This book brings together essays that ask how one may chart more productive engagements with the methodological foundations of literary studies, a discipline that is finding itself in a moment of severe crisis. The temptation to reduce methodological debates to method wars constitutes one of the main obstacles for what ought to be the common goal of our discipline: to articulate the possible and indeed necessary futures of literary studies.
How do we think about the future of literary studies in the funerary climate that has engendered the belief that we need to fight our internal wars for survival? How might (must?) our understanding of what literary criticism is and does change? How do we formulate possible futures for literary studies while grappling with the significant problems that our present poses? The chapters in this volume stage hopeful interventions that seek to contribute to the effort to explore the futures of literary studies by way of and conceived as a collective endeavor. Together, the authors advance a call for better, more useful, more active, more networked, and, yes, even for abandoned versions of the always multiple and joyously contradictory discipline that is called literary studies.
This book will be beneficial to students and scholars of English literature, literary theory and literary studies. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Textual Practice and are accompanied by a new Preface.
Preface: Futures of literary studies, revisited
Tim Lanzendörfer and Mathias Nilges
Introduction: Futures of literary studies
Mathias Nilges and Tim Lanzendörfer
1. Phronesis: Shifting the concept of the political in the environmental humanities
Caren Irr
2. The work of literary studies: Interpretation, argument, and socioaesthetic experience
Tim Lanzendörfer
3. Thinking the contemporary: Beyond distinctiveness in the literary humanities
Russell West-Pavlov
4. Prospective criticism: On private and public things
Anna Kornbluh
5. The notion of criticism at the present time: From postcriticism to an ethics of reading well
Josh Toth
6. A case for religious criticism
Matthew Mullins
7. Meathead materialisms: César Aira’s ANTsy fictions of a world without conviction
Emilio Sauri
Afterword: How we argue
Jessica Swoboda
Biography
Tim Lanzendörfer is Heisenberg Fellow for Literary Theory, Literary Studies, and Literary Studies Education at Goethe University, Frankfurt. His most recent books include Utopian Pasts and Futures in the Contemporary American Novel (2023) and, with Max José Dreysse Passos de Carvalho, The Medial Afterlives of H.P. Lovecraft: Comic, Film, Podcast, TV, Games (2023).
Mathias Nilges is Professor of English at St. Francis Xavier University, Canada. His most recent books include How to Read a Moment: The American Novel and the Crisis of the Present (2021) and, with Mitch Murray, William Gibson and the Futures of Contemporary Culture (2021).
