The Swerve Around P: Literary Theory after Interpretation

Abstract

The “P” in “The Swerve around ‘P’” refers to the Library of Congress designation for language, literature, and literary criticism/theory; the essay reflects on the fact that a lot of the work that’s produced in literature departments these days doesn’t end up in that section of the library (or, conversely, much of the research on the “P” shelves finds its primary engagements elsewhere: in history, sociology, science and technology, philosophy, social science, and so on). Literary scholarship isn’t “literary” in quite the same way it was even a decade ago, in the sense that it’s no longer primarily concerned with producing rival interpretations of existing or emerging literary artifacts. The reason there’s no hot new interpretive paradigm on the horizon is not so much because of the exhaustion of theory itself, but because the work of interpretation is no longer the primary research work of literature departments. However, it is precisely in the name of re-imagining a research future for literary theory that I turn to Alain Badiou’s account of the literary’s demise in recent philosophy. My provocation here, if I have one at all, is to ask theoreticians to rethink possible relations among literature and philosophy, other than in the key of interpretation—which (despite ubiquitous claims to the contrary) has been the dominant research practice of the “big theory” era in North America.

I. Literature

On a recent trip to the library to find an essay that a visiting speaker was going to talk about, something odd (and a bit embarrassing) happened to me. I got the call number for the volume, and bee-lined directly to the library’s “P” shelves (the Library of Congress designation for language, literature and literary criticism/theory). But I found that the whole section had been moved—there were students working on laptops in the corner where literary criticism and theory used to be. I eventually found the volume I was looking for, along with some old friends like my own first book (a proud alum of PS 228, Class of ‘93), relocated in the 5th floor stacks. I later asked the humanities librarian, when I saw him at the talk: “Hey, when did the ‘P’ section get moved to the 5th floor?” “2002,” he answered, a bit incredulously. I could see him wondering: this guy makes his living as an English professor, but he hasn’t been in the literary criticism section for years?

It struck me as puzzling as well. When I was in grad school—not that long ago—just about everything I needed to know was in the P section. I knew those shelves like the back of my hand. But I guess it is true that, in Library of Congress terms, for my work in recent years it’s been all B’s, H’s, and J’s (Philosophy, Social Science, and Politics), hardly any P’s—both in terms of the theory and criticism that I read, and in terms of the work that I publish. At first I thought that this was simply an anomaly of my research agendas; but an overwhelming number of colleagues I’ve since talked to about this experience have similar tales of the swerve around P. Others of course have different preferred Library of Congress designations for their research: the vast D through F shelves for the department historians, Q and R for science studies, more H and J for the queer theorists and cultural studies people, as well as a healthy smattering of G and T (geography and technology). And even those whose work remains firmly on the language and literature shelves admit that much of what goes into their books on literature requires research from other places: history, sociology, social science, not to mention the unclassifiable archival research that informs so much of the work on the P shelves. In short, even the scholarship on the language and literature shelves isn’t “literary” in quite the same way it was even a decade ago. There’s plenty of superb “theory” and “criticism” being produced in and...