Possibilities for English Studies

This cluster, Possibilities for English Studies Scholarly, Research, and Creative Activities (srca), facilitates two interconnected interventions: it inspires literary scholars to identify as creative and to help build a culture of transformative creativity grounded in hope and joy. This special research cluster advances these goals by disseminating possibilities for srca unrestrained by practical concerns and inviting readers to continue the creative act as sympathetic colleagues who can appreciate, and perhaps act upon, the hopeful visions that are collected in this special cluster.

In inviting colleagues to imagine possibilities, and invoking hope and joy as options for srca, we were responding to what our call referred to as the “many intersecting bummers” of the current moment. Those bummers include daunting global politics and ecological crisis, as well as the numerous widely discussed challenges facing the Humanities in higher education. Front of mind for us, however, were two more specific concerns. We were worried about how neoliberal discourse, especially as employed in higher education, works to co-opt possibility for the sake of institutional profit, encouraging forms of creativity that may result in uncritical conformity, in more tolerable ways of surviving the system, rather than in transformation. A vivid example of this co-opting of creativity is offered by Andrea Charise and Stefan Krecsy, who recently critiqued narratives of futurity in health care and educational discourse. Their article was authored prior to the covid-19 pandemic, and, with the precision of surgical lasers, they dissect how neoliberals place the onus on individuals to prepare for a future of perpetual crisis, which blinkers the need for systemic change. They write: “What narratives of futurity all too frequently foreclose are accounts of the present conditions that give rise to instability in the first place, taking the present not as a site, reform, or development but, rather, as a site of ‘preparedness’ to come” (48). Neoliberal understandings of creativity, in other words, reframe creativity as a form of preparation to survive exploitation or as the ability to survive toxicity. Tropes such as resiliency, grit, and perseverance are now celebrated in higher education—as they should be—but too often they are invoked, in effect, to sustain toxic systems: if grit can get you through, then the system must be fine. We hoped to reclaim creativity as a catalyst for transformative change by imagining what neoliberal institutions blinker: systemic crisis and the very possibility of alternative approaches grounded in social justice.

A second worry was about how our standard routines of srca practice can themselves be a bummer. As with any standard routine, they enable certain types of intervention but discourage others. In inviting literary scholars to see themselves as creative, we are reflecting on the high value our discipline places on criticality: on theorizing and critically describing how “present conditions give rise to instability,” to echo Charise and Krecsy, but stopping at this critique or deferring to the solutions imagined in works of literature, rather than following critique with creation. English studies can tend to emphasize our role as problematizers: the problematic is a well-established scholarly genre and problematization is commonly presented as a key “value” that humanists create or can bring to other areas of practice such as marketing, health care, engineering, or business. We were concerned that problematization can, sometimes, blinker futurity: the very possibility of transformative change. We were also concerned that devoting one’s professional life to problematizing toxic systems and challenging the devaluation of the Humanities in neoliberal societies can be, well, depressing. As proposed in the call, “Facing so many intersecting bummers, it seems all that one can do is retreat to a comfy couch with coffee, quilt, and literature, and hope that, somehow, a resurrected Humanities will emerge.” We saw the potential to further explore possibility as an extension or subgenre of problematization, one that imaginatively exposes both “intersecting bummers” and how to solve or transcend them.

Alexander Hollenberg introduced the idea of “critical creativity” to resituate literary interpretation as a creative act: a literary scholar places a text in critical dialogue with socio-cultural context to create novel...