On Literary Worlds by Eric Hayot (review)

Academics rarely write manifestoes, and for good reason. The adversarial gestures that give the genre its form mobilize a righteous us against a wrong-headed them, so it proves useful to writers who aim to rail against despotic regimes or advance the brilliance of new aesthetics against the dullness of the old. Those clean divisions work less well for writers who aspire to trace the ways that nuanced ideas are expressed in a tiny world, where everybody knows everybody else and any two might work on a committee in a room that is brightly lit.

That limitation became evident last spring, in the brouhaha that surrounded the manifesto published by the v21 collective. It declared the unimpeachable goal of rendering Victorian studies “a more argumentative, porous, and ambitious field” in the twenty-first century, and it bowed toward collegiality by withholding the names of the adversaries it described. But it hewed to conventions of the genre, too, by embroidering pet peeves around the holes where names would go, which left Victorianists to wonder which among them stood accused of harboring the “show-and-tell epistemologies and bland antiquarianism” that lead inexorably to “the instrumentalist evisceration of humanistic ways of knowing.” Responses took shape, predictably, as a litany of defenses that worked at least as hard to muddy the clean polarities the manifesto constructed as to debate the various futures that it projected. (See the manifesto and its affect-laden responses online at the website of the v21 collective.)

And yet, if the binary logic that the manifesto imposes makes it a blunt instrument for scholarly debate, the vitality that it marshals also gives humanists good reason to look longingly in its direction. The genres that we find closer at hand—the monograph and its miniature, the scholarly article—afford us little rhetorical room in which to say: My field rests on assumptions that are all wrong, and that wrongness leads us collectively into all manner of practices that are bad. Could we scrap them and try again?

Eric Hayot invents a subgenre of the scholarly monograph to follow that line of inquiry in On Literary Worlds. A manifesto written in the voice of a good colleague, it advances a convincing argument for the displacement of periodization as an organizing principle for literary study. And it imagines the revolution that such a displacement would entail—in undergraduate and graduate curricula that are structured chronologically; in hiring practices that identify candidates by the periods they study; and in the methodologies of writing and research that gird those identifications. It seems only logical that Hayot followed this book swiftly with The Elements of Academic Style.¹ After he proposed a new way to think broadly about every aspect of the work that we do, he got down to the nitty gritty, to propose better ways to do that work at the level of the paragraph and the sentence.

Hayot’s revolution begins, as revolutions tend to do, with a lament. The “near-total dominance” of periodization “amounts to a collective failure of imagination and will,” he writes, which leaves literary critics unable to think meaningfully beyond the limits of the periods we study (149). Hayot’s object of critique is the period as such, as he notes that the persistence of the concept amid more expansive ways of reading “the long eighteenth century,” perhaps, and a modernism that is transnational, including work by women and people of color. “The ongoing dominance of a core version of modernism” elicits particular ire, and Hayot defies the conventional ban on the exclamation point to marvel at its endurance “even when most scholars agree that these noncanonical authors should alter the core meaning of modernism!” (155). This contradiction between practice and theory prompts Hayot to conclude that periodization is “the untheorized ground of the possibility of literary scholarship. So we live with its limitations and its blind spots” (154).

Imagining an alternative, Hayot proposes a taxonomy of “modes” that cut across time and space...