Institutions, Genres, Readers

For 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 university as a whole.¹ Still, even as debates about method moved from specialist journals to venues like the Chronicle of Higher Education and into discussions of higher education more generally, a parallel methodological phenomenon went overlooked: the field’s less spectacular, yet more broadly pervasive, infiltration by the sociology of culture, which has overlapped with the development of certain kinds of quantitative humanistic work but is better understood independently.

A sociological bent in English literary criticism is not new; a genealogy might be traced through Q. D. Leavis’s Fiction and the Reading Public (1932), Lucien Goldmann’s Towards a Sociology of the Novel (1963) and the work of Raymond Williams, from Janice Radway’s Reading the Romance (1984) to Mark McGurl’s The Program Era (2009) and a 2010 special issue of New Literary History devoted to the topic. But a signal moment would be John Guillory’s invocation of the sociological work of Pierre Bourdieu in Cultural Capital (1993). Guillory clarified the occluded grounds of the early nineties’ canon wars by redirecting attention from an immaterial concept of “the canon” to the institutionalized forms (departments, curricula, syllabi) through which literary study and its objects are reproduced. Cultural Capital was an intervention that only a literary scholar could have made, but that intervention was accomplished not through close reading (still invoked as the core methodology of English studies) but through a fresh deployment of concepts borrowed from sociology. The relative absence of sociology from the method debates was a missed opportunity insofar as it is the discipline perhaps best equipped to analyze the stakes and significance of the debates themselves.

Two remarkable recent books, taken together, make a strong case for recognizing the importance of sociological thinking to recent developments in English, and the promise of that form of thinking for the production of new knowledge within the discipline. Merve Emre’s Paraliterary: The Making of Bad Readers in Postwar America and Gloria Fisk’s Orhan Pamuk and the Good of World Literature differ widely in subject matter and approach, and neither precisely foregrounds a polemic on behalf of a sociological method. But this is part of the point: both books exemplify, rather than merely call for, an already present but underappreciated mode of interdisciplinary scholarship. This should make them required reading, not only for those interested in twentieth-century American literature and twenty-first-century world literature respectively, but for anyone interested in the best of contemporary literary scholarship, and what that scholarship can say not only about its objects, but about the conditions of its own production. Both these books ultimately cast a critical eye on American...