Literary Scholars Should Argue Better

A couple of weeks ago, I attended an interdisciplinary seminar featuring work in progress on law and humanities. After the guest presenter finished reading his chapter draft, the floor opened for discussion: Legal scholars pushed for more terminological precision, historians suggested alternative timelines, political scientists offered comparative context that called some of the author’s conclusions into question. It wasn’t until the frank, fun, productive conversation had wrapped up that I put my finger on what had been missing. Where was the praise?

In my own field, literary studies, almost every talk involves some kind of panegyric, from an effusive speaker introduction to a closing moment of gratitude for the power and timeliness of the event. In between, there’s a very good chance that audience members will begin their questions and comments with an expression of devout gratitude. Thank you so much for this beautiful, this important, this fascinating, this marvelous talk!

This wasn’t the first time in recent memory that my academic affects had been out of whack. A few days before, doing background research, I had come across an “open peer commentary” in Behavioral and Brain Sciences — a forum in which prominent psychologists, philosophers of mind, and other scholars of cognition publish brief responses to a significant recent book or article. Several of the responses struck me, still shaken by a harsh recent peer review of my own, as terrifyingly substantive: One commentator explicitly negated a key claim of the book under discussion, another accused the author of cherry-picking evidence, and several pointed to significant holes or oversimplifications. I couldn’t imagine receiving such feedback in a public forum and living to fight another day.

Other commentaries, of which there are several in each issue of Behavioral and Brain Sciences, suggest that this sort of frank criticism is typical. In addition to what feel to me like tactful responses — those that expand on the author’s argument or offer alternative explanations for the data without explicit contradiction — there are always many commentaries, sometimes a majority, that declare the author to be wrong about a major claim. The tone is typically calm and even pleasant; indeed, some of the responses start on a positive note before launching into criticism. But those positive words are subtly different from the ones spoken in my field: not adjectival praise for what the author is or the quality of her performance, but a statement of agreement with some proposition the author has put forward. We agree that X, but disagree with the conclusions the author draws from X; we accept the author’s explanation of Y, but don’t share her belief that the same explanation applies to Z; we agree about the paradigm cases of X and Y, but think ambiguous cases like A and B reveal a weakness in the author’s framework … and so on. Like the discussion in the law and humanities workshop, in other words, the cognitive-science reviews I read focused on the shared world that the reviewer and main author were both attempting to describe. Methods, theories, concepts succeed or fail insofar as they prove to be useful tools to explain the features of that world.

I want to avoid idealizing other disciplines or vilifying my own. I don’t mean to suggest that literary scholars never have substantive arguments with one another, nor, certainly, that the rest of the humanities and social sciences are engaged in a pure quest for knowledge without pettiness or personal investment. But the relative scarcity of this more clinical type of argument in literary studies seems to shed new light on the “method wars” — debates over the status of critique that have played out across the field for the last several years and have recently bubbled up in general-audience publications and on literary Twitter.

The term “critique” itself often remains curiously undefined in these conversations, but it clearly means something more than an attitude or affect. I’ll hazard a working definition: Critique is the process of reading a text, artifact, or performance in light of the discourses within which it is embedded and the discourses embedded within it — its “political unconscious,” in Frederic Jameson’s famous phrase, rather than its apparently “intended” content. Those discourses, which are often (but not always) ideological, are typically reflected in the formal features of a text, and the act of critique often involves using these formal subtleties to draw connections between texts. The reading produced by the act of critique can be (but isn’t always) “critical” in the colloquial sense. Under this definition, it would be silly to suggest that literary studies should or could divest itself of critique, a tool as fundamental to our various methodologies as close reading itself.

On the whole, not that anyone asked me, I find the pro-critique camp more appealing, and I’m exceedingly skeptical of the “attending”/“interpreting” dichotomy that David Kurnick has insightfully — well — critiqued. Even when we’re dealing with objects far less complex than literary texts, attention is a top-down process that depends on cognition and judgment, not a condition of passive receptivity. When we are dealing with literature, the relevant opposition is less between attending to the text and interpreting it than between interpreting only those aspects of the text that the text itself sanctions and interpreting those aspects that the text disavows, disregards, or simply fails to foreground.

But critique thus understood has a profound limitation that emerges when we apply it, not to art objects or texts by (literally or figuratively) dead authors, but to the critical productions of our peers: It is a one-way street. When I bring the methods of critique to bear on your criticism, you can certainly do the same to mine, but we aren’t having a conversation when we do so: We’re trading performances, probably for the benefit of a third party. Perhaps appropriately for a method that came into its own in the study of fictions, critique can produce truth claims but is not particularly good at evaluating them. That’s not a weakness of the method; it’s just not what it’s there for.

When we engage with other literary scholars in the mode of critique, we turn away from the content of their claims — which concerns, usually, the ostensible shared object of our study (the text, the artifact, the formal device) — and toward the form in which those claims are made, the discourses in which they’re embedded and the politics they encode. The turn is most obvious when the result is an evisceration, but I’d argue that critique in this sense makes up the majority of our engagement with our colleagues’ work — both when blaming and praising.

In “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading,” a key text in the critique debates, the late queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick herself links a lack of interest in truth claims with an emphasis on the felicitousness of critical performance: We read D.A. Miller’s The Novel and the Police, she suggests, for its “wealth of tonal nuance, attitude, worldly observation, performative paradox, aggression, tenderness, wit, inventive reading, obiter dicta, and writerly panache” — but not, of course, “to find out whether its main argument is true.” Sedgwick’s diagnosis reveals that the reader of the paranoid text — whether approving or disapproving — must actively go along with this rejection of argument. What discourages us from asking whether Miller’s argument is true (or, if “true” seems like the wrong word for a theory, whether it produces useful explanations and predictions) is not necessarily Miller’s text itself, but a kind of disciplinary common sense so widespread that Sedgwick doesn’t localize it but merely ventriloquizes it: “Who reads The Novel and the Police to find out whether its main argument is true?” That’s simply not done.

What is done: approving a critical performance as aesthetically pleasing or politically useful or simply virtuosic; criticizing the performance as clumsy or in poor taste or putting the author in suspect company; reading an argument as symptomatic of some unspoken, often problematic desire or attitude; tracing a critical style to a particular source and letting the rest of the audience infer its validity or invalidity from there. “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading” shows Sedgwick to be a master of all of these moves; they are not restricted to the explicitly pro-critique crowd, nor, in my experience, to any subsection of the discipline.

All sides of the “method wars” critique other critics. This is what we do instead of argue over a shared object: We distance, we affiliate. By locating a talk or an essay in a network of critics, we both identify the discourses in which it is enmeshed and quietly position ourselves in relation to the field. If we are used to mentioning other scholars primarily to situate them in this way (rather than to take issue with their claims), it’s no wonder that citation has taken on surprising weight as an end in itself. Citation, in this framework, is the minimum gesture of affiliation, the textual equivalent of thanking someone for the beautiful talk — critique degree zero.

Literary studies’ habit of exuberant praise is not necessarily nicer than telling someone they’re wrong, even though it might seem so at first glance. To argue with someone — that is, to disagree with someone’s claim about the world and attempt to persuade them that they are mistaken (and, sometimes, that your competing claim is right) — requires accepting that they are competent and acting more or less in good faith. If either of those conditions isn’t met, you might still disagree, but argument would be pointless. In literary studies’ more affirmative modes, elaborate assurances of our colleagues’ competence — those more-a-comment-than-a-questions that praise a talk as beautiful, brilliant, powerful, and so on — end up standing in for actual arguments about the rightness or wrongness of a claim. In more negative modes, eviscerations of bad writing, insinuations of bad faith, and diagnoses of embarrassing or unacknowledged discursive debts may have more of the flavor of “arguing,” in the sense of “disputing” — but they too are substitutes for evaluating claims by testing them against external evidence. In both cases, we declare our colleagues worthy or unworthy rather than declaring their theories well founded or poorly supported, their assertions true or false.
If the disciplines that argue more also tend to omit the preliminary paeans, the difference isn’t merely temperamental. When I take a claim of yours seriously enough to argue with you about it, I’m implicitly accepting you as a colleague or at least as a reasoner; I don’t need to restate your legitimacy. Epistemic authority admits of many degrees, from “sentient perceiver” to “expert in a field.” I’m not suggesting that arguing with someone implies granting them the latter — you can argue with someone who doesn’t know what they’re talking about — but I think it implies a basic degree of epistemic respect. Your information may not be as good as mine, and your theories may be inadequate, but if I’m arguing with you, I acknowledge that you and I are both engaged in a legitimate effort to figure out what is true.

What’s more, insofar as my argument involves attempting to persuade you by explaining how and why you’re wrong, I am deeming you at least temporarily and locally fit to evaluate my own claims. In arguing with you, that is, I not only hail you as my epistemic equal; I enfold us both in an interaction that depends on our continued mutual acceptance of each other’s epistemic authority. That acceptance can be fragile, of course: I can lose my epistemic authority by repeatedly demonstrating a lack of concern for the truth of our shared world. And the same systemic inequalities that produce epistemic injustice in any truth-seeking enterprise can intrude at any point to unfairly deny one participant’s capacity to argue. But I believe this constitutes a grave injustice precisely because I believe that participating in argument is crucial to full belonging in an epistemic community.

Is literary studies an epistemic community? I think so, but I suspect that we often don’t see ourselves that way. We have accepted, whether gladly or grudgingly, an account of our work as canon-making or taste-training or “soft skills”-inculcating — all of which rightly plays a role in our classrooms. But our research isn’t just about skills, nor about a body of facts that one either knows or doesn’t; it’s about discovering how literature works, adding a thread to a web of explanation shared by all the disciplines that study human beings and their creations. Of course, that’s a contentious claim about what our discipline does; you might well want to argue with me about it. But if you agree that we’re engaged in some form of knowledge production, then we should treat our work with the epistemic respect that argument entails. To do that, we need colleagues, not just audiences.