Singularity and the Literary Market

This essay looks at how our perception of literary presence relates to markets and institutions. I wish to show how the commercialization of literary culture—from the 1800s to today’s “program era”—led to the rise of market-sheltered sites of consecration, “spaces of singularity” that shape people’s sense of cultural authority, and their orientation within the aesthetic and moral hierarchies of cultural space. Using examples from Walter Scott to Toni Morrison, I suggest that we experience literary singularity through a phenomenology of the sacred that manifests itself in the production of social trust.