How mainstream literary criticism hobbles thinkers seeking to understand literary phenomena

By insisting on purely discursive methods, that’s how. I’ve said this before, in various ways. But I now see it in a different light. Let me explain.

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I was sitting in my doctor’s waiting room yesterday – well, actually, the waiting room of the clinic where my doctor practices – and it suddenly hit me, Yes! that’s why the future of discursive criticism is so limited (well, not quite in those words, but what was the import). It simply cannot handle describing form, because that requires charts and diagrams. Now, the emerging crop of descriptivist critics doesn’t realize that, and they seem more interesting in theorizing description than in doing it, but...

And so I went on thinking and then came up short: But haven’t I already said that? I checked my working paper Prospects: The Limits of Discursive Thinking and the Future of Literary Criticism and there it was, at the end of the abstract: “From this we may conclude that discursivity, prose-centric thinking, is the primary obstacle preventing further development of literary criticism. It stands in the way of computational criticism and description, neither of which is fundamentally discursive, and constrains the development of naturalist criticism.” There it is. So why did it feel like a new idea?

I don’t rightly know, but it did. Maybe I was coming at it from a different angle, a new perspective.

I had just published a long post that contained this paragraph:

For years I’ve been reading that there’s been no substantial new development since Barbara Butler and queer theory. I’m not entirely sure that’s true. Does animal studies count? What about eco criticism? Is Tim Morton a major figure? He’s given the Wellek Lectures (2014); he’s touring the world giving speeches these days; Bjork has endorsed his work and I believe he’s completing a general audience book for Penguin. Sounds pretty major to me. And I think he’s brilliant. But – the future of literary criticism?

And when I’m pursuing that train of thought I’m imagining the mainstream thinker responding by assuring me that, well, certainly, new interpretive schemes will emerge, in time. And how can I dispute that? After all I can’t see into the future.

But I can surely see that discursive criticism can’t, more or less in the principle of the thing, deal with the description of form, something I’ve pretty much argued in Description 3: The Primacy of Visualization. And sooner or later mainstream critics are going to come around to being curious about form. And when that happens...

It simply doesn’t matter what new interpretive schemes fall off the back of the truck in the next quarter of a century. They’re interpretive schemes, they’re discursive, they’re allergic to charts and diagrams. They can’t deal with form.

By (tacitly) insisting on discursive thought, mainstream criticism in effect aims to PREVENT the use of a full range of human faculties in investigating literature. Charts and diagrams bring visual thinking to bear. Computational criticism brings both numerical and visual thinking to bear. No, I’m afraid, that at this point mainstream critical thinking is looking like high-class intellectualism, genteel aristocratic amateurism gone mad.

Of course that’s not how these proletarian bourgeois aristos see it. They see anything but words coming in contact with literature as evidence (neoliberal) scientism. The problem, though, is the texts really do have form and they can’t well deny it. And so they deny the importance of attending to form and fall back on meaning and the theory machines that crank it out.

But I better stop here. I’ve said enough.