Comment
Comment on blog:
I’d just restate the implicit argument of Gerald Graff’s “Professing Literatureâ€: the criticism and discussion of literature has never really been at home in the modern research university. We’ve imported our professional M.O. from the sciences (e.g., the scholarly journal that comes out four times a year), and I guess our disciplinary rationale is that we’re “accumulating knowledge†in some way, even though the journal format and the model of quantitative “knowledge accumulation†does not suit literature or the study of literature at all. I’d guess that the future of academic literary study will go less in the direction of Moretti’s (deliberately counterfactual, to point up the absurdity of humanists trying to act like natural scientists?) model, and in more of a free-form, interactive model. I.e., the future looks more blog-like and less like the quarterly journal with all those footnotes that no one, not even scholars themselves, want to read.