Literary Studies

Kwame Anthony Appiah¹

Academic literary scholarship in the United States covers a vast range of languages and genres. A large number of scholars write and teach about literature written in English around the world, many focusing especially on British and North American writing. But you can also study: literature in many other European languages, from modern Catalan, Dutch, French, Gaelic, Greek, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Yiddish, and various Nordic and Slavic languages, to “dead languages” such as Anglo-Saxon, Celtic, Classical Greek, Norse and Latin; literature in Middle-Eastern and South and East Asian languages—from Hebrew and Arabic, ancient and modern, to Bengali, Sanskrit, Chinese and Japanese; as well as literature and orature in more than a dozen African languages from Asante-Twi to Zulu. While the focus in the study of the literature of Australasia and the Americas is on work in languages that came from Europe, as with Africa, you can also do work in languages that were present before European colonization. Many scholars write about more than one literature or operate explicitly in the field of comparative literature, which began with a focus on reading together work in more than one European language, but has increasingly included literature from elsewhere.

This work is done in a variety of different disciplines and departments, and it would be impossible to capture such great diversity in a few broad strokes. Still, books and articles in many of these literatures are written by members of the Modern Language Association, which has more than 20,000 members.² Even when they do their work in departments other than departments of English or Comparative Literature, there is a common sense among most of them of a professional identity as literary scholars. So, too, the scholars who gather annually for the conference of the American Comparative Literature Association, which has 3,000 members, have a shared professional identity, even though they work over many languages and literatures.³

Such scholarship presupposes that literature, however we understand it, is worth understanding; that it is worth not just reading but interpreting with concepts—as diverse as Romanticism and irony and cultural capital—that are not themselves the subjects of the literary work. The teaching of literature at the college level aims to make the rewards of serious reading accessible to each new generation, in part by interpreting it in these ways. If it does not do this, it is hard to see why literary study should play a part in a liberal education—the kind of education that prepares students to be free people managing their own lives.

Departments of literature also teach languages and the writing of fiction and nonfiction. Language pedagogy, composition and rhetoric, and the teaching of “creative writing” in poetry and prose, have developed theories about their practice. These are important independently of the study of literature, but my focus here is on the study of literature. To the extent that work in these other areas is influenced by literary studies in this sense, it will, no doubt, reflect any problems I identify there.

My aim in this report is to capture a number of prominent trends within this broad field that I find worrying and to explain why I think they should worry anyone who believes in the importance of literary study. But I want to begin by insisting that, whether or not I am persuaded by one claim or another, much work meets appropriate scholarly standards and is regularly appropriately evaluated by professional literary scholars and scholarly institutions, and that much work, too, can be profitably read by people who are neither scholars nor students.

1 I am grateful to my colleagues in this study for their comments on earlier drafts and for the illuminating discussions at our meetings. I am especially grateful to Yu Guo and Gavin G. Cook for the analyses that appear in six appendices.

2 https://www.mla.org/51��-Us/51��-the-MLA

3 https://www.acla.org/become-member

The subject

The proposition that there is something called “literature,” understood as imaginative writing that exhibits formal literary features that are available for aesthetic appreciation, and that those writings are an appropriate object of literary criticism is a relatively modern one. As John Guillory has argued, the word “literature” has a complex history, in which by the middle of the 20th century, the term comes to apply mostly to writing that exhibits certain distinctive stylistic features—delineated sometimes by the term “literariness”—though with a focus on work of a special quality that distinguishes it from “subliterary” writing, exhibited in popular forms such as detective fiction or the romance novel.⁴

Academic literary criticism, by that name at least, is, perhaps surprisingly, also relatively new. Guillory, focusing on the English department in the United States, writes that “[t]he history of the university reveals no discipline called ‘literary criticism’ until as late as the Second World War.”⁵ And he reminds us that Gerry Graff had noted, in his influential history of the literary academy, that the word criticism was not added to the Modern Language Association’s constitutional statement of purpose until 1950.”⁶ Of course, the word was much used earlier in the context of literary study, especially by the exponents of “practical criticism,” first in Britain starting in the 1920s and then in the United States, through the related activity of the New Criticism, pioneered by John Crowe Ransome, whose 1941 collection of essays of that title was extremely influential. (And even earlier, Matthew Arnold published two collections of much-admired Essays in Criticism in 1865 and 1888.) But, as Graff’s work argues, it was only in the post-War era that literary criticism came to be a central part of the definition of the scope of scholarship in most departments of literature.

One other item of consensus within Anglo-American literary studies over the last century or so—as Barbara Herrnstein Smith has argued—was that literary scholars centrally engage in something called “close reading.” As she puts it:

The term close reading refers not only to an activity with regard to texts but also to a type of text itself: a technically informed, fine-grained analysis of some piece of writing, usually in connection with some broader question of interest.⁷

And, as she also said, this activity could be pursued over a great variety of materials and with many theories and motivations.

The texts varied from presumed literary masterpieces to works of popular culture and documents of manifest oppression; the discourses that directed their examination varied from Christian humanism to structuralist linguistics to queer theory; and the spirit in which they were examined varied from the appreciative to the disinterested to the deeply suspicious. Nevertheless, throughout the twentieth century, whatever the mood, motive, or materials, if one was teaching literature or doing literary criticism in the Anglo-American literary academy, one was likely to be reading at least some individual texts closely.⁸

4 John Guillory Professing Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022): 200-201. The term “literariness” was central to the influential early 20th century work of the Russian-born formalist Roman Jakobson. Jakobson, R. O., 1921. Noveishaya russkaya poeziya. Nabrosok pervyi: Podstupy k Khlebnikovu [The latest Russian poetry. First sketch: Approaches to Khlebnikov]. Pra¬gue.

5 Guillory op. cit. 49.

6 Gerald Graff, Professing Literature: An Institutional History (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1987): 283.

7 Barbara Herrnstein Smith “What Was “Close Reading”?: A Century of Method in Literary Studies” The Minnesota Review (2016) 2016 (87): 58.

8 Herrnstein Smith loc. cit.

Changing the subject

In the last half-century, all the elements of this understanding of literary study have been challenged and rejected by many literary scholars. Partly in the name of new digital techniques, scholars such as Franco Moretti have urged the importance of “distant reading,” using computational techniques to discover patterns in large bodies of literary “data.” I have no doubt that much can be learned this way, even if, in the end, as Herrnstein Smith suggests, it seems most useful as an adjunct to reading closely.⁹ Still, distant reading has been applied to large bodies of literary criticism, as when Andrew Goldstone and Ted Underwood argued in an essay in New Literary History, that there was a significant increase over the three decades before their study, published in 2014, in topics that “overlap conspicuously with the subject matter of the social sciences.”¹⁰ (This shift is connected with several of the issues discussed below.)

Some have rejected the very idea of “literariness” as a property of texts, often in the context of claiming, in the spirit of reader-response criticism, that literariness is not inherent in the text but constructed, against a cultural background, by the reader. Or they have suggested, in the spirit of the New Historicism, that one cannot study literary texts without paying attention to the nonliterary texts that circulate with them.

Others have opposed the notion that scholarly attention should be guided in any way by a hierarchy of aesthetic value, with some texts of greater aesthetic worth being more deserving of attention. The widely used Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism asserts, in explaining the views of some in cultural studies:

Keeping the emphasis on how cultural meanings are produced, circulated, and consumed, the investigator will focus on art or literature insofar as such works connect with broader social factors, not because they possess some intrinsic interest or special aesthetic value.¹¹

This does not, as stated, entail the further claim that there is no such thing as aesthetic value; nor, indeed, does it rule out in advance the possibility that the study of cultural meanings will reveal some of the ways that aesthetic value is created or discovered. But it is certainly compatible with a complete rejection of the very idea of aesthetic or literary value. And many literary scholars have, in fact, been persuaded, perhaps by reading the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, that one social function of judgments of taste—understood as a tendency to value some works over others—is to maintain hierarchies of class. Bourdieu wrote that surveys establish that all cultural practices (museum visits, concert-going, reading etc.), and preferences in literature, painting or music, are closely linked to educational level (measured by qualifications or length of schooling) and secondarily to social origin.¹²

This claim was based on extensive analysis of social surveys he conducted in France. I am aware of no reason to doubt it. But that the literary and other aesthetic tastes of the social elites corresponded with what was celebrated as high culture is perfectly consistent with those judgements of taste nevertheless being correct. Social elites get more education in and more exposure to high culture, as he also pointed out, so you might expect them to be more reliable judges of such things. To consider another case, it would not impugn the idea that scientific knowledge is more reliable than, say, astrology, if one showed that people with more education were less likely to believe in the latter.

Still, against the background of the widespread rejection, in the name of postmodernism, of the idea of objective truth in this (or any other) domain—a rejection we discuss in our report—it was no doubt tempting to move from the idea that taste was linked with class to the idea that it was merely a matter of class. And, had that been so, identifying works as of greater literary value would indeed have meant taking sides with elites against the socially subordinated. It is hard to defend a discipline in a democratic society if its function is class warfare.

I do not, however, share the view that there is no such thing as aesthetic value. So I do not accept the major premise of this argument. One can identify works of greater and lesser aesthetic merit and justify judgments of this sort.¹³ In “In Memory of W. B. Yeats,” W. H. Auden famously wrote that “Poetry makes nothing happen...”; but, as he went on, poetry “survives in the valley of its own making...”¹⁴ One way of reading that is as saying that it has a kind of value of its own.

Aesthetic value is, in that sense, autonomous: It is not the same as moral or political value. That does not mean that there is no room for debate about aesthetic claims. Quite the contrary. Claims about aesthetic matters need to be supported by evidence and argument; teaching how to do that is one thing literary studies can do. And, of course, to the extent that such judgments are mobilized as an exercise in snobbism, we can respond by arguing that the problem is not with the judgments themselves but with the unequal distribution of literary education.

But even if I didn’t believe this, I would not think it appropriate to rule out the exploration of the possibility of aesthetic value in the study of literature or any of the other arts. And there would still be a place for claiming that certain literary works were superior in other, nonaesthetic, ways: in their depth of psychological insight (Shakespeare, Austen), in their capacity to illuminate moral ideas (Morrison, Eliot), in opening readers to human experiences different from their own (Achebe, Ishiguro), in sustaining democracy (Whitman). That a work can be held up for celebration for bad reasons—that it is an expression of the superiority of the White race or of the German Volk or the ruling class, say—does not mean that it cannot be admired for good ones.

There are many truths about literature that are historical or formal: This poem is a sonnet, this novel belongs to Romanticism, a haiku has 17 syllables, George Eliot was influenced by Feuerbach. But the history of literary studies demonstrates that serious literary interpretation involves more than truths of this sort, that it also requires making evaluations of the various kinds I have just suggested. And, while the experience of many readers will confirm that you can take pleasure in, say, a novel or a poem, without any explicit interpretation of it, reading informed by such explicit interpretations, reading guided by criticism, has unique rewards. That is something that the teaching of literature and of literary interpretation should convey. It can only do so by actually paying careful attention to works of literature, whatever else is read in classes in departments of literary study.

9 A highly cited 2019 study in Critical Inquiry makes the case against some aspects of this approach. N. Z. Da (2019). “The Computational Case against Computational Literary Studies” Critical Inquiry, 45(3), 601–639. “In a nutshell the problem with computational literary analysis as it stands is that what is robust is obvious (in the empirical sense) and what is not obvious is not robust, a situation not easily overcome given the nature of literary data and the nature of statistical inquiry. There is a fundamental mismatch between the statistical tools that are used and the objects to which they are applied.” Our own use of similar tools to answer the sorts of questions about shifts in literary study, prizes or jobs, is not open to this objection.

See also: Timothy Brennan, “The Digital-Humanities Bust,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 15 Oct. 2017,, and Danielle Allington, Sarah Brouillette, and David Golumbia, “Neoliberal Tools (and Archives): A Political History of Digital Humanities,” Los Angeles Review of Books, 1 May 2016, . Other critiques include Maurizio Ascari, “The Dangers of Distant Reading: Reassessing Moretti’s Approach to Literary Genres,” Genre 41 (Spring 2014): 1–19, and Daisy Hildyard’s incisive description of the crudeness of interpretation in Jodie Archer and Matthew L. Jockers’s The Bestseller Code (2016), in Daisy Hildyard, “Writing is Heavy Bombing,” Times Literary Supplement, 8 Feb. 2017, .

10 Goldstone, A., & Underwood, T. (2014). “The Quiet Transformations of Literary Studies: What Thirteen Thousand Scholars Could Tell Us,” New Literary History (Vol. 45, Issue 3, pp. 359–384). Johns Hopkins University Press.

This study used topic modeling, a statistical technique developed in natural language processing, that seeks to discover abstract “topics” within a collection of documents by finding groups of words that frequently occur together. It helps in identifying hidden semantic structures in large text bodies, allowing the analysis of literatures that it would be impossible for a single person to read. Their study was based on surveying work in these seven major generalist journals in literary studies: Critical Inquiry (1974–2013), ELH (1934–2013), Modern Language Review (1905–2013), Modern Philology (1903–2013), New Literary History (1969– 2012), PMLA (1889–2007), and the Review of English Studies (1925–2012).

11 The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 2nd edition, ed. Vincent B. Leitch et al. (Norton, 2011): 2478.

12 Pierre Bourdieu Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984): 1.

13 It is easy to mock earlier claims about the greatness of various literary works. Recall Frederick Crewe’s delightful parody of the critic F. R. Leavis in The Pooh Perplex: (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1963): “D. H. Lawrence is the only English novelist worth reading. Now, I know that some of you—the sort that creep around in libraries looking for inconsistencies in a man’s work—will say that my position has changed since last year, when I said the great English novelists were Richardson, Fanny Burney, Disraeli, and Lawrence.”

14 https://poets.org/poem/memory-w-b-yeats

Problems

Politicization

Scholars are citizens. They have as much right to political views and to their expression in the public world as anyone else. But there are appropriate and inappropriate ways for political views to shape scholarship. Some scholars in literary studies defend what they call “scholar-activism,” which has been defined by a group of its proponents “as scholarship that seeks to contribute knowledge to activism.”¹⁵ The reference to knowledge here is important. To be knowledge, a claim must be true. And such activists surely care about the truth, not least because holding onto a lie typically weakens your capacity to get things done, and they surely know this. Like the other members of this commission, I do not think that studying a certain subject matter because you think the knowledge you produce will be useful in advancing some agenda is wrong. It should be obvious that one can do research that’s aimed to serve a purpose while still being guided by the desire to understand what’s really going on. Cancer research is, no doubt, usually aimed at the external purpose of curing cancers. But that aim is pursued by trying to understand (the truth about) how cancers work. So activist research in literary studies could be aimed at finding the truth about how, say, literary institutions worked to support a political order or structures of power in order to figure out how to subvert that order. Or it could, on the other hand, be guided by an interest in how literature supports patriotism or religiosity. But the research would best serve that aim by finding the truth about how literary institutions did this: A possible discovery could be that most literature and criticism have few political effects. (Perhaps Auden believed this.) The task of literary studies, in short, is to make discoveries about literature. If a scholar’s aim was to advance social justice, it would take an argument to show that studying literature was a route to that aim.

Such arguments have, in fact, been made. Caroline Levine in The Activist Humanist, for example, argued in 2023 that what she calls “anti-instrumentality” underlies much work in the humanities, and that, as a result, much teaching in the humanities actively discourages hopeful political engagement. So she urges a resistance to this thought in the name of an “affirmative instrumentality.”¹⁶ The book ends with a workbook that is designed to help students discover forms of political engagement with the climate crisis that involve no literary attention or material at all. True, the book argues that what she calls “formalism,” a technique evolved in the literary humanities, allows us to understand social life in a way that “sustains collective life.”¹⁷ What has this to do with literary studies? “I hope it is clear.” Levine writes, “that I am reading cities in some of the same ways I would read a poem.”¹⁸ The right kind of formalism, she thinks, allows one to read a poem and a society. Literary study, she thinks, can be enabling for political engagement. But there is no evidence in the book that this is so: The success of the workbook, which she calls an “experiment,” wouldn’t show this, since there is nothing specifically literary about it. And, given the claims for the power of literary studies in advancing social justice, the lack of interest in empirical evidence for these claims is surprising.

It is difficult to tell whether Levine is criticizing “anti-instrumentalist” assumptions—which include the idea of the autonomy of the aesthetic—on the grounds that they are mistaken or on the basis that they are counterproductive for the politics she endorses. Levine thinks that formalist insights about society will serve an activist agenda aimed at changing society in ways that will ameliorate the climate crisis. Nothing in her argument guarantees, however, that these insights will, in fact, be used to advance any particular agenda.

In the opening of The Routledge Companion to Literature and Social Justice, Mark Bracher, who believes that advancing “social justice through the study of literature … should be done,” claims “there is now empirical evidence that teaching for social justice does succeed when one employs a pedagogy appropriate to the task.”¹⁹ And he refers in a footnote to evidence that literary study affects people’s attitudes.²⁰ This supports a claim, long made by literary scholars, that the study of literature can enrich one’s moral imagination. But it does not, of course, follow that literary scholars should shape their claims about literature in ways that sacrifice truth to the advancement of social justice.

It would be a real problem if scholars concealed or contested inconvenient truths, pretending that things are a way they aren’t because the pretense advanced some important goal. One way a truth can be inconvenient is if someone who believes it will be less likely to support a policy you favor: the one you’re advocating. That could happen even if your policy was a good one, given your aims. So you would be endorsing the right policy but offering the wrong reasons for supporting it, presumably because your policy opponents wouldn’t accept the right reasons.

Why not? It could just be that they have different reasonable aims, or that they hold a view about how the world works that is reasonable, though wrong—one that you can’t effectively disabuse them of. Pretending that you have good evidence for something you haven’t in these circumstances is disrespectful to your fellow citizens. It would be manipulative as well as dishonest.

On the other hand, your opponents might reject the right reasons because they’re wicked or confused. It’s an interesting moral question whether, if the policy is important enough, it might be okay to manipulate them in that case. This is a version of a traditional “noble lie” question. And in the contemporary political world, the notion that an intellectual elite should keep hard truths from the populace is more likely to be endorsed among Leo Strauss’s followers on the right than among progressive activists.²¹ But in scholarly discussions, you should not succumb to this temptation, even if one can imagine particular circumstances where the stakes were such that one might give in. (I am skeptical, however, that lying or concealing the truth about important matters would be effective for very long.)

I doubt, however, that this is what is going on in our present situation. We have found little evidence that the scholar-activists doubt their claims. Far from it. The problem is not that they are insincere. What’s going on is that, for whatever reason, they’re sometimes refusing to consider possibilities that they have no sufficient reasons to rule out. And one reason they aren’t entitled to rule them out is that they are failing to pay attention to reasonable and relevant objections. Indeed, in failing to pay attention to criticism when it comes from people whose politics they reject, they are failing to take one lesson of standpoint epistemology, which is that a community of scholars attentive to people with a diversity of identities can open us more fully to the truth.

The “political” part of the story here is that they think that the objectors are not just wrong but wicked: transphobic, say, or racist. Because it is so tempting, especially in an age of extreme political polarization, to think ill of people who disagree with you about matters that are important to you, it is essential to consider objections seriously, even if you disapprove morally of the objectors, and even if you doubt their sincerity. That is because of the truth in fallibilism, the recognition that we are both psychologically prone to epistemic error and environmentally susceptible to epistemic bad luck. Because I am a fallibilist, I am aware that some of what I say in this report may be mistaken. I look forward to vigorous and responsible debate. But my faith in the value of literary studies, properly pursued, explains why I want to contest what I see as mistakes that are damaging the field.

Some of the mistaken things some literary scholars believe—various relativist claims, the claim that every position that diverges from theirs has some sinister agenda, views about the economy—might be corrected by a more careful attention to those who disagree. And you’re more likely to get a good grip on questions, even if you don’t change your mind, by listening to skeptics, as John Stuart Mill argued, in On Liberty, long ago.

We have hitherto considered only two possibilities: that the received opinion may be false, and some other opinion, consequently, true; or that, the received opinion being true, a conflict with the opposite error is essential to a clear apprehension and deep feeling of its truth.

But, as he went on to insist,

… there is a commoner case than either of these; when the conflicting doctrines, instead of being one true and the other false, share the truth between them; and the nonconforming opinion is needed to supply the remainder of the truth, of which the received doctrine embodies only a part.²²

You do not have to accept everything in Mill’s argument to be persuaded that, in doing our best to aim at the truth, we are more likely to be aided than hindered, by hearing a broad range of arguments against our current view.

15 Philipson Garcia D, True J, Abbashar A, et al. “Is Scholar-Activism an Oxymoron? Reflecting on the Challenges and Opportunities for Scholarly Activism or Activist Scholarship in the Politics and Gender Field.” Politics & Gender. 2025 51��;21(4):1110-1118. doi:10.1017/S1743923X25000194

16 Caroline Levine “Toward an Affirmative Instrumentality,” The Activist Humanist: Form and Method in the Climate Crisis (Princeton, NJ, 2023; online edn, Princeton Scholarship Online, 19 Sept. 2024), , accessed 11 Jan. 2026.

17 Levine op. cit. Chapter 2. The notion of “form” and its analysis relied on here comes from her earlier Caroline Levine, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015).

18 Levine op. cit. Chapter 2.

19 Masood Ashraf Raja and Nick T. C. Lu The Routledge Companion to Literature and Social Justice (New York: Routledge, 2025 51��): 13.

20 Bracher, Mark, Deborah Barnbaum, Michael Byron, Tammy Clewell, Nancy Docherty, Françoise Massardier-Kenney, David Pereplyotchik, Susan Roxburgh, and Elizabeth Smith-Pryor. “Compassion-Cultivating Pedagogy: Advancing Social Justice by Improving Social Cognition through Literary Study.” Scientific Study of Literature 9, no. 2 (2019): 107– 162. Johnson, Dan R. et al. “Reading Narrative Fiction Reduces Arab- Muslim Prejudice and Offers a Safe Haven from Intergroup Anxiety.” Social Cognition 31 (2013): 578– 598. It’s worth observing that these papers demonstrate changes in attitudes—what one might think of as ordinary moral education—rather than any actual activity that advances social justice.

21 Whether Strauss himself endorsed it is a different question.

22 Mill, John. The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Volume XVIII - Essays on Politics and Society Part I. University of Toronto Press, 1977, p. 253.

Refusing to engage

I have suggested that one reason that scholars might ignore arguments is that they thought their opponents were wicked. Some trans rights activists now explicitly refuse to take part in panels or conferences where people they consider transphobic are invited to participate. Some think that such people should not be invited to give talks; they should be “deplatformed.”²³ Among the views that are considered transphobic by some is the claim that there is something conceptually puzzling about identifying as a person of a certain sex or gender if there is nothing other than identification that makes one the gender that one is. However, I have found little evidence that deplatforming of this sort is common in literary studies in the strict sense.²⁴ It seems commoner in anthropology and philosophy and gender studies. But the presence of the practice anywhere in the academy discourages people in all fields from making the sort of claims that are challenged in this way.

Still, the right response to a challenge of this sort isn’t to refuse to discuss with people who make it, but to explain the puzzle away: to solve it. Trans men and women ask us to recognize them as men or as women. There is nothing unreasonable in asking for an explanation of what that amounts to: and it is hard to see how the claim can be explicated without some notion of what it is to be a man or woman, independently of claiming to be one. (This is analogous to the difficulty we have in understanding literally Hamlet’s claim that “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”) Of course, one can make this argument disrespectfully or contemptuously. That is bad academic practice because it distracts attention from the argument being made.

I know—from lived experience!—that it can be upsetting to have your views disputed. But the aim of the academy is to understand issues, to identify questions in a discipline worth asking and to try to do one’s best to answer them correctly. It is not to make people happy (or unhappy) in their views. If the pursuit of that proper aim by appropriate methods is upsetting for some, that is a price we in the academy should be willing to pay. It may indeed be disturbing to think of yourself as the recipient of unjust privilege or to hear religious views important to you disputed, or to face arguments that you belong to a class of people who are, on average, less gifted in some way. But since any of these things might be true in some cases, the careful exploration of such claims, in the fields competent to examine them, is one of the tasks of the academy.

Of course, they might also be false. And it might also be that they are believed as a result of a prejudice of some sort. These are possibilities that careful scholarly exploration should be able to examine, too; and the presence of people of a wide range of identities will make it more likely that they will, in fact, be explored. That is one reason for diversity of identity, especially in academic fields that bear on identity.

And—also of course—discourtesy in discussion is unscholarly because it generates emotions that get in the way of looking at evidence and argument. Still, nobody is obliged to enter a field whose study will disturb them. Conversely, however, nobody who wishes to enter a field should be discouraged, because of their identity, by the alienating attention of those who already practice it.

23 Grace Lavery, a professor of English at Berkeley, argued on Twitter that Helen Joyce, whose book Trans criticizes the transgender rights movement, was a fascist and that “no-platforming fascists is still the right move.”

This article suggests that her withdrawal from a planned discussion was a response to pressure from people who believe that it was wrong to debate Joyce.

24 This is not to say that it has never occurred. But we have searched for proven cases and found only a few.

Identity as a basis for criticism

I have heard people (within and outside literary studies) question whether it is appropriate for people of one identity to discuss at least some claims about people of some other identity.²⁵ So, in the somewhat caricatural archetype of such arguments, a cis man is asked why he is in a position to assess claims made by trans people about their identity; or a White person is told that she cannot discuss the “Black experience.” There are puzzling asymmetries here. Trans people and Black people aren’t supposed to be told they can’t talk about cis or White people. Yet, if truths of identity arise, as is now often claimed, from something called “lived experience,” what’s sauce for the gander is presumably sauce for the goose.

It is hard to find written defenses (as opposed to articulations) of these exclusions, stated thus starkly. Indeed, the main evidence for these sentiments in the study of Native American literatures, for example, is that leading scholars have felt the need to deny that they favor them.²⁶ I know of departments, supported by administrators, seeking to diversify their demography by specifying subject matters—such as various ethnic American literatures—whose study has a significant number of scholars of some ethnicity, then insisting that the successful applicant be of that ethnicity. There is nothing wrong with hoping or even expecting to increase departmental demographic diversity by specifying a recognized field, but, once that is done, I think the right way to proceed is to pick the best candidate for the job.

I have also seen people criticized because there is a mismatch between their identity and their subject. So criticism of scholars who are White, male, straight or cis by scholars (or, perhaps more commonly, students) who are Black or female or LGBTQ does sometimes reflect a suspicion that the former are very unlikely to “get” questions that are in some sense about the identities of the latter.²⁷ In particular, when a claim that is widely accepted among people who work on, say, Black literature or feminist criticism is contested by a White person or a man, the identity of the person making the claim is sometimes invoked in the criticism.²⁸

Some arguments here misunderstand the truths that support standpoint epistemologies. It is surely true that there are thoughts that are much more likely to occur to a person of one social position than another. That is especially true of beliefs about various kinds of people, since it is much easier to believe people of other kinds to be defective than to believe it of your own kind. There may even be experiences—such as those of being demeaned as a person of an inferiorized kind—that are hard or impossible to understand if you have never had them. But just as those who are born blind can learn something about the structure of visual experience, that would not mean that there was nothing to understand for those who have not had the experience. It seems to me a significant question, for example, whether there is such a phenomenological difference between being demeaned simpliciter and being demeaned as a person of a certain kind, so that, say, the lived experience of racist insult might give you access to the phenomenology of homophobic disparagement. (Despite having experienced both, I have nothing useful to report on this matter.) Still, even if we accepted this, so that there was an epistemic privilege of some kind associated with some claims made by people of certain identities, it would not follow that people of other identities could not explore and examine those claims. And, since people of one identity are typically not of one opinion, one obvious way they could do that would be to point to such disagreements.

In any case, even if there were truths that are inaccessible to people of some identities in the way that some of the truths about music are inaccessible to those born without hearing, most claims about literature cannot be like this. And so there is no literature produced by people of one identity that cannot be the object of scholarly study by people of other identities, if they have the appropriate preparation. Furthermore, the social identities of critics do not show what is wrong with their claims, even when their standpoint is relevant to explaining why they have the views they do. Argumentum ad hominem is not warranted by noticing the statistical fact that some positions are more likely to be held by people of some identity.

25 Aveling, N. (2013). “‘Don’t talk about what you don’t know’: On (not) conducting research with/in Indigenous contexts.” Critical Studies in Education, 54 (2), 203–214.

26 So, more than a decade ago, writing in Reading Native American Literature (Routledge, 2011), Joseph Coulombe felt the need to address the question head-on. On page 3, he wrote: “Recent calls for American Indian literary nationalism and/or separatism have been misinterpreted by some as an effort to silence white critics. It is true that some Native American scholars have encouraged indigenous critics to interpret Native-authored texts using an Indian or specifically tribal intellectual approach—as Craig Womack’s title Red on Red succinctly puts it—and they have also advocated for the privileging of Native ideas and experiences in criticism about Native literature. Yet no one is excluded. Jace Weaver writes, “I have never said, nor have I ever heard any responsible Native scholar say, that non-Natives should not do Native American Studies, much less the study of Native American literature, any more than Natives should prescind from bringing their own insights to literature by anyone else.” (Jace Weaver That the People Might Live: Native American Literatures and Native American Community (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997): 11. Craig Womack writes, “I have never said non-Indian critics cannot or should not participate in the criticism of Native literature—no such statement appears in a book or publication of mine, and I have never suggested anything like this in public or even in private.” Jace Weaver and Craig S. Womack American Indian Literary Nationalism (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006): 103.

27 This seems to have been what happened in a case involving Aaron Kunin at Pomona, discussed in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Kunin was accused of engaging in “literary blackface” after proposing to explore Ralph Ellison’s work. https://www.chronicle.com/article/when-a-department-self-destructs

28 Rogers Brubaker discusses this under the rubric of “epistemological insiderism” in “The uproar over ‘Transracialism,’” an op-ed in The New York Times, May 18, 2017.

What, exactly, is theory?

In the 1970s, yet another new way of doing literary studies developed, with an epicenter in the United States at Yale in English and Comparative Literature. Some, though by no means all, of it drew on philosophical writing by Jacques Derrida. One verbal index of adherence to these broad movements was to say that you were doing something called (literary) theory. It would not be easy, and it’s not necessary for our purposes, to describe the ideas that were central in this moment. Nor am I inclined to argue that they produced no useful or interesting writing about literature. Far from it. But it will help to say something about this tendency of thought in order to explain what I think are some problems to which it has led.

In the sense that theory is systematic thinking about a subject matter, it is hard to see how you could teach or discuss literature usefully without some theory. That does not entail that your needing a general theory of literature. And “literariness,” if it exists, might well have many distinct elements that could be hard to integrate into a single, unified account. But the field of literary studies has a technical language—elegy, essay, figure, genre, metaphor, modernism, novel, praise-poem, Romanticism, sonnet, synecdoche—and these terms need to be understood by knowing something about how they work. That much theory seems inescapable.

But this body of ideas is only a small part of the domain of theory, as that word came to be used, and it is worth trying to say something about that contemporary usage. Jonathan Culler, a distinguished practitioner and exponent of theory, has argued persuasively that while “it is a body of thinking whose limits are extremely hard to define,”²⁹ there is, in fact, a number of general things that can be said about this very diverse set of writings. First of all, it is not “an account of literature or methods of its study …”³⁰ Rather it is “an unbounded group of writings about everything under the sun …” in fields as diverse as “anthropology, art history, film studies, gender studies, linguistics, philosophy, political theory, psychoanalysis, science studies, social and intellectual history, and sociology,”³¹ whose “main effect is the disputing of ‘common sense’ about meaning, writing, literature, experience.”³² Key to this usage is the idea that “works regarded as theory have effects beyond their original field,” in particular, of course, in the study of literature.³³

So, one prominent model of theory took philosophical ideas from Derrida and applied them to thinking about literary texts. One of the ideas of deconstruction was that texts are often, perhaps inevitably, at odds with themselves in various interesting ways. (Practical critics suggested a similar notion earlier in their exploration of what Empson called “ambiguity.”)³⁴ Whether or not the general claim is correct, readings of prose or poetry in this tradition surely brought out interesting features of the texts.

Among the other ideas from outside literary studies that have been influential are postmodernist claims from philosophy about the unavailability of truth that are, as we argue in our main report, at best philosophically contestable and at worst incoherent. The idea that there are no truths is inconsistent with serious scholarship about literature … or anything else. “Facts deserve immense respect,” Guillory wrote recently. He was speaking of such facts as “who is the author of a work, when and where it was written, how the work was disseminated, its generic affiliations, how it was received by its early audience, what allusions and references need to be explained.” They “are the bricks of knowledge, but they will never be of great interest if not taken up into an argument that builds with them, that establishes relations among them.” “Unfortunately,” as he goes on to say, “it is just on this matter of argument that the epistemic aims of literary study defy an easy defense.”³⁵ But, as his work and that of countless other distinguished literary scholars shows, it deserves the careful attention of a more difficult defense.

And, in fact, most literary scholars behave as if they work with the same idea of facts as everybody else, even though they might well be committed to theories that appear to deny it. Their practice also suggests that most of them agree that some works are more worth studying than others—departments at major universities continue to have courses on Shakespeare—and that that is because they have some formal and other properties that make them more successful as literature.

Another body of influential work, from a kind of philosophically infused historical analysis, came from Michel Foucault. And some have accepted the idea—attributed, rightly or wrongly, to him—that claims to truth are always expressions of power. This is more exciting, but also much less plausible, than the unexceptional claim, which one might also find in his work, that power shapes what is accepted as knowledge. And this more modest and plausible claim is also consistent with the idea that there are truths, however difficult the distribution of social power can make their discovery. Foucault’s work also had a broad influence on thinking about gender and sexuality, in part due to his claims about how concepts such as “homosexuality” have been construed over time. Yet another influence has come from psychoanalysis, including the foundational works of Sigmund Freud and the more recent developments in the work of French analyst Jacques Lacan.

Precisely because “theory” generally involves, as Culler argues, taking ideas away from their original field, there is an inevitable interdisciplinarity in this work. It is clear that work across disciplines has been enormously fruitful in the study of many questions—across the whole field of scholarly study. But there is always the risk that an idea developed for one scholarly enterprise will be misunderstood when it travels across borders. There is nothing to stop scholars developing a deep understanding of ideas from “elsewhere,” from fields other than those in which they were trained. But without input from those trained in a discipline, concepts and claims can easily float free of a proper understanding. No doubt there can also be misunderstandings that are fruitful. Still, the excitement and even the illumination of disputing the common sense of a field by introducing thoughts from some other field, need, surely, to be combined with a respect for whatever distinctive claims have been developed in one’s own field, and for expertise in the fields from which one borrows.

There is evidence that the appeal to theory of this sort has, in fact, been on the decline for some time, even if it has left some residual problems of the sort I am discussing. (See Appendix 3.) References to “theory” and to “literary theory” in the MLA corpora peaked in the late 1980s. In the MLA convention programs’ full-text corpus (1986–2025 51��), the frequency of “theory” in the full program texts also shows a steady decline from 1986 to 2025 51��. (See Appendix 3, §1.2.) But some of the various convictions of postmodernism that we discuss in the main report, including a resistance to claims to objective truth, remain in literary study.

29 Jonathan Culler Literary Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011): 4.

30 Culler op. cit. 2.

31 Culler op. cit. 3.

32 Culler op. cit. 4.

33 Culler op. cit. 3.

34 William Empson Seven Types of Ambiguity (London: Chatto and Windus, 1930.)

35 Guillory op. cit. 381.

Gesture politics

I agree with Guillory that the field of literary studies is replete with what he calls “the overstatement of aim.”³⁶ You can find examples in many course descriptions and on many departmental websites of claims about the connection between literary studies and various forms of social justice. (See Appendix 4.) When a department claims, as the Michigan State Department of English does, that “Our teaching, scholarship, and service are explicitly committed to advancing equity and justice and questioning established power structures …,” or asserts, with the course description of Stanford’s Comp Lit 207 (“Why Is Climate Change Un-believable? Interdisciplinary Approaches to Environmental Action”) that “one of the primary goals of this course is to not only understand the problem of climate change, but also how to best act upon it,” it is not unreasonable to ask what evidence there is that literary studies is equipped to do these things or to wonder whether any of their work has in fact advanced any actual political change. After all, the last few decades of scholarship in service to progressive causes has left the United States with conservatives in charge of the executive, legislative and judicial branches of government in many states and at the federal level. Thinking does not make it so.

Such departmental and curricular claims are not hard to find. (Appendix 4.) They are objectionable not just because they don’t seem to be supported by much evidence, nor just because they may well alienate students from entering the field (in ways John Guillory has explored),³⁷ but also because they contribute to the problems that I discuss next.

36 Guillory op. cit. 79

37 John Guillory, “Scholarship, Activism, and the Autonomy of Social Spheres,” lecture, ICI Berlin, 5 December 2024, video recording, mp4, 54:59 https://doi.org/10.25620/e241205

Narrowing the focus

There have been significant and related shifts in the curriculum of literature programs and in the fields in which they make appointments. We have analyzed the job ads in English and Literature at the 69 research universities in the United States that are in the Association of American Universities in the Chronicle of Higher Education between October 2020 and October 2025 51��. Of the 106 tenure-line jobs in the domain the MLA calls “literature”—which excludes jobs in the two categories of writing (including Rhetoric and Composition) on the one hand and English education on the other—51 had a primary field defined by some social identity: race, ethnicity, gender. (Appendix 5.) A similar analysis of MLA job lists shows descriptive trends consistent with these claims. (Appendix 6.) We should note that these job descriptions require approval by administrators outside the department. This is one place where the university administration has a standardly recognized role to play in shaping departments.³⁸

Identity is evidently not an inappropriate focus for literary study. (As someone who has worked in African American and African literary studies, I could hardly think that.) One sort of traditional literary analysis explores themes in imaginative literature: honor in Homer, marriage or warfare or religion in 19th-century European novels. Social identities provide a natural focus for thematic analysis. Novels and poems often touch on questions of social identity; in reading them it is natural to reflect on what, if anything, they teach us about race or gender or nationality or religion. It is surely an interesting question—one that arises naturally as one watches a performance of The Merchant of Venice—whether Shakespeare’s depiction of Shylock is anti-Semitic, not least because if we are to understand a work, we need to think about it in the context of its times, and anti-Semitism has a history. In a similar vein, G.K. Hunter’s Othello and Colour Prejudice (1968) is surely a useful exploration of a topic in Shakespeare studies.³⁹

But you might reasonably wonder whether such extensive attention to issues of identity distracts from the important study of literary works by genre or period, or of canonical authors whose work can usefully be approached through non-identitarian lenses. The paper using topic modelling cited earlier concluded, already more than a decade ago, that:

In the last three decades literary studies has, in our model, taken a striking turn towards discussing—or theorizing, or criticizing; the topic model does not tell us which—the subject matter of the social sciences. The remaining topics on the rise in the last three decades ... concern media and technology; politics; science; the postcolonial and transnational; economics; and the law. Only two recent topics, concerned with philosophy and sentiment, lack this social emphasis.⁴⁰

Our own analyses are consistent with similar claims of a shift in the focus of the field. The descriptions of books recognized by the MLA’s Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies (1993–2025 51��), the MLA Prize for a First Book (1994–2025 51��) and the James Russell Lowell Prize (1970–2025 51��), all show a drift toward books using the terminology of social justice; a shift especially evident in the first two. Similar results are evident in the major prizes—the René Wellek and Harry Levin prizes—of the ACLA. (Appendix 1.)

That the field has turned toward these issues evidently does not mean it involves nothing else. An analysis of abstracts done for this report by Gavin G. Cook revealed some interesting facts about the changes in literary studies since 1980. (Appendix 2.) Among them the easiest to identify are these: that the field covers a wider range of topics than it used to; that the study of Shakespeare remains the leading topic, but accounts for a diminishing proportion of work; and that there was a significant bump in studies of Chinese literature in the first decade of the millennium.

But the rise in attention to topics that are addressed by the social sciences, does, in my view, make it reasonable to ask whether this focus is appropriate, and whether the curriculum and research agenda in literary studies should not pay more serious attention to topics that are more distinctively literary. After all, the social sciences already pay attention to these questions. And if literary scholars argue for claims about society and are confronted with social science that seems to argue against their claims, they need to have some explanation as to why we should count them as the experts we should believe. Interdisciplinary work can be extremely fruitful, but it surely requires respect for the disciplinary tools and methods of the fields with which one is engaging from a discipline of one’s own.

I am not objecting here that literature should avoid “political” subjects. It is worth distinguishing two senses of the political that have played a role in criticism of this “sociological” turn. One is just “partisan.” The other is, roughly, making normative claims about social life. In the former sense, conservatives sometimes object to discussing things that, for a variety of reasons, they don’t want discussed or to hearing claims that they disagree with. Just as progressives sometimes object to the claims of economists that undermine their policy agendas. The right response to such claims is to make the arguments against them, not to refuse them a place.

In the latter sense, it’s hard to see how you can avoid making normative claims while interpreting literature, if it is, at least sometimes, as Arnold famously said of poetry, a “criticism of life.”⁴¹ Certain novels—by Dickens, say, or Balzac—are hard to discuss without informed political commentary; they were meant to engender it.

If there is, as the course description of University of Pennsylvania’s English 2300.401 “Queer Poetry from Homer to Hughes” asserts, a “long history of queer desire at the center of the Western canon,” I see no problem with pointing it out. Of course, this may be, in the partisan sense, political, if, for example, denying it is central to a long history of homophobia, in which state and society in Europe and its descendant cultures have damaged queer lives, and if some current conservatives wish to continue that history. Contesting that history by examining canonical literary works might indeed help keep these classics alive in the present at least for some readers. But it could also just be a legitimate exploration of an important question about the history of literature, even if it disturbed some political conservatives.

As I said at the start, one thing that literary studies have done since the Second World War is precisely to keep alive in our culture literary works that might otherwise have disappeared from view; another is to create a public prepared to read the more “difficult” works that were the product not of academics but of modernist and post-modernist writers. The literary humanities are surely predicated on the assumption that this is a worthy enterprise. If a sociological turn has undermined this function, it is, in my view, worth asking whether it has gone too far.

38 Job advertisements don’t tell you who was eventually hired, so we evidently don’t know, on this basis, how central social identity was to the work of the people actually hired.

39 The field has continued to flourish over the last quarter century, even as the proportion of work in that field has declined, and a useful bibliometric study published last year shows significant shifts recently toward what they call a “post-Theory” approach that “moved away from singular theoretical frameworks, embracing diverse and interdisciplinary approaches.” “Scholars analyzed Shakespeare’s works through cultural studies, new materialism, and ecological criticism, highlighting their global and cross-cultural relevance.” Li, X., Li, S. “How Shakespeare’s works have been reinterpreted, adapted and reshaped: a bibliometric review and trend analysis of Shakespeare studies from 2000 to 2023.” Humanit Soc Sci Commun 12, 306 (2025 51��). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-025-04664-8

40 Goldstone and Underwood op. cit. 24.

41 Matthew Arnold “The Study of Poetry” reprinted in Essays in criticism: First and second series complete (New York: A. L. Burtt, 1900): 281.

Urging students to engage in activism

Suppose you were convinced that literature or criticism or movies or television supports prevailing unjust structures of power. Then you might seek to show this in the literature you study. You might, at the same time, want to urge your students to undertake activities that undermine the current unjust situation. This is a bad idea, as I intend to argue: The primary task of the disciplines is to understand their various domains. The right way to combat injustice is as a citizen, through other institutions.

Why? First, because there is a division of labor among institutions, and they serve our purposes best by focusing on their distinctive tasks.⁴² A hospital exists to use its resources to sustain and improve the health of a particular community. Perhaps its resources would do more net good if the whole thing were sold off and the money used to serve medical needs in some other country; or if they were used to bring democracy to North Korea. That’s not a good enough reason for the trustees of the institution to switch their resources to those other purposes. The disciplines of literary studies exist to study various literatures. They may extend their focus to consider other artifacts to the extent that they are relevant to understanding literature or, perhaps, because the methods of literary studies usefully apply to them. But if they give up that focus, they cease to serve the intellectual goals that define them. If you think that the search for literary understanding is only instrumentally worthwhile, you might want to take up some other activity.

Students who study the ways in which literature or criticism shape inequalities will draw their own conclusions about whether they want to help combat injustice. But the task of literary studies is to provide them with an understanding about literature, which may or may not lead them to do that, not to urge them to adopt any specific form of political activity. There is a line between providing students with information, normative and non-normative, that is relevant to their lives as citizens and aiming to push them to particular forms of political action. In all the humanities, the task of a teacher is to help students develop the ability to think critically for themselves.

42 Guillory has made this point using the language of “spheres.” This has interesting echoes of the notion of sphere sovereignty developed in the writing of Abraham Kuyper, Lectures on Calvinism (New York: Cosimo Classics, 2017). These lectures were given at Princeton in 1898.

Partisanship

There is a second important reason for not using academic disciplines to pursue specifically partisan agendas, indeed for accepting that that is simply not their function. And that is a political reason. Our universities have flourished in a society that provides us with enormous public and private support. If one social group or another becomes convinced that we are skewing or concealing the evidence to advance some interest—rather than providing understanding that can serve people independent of their (reasonable) interests or purposes—they will have much less reason to continue that support. Even in the unlikely event that every claim by a literary scholar about the social good were correct, so long as there are people who reasonably contest the policies the scholar favors, we have to do our scholarship without prejudging the case against them. That is our compact. If you want to do something else, you should work in an institution—such as a think tank—whose support comes from people who share a certain set of aims and interests. But that is not a way universities should be organized in a democratic society.

So the right response to a distorting partisanship on the left is not to create units or fields that display a distorting partisanship of the right. Scholars should be able to challenge the pieties of our public life from any direction. If, after all, it is a fact, say, that America’s traditional values—however understood—are the right values, that is something that a careful study, attentive to the evidence, can presumably reveal. But, as we argue in our main report, disciplines should not be defined by partisan agendas. It was wrong when Cold War liberalism sought to exclude Marxist claims from debate. It is wrong if an enthusiasm for social justice, however worthy, distorts the study of literature in another direction.

Conclusion

John Guillory remarked recently that “literature is no longer, as it once was, the principal source of entertainment for those able to read.”⁴³ “Nor is it,” he went on, “the principal means of achieving cultural distinction of the sort that once motivated the European bourgeoisie.” In these circumstances, he argues, “creating the conditions for aesthetic pleasure in the ancient technology of writing has become more difficult, more likely to fail.”⁴⁴ Because I agree with this, I believe it is important to work to strengthen literary studies; and I believe that that will require paying attention to the problems I have identified, in the first instance by challenging the literary academy to face them itself.

43 Data supporting this observation comes from a widely reported recent study by Bone et al. (2025 51��) that found that from 2003 to 2023, the number of Americans who read for pleasure fell 40 percent (or about 3 percent per year): Bone, J. K., Bu, F., Sonke, J. K., & Fancourt, D. (2025 51��). “The decline in reading for pleasure over 20 years of the American Time Use Survey.” iScience, 28(9). �� The Guardian observed; “The number saw a peak in 2004, with 28% of people qualifying, before falling to 16% in 2023. The data was taken from more than 236,000 Americans who participated in the American Time Use Survey … The definition of reading in the survey wasn’t limited to books; it also included magazines and newspapers in print, electronic or audio form.”

44 Guillory op. cit. 378.

Appendices

Yu Guo

Gavin G. Cook

Yu Guo

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