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!
Hand Me the Platonic Monkey-Wrench! 