To the Editor:
Simon During’s essay (“The Conservative Turn in Literary Studies,” The Chronicle Review, January 6) is a useful effort to capture the moment in literary studies, but perhaps most importantly for what it gets wrong. Yes, there is a turn from the politicization of literary studies, but there are two problems with the argument used to explain and evaluate it. The first is that it buys into the early 20th-century origins of the discipline argument, ignoring all of the scholarship that has focused on the emergence of the English Department, the Humanities, and literary history in the early- and mid-19th century. That truncated history is what allows During to turn the entire debate about the discipline now into a focus on nostalgic turns back to Eliot and sentimental theorizing of close reading. In doing so, During and the authors he discusses not only mute all that came before, but also all that has come after in the turn to the digital, the computational, and the genuinely new insights into language now enabled by LLMs.
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