We Have Never Been Critical: Toward the Novel as Critique

The president of the Modern Language Association, higher education policy wonks, and the governor of Wisconsin all readily agree that our current present represents a crisis for the humanities. Cosigning that consensus would seem an obligatory opening for any stock-taking essay like this one, assessing fifty years of Marxist literary theory. Yet the struggle to justify the humanities, however vitiating at this moment, is not readily periodizable: as Friedrich Nietzsche and Matthew Arnold already argued, education in arts and ideas inherently clashes with the roiling wheels of modern democratic capitalism. Even though critical thinking and cultural difference are so frequently brandished as banners for the unceasing expansion of the world market, aesthetic-philosophical inquiry into the allusive values of the beautiful and the good can never be wholly assimilated to the regime of surplus value; reveling in uselessness can never be wholly incorporated in the reign of instrumental reason; heralding the singular and the universal can never be wholly squared with institutionalized pluralism. Within this long arc, the present moment can only appear new qua the quantitative intensification of the crisis after the 2008 financial meltdown and qua the internalization of crisis into an engine of methodological innovation and strife. Indeed, the very latest trends in the academic humanities—big data, thin description, positivist historicism, and the critique of critique—enjoy the veneer of the cool and roll deep as the funded, but must all be grasped as so much soul-searching and epistemic capitulation inevitably consequent upon crisis. This is of course not how these movements see themselves, but that is in no small part because they do not see the humanities’ permanent war for legitimacy (nor even that war’s contemporary front). In this essay, I argue that Marxist theories of the novel, embedded within broader Marxian approaches to crisis and to the aesthetic, continue to frame urgent questions for the study of the novel and continue to illuminate avenues for future study that confronts contradictions in the social life of literature. Arguing this persistent importance requires tackling the contemporary repudiation of Marxist literary theory in the movement known as “postcritique.” While numerous schools of recent literary criticism have resigned both the aesthetic and the political purviews of Marxism, the utopian dimensions of Marx’s own work and of the finest Marxist literary readers still remain promising arcs for tracing the unique values of literary production, literary reading, and literary critique today. The most prominent platform of postcritique is Rita Felski’s The Limits of Critique (2015), poised as ex post facto manifesto for the past decade of method wars and