In response to Jed’s last post, I wanted to raise some general thoughts on a dilemma that I think that we might all be sharing. Considering our shared political commitments and desires why is “literature” THE site (based on our share institutional placement) for investigating/exploring/interrogating the issues that we mull over constantly? It seems like we (or maybe just me) are stuck in a bind between “literature” as an autonomous transcendent sphere of “sweetness and light” (Arnold) or “literature” as an activity that does nothing. In the former we have a grandiose and universalist conceit and in the latter we have action that does not do enough. And so why would we look at it? Why look at “literature” when other institutional disciplines (after the cultural turn) have just as much claim to culture as an analytic for inquiry as English departments. After talking to Sooja, she brought up a good point to ask us why this is an issue in the first place. The above setup forecloses possibilities for thinking about our intellectual work since both are predicated upon an idea of the transhistorical value of “literature” as either too much or just not enough. Thought in this way, “literature” should neither be elevated nor dismissed but instead situates a type of intellectual responsibility on us in relation to whatever intellectual project we pursue. In other words, we must be accountable to the archive we produce, situating “literature” as one site of knowledge among others that are necessary for our projects. I am sure that we all know this point but it is comforting to have it made explicit through writing.
With such a setup, it might be valuable to enumerate ways in which “literature” seems valuable for us in terms of its claim to knowledge. Here is a list, I thought up which we can elaborate on as a topic of discussion.
- “Literature” for how “the Future haunts the Present”
- “Literature” as a “Structure of Feeling”
- “Literature” for how the ”past is not dead, it is not even past”
0 Responses to “On “Literature””