A quick note on the future of literary studies [hot off the press!]

I’ve been participating some interesting discussions on Twitter, yesterday about computational criticism, today about fan fiction.

10 best-selling books of the decade are mostly by women, 2 are "young adult", and 3 were originally fanfic. https://t.co/dvcoMKyJ9i via @lithub

— Lynn Cherny (@arnicas) December 22, 2019

I'm actually ok with saying you need to know the basics of data-driven text analysis to graduate with an undergraduate degree in literary studies. Anything less is a failure to prepare students for the technological and textual conditions of our time.

— Andrew Piper (@_akpiper) December 19, 2019

Are we heading toward a Copernican transformation in literary studies, to borrow a phrase from one of the last essays written by Edward Said[1]?

For the sake of discussion, let’s assume that that is what the discipline is undergoing. Just what is the earth around which the whole system is thought to revolve? I would say it is interpretation. What then would correspond to the sun around which the system should be reconfigured? Is it computational criticism? No. Fan fiction? No.

Again, for the sake of argument, let us assume a simple story about the centrality of interpretation. It mostly happened after World War Two with the so-called New Criticism in the driver’s seat. The New Critics posited an autonomous text and practiced a criticism unadorned with any specialized critical apparatus. In time many, perhaps most, critics dropped the assumption of autonomy and summoned various specialized bodies of knowledge – philosophy, rhetoric, psychology, anthropology, social theory – to use in constructing interpretations. Collectively they came to be known as Theory.

That’s the sun in this metaphor, sorta’. It isn’t really theory about literature, but rather it is theory about various other things – signs, the mind, society, history – being put to use as ways of interpreting the (various kinds of) events depicted in literary texts. I want to relieve those various theories of their interpretive burden and put actual theory of literature into the center position of a Copernican realignment.

Theoretical work would thus take literature and literary process itself as its object of study rather than interpreting our way through literature to something else. In this context the study of fan fiction is allowed to be what it is, the study a certain kind of text and its function in the society-wide literary process. It is no longer a poor second cousin to the interpretation of canonical texts. And computational techniques are free to be what they are, tools for conducting various kinds of investigations of texts, canonical and non-canonical, without prejudice either way. They need no longer justify the fact that they aren’t primarily in the business of cranking out readings of canonical texts.

I realize that, in this short note, it is easy to see this Copernican suggestion is a mere rhetorical maneuver without any intellectual substance. Whether or not that is the case depends on what happens with literary studies in the future. I note only that I have produced a reasonable body of work that fits my prescription – using psychology, mostly, but other disciplines as well, to make literature itself the object of study – and others have as well. I see no reason – other than organizational inertia, which, alas, IS a heavy drag – why more such work cannot be done in the future [2].

References

[1] Edward Said, Globalizing Literary Study, PMLA, Vol. 116, No. 1, 2001, pp. 64-68.

[2] A significant chunk of New Savanna is devoted to literary study. See, for example, work gathered under these labels, method and literary criticism, search on “the profession” and look at these two short posts: Critical Method: the Four-Fold Way, from Then to Now (September 2015), The Key to the Treasure IS the Treasure (December 30, 2012).