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  • The Colloquy of Little Books
  • Karen Steigman (bio)
THE HUNDREDS
BY LAUREN BERLANT AND KATHLEEN STEWART
Durham: Duke University Press, 2019

Joan Didion once explained the famous calculated brevity of her style by telling The Paris Review that "I always aim for a reading in one sitting" (2006, 77). Didion was clearly echoing Edgar Allan Poe's dictum in "The Philosophy of Composition," where he argued that "there is a distinct limit, as regards length, to all works of literary art—the limit of a single sitting." "It appears evident," Poe claimed, that the proper length for any literary work of art is "about one hundred lines," and in a kind of mathematical proof of his own poem "The Raven," Poe set out to describe the precise poetical effect produced in the duration of that precise one hundred (Poe, 546).

The question of length—particularly the relation of length to affect and reception—appears to be on the academic hive mind lately. More to the point: it appears "the short form" is the dominant critical academic and fictional mode du jour. Minimalism is having a moment. Contemporary writers like Rachel Cusk, Lydia Davis, Jenny Offill, and Sarah Manguso are acclaimed for their aphoristic, distilled prose; their use of fragments; and attention to white space—a strategic style of reticence reminiscent of modernist fiction and the postmodern "flash cuts" (Didion's term) that is trending in a current return to writers like Renata Adler, Natalia Ginzburg, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Fleur Jaggy, with books typically "clocking in at a sharp 101 pages" (Phillips), or nearly so. A plenary at the 2020 American Comparative Literature Association on "The Short Form" promises to scrutinize a series of short forms currently on trend, including "the tweet, the bumper sticker, and [End Page 186] the elevator speech." And then there is the spate of so-called little books that have appeared from nearly all major university presses over the past decade, to take Bloomsbury's Short Cuts and Rutgers University Press's Quick Takes as just two examples trumpeting the new academic style of brevity in their respective series' titles.

Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart take up the current challenge of limit and exactitude in their own recent little book, The Hundreds (Duke University Press, 2019), a series of hundred-word experimental exercises in composition, critical theory, and academic collaboration. The book operates on two critical registers, one affective (predictably so, as it is written by two of the foundational thinkers in affect studies) and the other formal. On the question of affect, the book treads some recognizable ground, still worth going over first; on its relation to the question of length at the present time, more in a moment.

The Hundreds operates on a catholic "commitment to stay open to what's in your vicinity" (34)—"an experiment in keeping up with what's going on" (5)—the book's style is at once creative and critical, its method collaborative and particular, its objects theoretical and commonplace. It appears variously as a diary, a catalog, a conversation, and a conceptual art project, staging oblique and colloquial encounters with the Beatles, the actor Holly Hunter, family members and students, people at the gym, and dogs on the street. Berlant and Stewart find their predecessors in the creative-critical hybrid work of Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, Eve Sedgwick, Michael Taussig, and Georges Perec; they self-consciously evoke and mimic other theo-critical forms that seek to apprehend the everyday, including ethnography, autofiction, fictocriticism, and critical theory. The book ends with several meta-indexes by invited scholars and artists ("Index," "Not-Index," "The Index," and an invitational blank page to the reader, too, titled "For Your Indexing Pleasure"). Its unorthodox bibliography, entitled "Some Things We Thought With," includes premier academic scholarship (Adorno, Agamben, Ahmed) alongside pithy commonplace items like "a box of photographs once taken," "a few pansies stuck in a window box," and "a fuck-you shrug" (157).

The result is a paratactic style of collaboration between the authors and their eclectic, nonencyclopedic—and perhaps to some readers, erratic—archive of objects, people, academic currents, current events, popular culture, and theoretical and institutional interlocutors, including readers themselves...

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