails more than hand-eye coordination, obviously. Most importantly, I would insist, it does entail a specific form of attention to the text. Kramnick is right to say that close reading isn’t just reading; he’s wrong to say it’s (just) writing. Like all intellectual endeavors, it is bound up in the forms we do our work in, in the historically specific and contingent; and it doesn’t even exhaust the full spectrum of literary studies work. I write about Geistesarbeit below, and I recommend this as a useful corollary to Kramnick’s suggestion. Yes, close reading may be the most easily operationalizable version of what we do; but even so, it needs to be read in context.

Secondly, I think I disagree with what Kramnick posists our knowledge is, and how our knowledge comes about, although to be fair, I’ve yet to work out the whole of my counterargument, either because I’m spinning in a circle, or because Kramnick is (and perhaps both). There are two slightly separate issues I have here, let’s call them a & b. For a, I have a quibble with the way in which Kramnick’s examples of “apt” work all revolve around critics forging their language to the language of a writer. This is especially the case because, by tying his examples of close reading so closely to literary writers (William Cowper, Toni Morrison, Stephen Crane, Fred Wah, George Eliot, for instance), Kramnick seems to impose an a priori aesthetic judgment on close reading’s potential subjects—and to reserve close reading to aesthetic language. The problem here, it seems to me, is not just that literary criticism of writers whose writing may not as easily lend itself to this kind of word-by-word or phrase-by-phrase interaction, for instance those which may be more plot-driven or, for lack of a better term, “inartful” in their writing, may appear invalidated by this. One might counter that this is an artifact of terminology: that when you encounter these writers, you cannot perform a close reading of them, without prejudice to other modes of access. Fair. But here is where we return to my earlier concern: this really only is problem when you define close reading as the “deft treatment of language” (9). So, while I am unconcerned about Kramnick being coherent—he is—I am concerned about the fast limits of his axiological use of the term “literary” and the way in which this use would seem to include, say, a literary studies of popular fiction. Is that his point? I’m not sure. But I am quite sure that you can have a literary studies of popular fiction.
For b, the more fundamental issue I have is that the whole construction of “knowledge,” the claim that “aptness of style and dexterity of quotation have epistemic significance” (46), appears to lend itself to circular reasoning. For how, but for judging its epistemic significance (i.e., for having successfully argued a truth about a text, I think), can we adjudicate the aptness of the style? Any style that convinces must be “the truth” (62): “claims for truth follow from an apt negotiation with and adjustment to (again) the indissoluble grammatical epoxy before you” (63), Kramnick avers, but “apt” is made to heft such a load here. Aptness, Kramnick clarifies in a very Kantian move, is best understood as “aptness to compel our assent, our appraisal of it as well-formed, perspicuous, or adroit” (78). We’ll need to let slide the fact that defining a word with itself is generally not likely to help much. But I also don’t think the text really makes this stick very well.

The upshot of Kramnick’s argument, as far as I can tell, is that if it’s well done, it’s correct. I’m still not quite sure I disagree, since at least one obverse formulation is so clearly also correct (if it’s not correct, it’s not well done); but it smacks of circularity. Can there be claims that are correct, but not well done? Can there be claims that are well done, but incorrect—a tour de force of style and dexterity that nonetheless does not produce an intersubjectively valid interpretation? Is that not what (some might argue) Fish is doing?

Kramnick provides a single example where, apparently, he thinks this can be shown to have gone wrong: Stanley Fish’s reading of Samson Agonistes. That reading, Kramnick avers (I’m no judge of this, because I haven’t read the poem OR Fish’s argument), is wrong (I infer, from the earlier point Kramnick makes that the point of Fish’s critical work isn’t “getting it right”). Specifically, it is wrong, or (see the problem?) can be recognized to be wrong, because it sets “parts of speech inside and outside of quotation marks […] in deliberate abrasion with the larger pile from which the quoted material is taken [i.e., Samson Agonistes?].” Wait, so why does this not work? It’s dexterous, it’s creative, only (Kramnick says) it’s wrong. But that “wrongness” then cannot be located in the aptness of anyone’s writing: it must (must it not?) precede writing about Milton’s poem. Can something be correct, but not apt in style and dexterity? I think the choice of words basically precludes that: “apt,” after all, means “suitable or appropriate to express ideas, apposite, expressive” according the OED. In simple terms, then, to accept something as correct is basically to concede the aptness of the proof for the purposes of the proof. (You may still, I think, quibble with the style for reasons that don’t have to do with how convincing something is, but because the specific word choice does not fulfil the formal criteria of academic discourse, for instance. Can we say: “You’re right, but can you put this better?” I think we can.)

Here’s another thing: apt, notes the OED, also means “customarily disposed, given, inclined, prone” if used of persons, which is, for now at least, something all literary critics are. “Aptness” thus at least also comes with overtones of customariness. This is, obviously, implicitly and positively, acknowledged in calling the construction of close readings a craft skill, a know how. But it also points us away from epistemic significance towards mere custom and ritual.

There are two versions here, I think, of what’s going on: a) Kramnick doesn’t think the language Fish uses is “compelling his assent” sufficiently to assent to Fish’s reading (but the argument is clearly meant, in the Kantian manner, to compel assent; that’s what critical arguments do); b) Kramnick thinks Fish is misreading Samson Agonistes—Samson Agonistes does not in fact say what Fish says it says. That the language is “abrasive”, that Fish’s choice and reading of Milton’s text is in “abrasion” to the rest of Samson Agonistes (rather than in abrasion to the “grammatical epoxy” of Fish’s sentences, which are, in typical Fishian manner, deftly composed), that fact is only available to the reader who knows the rest of Samson Agonistes. To be apt, then, isn’t just to write well, it is in fact to have read well: to have understood what Samson Agonistes was trying to do, which was not what Fish says it was trying to do. The commingling of dexterity of prose-fashioning and being right about a text’s meaning is unhelpful here, I think. Kramnick isn’t saying Fish is writing poorly except insofar as he makes a poor argument; but that poor argument could not be helped except by making better choices about what to write, which in turn requires an understanding of what that “better” would entail that is clearly no coterminous with writing itself.

Do I get that wrong? It’s possible. I’m not sure. And as I say: I think that even a bad version of this is an interesting one to think with. The notion that we’re an arts-and-crafts discipline is compelling; I think it’s basically not correct, but it’s nonetheless compelling.

This is already getting too loose, and so in the fashion of bad essays everywhere, I want to slip in a more tangential issue. Kramnick avers that “the live presentation of literary criticism tends […] to be read out word for word from printed or digital copy […] because the argument is understood to be inseparable from the writing” (62). I’m not sure that’s true. I’ve certainly free-styled papers; I’ve also seen it done; I’ve been more convinced by papers that were free-styled than by interminable, 20-minute density-fests that were impossible to follow. Does anything hinge on this? Maybe in so far as Kramnick insists that there’s something about this that provides “evidence of [the] epistemic significance” of his version of close reading. Or maybe it’s because we’re shit at presenting? I’m not sure.

Where to end this? I really enjoyed reading Kramnick’s take, and I think there is a lot useful in this. I feel compelled to assent, and yet don’t, fully.

On Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon

So my department was invited wholesale to participate in the German premiere (apparently?) of Martin Scorsese’s latest film, Killers of the Flower Moon. And because it was free, we went! I have notes.

I’m not a film critic. In fact, I barely have the language to critique film, and I’m not sure I’m wholly accurate in my observations about this film, but it’s struck a chord, and I find myself interested in ruminating about it. Killers of the Flower Moon is based on a 2017 non-fiction book of the same name, written by the journalist David Grann. I’ve read the book! It’s really very good, and I can see why the story might have appealed. This film, I’m fairly sure, isn’t really very good; but I’m less sure why. Spoilers below, which may be relevant if you want to see the film at some point in the future. I’m not really sure how relevant, I’ll admit: the film sets up basically everything very early on, and besides, it sticks fairly closely to historical reality.

But anyway! Again: I’m not a film critic, and I’m not sure if I’ve simply misunderstood some bog-standard language-of-film-issue, or something, or am just preternaturally unsophisticated. Were I to try my hand at film critiquing, though, I might start with the question that’s bugged me since this morning, when I briefly skimmed Grann’s book again. What does Scorcese think cinema—film—can bring to this story? Because the story really is quite complicated. It begins with the Osage tribe’s historical origins and displacement to western Oklahoma, where their reservations sits on top of vast wealths of oil. This oil, in turn, makes the Osage rich (the film displays a title card to that effect before its really effective opening montage, saying something like “the richest population per capita in the world in 1920”). One of the issues that comes through fairly well in Grann’s book but less so in the film is the way this wealth was available to the Osage. I think there are two major issues here: first, the oil-rich lands of the Osage had been divided up into allotments, and were distributed among the Osage as “headrights,” basically shares in the oil-drilling rights that made the Osage rich. These headrights were not for sale, and could not be gifted away; the only way for them to pass was by inheritance. Secondly, control over the money the Osage received from those headrights while alive came to them under the strict rules of “guardianship” laid down by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. In the film, we see Osage with the BOI agent discussing this expense or that, and the question of whether or not money would be released for that; the film suggests the existence of “competent” and “incompetent” as categories that determined this access. (In a brief skim of Grann, I couldn’t make heads or tails of this, and I may look it up in more detail later. Importantly for my purposes here, I don’t think Scorsese makes it very clear in the film either.)

For white people determined to secure access to these funds, then, required marrying into Osage families; for even more secure access, Osage then had to die. This is the background against which the film starts, and it starts with murders: Osage shot, poisoned, otherwise killed. We join the film’s protagonist, Ernest Burkhart, as he arrives at Fairfax station and gets driven to his uncle, “King” William K. Hale, a wealthy cattle rancher. Leonardo Di Caprio stars as Burkhart, a somewhat simple World War I veteran whom Di Caprio plays—competently? It’s possible there’s not much to be done with the character, but Di Caprio felt a bit one-note to me. Robert De Niro is Hale, and was a little more interesting, by turns caring and devious, as the film introduces, very early on, Hale’s firm belief that white people should own the wealth of the Osage. Things move apace. Di Caprio sets up as a chauffeur/taxi-driver in Fairfax, and happens onto Mollie Kyle. Mollie, Hale tells Ernest one night, is unmarried—and, like all Osage, wealthy. Ernest, Hale suggests, should court and marry her.

And so he does. That’s actually the first bit I didn’t think in any way convincingly told. And I mean, I know it’s historically true! But that’s not, I think, how a film should handle this: narrative must be plausible, and this felt rushed. The courtship to marriage scenes didn’t really seem to me to establish why Mollie would consider Ernest; indeed, this was an issue I had, also, with the other major relationship between a white man and an Osage woman in the film, Mollie’s sisters’ husband (in sequence) Bill Smith, first married to Minnie, who potentially died of natural causes, and then Rita (the film’s subtitles persistently named her Reta, but that’s not right). There’s a brief scene where the tribal elders moan the loss of the indigenous ways and the fact that all the women marry white men. But why did they marry those white men? There’s terribly little on this in the film.

I say terribly little because the heart of the film, such as it is, is the relationship between Ernest and Mollie, and the ways in which Ernest not only is a bank robber and highwayman on the side, but also gets roped into a plot to murder every single member of his new wife’s family in order to make all the headrights come to him. In the book, I’ll say, it remains unclear whether Ernest was a willing accomplice entirely happy to court, marry, and murder his wife (plus the kids), and also to kill her sisters and in-laws, whether he ever “loved” Mollie or not. In the film, it’s pretty clearly implied that Ernest is a dimwit manipulated step-by-step into going along with Hale. The point here is: I don’t get the relationship between Ernest and Mollie. In the book, I didn’t need to; it’s not really about that so much as it is about the larger set of murders and the beginning of the FBI, which comes (a bit white-man-saviorish, admittedly) in late in the day to uncover the truth of events. In the film, because it’s so central, that lack of an intelligible relationship between the two, or between Bill Smith and his wives, was a problem for me. The all-too-short nods that the film gives to the “why” didn’t help; they were, in fact, almost insulting, I thought. In a short scene, Mollie and her sisters discuss their relationships, and their reasoning boils down to: Ernest’s dumb but pretty to look at, and Bill’s good in the sack. Oh, and yeah, they’re after money, but who isn’t. (Even the book did a better job here, I thought.) Case close, get the pastor, we’re off to the wedding.

Again: what does Scorsese think film can bring to the story? Pretty clearly, he realized that he needed some sort of emotional center; but for me, at least, that center failed to work. Not in the moment, or for the smaller-scale things that can move you, I think: it’s pretty heart wrenching to see Di Caprio accede to becoming an accessory to the murder of his wife’s family. It’s also terrible to see that family be murdered one by one. But only in a distanced, general way: sure, you kinda feel with Mollie when the final sister gets blown up with her husband, in that way you do. But not because we have a strong sense of the bond between the sisters, or the closeness of the family, or anything; it’s all too superficial and rushed (at 3 ½ hours!) for that. Perhaps most disturbing in this sense was the cheapness with which the film used the (apparently unrelated to murders?) death of Ernest and Mollie’s youngest daughter. She’s got the whooping cough, so Mollie gives her to a cousin to take care of outside town; we don’t see her again until she lies on her bed, dead, with Mollie mourning her. I don’t know that kid! She’s no character, she’s a prop to make me feel bad.

Scorsese, it feels like, didn’t want to sacrifice time and “depth” from the story of William Hale’s systematic murder spree and the deep entanglements of anti-indigenous racism, overwhelming white disregard, and cruel exploitation. Like a small-town Vito Corleone, De Niro’s Hale directs, plots, and orchestrates the exploitation of an already exploitative system to his own advantage, cold-blooded and mendacious, and that could have been a film. And so could the story (even if it’s more made-up) of Ernest Burkhard falling earnestly (ha!) in love with a woman he, basically, gets assigned as a job, a woman who loves him back for relatable reasons, and to see the ways in which Ernest justifies to himself why murdering that woman’s family is acceptable. We get basically half of both films, plus a little courtroom drama (with Brendan Fraser and John Lithgow!!). Terribly simply put: it’s clear what Scorsese wanted this to do, but what he wanted this to do, he needed an eight-episode Netflix miniseries for, not a 3 ½ hour movie; it’s almost ironic, given his vocal defense of cinema of late, that this film isn’t really cinema.

The thing is: it’s not even that the film’s terribly well shot, or anything. It’s not bad, by any means, but it’s also not—terribly filmic? Terribly good, period? Not just because Jesse Plemmons is also in this film, I kept getting dragged back to The Power of the Dog, and how exceptionally this film translated its source material: specifically, how it made the most of the camera lens, how effortlessly it produced a sense of scale, of remoteness, of location, how it framed its shots and understood the landscape: of how clearly it required the screen for how it narrated. We got invited to this screening with claims of “opulent images and hypnotic editing;” I can see the latter (more on that later), and occasionally the former, but what’s striking me most right now is a sense of disconnection from the scene. If you’ve read the book, you’re kinda helped along by knowing the major “settings,” as it were. But I still was somewhat struck by the cut, mid-way through the movie, from the old West feeling of Fairfax’s initial appearance—train station and single-street “downtown” straight out of High Noon—to the lush setting of the neighborhood in which Rita and Bill Smith’s house stands, and where Ernest and Mollie shelter after feeling unsafe in their out-of-town house. Several times, I was at a loss at what house I was supposed to be seeing the inside of; at least once, I was completely baffled by the choices.

(Nerdy, perhaps: when Jesse Plemmons’s Bureau of Investigations agent first assembles his team to info-dump viewers with what they founds out, they’re assembled in an arc in front of the camera; the scene’s at night, but it’s lit so that it almost appears as if on a soundstage, or a stage, period. And that’s followed by a weird scene in which (apparently) the grassland in front of Hale’s ranch has caught fire, and six of his ranchhands seem to try to tamp the fire out with branches? It may be meant to suggest an indigenous dance-ritual (for some reason), but it’s just weird, and when the scene cuts to Ernest and Mollie’s bedroom, the fire is present as a terrible, quasi-lava lamp visual effect on their suddenly-milky window panes. Maybe an intended effect, but nonetheless shitty.)

Nothing so much symbolizes the way the film is only half-something, half-something else, than the absolutely batshit ending. We cut to a radio-play stage, where we get the “true crime podcast” version of the end of the story—who got what prison sentence, who didn’t, who died when and of what, with the final words left to Scorsese himself, reciting (something that I’ve forgotten) about the end of the story. For someone who, like any true crime podcast, has just made the potentially unnecessary choice to base his film on the real-life suffering of (largely) women, that seemed unearned. Had the film started with that, it might have made sense as bookends—perhaps even as a commentary on Grann’s book itself, which, for all the potential criticism of all true crime, however, apparently did the lion’s share of the work of getting the Osage murders into any kind of public consciousness. As it is, it just seemed to highlight that Scorsese didn’t know how to end a movie that maybe should never have been a movie in the first place.

Popular (World) Realism? On Moritz Baßler: Populärer Realismus

I’m reviewing a German book again! Or maybe not so much reviewing as thinking with? We’ll see.

Moritz Baßler is one of the most prominent German Germanists, a claim I prove mainly through the fact that I’ve heard of him (and, in fact, now have read two books of his, the other being the equally enlightening Gegenwartsästhetik, with Heinz Drügh). I could have even seen him speak, but I forgot to make a calendar note. So it goes.

Populärer Realismus is a book aimed at the very least at a mixed audience: it’s not dry enough to be purely academic, but it’s also not chatty enough to be purely popular. Its starting point is an observation that the idea of “midcult,” originally coined by the critic Dwight Macdonald in Partisan Review (unless I’m mistaken), and later used extensively by Umberto Eco, is the best descriptor for major tendencies in contemporary (German, but also international) literature. It argues that “popular realism has developed into a global model of success under contemporary market conditions” (9—all translations are mine). Baßler discusses this thesis and its consequences over 400 pages, and, I’ll say, he persuades me. My reason to engage with him in writing then is not (as is so often the case on these virtual pages) to bitch and moan about other people’s terrible books, but to get a clearer sense of what I think. And maybe it’ll help you, too, possibly imaginary reader.

Perhaps the most interesting thing that Baßler does—the only “theoretical” thing, which isn’t a criticism—is his definition of realism. Realism, says Baßler, is a literary Verfahren, and the reason I’m not immediately translating the word here is that the concept of “Verfahren” is already at least slightly unclear to me. Strikingly, I should say—it’s not a particularly uncommon word, but it turns out I wasn’t entirely sure what Baßler meant. The thing is, in German literary studies, it’s a fairly frequent way to describe your research interest: “X als literarisches Verfahren.” A Verfahren is the ways and means of doing something, sometimes even a “method,” maybe, but also just an act, maybe a procedure, process, or technique. In the common parlance of Anglophone literary studies, we might say: form, but we would probably miss the point that it’s at least also a practice; not just a thing that emerges, but a whole becoming. Realism, says Baßler, is “a texture, a literary way of making [a style] that makes itself as it were invisible and transports us in our reading directly to the level that is important to it: the level of the story. We do not have to worry about the level of signification of the novel, the letters, words and terms, they are already chosen so that we do not notice them” (18-9). Realism, in Baßler’s terms, produces immersion by refusing complication and complexity on the level of language, and any immersive text (including computer games, films, or TV series) and any contemporary genre (from the thriller to fantasy to ordinary realism) can be realistic.

The definition is obviously important, because it replaces what amounts to an ontological question (literature’s relation to the “actual world”, the particular ontology of the storyworld) with a formal one (literature’s concrete way of writing about anything). It’s what allows Baßler to make the claim for realism’s contemporary dominance and also to think through carefully what “really” distinguishes (as in his examples) a Dietmar Dath novel from a Daniel Kehlmann one. And I like this definition to some extent! One of the ways in which it mashes with things that I also like is, for instance, to use it to center the idea of “genre” as far more of a marketing category, in the way Jeremy Rosen has understood it, than as a formal category. For Baßler, the ontological status of the narrated world, again, is not a concern: it’s only the way of narrating it that’s of interest. This move allows Baßler to usefully flatten the differences between different genres of narrative writing, and indeed between different media.

There’s a necessary and simply obverse “but” to this, of course. As with any change or perspective, this involves a loss of an idea that’s also pretty dear to me. I can’t really yet bring myself to ignoring the difference between, say, the historical novel of Kehlmann and the science-fiction novel of Dath (or, to use Anglophone examples, the historical novel of Hilary Mantel and the science-fiction novel of Kim Stanley Robinson) as more importantly different than similar, no matter how much they might resemble texturally a “popular realism.” And in the same digital breath, I will acknowledge that I do not fully know how I would defend this take. I’ll need to return to this a little later, when I also say something about what I find still puzzling about the book.

I will give comparatively short shrift, now, to most of the book, and not because it’s not worth dwelling on, but because it’s so well done and persuasive that I find myself unwilling to quibble with it. For the majority of the book, Baßler engages examples of popular realism, from Daniel Kehlmann and Sebastian Fitzek to Elena Ferrante and Sharon Otoo. Closely analyzed and exquisitely read, Baßler’s critiques of the novels he discusses are great reading, and it is entirely to his credit that the idea of popular realism helps elucidate how so many of these novels remain unable to genuinely produce insight, or conflict, or anything beyond the pleasure of reading. This is especially the case where Baßler quibbles with previous readings, and I’ll briefly single out here his discussion of Ferrante, which he reads in conjunction with the discussion in Chihaya et al.’s The Ferrante Letters. I find The Ferrante Letters interesting and frustrating (largely because I’m not sure how one would operationalize its method, or indeed if it has a method in the first place). Baßler shows rather pointedly how effortfully the four writers of that discussion of Ferrante seek to lift Ferrante to quasi-modernist literariness, as when Chihaya herself insists on the way the texts “becomes something of a surrealist assemblage” (44); Baßler responds by simply saying: “No! The Verfahren of Ferrante has nothing to do with surrealist textures at all.” (181) Not only is he, I think, correct about that, but also in his conclusion that literary studies has a problem with the recognition that virtually all contemporary literature, and at any rate all contemporary literature anybody ever reads, is insistently non-resistant, no matter how much we would like it to be. (Anecdote: I once presented on Jonathan Franzen’s absolutely terrible novel Freedom, essentially saying: this is a terrible novel because it utterly fails to understand what it itself is even about. And one of the questions I got was: maybe it’s subversive? No!, I said; it’s really just terrible. My interlocutor, I think, had the same impulse of trying to find the moment of resistance.)

Which brings me to what might be my major, and only partially fair, complaint about Baßler’s book. One of the projects I currently am working on is concerned with the lack of interdisciplinary exchange among the literary studies disciplines—which is to say, the national language disciplines. Baßler’s book reminds me of why I was interested in this. Much of his argument recapitulates things that have been discussed in American and English literary studies for some time: the question of the role of genre, the capacity of TV series to react more swiftly than other forms of cultural production to the demands of the viewers (in Baßler: 136), but also the very foundational (really important!) question of what constitutes “literariness” today. I know, because I’ve dabbled in this stuff myself (much of The Novel as Network is devoted to these questions, as is my forthcoming Habilitation). Is this a diss? In a way, I suppose, it kinda is? I mean: Nicholas Brown, whose praises I sing somewhat regularly here, spends a chapter in his Autonomy discussing The White Stripes, a band which Baßler also occasionally mentions positively (as in: that might still be art). There seems to have been the opportunity for something fruitful here (or in Jeremy Rosen, or in Jim Collins). But also, no, it’s not a diss: it’s just how things are. Baßler’s argument would have profited from more Anglophone insights, as no doubt Anglophone insights would profit from Baßler. It’s not that Baßler is not familiar with parts of this discussion—not only does he discuss The Ferrante Letters as well as Amy Hungerford’s annoying 2016 Making Literature Now, for instance, he is also comparatively well-versed in contemporary Anglophone fiction. But that there’s been a vast array of discussion of the state and status of contemporary literary writing goes too unremarked given Baßler’s rightful insistence on the point that his popular realism is also explicitly an “international style.”

I want to end this review on two more question-quibbles that I have already briefly broached above. I’ll preface this ending by saying: I’ll need to think more about this, and I have not got a good sense of the validity of my points here as criticisms, exactly. The first regards the use of “realism” here. Baßler opposes “realism” as a formal feature of a text to “Realistik,” which appears to be the noun form of the word “realistisch,” perhaps best envisaged in such familiar constructions as “es wäre besser, hier realistisch zu bleiben” (it would be better to remain realistic here): “Die Realistik der Außenpolitik Kissingers,” as it were. It’s an unfamiliar word in German, I think, and I’m not entirely enamoured of Baßler’s choice here. I’m not sure what actual good it does to call this particular sense of contemporary literary form realistic while holding its ontological commitments in abeyance. Baßler’s point, as I understand it, is to stress how the ontological uncertainties or divergences from the world-actual remain unable to shift our perception of our world while we are, by way of the Verfahren, caught in the simplicity of understanding popular realism. This, at least, is towards the end of the book, in the absolutely persuasive chapter on popular realist texts that nonetheless are “good” (my second quibble!), what actually constitutes “good literature” today: “exploring spaces of possibility” (335) even if those spaces are spaces of content, rather than of form. Texts which Baßler suggests are positive examples are those which “go forward” (342) (he dubs these, with Dietmar Dath, “Kalkülromane;” another difficult-to-translate term, derived by Dath from formal logic and so, properly “calculus,” it suggests in Dath a sense of logical axiomatic derivation—a science-fictional thinking-forward from the present, as it were). For Baßler, good realism produces “paradigmatic comparisons and reflexions that remain open to the future” (377). This kind of levelling move is useful, I agree, and in many ways a better version of the ideas of genre amalgamation, genre turn, and cross-generic alliance that I have used to describe something similar about literary value. But on the other hand, I still find it problematical to reduce fantasy and science-fiction to the level of content. Dietmar Dath, whom I have mentioned several times, insists in several recent essays, interviews, and his expansive history of science-fiction, Niegeschichte, on the peculiar constitution of that genre as a machine to think with, a technology distinct from other literary forms. I think I still agree with that assessment, and would prefer Baßler’s book to pay more attention to the specific ways in which the literary Verfahren works differently in science-fiction and in Realistik. I suppose Baßler just does not agree that it does; if so, I would probably call that an only partially, or selectively, useful shorthand.

The second thing I would have liked to have more insight in is Baßler’s stance towards what his diagnosis that this form, whatever name it would take, is dominant in the contemporary means. It’s perfectly possible I missed this, but between the insistence that there is no more formal avant-garde and formal complexity in contemporary literature (by and large) and that we find good, useful literature thus largely in the content of literature, there seems to be a bit of a missing joint. Baßler’s point, to a large extent, seems to be that some texts, such as Mithu Sanyal’s Identitti, are “good” because they refuse easy moralizing, simple identification of themes, “correct” stances and morals. In other words, they produce “difficulty” thematically, where modernist novels tended to produce it formally. They raise more questions than they give answers to. I think Baßler retains the modernist commitment to difficulty as the hallmark of “good” literature (and by the way, “good” is a word used repeatedly, so the scare quotes here are more marks of my own concern with the word), but shifts it to the level of content, rather than form. What remains elusive to my mind is an outright statement of why difficulty is good. It’s not that I don’t tend to agree with his assessments—it’s more that I would have liked to see him spell out why “difficulty” is more useful than, say, a morally supportable, straightforward moral. This is, to be sure, a fundamental question, but precisely because so much else in the book is fundamental, I had hoped this fundamental question would also be touched, if for no other reason than to also place literary studies more properly in this new constellation of literary production. Again: I have my own answer to the question of my ambivalence and a lack of a straightforward moral are desirable; I don’t mind this idea here. But I would have liked to see Baßler spell out why they are; and, at the highest order, I would have liked him to reaffirm what it means in this context to call a particular work a work of art.

I’ll close this here. Suffice it to say that I will re-read this soon, as it touches on a number of ongoing research interests, and possibly I will work out an answer to my questions. In the meantime, I repeat what I said in my last review here: if you read German, buy and read this book; if you don’t, get someone to publish it in English.

On Geistesarbeit

I’m going to try to say something here about a very unique book: Steffen Martus and Carlos Spoerhase’s Geistesarbeit. In the way I usually categorize my theory reviews here, this is one of those books that are just eye-opening, if again in a different way than other books I’ve praised here.

Martus, at Humboldt University in Berlin, and Spoerhase, now at LMU Munich, are German Germanists. Geistesarbeit, obviously, is a German book, and indeed its two major “case studies,” the Germanist Friedrich Sengle and the rather better-known comparatist Peter Szondi, are also German, and they are both literary scholars (or shall we say: they’re all four of them literary scholars). The book promises to be, and probably is, more generally about the practices of the humanities: the things we do, why we do them, how we do them, and how to best understand them. “Geistesarbeit” hints at this already. It’s a play on “Geisteswissenschaft,” the German term for the humanities, with its various overtones of Hegelian Geist / spirit, of intellectualism, paired with the all-important question of what our “Arbeit,” our work or labor, really is.

Almost inevitably, Martus and Spoerhase situate this effort in the context of the trope of the crisis of the humanities. The solutions that have been advocated, Martus and Spoerhase suggest, may have a glaring weakness: a lack of clarity about what, in practice (that is to say: in practice theory) the work of the humanities actually is, which is, they suggest, an “intricate and sensitive assemblage of practices” (21). I’ll briefly return to the whole theoretical framework of the book below—I’m not, in fact, terribly interested in it, and I’m not wholly convinced Martus and Spoerhase are. For now, I’d just like to say that what emerges from their work in the archive of the Szondi and Sengle papers is a remarkable view of academic praxis, certainly in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s in Germany, but by not-too terribly difficult extrapolation generally.

This, then, is also why you should read Geistesarbeit. Perhaps most importantly, I think you should read it to get a better sense of what your work (if, as seems likely, you’re a literary studies or humanities worker) actually is. I say this in part because it was fairly eye-opening to me, and I have been thinking about the problem for a while now. In three dozen short, thematically at least partially progressive chapters, Martus and Spoerhase offer perspectives on collaborative work, publication, theorizing and the impact of theory, the way we understand our objects to work, for instance. But they also address themselves to the way in which teaching, the production of syllabi, the entire praxis context of a department (a Lehrstuhl, admittedly, because of the German context), and spatial locativity commingle in the production of what our “actual” work, the concrete practices of our everydays, is. What emerges from this is a complex web of negotiable but preexisting interferences that should have a serious impact on our self-conception as scholars. However we conceive of our ourselves—as researchers forced into the classroom against our will, as teachers with little interest in advancing the somewhat tenuous bounds of humanities knowledge in research, as administrators with a mission to reform, as theorists with a desire to shape the future methods of the discipline, and so on—Martus and Spoerhase note our bounded-upness in networks of relation expressed in practices that are not always “learned” but often copied, part and parcel of how Geisteswissenschaften operates. And the thing is not so much that we do not, technically, know this. In writing this, I have already made a mental note to distribute this blog post via Twitter to a potential audience, just set aside my copy of “Culture Industry,” marked up in yellow marker pen, for teaching later, and am mentally preparing to hear an intra-departmental lecture in a couple of minutes; meanwhile, I just talked to a colleague about their upcoming administrative meeting involving the hiring of a new assistant to the department. You also know this! But it certainly pays to have it laid out in great detail, to understand how many practices are indeed involved in the production and reproduction of humanities scholarship, if for no other reason than to glean a sense of how difficult change is within such systems.

The point of Geistesarbeit is no, though, to highlight that resistance: rather, it is to highlight the peculiarities of that whole array of practices that they look at, if you can “highlight everything.” There are surprising insights into interpretative practice, for instance, as when Martus and Spoerhase analyze Szondi’s choice of language with regards to how well Szondi appears to believe it captures an interpretative insight, but also how such often elaborate quests for “just the right word” are impacted by the conditions of their use: oral presentations and different forms of written publication. Or later, when they discuss the question of how academic reading functions, and reveal (except it can’t be a revelation) how diffuse and variegated actual academic reading practices are, despite our oft-stated, and strategically overstated, insistence on being always-careful, always thorough (for instance, I did not completely re-read “Culture Industry” just now—I already had a bunch of markings in it that I took as the occasion to re-read certain passages).

Many, many more instances of such insights that might not seem particularly revelatory could be cited, but I would instead like to stress how revelatory these passages are even though they may not seem like much. Martus and Spoerhase genuinely, I would say, manage to produce an account of humanities practice: the sheer fact that you pass out of the book without thinking that this is a doubtful account is worth mentioning. For anyone who, like me, is interested in accounts of what our work is, this is just a must-read.

I’ll note semi-randomly a few things that nonetheless bear mention. The first, to pick up from above, is that while I am convinced practice theory offers a useful vocabulary for talking about the work of the humanities in the way Martus and Spoerhase want to talk about it, it’s not quite as clear to me that it’s wholly…well…necessary? Don’t get me wrong: it’s clearly the case that practice theory is a useful frame, and to highlight, at least occasionally, the way we do things as opposed to how to conceive of them (or in addition to that) is helpful. But all the same, I can’t help but feel like it’s a scaffolding that does not, as such, add persuasiveness to the observations, “only” a theoretical language to do it with. The periodical reminders that Geistesarbeit adds to how practice theory conceives of practices are congruent with the observations; I’m not sure they measurably influence my take, at least, on the observations and conclusions. But I’m also not sure that that’s a criticism.

The second is to note two issues I do have with the book. I’ll try to and make those, at least, make sense.

So, first. This is probably the first Suhrkamp book I have ever read cover to cover. That’s a measure of how well Martus and Spoerhase write: this is an eminently readable book! It’s also a measure of how badly this needed to be not a Suhrkamp book, or at the very least not a Suhrkamp Taschenbuch Wissenschaft edition. There’s a need congruence here between the authors’ observation of publication practices, especially Szondi’s desire to be available cheaply and “usably” for students, and the choice to publish in this series, yes. But on the other hand, if ever a book cried out for an index, it’s this—and it gets not even the Namensregister occasionally afforded Suhrkamp books. That was a terribly choice for usability!

And then, second, tied to this, feel like the obvious complaint is to criticize the choice of material, i.e., the archival picks of Szondi and Sengle. I’ll apologize beforehand because it’s so obvious, and clearly also understandable: I’m not sure how much more recent archival materials there are in the first place, and Szondi and Sengle do function pretty well as quasi-poles of a field of professorial positions. But it does leave the flank open for questions such as: how much of Szondi’s practice is still contemporary practice? How, in particular, have digital means changed this, or the professionalization (if that is the word) and proliferation of funding agencies? Martus and Spoerhase nod towards this, but can’t give the same level of answer that they can give about Szondi’s reading; it maybe that no-one really can, or at any rate, that literary scholars can’t; and Martus and Spoerhase realize the problem and gesture towards it often enough. It still feels like a gap. And related to that gap is the desire to have more reflection on their own practice in writing this book. That seems like a genuine missed opportunity. Co-authored monographs are very rare; this book’s place in the practices of contemporary literary studies, including the ways they wrote it, how they divided the work, what support they used, and so on: that seems like it’s accessible to them, and could have usefully complemented their archival work. There’s a one-and-a-half page acknowledgments that, given everything one’s read by the time one gets to it (it’s at the end!), one would simply have loved to know more about.

But overall, I think, none of these complaints detract from the impressive work of Geistesarbeit, and from how it allows us to take a new view of our humanities work. So, if you read German: go and read it. If you’re an English-language publisher, go and translate it. I’ll return to this book very often in the coming months.

On Sarah Dillon and Claire Craig: Storylistening

I tend to write here about two kinds of books: books I hate and books I love. That is why Hooked, and that is why Generous Thinking. And now, I’m expanding my reach to write books I respect, books I think are vitally important, books that leave me excited. I’m talking about Sarah Dillon and Claire Craig’s 2022 Storylistening: Narrative Evidence and Public Reasoning. If you’re in literary studies, you must go and read this book; if you’re in government (but why would you be, if you’re reading this blog), you must go and read this book. It’s an unlovely book—I’ll get to that below—and it’s a difficult book, but it’s an immensely necessary book. It may be the most important book I’ve read in a decade, if only for the anticipatory future in which its most important belief, that studying stories has important public function, has secured a place for thinking with stories about public problems. Will it happen? I’m not sure. But I’ve seen no-one make as convincing a case for literary studies as Dillon and Craig.

So what is Storylistening about? Dillon and Craig hold that stories provide what they call “narrative evidence” that is important to make better “public reasoning” (1). “Narrative evidence,” Dillon and Craig say, is “the product of the expert act of both direct critical engagement with stories, and critical engagement with others’ reading, viewing, or listening to stories” (3); “public reasoning” is the “practical activity of [institutions of power] when making decisions in the public interest” (9): think expert advisory bodies, parliamentary hearings: the apparatus of (democratic, anyway) government. As Dillon and Craig point out, this is in distinction from more familiar ideas of where the humanities operate in public (in newspaper articles, say, or in the roles of “public intellectuals”); I’ll also note, though that’s not very important, that it’s not where I’ve seen the public role of the humanities so far. Dillon and Craig suggest that stories perform a variety of social functions (among them the framing of issues in particularly illuminating ways, providing varieties of points of views, anticipating potential futures, creating and consolidating identities, and mimicking the present so as to illuminate it in helpful new ways), and argue that literary studies professionals are experts not just in understanding how they do so—that they do so—and what we should read them as doing, but also (by dint of our professional role as readers) in the scope of texts that can illuminate particular issues best. In simplest terms: we know more texts better than either the political professionals or the scientific colleagues that largely set the public agenda. And of course we should: we’re being paid to know that. “Storylistening,” then, is the result of this expertise brought to bear on a particular public problem; as the glossary has it, it is the “theory and practice of gathering narrative evidence to inform decision-making, especially in relation to public reasoning, as part of a pluralistic evidence base” (163). The book thus carves out a path beyond the oft-invoked idea that stories do work on the world (something of a banal truism) to the question of what kind of work on stories usefully frames the kind of work that stories do, when they work.

Dillon and Craig work this out painstakingly over the course of the book, and I again enjoin you to read the book, because it makes little sense for me to summarize what is, in large part, not usefully summarized because the process of laying this out matters; it matters how carefully constructed their argument for the need to include storylistening in public reasoning is, it matters to see how particular story examples are utilized to show how literary studies might usefully intervene (not as in: prevent a particular outcome, but as in: change the general shape of outcomes) in public reasoning.

A brief anecdote. At a conference on contemporary literary theory, a host of American colleagues debated the question of what the discipline’s politics should be, and why it might be important to produce critical takes on hegemonical stories, among other weighty political questions. We seemed pretty much agreed that we had the best takes available on, well, pretty much everything. During the break, I chatted with a colleague from Germany, who, somewhat perplexedly, wondered if the others were serious: what did our politics matter, and to whom? “You know who gets invited to sit on an advisory panel? Sociologists. Biologists. Physicists. Not us.” His tenor was, however, not one of resignation: he did not mean to say “but we should;” we meant to say “and that’s just how it is.” Literary studies, he felt, had no public role; that, he seemed to suggest, was fine.

Dillon and Craig don’t think that any of that is fine. In fact, they think that that’s pretty bad, not because we have the bestest insights already but specifically because we have different kinds of insights to offer. They realize, for instance, that the most crucial issues to be solved by public reasoning—they choose AI, economic policymaking including issues related to climate change, and the dangers of nuclear war and nuclear energy; these may or may not be the most crucial insights, and I’ll admit to being somewhat surprised that what I’d understand to be somewhat lower-hanging fruit (racism, say—a narrative problem tout court?)—are rightly understood to need to involve scientific expertise. “Storylistening” does not supplant that, but intervenes in it to broaden the evidence base, to make available wider perspectives.

Dillon and Craig have a difficult audience problem to solve: of necessity, they need to convince both “sides”—literary critics and hard sciences people, including the officials of various stripes who undertake recruiting into the kinds of public bodies that perform advisory functions and engage in public reasoning. Their book, perhaps because of that hard task, is dry and precise; it reads far more like sociology than literary criticism, and maybe not just because it isn’t what literary criticism usually does, but because literary criticism’s narrativizing tendency and interweaving of different textual levels (of the kind Jonathan Kramnick’s “Criticism and Truth,” in Critical Inquiry, holds up) may not seem serious enough to the scientists and politicians that must be Storylistening’s audience as well. I think Dillon and Craig were well advised to couch this book in the analytical terms of the social and natural sciences. There’s no gainsaying that that makes the book, occasionally, a bit of a slog; but it methodically works out how it understands stories to work, and the precisely established equivalency between scientific and story-models is the fruit of that methodical and dry work. Know your audience, I think the point is. It’ll still be a challenge to pitch this, I think, to any but the most open-minded scientists; but in as much as it can, the book makes excellent efforts to appeal to such an audience, notably in later sections highlighting the way science fiction and science have long had a synergistic relationship.

Storylistening carves out a space in the hardest rocks it’s possible to drill, I think; and it does so specifically because it challenges the self-conceptions of all those involved–not just of scientists. “The skills and methods of literary studies,” Dillon and Craig say toward the end of their book, “are not widely understood” (145). Amen, and yeah, and so on. While this is not at the center of their book (except insofar as it names the reason why they need to write the book in the first place), I find myself drawn to the quiet hopelessness of the point, and how Dillon and Craig distill a hopeful future from it nonetheless. From my colleague’s point above, part of the problem is that we, ourselves, as literary studies professionals, do not understand what our work can do. In fact, in my anecdote, both groups of scholars did not understand it, and both ended up resigning hopes of just being active in shaping practical futures. One side appears to keep wanting to believe that more critique will make the world better, even if literally nobody reads Critical Inquiry. One side appears to be resigned to the idea that nobody wants to listen to us anyway. There is a third side that was not present at the conference: postcritical thinkers (Yeah, so sue me! It’s my pet peeve.). One of the take away I have from Dillon and Craig (surprise, I suppose) is that this is also a group that does not understand the skills and methods of literary studies: the affective approach to literary texts, the clear lack of a communicable methodology and the problematical stance towards interpretation that postcritique takes seems tailor-made to not be relevant in the kinds of settings Dillon and Craig envisage. In as much as that seems to be the case, I think that makes it more urgent to stress the limits of postcritique as a practice.

I want to close with another quasi-anecdote. In 2021, the German government established a Covid Expert Council, designed to supply the government with expert knowledge and strategic advice on how to cope with the coronavirus pandemic. The council, which as of writing consists of nineteen members, does not include a single humanities scholar, and certainly no expert in storytelling. Vaccination, understood by most experts as the only way of escaping recurring bouts of death, economic destruction, and personal isolation periods, hovers (again, as of writing) at about 78% of eligible adults; and that despite the repeated insistence of many of the experts on the council in various public forums, including talk shows, podcasts, newspaper articles, and so on. It’s almost as if reiterating the data does not work in convincing people about the need for vaccinations. Would an expert in storylistening have changed that outcome? That’s not the moral of this anecdote. The moral of this anecdote is: they didn’t even think to think to try. That’s part of the work Dillon and Craig have cut out for themselves. But here’s another part: the expert council’s expert advice tends to be ignored. The “public reasoning” informing the current administration’s policies, as far as I can tell, makes only the most minute impact, when read against the impact of politics, of servicing niche interests. Literary studies struggle to make itself useful (in the most positive of possible senses!) is desperately uphill: it’s the quest to find a place in a system of public reasoning that itself struggles to have an impact. None of that should detract from the audacious program Dillon and Craig lay out; but it does need to inform whoever follows their argument that the struggle to make anything come of our knowledge will be long and hard.

Read this book. It’ll take all hands on deck to make it work.

The Uses and Work of Literary Studies (Or: Why I’m frustrated)

Last week, I was at the Use of Literature Conference (virtually, anyway) that marks the end of Rita Felski’s five-year research professorship at the University of Southern Denmark. I was genuinely hoping, I think, for some enlightenment on the various issues I’ve discussed here and in academic print. And while I didn’t get to see all papers or keynotes, because there were parallel sections and I occasionally had to spend time with my family, I saw a lot, and was puzzled by a lot. My own paper would have been an abridged version of a forthcoming essay in Textual Practice; but finally, I decided that it made more sense to slightly re-write the paper, seeing as how it was placed at the very tail-end of the conference. I’m posting it here just so it’s somewhere.

The Uses and Work of Literary Studies

[READING TYPESCRIPT]

Hello everybody.

I’ll need to start by correcting my title—it’s not “The Uses of Work of Literary Studies,” it’s “The Uses AND Work of Literary Studies.” That’ll be “important” in a minute. I also want to say that I’m partially in the wrong panel, I think. I’m not going to be talking about teaching very much at all. But I am going to be talking about the “uses of literature,” at least, so if I’m on the wrong panel, I’m still at the right conference.

Well, kinda. My talk is going to be different than it was on Wednesday morning, I’ll admit, largely because I found the experience of the conference, let’s say, productively infuriating, and I need to incorporate some of the things that I heard here into my own talk.

My point today was going to be largely this: quite a bit about the debate we’ve been having over the past couple of years about literary methods has sought to return some value to literary studies by paying attention to ordinary modes of reading and nonprofessional readerly responses to reading. I was going to argue that this idea solves little because it just shifts what’s always been the transformation problem of literary studies: how to translate ideas about the “uses of literature” to the “uses of literary studies.” The largest point would have been that it’s by no means clear at all that good accounts of literature make good accounts of the need for literary studies.

I’ll still make part of that point, I think. But I’m drifting more into the confessional here, for which my apologies. The thing is that I’ve been severely critical in a number of venues—essays and reviews, mostly, but also my blog—about the whole postcritical enterprise. I want to say this upfront because there has been a lot of commitment to the ideas undergirding postcritique at this conference—often expressed in the same way I have found so frustrating elsewhere. I was hoping to learn more than I have; that’s no doubt partially on me. I feel like I’ve heard more about what work we should be doing rather than seeing what work that postulated work would actually BE doing. Kind of like with the catalogue of questions that ends Hooked, I’m left to wonder why years’ worth of research doesn’t produce more “use”ful results.

But I’m grumpy. I’m grumpy, I think, because I think the issue that the method debate often skirts is crucial, and bits and bobs of postcritique asks good questions that deserve answers. One of these questions, I’m still more convinced than I was before, is the question of what the use of literary studies is: this is where I’ve found some of this conference productive.

Let me briefly point out that I am still fairly certain that the idea that if we return to better uses of literature than ideology critique, we’ll go anywhere to resuscitate literary studies is, well, at least unformed. That’s a crucial part of the postcritical argument, such as it is. On the second page of Uses of Literature, Rita Felski writes against the backdrop of dwindling humanities enrolments and growing domination by the natural sciences: “In such an austere and inauspicious climate, how do scholars of literature make a case for the value of what we do? How do we come up with rationales for reading and talking about books without reverting to the canon-worship of the past?” Since then, the question of how “reading and talking about books” can be justified in the context of a neoliberalized university landscape has been front and center. In Limits of Critique, Felski suggests that “questioning critique is motivated by a desire to articulate a positive vision for humanistic thought in the face of growing skepticism about its value” (186); in Hooked, she asks if connections between humanities scholarship and lay audiences cannot “provide stronger public rationales for why the humanities matter” (2020, 162).

I sympathize! But how does this work? Problematically, I think, writing with Elizabeth Anker Felski suggests that postcritical thinking draws its imperative from the “urgency of crafting new rationales for the value of the arts and humanities” (2017, 20). That gives me the most trouble, I’ll confess. Felski and Anker’s lumping together of the arts and the humanities is really problematic. Anker and Felski also suggest that we need to “clarify to larger audiences why anyone should care about literature, art, or philosophy;” Felski, in Limits of Critique, says we should center again the question “why literature is worth bothering with? What is at stake in literary studies? […] Why […] should anyone care about literature?;” and Toril Moi suggests that “[o]nce we learn to read beyond the traditional parameters of critique and suspicion, we will find it easier to show why literature matters, why people should care about it, and why it is important to create a society that takes it for granted that such things are to be cherished and preserved” (2017, 47).

I think it is important to note the logic insisted upon here: the argument is that if you can clarify why literature matters—what the uses of literature are—you have also developed a rationale for literary studies. This argument is instrumental and strategic: we need to develop a new rationale for why literature matters in order to save literary studies, not per se because our previous rationales don’t work, or because our new ones are “better”. But more to the point, I think the entire premise of the argument is probably wrong: arguing like that, what you have done is you have conflated the question of the value of the arts with the question of the value of the study of the arts. But this is, precisely, the problem: the problem of translating the uses of literature into the uses of literary studies. The rationales I have cited above assume what should be shown in light of their own arguments, namely that offering “better” accounts of literature’s use does any kind of work for literary studies, and how. This is, again, what’s so infuriating to me about this conference: I don’t see what the work done actually does that is different in kind from what we’ve been doing all along.

I’ll even bracket the observation that, in all these cases, it’s taken for granted that the idea that literature matters because it symbolically resolves real social contradictions isn’t actually why literature matters. If that were the case, what we would need to focus on in developing the discipline would not be to shift what we do, but to shift how we communicate it. The theorists of postcritique are rightly worried that our work as literary studies professors does no real work in the world, because it actually does not real work in the world. They are wrong to think that doing postcritique—whatever that is—would change anything about that.

There is a set of really rather complicated assumptions in what I have quoted. The first of these ties to the idea that we need to articulate the value of literature. To whom, though? To people who don’t read? To people who don’t read the “right kind” of text, namely: literature, whatever that is? To existing readers who read the right kind of text wrongly? How do we articulate this value? In books published by the University of Chicago Press and New Literary History? (I’m in a teaching panel, so I’ll say: yes, to students, that’s fine! I’m for it. Is that all of our audience?)

So on the one hand, apparently, there’s lots of people who need the uses of literature advanced for them so they understand better why we should exist. There are also all those ordinary readers from whom we can learn a better (?) practice; or at the very least a practice that (tautologically) is closer to how ordinary readers read. Tobias Skiveren noted the paradox inherent in this call on Wednesday: as we get closer to ordinary readings, what differentiates us from lay readers?

In a different paper, I would have said here, at some length: what differentiates us is our professions, the fact that we do our work as work, as labor that produces value in the Marxist sense, labor we exchange in an inescapable market place; I would have said that we need to understand ourselves as producers of goods, and the best we can do is understand ourselves as producers of social goods we can name. I would have asked Toril Moi: yeah, so, why IS it important to create a society that cherishes and preserves “such things as literature”? I would have proposed that literary studies—humanities scholarship—can only ever be professional: that its specific productiveness is worth highlighting in contradistinction to ordinary reading. I would have noted that because we’re being paid, we are called upon to do more useful work than just “express our own adventure,” as Toril Moi has it. I would have suggested that this requires us to engage widely and publically, to connect to programs in literary education that are ongoing, to step into schools and book stores, and to devise an actual rationale for literary studies that locates its utility in more than literature’s “magic,” but in something concrete, and an proposal for an understanding of how, exactly, literature and literary studies make the world a better place. I would have said that a possible rationale was the shared work of close reading of books in order to engender ways of engaging in critical arguments about the meaning of texts as a means of fostering a minimal consensus around what might constitute argument and evidence in the first place, and finally the suggestion that such training in argument might make us able to make audiences into better members of society, rather than mere nodes in meaningless networks.

You can read the long version of this in Textual Practice sometime next year. I’m not going to spell all this out because here, at the tail end of the conference, I’m frustrated, and I feel that expressing that frustration may, overall, do more useful work. I’m frustrated because I kept hearing the same arguments about critique—it’s negative, all it ever wants to do is “uncover” the “hidden,” and so on, and so forth—as though there had not been engagement with these claims, repudiation of them, calls to clarify what texts are being spoken about, and how critique’s negativity actually impacts anything. I’m frustrated because Hooked ends on a couple of paragraphs of questions, instead of even the attempt at spelling out an answer, and this conference is no help. I’m frustrated because we—the discipline itself, if you like—cannot even conduct an actual argument, and here I’m saying that our best bet at socially useful work is to teach people how to have arguments. I’m frustrated because I don’t believe saying all the things I would have said would have done any work at all, any more than the reviews and discussions of Limits of Critique have changed a thing about how Hooked argues its case. I’m frustrated because just yesterday a speaker claimed that argumentative resistance to postcritical thought—spelling out what critics of postcritique think is logically flawed, say—was just another example of how critique doesn’t tolerate rivals, not even worth responding to on its merits. Perhaps most of all, I’m frustrated because I had been hoping to learn something here, but haven’t. That’s partially on me, but I want to say it’s also partially on how this conference has been going.

Most of all, I think, I’m frustrated because I don’t know how to bridge this gap in our discipline, or if anyone even cares to do so, even as I feel it’s vitally important that we do so. Maybe better, clearer work on both sides on the rationales for these different strands in literary studies can do some work here; maybe it can’t. But I think it’s incumbent on us to try.

So: sorry for misusing this panel on teaching; I’ll stick around, but I guess questions and comments should be directly chiefly at my co-panelists, and if you want to catch me, I’ll stick around for the break in a café. Thanks for letting me witness!

On Felski’s Hooked

A woman said to the profession,
“Hey, experiences of literature exist!”
“However,” replied the profession,
“The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation.”

My first conscious aesthetic experience, for the purposes of this blog post, is a moment when I must have been eight or so. We had gone to a theme park and had been riding on a rollercoaster in the dark (whee!); the rollercoaster stopped, we got out in the half-dark, guided by a single light (probably not, truthfully, but hey, memories) to a swing door. The door opened, and we stepped into the glistening lights of a (fake, obviously) Paris boulevard-side café, all white facades around us, little tables set under triple street lights, also white-painted, with large (fake?) maples (?) set between, everything bright, sparkling, beautiful. It was a shocking experience, so much so that I can still remember (or imagine) it today—and still feel the same about it today that I felt then. I’ll always have fake German theme park post-darkness Paris.

Looking back on it—not even as a trained reader of culture, merely as an adult—I recognize, of course, that my reaction was a bit out of whack: my response was partially manufactured (surely the theme park designer realized the effect of darkness-to-light), partially rose-tinted; those cutesy little tables were probably bolted to the ground and littered with discarded fast food boxes. Such criticism devalues, in a manner of speaking, my initial aesthetic experience. Am I “obscuring or overshadowing [my] objects rather than allowing them to shine forth” (134)? I suppose. Is that, in this instance, a bad thing? I’d like to say not.

This is a problem I will recur to throughout this meandering, long review of Rita Felski’s Hooked. I don’t know if Rita Felski would agree, and in part, I want to say that that’s because Hooked doesn’t actually tell me. It does, to its credit, tell me a lot that I didn’t know before about what Felski things the troubles with the discipline are and what we could be doing differently—after the polemic of Limits of Critique, that’s very refreshing. In fact, the entirety of chapter 4 of Hooked is meant to (but I’ll come back to that, too) tell us what her ideas about attunement and attachment could mean for the work we do in the discipline. But overall, I’m still baffled, and this is going to be a grumpy means of puzzling out why.

Hooked’s split into two parts: the first three chapters, on attachment, attunement, and identification, reiterate (in the last case, literally) points Felski has made elsewhere about how reading (to her) works, and what terms might best describe the personal relationships people build up with art. None of this is new, either in terms of content or in terms of style; and it’s this latter bit that grates more than the largely unspectacular claims about how people relate to art.

It’s strange to say it, but Hooked at 163 pages is wordy. It is repetitive—not just of earlier things Felski has said, including essentially reprinting her essay from Character, but also of itself, repeating over and over variations of the (controversial?!) idea that aesthetic experiences happen, and are not completely internal to either the observer or to the work of art . Felski has honed a writing style that is long on generalities and short on particulars, especially when it comes to naming names and providing evidence for her largest claims. Large claims stand on narrow grounds (“Attunement cannot occur without a nascent state of readiness; aesthetics cannot forgo or dispense with the first-person response” because Zadie Smith was surprised by suddenly liking Joni Mitchell on a visit to Tintern Abbey; 52). Words like “the usual” do very heavy lifting: throughout the book, Felski posits, but never establishes, common place versions of academia, critique, literary studies, professional reading, non-professional reading, indeed even of aesthetics and social theories of art, that she studiously avoids weighing down with footnotes. The breeziness of Felski’s prose makes Hooked a preternaturally easy read (that is, if you discount the breaks for throwing, cursing, breathing in, picking up, and settling back into a reading stance); it also makes it deeply annoying to anybody, I think, who would be interested in getting answers to the questions that Felski poses throughout. Nor does the book offer much in the way of readerly guidance as to the relevance of these claims for anything. My most frequent annotations, I see as I skim my notes, in the first three chapters are “evidence?” and “so?”—the latter being shorthand for “even if I grant you this wild claim, what the everloving hey does it mean!?”

This may well be me: I’m clearly not attuned to insistences like “Mediation does not detract from the magic of art but creates it” (78; this is not Marxist mediation, sadly.) Fuck the magic of art! But while I can skip these kinds of esotericisms, I have a much harder time when, just a line or two before, Felski insists that she has “argued a thesis: that attunement is the result […] of things ‘coming together’ in expected or unexpected ways” (ibid.). The thing here is: if this were thesis in a paper I was grading, I would return the paper. That’s not a thesis: that’s a description of everything. “Life” is… “Happiness” is… “All there is, is…” This definition, such as it is, may even be correct: but eloquently describing an impossible “puzzle” (ibid.) does not make an operative theory, as the rest of her book also plainly shows. Sheila Liming has pointed to Felski’s rhetorical violence in her LARB review, her insistence on describing her intervention as cutting, slicing, and so on (I disagree that this is a major thing, by the way); I want to point, instead and again, to her persistent use of constructions that in her deft hands are variations of both/and: not all; and yet; another word is; but also. Felski throughout asks us to see as meaningful that attunement can be sudden and mysterious, but also explicitly worked towards; not all of it arrives as a bolt from the blue, some of it does and some of it doesn’t; attunement is societally prefigured, and yet people disagree with one another about art. Long and short, spontaneous or willed, this, and that, and something other yet, aesthetic experience is ineffable.

This remains of a rhetorical piece with her penchant to insist that those things she doesn’t want to do anymore are “only” doing one (bad) thing: “If a work exists only as an object to be deciphered, its impact will be attenuated” (152), she writes (repeating herself). Yes, I say. Who thinks art should be treated like that? Better: what theory proscribes that? What method works like that? These lines—and they remain frequent in this book—are still strawmen, still do not describe the reality of critical work. This is, perhaps, the most clearly frustrating aspect of the book: the sense that, after twelve years (since Uses of Literature) of repeating claims about the discipline that fellow scholars have resolutely sought to counteract, Felski cannot be bothered to engage. After Limits of Critique, which almost singlehandedly made postcritique a thing, such criticism on its part has engaged (not: dismissed) with Felski’s desire to move literary studies towards ANT, broken down the problems with her championing of experience, and commented explicitly on her penchant for sweeping generalizations about the discipline’s diverse methodology. In Hooked, none of these criticisms are picked up, no defense is made, no argument put forward to situate her work against her critics. After twenty years at least of engagement with the clear limits of Latour’s ANT, not critic of Latour warrants citing. What much of Felski’s argument boils down to, I think, is that modes that don’t pay attention to the experience of individual artworks cannot account for the experience of individual artworks (see 45-47 for what I mean). That’s shocking! The only thing more shocking, perhaps, is that Felski then proceeds to not account for these experiences either. In an echo of Caroline Levine’s Forms, subjectless actors in a Latourian network make things happen. “As constellations [of what?] come together or fall apart, as actors turn into allies or antagonists, as meanings are remediated and translated, new realities come into view—and new attachments to artworks are formed” (48). Does this help us understand why Felski is “captivated by The Unconsoled rather than Ishiguro’s other works” (47)? How is this not just a pretentiously theoretical paraphrase of “somehow!”? In point of fact: how, and why, do constellations come together? What makes networks? Who pushes actors into new networks? How do things happen? These questions are, to be sure, more readily addressed to ANT than Felski, but given that for the past twelve years or so, ANT has been what Felski champions as a replacement for critique, I find it baffling that she does not—one presumes cannot—answer them. Another way of saying that “ANT’s flat ontology is designed to skirt dichotomies” (138) is to say ANT doesn’t take a stance on anything. Network theory, certainly as Felski uses it, but I think generally, does not answer questions of why—or “is that a good thing”—it only answers questions of how. In fact, I think, she is wrong there, given that “how” seems to at least allow for a causal answer. “How does it do that?” “By doing X…”. What ANT seems to do instead is asked “what connections are made”? That is fine as a point of departure, I guess (if you’re not interested in questions of history, or of power), but it’s not a place to end.

Felski, appealing for generosity of spirit in a (slightly tacked-on) final couple of paragraphs, is not generous enough to acknowledge, let alone debate her critics; this is all the more unfortunate given that her final chapter does address some of the obvious gaps in her previous writing. I’ll turn to this section now. Perhaps a “period of incubation” (58) will be necessary to appreciate the first three chapters of Hooked as more than a somewhat trite set of banalities about aesthetic experiences reported by an expert spinner of tales. But I rather think not. The problem with this book is not that its attempt to make attunement, attachment, and identification operative as points for professional critical engagement are unpersuasive; it’s that even if they were persuasive, Felski does not manage to make them cohere into a program for literary studies.

There so, so many ways in which this book takes long strides over logical crevasses. Felski takes reported experience for granted as actual experience; and of course, she must, because if she didn’t, she wouldn’t have anything to write about. But she never deigns to theorize this gesture of surrender to the truth of self-reportage. Would anything about her theory (such as it is) change if it turned out that Zadie Smith liked Joni Mitchell all along, or that T.J. Clark is not offering a “painstakingly precise record of what he sees,” but rather a record of things he sees that he a) consciously noticed and then b) felt worth reporting to his readers (59)? When she insists that to understand the analysis that Claudia Breger’s film Western puts forth, “no strenuous reading against the grain is needed,” but only what she calls readerly “actualization” (146), why does she appear to think that a critical reading of Breger’s film is not merely an “actualization” of things in Breger’s film that another actualization does not achieve? How does she determine what is “in” a film, and what is not? If this is not the point, why does a critical reading, being read in turn, not simply aid in the actualization of a different reception of Breger’s film? If it is—then why does Felski not have the courtesy to acknowledge that point? (And of course, in saying all of this, I’ve not even mentioned the simple point that no-one disputes that some films have overt political messages that need not be read against the grain!) What are we to make of a line such as “coactors are needed to discern the metaphysical subtleties of Mozart” (140)? Are these “subtleties” actually there, in Mozart all along—that seems to be the force of “discern.” Or are they “made” in the network of actors—like Latour’s “social”? Are metaphysical subtleties “valuable”? If so, why? A text, she avers, “is not a sequence of signs to be decoded but a structure that we come to inhabit” (77). Surely, at the very least, and very practically, a text is exactly a sequence of signs to be decoded before anything else can happen with it or through it or from it to anybody else: decoding signs is precisely what reading is, is it not? Does decoding play no part in inhabiting the “structure” of the text? What kind of structure is it? Is this structuralism’s structure (surely not)? Do the words “structure” and “inhabit” mean anything here, or are they just nice-sounding ? Again: the breeziness of Felski’s prose, the light steps she takes when paragraphs end in declaratives whose corollaries remains studiously unexplored and whose evidence remains thin at best, the rapid-fire, individually low-stakes but cumulatively fundamental, no-evidence claims that Felski has made her trademark are very much present here.

But here, I think the fact that Felski departs from polemic in the final section, and turns towards attempting to forge a pedagogy, makes it all the more problematical. What remains utterly, and shockingly, unclear, is what all this ANTish work is supposed to be doing. Felski is quick to dismiss the “unearned complacency” of “humanists patting themselves on the back for creating empathetic persons or democratically minded citizens” (130), but precisely what it does to “trace out the entanglement of humans and nonhumans within the borders of literary works” (136) does is left obscure. It’s also left obscure how this work is in any way more “attuned” or closer to how ordinary people read—as in, my mum doesn’t trace out the connections to the world in Virginia Woolf’s careful description of the stamp (see 136-137), in large part because mum doesn’t read Virginia Woolf, but in a smaller part because that’s no more how real people read than critique is. In fact, when Felski cites Gabriel Hankins’s “compositionist aesthetics” as a possible ANTish reading practice, noting that it shows how “novels give eloquent testimony to the force of things” (137), I wonder if I’m being messed with. Who can take seriously, as meaningful, readings in which “the postal service” of Imperial Britain becomes a “thing” like her pencil, and the “worldwide network” in which Woolf sits “just a “commonplace object,” imperialism, power, and institutionalizing political and social forces vanish, and stamps become the “stars” of a book (ibid.)? Such is the magic of art. But problematically, what this no longer is, is a turn towards more ordinary forms of reading. If everybody has aesthetic experiences, nobody reads networks; but if reading for networks, for connections drawn, is now a thing that can be taught to students, why can we not also train people in better critique? Network-reading is “relevant model” for their own reading; but it’s not something that interests them in the first place. But if critique being “offputting,” as she had it in Limits, should be a strike against it—by what rationale can you not teach everybody, Johnny Q. Public included, to appreciate it, and the work it does? This returns me to the question I raised above: in what way are critical readings not means to a “better” actualization of the text, but rather violence on it? The answer is, of course: in no way, except in so far as Felski wills it.

The problem with the whole of Felski’s approach comes through best, I think, in the final pages, where she addresses her sense of translating her ideas into practice. She reports on her use of Lost in Translation, a memoir by Eva Hoffmann, in a class usually reserved for critical readings of postcolonial and transnational theorists. Hoffmann, Felski notes, has been the subject of important critiques: her memoir has been read as “based on misperceptions that need correction.” But, she suggests, “one might [instead] come to identify with Hoffman’s perspective or find oneself reattuned by the sensuous gravity and clarity of her style” (152). Boldly venturing into Godwin’s law territory, we might note that it’s easy to attune with the Polish émigre longing for her home, slightly more taxing to think through what this alternative position to take on a work of art (oh, and by the way: that’s not a term Felski defines, in this neoliberal age!) would do if you had your class watch Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will. Her intense attachment to facism remains affectively foreign, but now I know what it means to celebrate the Fuhrer, hate the Jews, and glory in martial imagery (see 153—just to make sure, I’m extrapolating here terms appropriate for Nazi fascism, not saying that these things are things Felski thinks.). Is that a good thing? I, again, do not know; I doubt Felski knows; I doubt this is very well thought-through. Of course, Felski has earlier hedged her bets to note that dismissal or rejection are also forms of acknowledgment, and so she can certainly say for herself that her attunement to Leni’s camera work might not mean she “acquir[es] a deeper understanding” of a desire to celebrate the Fuhrer, hate the Jews, and glory in martial imagery “that has implications, both existential and political, extending well beyond [Riefenstahl’s] works” (154; I’m extrapolating again!). But she cannot say this for everybody: nor, theoretically speaking, should she; for ANT, all connections are the same.

I’m not fan of Felski’s work (and here she goes saying Marxists can’t deal with surprises). But I was genuinely curious, and like to think genuinely open-minded, when I read that she was going to explain the relevance of her thoughts for critical practice. I ended up in a strange place. It goes without saying that I still don’t know how attachments, attunements, and identifications work: I doubt we ever will, and the trite commonplaces of “it takes lots of things coming together!” are inexcusable, frankly. I’m partially intrigued by Felski’s ideas for a critical practice, the notion that to read with a sensibility for attunement in mind, we may be able to train students into being better “knowing how something is rather than that something is” (153). But to me, this just simply begs the question: what is the value of knowing, and being able to teach to know, the use of literature to know “how” something is—how to “learn to be affected by literature”? What is the value of affect? What is the work that this work will do? I can’t help but think that this is an unbridgeable impasse.

Rather than asking, “What does this work fail to see?” one can ask, “What is this work forcing me to notice?” Rather than deploying political or philosophical perspectives to interpret a work, one considers how it might alter or reframe those perspectives. (153).

Me, me, me. If you’re the kind of critic who thinks what you notice, what the individual is touched by, in the kind of flat ontology, ahistorical, and in principle necessarily value-free network of connections that Felski draws from Latour, is important, you’ll probably like this. You’ll like it when scholars trace the connections which Woolf’s description of her character using a stamp traces on a world map free of power struggles; you’ll like it when classrooms start paying attention to “beautifully handled reflection(s) on aesthetic attachments and how they are formed [in a single individual] in predictable [retrospectively] and unpredictable ways, without ever losing sight of the music” (154). And you’ll probably dispute that one, fairly major, problem with this “sense of inhabiting from within” (153) cannot theoretically be different whether you’re watching Triumph of the Will or Roots.

But make your case—Hooked doesn’t.

A Scholarly Apology

Jeremy’s Book

A couple of weeks ago, Palgrave published Corinna Norrick-Rühl’s and my edited collection, The Novel as Network: Forms, Ideas, Commodities. And now I need to take the small platform of this blog to apologize to one of the contributors, Jeremy Rosen.

Jeremy’s an extremely smart scholar and one whose work I’ve had the pleasure to engage with for quite some time now! His Minor Characters Have Their Day: Genre and the Contemporary Literary Marketplace (Columbia UP, 2016) is an astoundingly good book, one that I encourage you to go out and buy immediately, not just because of its unique topic, but because it’s superbly well-written and uses what in less deft hands would have been a simple thematic study (Look! A minor character from Shakespeare! How interesting!) to do deep explorations not just of its chosen texts, but of so complex a topic as genre as a whole. His Post45 essay, “Literary Fiction and the Genres of Genre Fiction,” has been a text I’ve engaged with over and over because of the depth of its insight and the productive quibbles I’ve had with bits of it. And one less productive engagement with, which is the occasion for this post.

Jeremy is a contributor to the above mentioned book, but crucially, he is also mentioned in the essay I wrote for the volume, which is called “The Novel Network and the Work of Genre.” There, I suggest that part of my argument will be that something interesting is going on in the contemporary moment’s development of genre, genre fiction, and the literary novel, and suggest that one possible immediate reply to what I posit as a “belief” in the opening is simply to say, “no it’s not.” I say:

The Book

The simplest reply to this second belief amounts to its dismissal: the novel has always been omnivorous of genres, “plasticity itself” in Mikhail Bakhtin’s phrase (1980: 39). If not always, then at least since postmodernism and its voracious pastiches—at any rate, there is nothing interesting going on in the turn to genre that we appear to have been diagnosing for the past couple of years. “Literary fiction,” says Jeremy Rosen, “has always worked with existing genres, because all texts use genres” (2018).

I think that an argument can be made that such a reply shortchanges what is happening in the current moment, that something more is happening in the contemporary that shifts, if slightly and in fits and starts, the idea of what “the novel” is.

_{Lanzendörfer, Tim (2020). “The Novel Network and the Work of Genre.” The Novel as Network: Forms, Ideas, Commodities. Ed. Tim Lanzendörfer and Corinna Norrick-Rühl. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. 70.}

The quote is taken from Jeremy’s above-mentioned essay, and what I make of it here is essentially: Jeremy Rosen says that nothing interesting is going on, and that we can dismiss the turn to genre.” That is completely and utterly false, and nothing like that appears in Jeremy’s writing. It is also not what I thought the paragraph I wrote said, but that’s neither here nor there, obviously. Jeremy my apologies—that was not my intention. I meant the quote illustratively (It’s correct! This has been going on!) of points that people might use to deduce that nothing interesting is going on, not that Jeremy is saying that nothing interesting is going on, which he manifestly, obviously, straightforwardly is not.

I genuinely thought this paragraph worked. But having been told by attentive readers that it doesn’t, I can also see it. I can’t probably do anything much about the book, but if readers of it find my blog, or per chance googling Jeremy leads here, maybe it helps.

There’s a lesson here I hope I’ll learn, though I’m not sure which it is. I’d appreciate pointers.

On Kathleen Fitzpatrick: Generous Thinking

I tend to write about books on here that I have arguments with, because I need to get things off my chest and nobody tends to publish pointless and unfocused rants on theory, except postcritique collections (I kid!). But this time around, I want to write things about a book that I have enjoyed reading like I have few books in the last few years. I also agree with much of it, and I’m in awe of the writing. I’m talking about Katherine Fitzpatrick’s Generous Thinking: A Radical Approach to Saving the University. Go and buy it. And I write because today (well, tomorrow, actually, or whenever the stupid contract actually gets signed), I start my job as a Heisenberg Research Professor (no tenure) for Literary Theory and Public Literary Criticism, and I think Fitzpatrick’s book will be a guide to me for the next five years.

I came to it from Phil Wegner’s Invoking Hope: Theory and Utopia in Dark Times (which, incidentally, I also enjoyed!). Wegner notes in there that he felt “the argument [Fitzpatrick] advances for generosity of mind and openness to possibility complements the claims I advance” (222); and since I also am a firm believer in Phil Wegner’s argument, as voiced in Invoking Hope, and want to make use of it in my own work, Fitzpatrick’s seemed a must-read. I’ll say this: Wegner’s certainly right to say that Fitzpatrick complements his own work. It’s also distinctly different, and part of this post is to point out how it’s different, and why that matters to me—and also, perhaps, why it ought to matter to you?

As both readers of my blog know, I’m very much engaged in the critique-postcritique discussion, and Wegner’s book is, too—affirmatively on the side of critique and of theory, and with an eye towards establishing why the postcritical alternative isn’t an alternative at all, but rather an abdication of professionalism and, through its refusal of hermeneutics and interpretation, a deeply solipsistic endeavor. In this sense, it is a reinforcement of a general trend towards singularity rather than solidarity—to any Marxist, whether Wegner or myself, not at all a good idea, that is. As Wegner points out, too, much of postcritique in fact rests on a misrepresentation of critique, its essential openness and dialogism, and the way that (at least, Jamesonian, and, at least, theoretical!) critique is meant to be a dialogue, and not meant to postulate final truths.

I find Wegner’s points to be persuasive and strong, and cannot find anything in postcritical writing to rebut him, largely because, as I and others have now ad nauseam pointed out, postcritique doesn’t actually point to any concrete examples of critique when it critiques critique—it just claims. Wegner’s work is important, and I think it makes a good case for why we need theory, and utopian thinking. Where I think it doesn’t go far enough is in trying to diagnose opportunities for shared thinking about the future, or deeper problems about how we do our work. And Fitzgerald offers much of this.

At the heart of her book, somewhat unsurprisingly, is a call to be more “generous,” and I’ll confess that I found this, from the title of the book alone, a bit—naïve, maybe? Coming from contemporary literary theory, it sounded very much like the postcritical call to be more appreciative of texts. Needless to say, having read the book, I find it a concept that carries, and that is deeper, and more theoretically and politically committed, than postcritique. It’s also far, far more self-aware. Fitzpatrick is very aware of postcritique, quoting and commenting on Felski (very generously),  and I think she does an excellent job of picking up strands that she agrees with without being dismissive of things one suspects she may not. No need to rehash here my point that Felski’s diagnosis of literary studies is wrong, of course. As an aside: interestingly, I think some of the certainty that drives postcritical belief in the primacy of suspicion is located in the kinds of scenarios Fitzgerald offers in the introduction,  a scene in a graduate seminar in, it’s assumed, an English Department. Having offered a recent article for discussion, she receives “fairly merciless takedowns, pointing out the essay’s critical failures” (2), instead of open engagement with the premises and arguments of the text. And, in another anecdote, that’s what I was told, too (I didn’t go to U.S. graduate school): when I talked about Felski in 2016 with a colleague at UC Davis, he also told me that he saw the truth of Felski’s points in his graduate seminars. So fair enough, and interesting; not, still, I think, actual evidence of the most immodest claims of postcritique, but at least intersubjectively useful pointers to where and how this exists.

Most of my penciled notes of disagreement are in the chapter “Reading Together,” and I don’t want to delve into these here, as I will do so in more detail and rigour, I hope, in a forthcoming article. What I am completely on board with is the perspective change which Fitzgerald brings to bear on literary studies here. “Critical humility is one key to generous thinking,” Fitzgerald says at one early point (39). In that forthcoming essay, I am wrestling with this point—I call it critical modesty there, for reasons that are too long to go into here—and I want to emphasize it here, because I think it’s one of my two major takeaways from the call of this book, the other being to work toward restructuring completely the university’s internal and external, all of the social that is, relationships: first and foremost, to engage in literary studies not competitively but collegially, and to extend this understanding of a common interest and the ability to learn from, rather than against one another, to the larger public. And I want to emphasize (in fact, I have done so once before) that those in privileged positions, even in relatively privileged positions, as academics, often tenured, in stable, well-paid, publically-financed jobs have an obligation. Fitzpatrick notes this obligation, but also frames it as a request of generosity—a smart move, to be sure—and I think it can get lost how very, very radical it is, because it does involve getting us out of our comfort zones: it’s not enough to write for the Los Angeles Review of Books and claim you’re a public intellectual. It’s vital to look to the “world beyond” (157), as Fitzpatrick notes. It’s also vital to be active, and engaging, and not just to wait for people to come to you. Another anecdote: at a recent workshop, I felt obliged to note that it’s not nearly enough to say, even if it is true, that everybody could theoretically come to our lecture classes (in Germany, lectures are generally open to the public), or to say that our conferences are available to all. The campus isn’t, in a meaningful sense, a public space, or if it’s public, it’s not particularly inviting. We cannot wait for the public to come to us, we need to find, and find ways to talk to, the public. That’s incumbent upon us, especially if we are paid by that same public.

I’m not doing the book enough justice; but this is already running on too long, so let me end here. Two final things (again, not as generous as I would like to be): I cannot stress enough how different, despite superficial agreement, Fitzgerald’s book is from postcritical proposals, and if nothing else (though there is some “else”) in its unromantic view of what needs to be done. Where Felski et al. sound like it’s enough to just write different essays for American Literary History, as if literary studies can remain relevant simply by changing its methods, Fitzgerald knows that there is no meaningful survival for the humanities without a radically changed university. For that alone, this is a necessary read to literary studies scholars. Second, let me conclude by quoting at some length an early episode in Fitzpatrick’s book:

[A] few years ago, after a talk in which a well-respected scholar discussed the broadening possibilities that should be made available for humanities PhDs to have productive and fulfilling careers outside the classroom, including in the public humanities, I overheard a senior academic say with some bemusement, “I take the point, but I don’t think it works in all fields. There’s long been a ‘public history’. But can you imagine a ‘public literary criticism’?” His interlocutor chortled bemusedly: the very idea. But the word has long been filled with public literary critics, from the most well-regarded and widely disseminated book reviews through large-scale public reading projects to widespread fan production. All of these are modes of literary work that reach out to nonspecialist audiences and draw them into the kinds of interpretation and analysis that scholars profess, and we ignore that work to our great detriment.

I remain in awe at Fitzpatrick’s generosity here: I also am weak enough to say that I am on board with the spirit, but would like to the see the notion extended. My own work over the next five years will, hopefully, be to build on that but to ask and answer something slightly different: Can you imagine a public literary studies?  We need the work of review, of reading projects, and fan engagement, without any doubt at all. But I think that’s not “the kinds of interpretation and analysis that scholars profess”—for certain, it’s not the work I do, or read in Contemporary Literature. The work I do is not “better,” or even “more complex.” It is, however, an expression of a particular set of professionalized practices—a return on our ability to invest a lot of time and labor into the act of reading—that I feel is well described as “strong.” Again: I mean this disagreement not to disparage in any way Fitzpatrick’s larger claims, which I think may not actually be in disagreement with me here, although they may. I think we are, as literary critics “better readers” in a certain sense—a sense conditioned, again, by the sheer mass of time we (can) spend reading, and our interpretative reading tends to end in different places than lay readers does. But I think that that work has value: and I think that that work can be public. We can make our interpretative work, our historicizing work, our work on the text as symptom, public; and when we do, we must keep in mind Fitzpatrick’s injunction to do so generously. That, I think, must mean to advocate for the principles of interpretation, not the results; not to sell a reading, but to engage with readers in readings; and to bring the necessary modesty to bear on ourselves and our findings, understanding them as provisional and, perhaps, so pre-focused by our professionalism that meanings escape us that are otherwise available.

Five years, then, to advocate for public literary studies. But if that project fails, as fail it might, I’ll be glad to know that Generous Thinking is there to say things that need to be said.