Institutions, Genres, Readers

Abstract

or years, the central debates in English were over method. The now-familiar terms around which those debates coalesced―surface reading, digital humanities, world literature, literary Darwinism―were united (if not haunted) by an underlying question about the legitimacy of English itself. What claims―to relevance, to funding―could be made by a discipline that couldn’t produce a coherent account of itself? In each case, to varying degrees and in different ways, proponents of new or revised methods looked outside the confines of English proper: to overlooked European theorists, to computational and data analysis, to the biological and neural sciences. They began to ask not only what literature professors should do and how they should do it but, more centrally, whether literary studies could survive at all. Perhaps this was inevitable, given the contexts of the crisis in academic labor and the downward pressure on enrollments within which any discussion of work in the humanities now takes place. Interdisciplinary borrowing as a prop to methodological innovation has a long history in English studies. But now questions about the legitimacy of such borrowing seem inextricable from questions about the discipline’s ability to perpetuate itself, and about its place within the R O B E R T H I G N E Y