McGurl 2010

Mark McGurl. "Ordinary Doom: Literary Studies in the Waste Land of the Present." NLH 41.2 (Spring 2010), 329-49.

• starting with the SF writer Gregory Benford being asked to help figure out how to designate stored nuclear waste for a future un* imaginably far out
• 331 A mind-boggling situation, to be sure, and one that, inspired by the hiring of a science-fiction writer to think it through, I would like to take as an occasion to ponder the participation of literary studies in a reflexive modernity.
  • reflexive modernity being Ulrich Beck's term for living in a time "when the consequences of modernization have become a source of widespread worry" (329)
• To engage in such a task, as we shall see, is also to ponder the relation of literary studies to the discipline from which the concept of reflexive modernity emerges - sociology - and to argue for its particular relevance to the work of contemporary literary scholars. The question of the durability of their discipline is, after all, one that literary scholars are being forced to ask themselves with increasing frequency. In this context, a turn to sociology may prove helpful, given that a focus on institutions and the conditions of possibility for institutional continuity over time is one of sociology's central themes.
• But along with this turn to sociology I want to argue for the specific strength of literary studies, which owing to the nature of its objects of study and its largely historical orientation, takes a greater interest in the complexities of temporality than is typical in the social sciences. In allowing the unknown future to enter so powerfully into the machinations of the present, reflexive modernity, in a sense, derealizes the present by stretching it out, suffusing it with a quality of "speculative fiction," in the broadest sense, in ways that literary studies is particularly well-equipped to explore. As instruments of aesthetic reflection, literary works have proven remarkably sensitive to the conditions of reflexive modernity from which they emerge, remarkably responsive to the vagaries of time. It falls to literary scholars, then, to try to preserve these works in institutional environments where they will continue to be taken serious, if not for ten thousand years, then for as long as possible. For this task, a sociological mindset will be essential, helping to inspire an ethos of institutional conservation to join and complicate literary studies' long-regnant ideal of individual liberation.
  • ties to Felski 2016's sense of curating
• 335 If the university is going to serve as an engine for the generation and conservation of important social knowledge, how could it not continue to facilitate the scholarly exploration, by various means, of the omnipresent fact of fiction making?
• Given the lack of a society-wide consensus on this question, however, the task of literary studies in our time should include an increased empirical focus on contemporary literary institutions and their functions in both transmitting the texts of the past to living readers and undergirding contemporary practices of reading and writing. This sociological focus would help to legitimate literature in contemporary public discourse as something "real," and might provide a useful counterweight to the growing influence, in the mass media, of cognitive scientific and evolutionary accounts of why and how, in the distant mists of time, humans came to be interested in stories. While the latter accounts are useful in tying our [336] present attachment to fiction to an extended past and thereby revealing it to be essential to human life and cognitive functioning, the task for literary sociology would be to give a finer-grained account of how and why and in what circumstances people are reading -- or not reading -- literature in our time. Rather than exploring our essential interest in stories, it would ask how that interest is concretized in specific media, genres, institutions, and practices. This project might begin, reflexively enough, with a further interrogation of the place of literature in the school.
• And when we back up a step, we see a whole range of contemporary institutional phenomena that would benefit from a more extended sociological treatment: the conglomerate structure of the global publishing industry and its economy of prestige; the disappearance of the independent bookstore [overdone]; the rise of competing forms of entertainment and evolving attention spans; the persistence of small presses and literary journals at the margins of the market; the arrival of new reading technologies...and, coming full circle back to the school, the creative writing program. Of course, these and many other institutional players in the contemporary literary field have already received some attention, but they would naturally surge into even greater prominence in the further sociologization of literary studies, which could continue to toggle between empirically acquired contextual knowledge and the invigorating experience of a close reading of literary texts themselves, which may condense more knowledge about their environment, in their own way, than any one contextual framework is likely to reveal. Dispensing with the frequent bias toward popular (as opposed to literary) culture in cultural studies, sociological literary studies would encourage scholars to explore the material conditions and social meaning of literature in our time. It would, in effect, be a form of cultural studies that looks toward, rather than away, from "literature" as it has been traditionally conceived.
  • but what about the thing itself? Does this move away from the model of literature as an agent in the world?
• 337 For sociologists, the existence of institutions is the sine qua non of any properly literary act, while literary critics tend to see their existence in institutions as an embarrassment, if not a kind of imprisonment.... Of course, we remain rightly concerned with the social exclusions and other ills enacted by literary institutions, but their disappearance would not represent an answer to those dilemmas, only a disinvestment in literature.
• 341 Can we give up this version of critique [Foucauldian suspicious unmasking, which he calls gothic and darkly sexy] as a form of melodramatic unmasking and still remain critical? One possible way of doing so is by making things rather than negating things (whether literary texts or literary institutions), and making the case for their survival, and defending them when our case is not heard, and then rebuilding them when they are destroyed.