Something spooky is spreading through the contemporary humanities: the specter of the public. Quite unlike communism, here all the powers are in fervent pursuit not to eradicate it, but find ways to speak to it. The future of the humanities is public! This “public humanities turn,” as Philip Lewis calls it (it’s not the most original naming ever), arrives, quite like communism, against a backdrop of crisis.Footnote ¹ This “crisis of the humanities” has, of course, been ongoing basically forever both in fact and in discourse as Paul Reitter and Chad Wellmon have pointed out at length, but it has returned with renewed vigor in our late-late-stage capitalist moment.Footnote ² As with the wider field of the humanities, so too with literary studies. Literary studies, as Rita Felski had it a long time ago now, is “sorely in need of more cogent and compelling justifications of what we do,” a call since echoed numerous times but never fully heeded.Footnote ³ It’s against the background of the crisis in humanities and the related efforts to rethink literary studies that literary studies, at a slight delay, is making its own turn towards the public: now, the future of literary studies, too, is public.

None too soon. Because at this current moment, it’s clear that:

The question of what literary studies in fact does in the world, its “compelling justification,” takes on urgency and more precise contours through the question of public literary studies. As Carin Berkowitz and Matthew Gibson put it, even if there is an academic crisis of the humanities—or in literary studies—the vital question still is a different one: “Is it a crisis for society?”Footnote ⁴ Would there be a loss to society entailed in the loss of literary studies? It’s helpful, I think, to play with this question. Gibson and Berkowitz are not sure about their answer, but let’s say, for the sake of argument, no. What question have we answered here? If we’ve answered the question of an actual loss, a vanishing of literary studies from the world, but no concrete crisis is engendered by our disappearance, if our absence does not change anything about the world, then we’ve just decided that there is no use to literary studies. The crisis of literary studies is not a crisis for society, and, frankly, we need to stop doing what we’re doing as literary studies scholars. If, however, we’ve answered the question slightly differently, if the “crisis” is a matter of whether or not people have understood the actually quite dire straits they’re in without literary studies (shades of the climate crisis), then it’s a matter of communication. We’ve simply not made the case for literary studies in a persuasive enough manner for anyone to care. From that perspective, it becomes vital to show the relevance of the academic humanities for society, and here, in particular, of literary studies.

In this context, it’s relevant to tease out what objectives are pursued by driving literary studies towards a greater public role, several of which are largely divorced from this interest in showing relevance as part of the public profile of the discipline. For instance, having a public-facing element, outreach objective, or popular “deliverable” is often part of research agendas because funding agencies require it, not because we, as the concerned researchers, are already committed to being public. Such funding-driven outreach is also not necessarily well-thought-out as outreach, but only as a plausible response to agencies’ demands. In a slightly different vein, we commit ourselves to public works because our survival as an institution, employment for literary scholars, might be achieved through a clearer, more visible profile—a way of justifying our cost to administrators. This version, too, externalizes our public turn insofar as we would much rather not do it but are forced to by circumstances and our own feeling of being under threat. Lastly, as we will discuss later, public-facing activity is a way to practice a profession that is dear to the practitioner, even without the emoluments of employment. But such a practice outside the discipline has already surrendered the discipline, and thus the usefulness of the discipline as a discipline.

So, these are all apparently valid reasons for becoming more public, but they are all fully instrumental on either a personal or institutional level, a means to an end that is itself not socially relevant. They do not yet speak to the inherent good of literary studies, to the crisis for society that its absence would produce, only to the crisis for literary scholars that a lack of attention to the public might produce for their livelihoods or those of their doctoral students. But we need to solve a bigger problem. What is the social work that literary studies actually does: what problems does it solve, whose lives does it make better, whose knowledge is increased in what specific ways, and to what larger end? Would anybody have to miss literary studies, and why? These are all too simple phrasings for a complicated and complex problem, yes. They certainly speak directly to the foundations of the university, to the ulterior legitimation of our work, to what it means to do what we do. For all that, these questions can also seem to demand a utility of the discipline that goes against the self-understanding—if not the actual logic—of the contemporary university. They can easily appear to obtrude on the freedom of scholarship and science to pursue non-instrumental goals, immediately turning us to cost–benefit thinking well familiar from countless discussions of the neoliberal university. But that’s not what I’m after at all. No doubt:

Only it must not be allowed to stop there. It may be true—I confess to uncertainty about this point—that literary studies has an intrinsic value, that is, that its value is independent of purposes in the wider world. But, as Judith Butler points out, even if that were to be the case, “the problem emerges that others do not recognize that intrinsic value—at which point the intrinsic value must be demonstrated,” and that “within a language and an idiom that can be recognized by those who most clearly need to be convinced of that value.”Footnote ⁵ Often enough, the question of where value lies is impossible to determine before a project has been completed, before an avenue of research has been pursued. This needs to be communicated, and I think it needs to be understood that whatever intrinsic value some aspects of literary studies research have, as a larger social project, it must ultimately find a use for some of them. There’s a constitutive difference between doing research without purpose and only doing research without purpose. And while I’m not saying that all hitherto existing literary studies are research without purpose, I am saying that we have not been doing a good job at explaining its purpose—or indeed at phrasing the right questions about literary studies. Yes: we must be free to produce knowledge without consideration of immediate purposes.

The social end of literary studies serves as the ultimate horizon for literary studies work. Paul Jay argued a decade ago that “higher education is increasingly seen in sheer instrumental terms, with courses and programs judged in terms of their pragmatic and vocational value.”Footnote ⁶ The idea of “instrumentality” clearly names a problem—here, “pragmatic value,” or in simpler terms, knowledge and expertise that will get students a job. But it could also be understood much more broadly. Butler’s phrasing, in the form of a question, is both more expansive and significantly more challenging: “If the humanities are to make a difference in public life, does that mean we have to say that they are instrumental to some other social good? Is instrumentality the only way we have of thinking about what it means to make a difference?”Footnote ⁷ I think the major point to be made here is that the word “instrumentality” is not a necessary choice, especially given the overtones suggested by Jay. I’m not sure of the best alternative phrasing—“social end” is one try. But if we said the humanities must be working towards human flourishing, or a better life for all, would anyone have moral quibbles with the goal, or the same kind of quibbles that “instrumentality” produces? I think not. In this sense, we might simply acknowledge that the question of literary studies’ public turn is a question of instrumentality, but of a certain, better kind.

In fact, we cannot but understand the humanities, and literary studies especially, as being only thinkable in terms of their instrumental social good. Literary studies differs constitutively from other scholarly work, and certainly from scientific work. All its focus is on objects that have no life outside the human social. Absent humanity, stars exist; evolution occurs; igneous rock forms; and compounds react. But come human extinction, while books will persist for a while, literature in any form will sit inert. Its sole condition of existence is the social world; its entire impact is restricted to the social world; every fiber of its being is only imaginable in the social conditions of its existence. In this sense, while it conceivably makes sense to strive to understand the process of star formation, merely as something that exits outside human agency and obtrudes on us from that perspective, literature is a different beast. There is no meaningful sense in which understanding literature occurs outside of the social bounds and impact that literature inevitably has. Understanding a star, having knowledge of a rock stratum, can be its own end in much the same way that understanding literature isn’t. Nothing you know about literature matters outside that knowledge’s usefulness to reading publics. There’s, however, an obverse to this:

In The Limits of Critique, Felski presents a common argument for literary studies: the usefulness of literary studies is rooted directly in the uses and popularity of literature. The questions thus are: “Why is literature worth bothering with? What is at stake in literary studies?”Footnote ⁸ And more directly, Felski and Anker suggest that we need to “clarify to larger audiences why anyone should care about literature, art, or philosophy.Footnote ⁹ But this is a non-sequitur. No defense of literary studies that relies on a simple defense of literature can prevail: what is required is to make the case specifically for the social role of literary studies as a way of studying literature. Just because people like literature doesn’t mean there should be anybody studying it, and our role is not—and cannot be—to champion literature as a social good. We would not even be very good at it. As Jonathan Kramnick puts it, “People like literature. They just don’t like literature professors.”Footnote ¹⁰ Or, as Butler notes in her condensation of a large survey: it’s possible for 84% of adults in the United States to have a “positive view of literature” while still holding that “the teaching of literature at the college or university level is a ‘waste of time’ or ‘costs too much.’”Footnote ¹¹ Our justifications as literature professors cannot rest either on people’s appreciation of literature or on literature’s own social role.

Instead, we must understand ourselves as practitioners in a field that can add to and work in the world, beyond merely confirming people’s pre-existing and independent interest in our object. Lewis argues that the real question of the public humanities is “how the humanities as a sphere of inquiry and body of knowledge can intervene out there in the world.”Footnote ¹² This intervention is key in its encompassing phrasing. For the question is not how the public humanities can intervene, as a quasi-distinct branch of the humanities at large, or how, specifically, public literary studies could do so, as a distinct domain of literary studies—something that, imaginably, other people might just do for us while we do our thing. The question on the table is how, through the idea of the public humanities, literary studies can intervene—that is, what kind of a social role it can assume that would justify its existence, justify also its claim to being allowed disengaged research. That’s the public humanities challenge to literary studies.

There is no dearth of claims for literary studiers’ relevance, of course, certainly not of late. Some of the very basic conceptions of the humanities’ educational capacities are very frequently framed around notions of “critical thinking” or “critical judgment.”Footnote ¹³ More expansively and concretely geared towards literary studies, Martin Puchner at least implies that as a discipline “devoted to storytelling,” literary studies “needs to be harnessed to a new purpose: mitigating climate change.”Footnote ¹⁴ Caroline Levine sees in artworks “blueprints for social life” that participate in the making of “sustainable models of collective life”—with “activist humanists” turning to what she calls “affirmative instrumentality” in their teaching and writing.Footnote ¹⁵ Jens Martin Gurr, in his Understanding Public Debates, suggests that literary studies makes “a useful contribution […] regarding its societal role” by undertaking readings of literary texts that stage or comment on public debates in their own times, ideally with some application to our contemporary world.Footnote ¹⁶ And Sarah Dillon and Claire Craig, with some conceptual overlap, suggest that literary studies might provide what they call “narrative evidence” to public policymakers, informing their decision-making processes.Footnote ¹⁷

At the heart of all of these proposals lies an understanding of literary studies as a hermeneutic discipline, one that marshals its readings of literary texts to social ends. The details in these proposals vary, and I am more sympathetic to some of them than others (the more concrete and limited, the better, I think, so that I’m much more drawn towards Dillon & Craig’s institutional argument than Levine’s broadly public one). What unites them is that they address the public as recipients of professional expertise not in terms of method—as I will champion below—but in terms of what I called above “deliverables.” In these versions of public literary studies, we read for the public, perform our intellectual maneuvers on texts, and exude our wisdom so that others might benefit—I exaggerate, but only slightly and for effect. These attempts to resituate what we do in useful public contexts are, in different ways, valuable. They resist, for one thing, the nagging worry in literary studies that, as Robert Chodat puts it, “literary critics…have no expertise in anything.”Footnote ¹⁸ But conversely, they run afoul of other problems in our contemporary situation. First, by insisting on the scholar’s expert role, they rely on ignoring the wider “crisis of expertise”: the public’s increasing dismissal of expert knowledge, even from fields where a wider section of the populace still holds such expertise to exist.Footnote ¹⁹ And second, they must hold that the good of literary studies is in having good—perhaps even correct—interpretations, rather than having encounters with the hermeneutic process itself. In this regard, at least, I think, they are ultimately mistaken.

The expert’s encounter with the literary text produces valuable lessons or insights for the public: this is the basic structure of the public humanities approaches I cited above. It’s also the basic structure of a more visible, less theoretical kind of public literary studies: public-facing criticism. Online venues from the Los Angeles Review of Books to Public Books and beyond have opened the realm of literary-critical writing to both wider audiences and a more diverse (but really not very diverse) set of writers. This upswing in writing for a less monolithically professional audience (though, by most accounts, still largely a professional audience) is inseparable from the crisis of the humanities, of course: as Kramnick has it, the “vitality of such public-facing criticism has a clear relation to the present crisis of higher education,” providing a means for underemployed literary studies graduates to write and be published.Footnote ²⁰ In such a parsing, it might be understood to be a lesser version of literary criticism. It’s also possible to read this as a net positive. Likewise, observing the “surprising flourishing of criticism in the absence of sustaining material conditions for it” in the public sphere, Anna Kornbluh sees here the “glints of a future public criticism waiting to emerge.”Footnote ²¹ In her understanding, public criticism is a way to “mobilise rich literary and compositive analysis to evaluate artworks in order to give their readers language and frameworks for interpreting and appreciating the tropes, images, and genres that organise cultural experience.”Footnote ²²

As above, though, the public itself, in this take on public literary studies, would be addressed as an audience for critical readings, not as a participant in the hermeneutic method, and certainly not as a potential beneficiary from an understanding of this method. What all of these perspectives on public literary studies, whether couched in their relevance for public debate, public policy, or public perceptions of literature, share is their orientation towards the mediation of products of literary studies. Or, to put it more simply: what they advocate is to use the results of literary studies research in the service of the public. Let the professionals do the work, and the public listen. I am more in agreement with the goals Kornbluh sets out than those that Kramnick evokes, I confess. But I think both visions of “precarious public criticism,” as Kornbluh has it ultimately have the problem that they expect its publics—even if that public is not just ourselves again, as Kornbluh suggests might well be the case—to learn from performances of literary criticism without teaching the method of literary criticism.Footnote ²³ Both critics realize the stakes of method. In Kornbluh’s case, at least learning the method is implied in the “frameworks for interpreting.” For Kramnick, “[t]here is a method to what is said and what is learned.”Footnote ²⁴ But if there is a method, that method is not taught: it is (merely and imperfectly) exhibited in its final results. And even in its exhibition, it is opaque: quite why the experts who communicate their thoughts to the public write the way they do need not be clear, perhaps cannot be clear to the audience. Public facing criticism, in this sense, relies on the logic Kramnick frames in what appears to me to be stark terms: “Every time a critic is heard, someone learns something new about the corner of the world the critic finds of compelling interest.”Footnote ²⁵ In Kramnick’s take, we ostentatiously showcase what interests us, and the public may take it, paying suitable homage at the altar of our expertise. But why does it matter what a critic finds of compelling interest? And what if that interest is of no interest to the wider public? The question is not rhetorical. What’s implicit in Kramnick’s argument is that what is compelling to the critic is rightly compelling, the consequence of expert knowledge. In this sense, we are back to square one: instead of showing why we matter, we insist that we do matter, and that there are very much lesser ways of reading that do not matter as much. Learn from us, not with us.

Public-facing criticism and the various proposals for a publicly useful literary studies that I have listed above thus share the sense that what is required is to show results. Whether it is selecting the most impressive examples, marshaling the evidence, writing about what interests us: we are publicly useful in giving people results—the dreaded “deliverables,” even—when we educate the public about literature. That, I argue, is a mistake.

“Public space,” Berkowitz and Gibson write, “continues to be the clearest battleground of meaning making.”Footnote ²⁶ Meaning-making is a near-universal, everyday process with vast social and political implications. And yet, we seem inclined to short-circuit the process. We reject the public’s reality and substitute our own, as we substitute our interests for theirs.

In the work of Kramnick, Kornbluh, and Gurr, public literary studies is conceived as moments of meaning being made for publics. Not only is this meaning not made with them—except insofar as an educated public might follow along with the line of argument—but the entire communicative apparatus militates against participation. Our expertise, after all, relies on contextual knowledge that is often unavailable to the larger public, theoretical flourishes that it takes a long time to learn, and commitments to truths about textuality and fictionality that are non-obvious. Those are the accouterments of disciplinarity and professionality. And, however valid, they are—almost by definition—not open to everyone. We are stuck, therefore, in what might almost be an aporia, what we might call the postcritical aporia: we must take ourselves seriously as professionals (we’re defending literary studies here, after all), but we must also take seriously the fact that most reading will be unprofessional. We must resolve the problem that we think there can be better readings and worse, but that most of the better readings rely on professional methods and knowledge inaccessible to ordinary readers. We have to consider the possibility that nobody is really helped, and no human flourishing advanced, by giving an expert reading of Moby Dick that, in its expertness, also implicitly claims that no ordinary reader could have gotten to it on their own.

This is a minimalist manifesto, and so it does not even pretend to resolve this aporia. Instead, it proposes that the only meaningful step towards making sense of the situation is to foreground education in hermeneutic method. Teaching the ways in which a text-based close reading, paying attention to the text itself and relying on fostering intersubjective interpretative agreement and intellectual conflict over textual meaning, is public literary studies perhaps only meaningful contribution to social life.

This is, at once, a strong claim and a minimalist one. Take, for instance, Ignacio López-Calvo’s argument that “the humanities are suited for global citizenship, for cultivating well-informed citizens, and for the appreciation of esthetic values that may lead us to a more meaningful life and a curiosity for cultural understanding.”Footnote ²⁷ I see very little in our academic practice that would genuinely do any of that, and even if it were true for the humanities writ large, it’s fairly unclear what the pathway from literary studies to global citizenship might look like. In suggesting that public literary studies, understood as the teaching of method, might produce able contestants of public, intersubjectively valid meaning, I take no stance on the question of activism and concrete values—not even the fairly anemic “intercultural values” that López-Calvo foregrounds.Footnote ²⁸ In this sense, my take is minimalist. On the other hand, I raise a strong claim that my minimalist aim for public literary studies—making meaning-making readers willing to argue over a text with an eye to intersubjective agreement—is both a net positive social end and can only be achieved by teaching method, and not, for instance, by putting potential meanings before the public. It’s also strong because it is a strongly literary studies angle to take on public humanities, insofar as it involves a specific literary studies competency that is not (like critical thinking) a generalizable competency in the humanities—namely, textual close reading.

This is not to deny the possibility that, in individual cases, other uses for literary studies exist, that some people draw very pragmatic results from the study of literature, including perhaps skills in critical thinking. It is merely to argue that, as an overarching disciplinary goal, critical thinking and other potential benefits of doing literary studies are at once neither specific enough for literary studies (versus the humanities more broadly) nor sufficiently clear in what they might achieve to constitute a goal for public literary studies.

The teaching method in public has a participatory angle. As the historian Nina Simon puts it, such participation is a way for “cultural institutions” to “reconnect with the public and demonstrate their values and relevance in contemporary life,” becoming “active participants, not passive consumers.”Footnote ²⁹ In lieu of presenting to the public what we find of “compelling interest,” as Kramnick has it, we present the way we read. Close reading emerges as the method of choice here less because it is inevitably the best way of reading, but because it is the best way of reading that can easily be taught as a method. It requires neither an extensive theoretical apparatus nor any particular historical or contextual expertise. One of the most evocative versions of this has been proposed by Phillip Wegner, who frames a version of close reading as a moment where readers “occupy the same plane […] refusing appeals to authority and referring only to the text itself.” In this moment, “the possibility might ensure of the ‘minimal communism’ of real and productive dialogue—truly listing to one another rather than […] just waiting for [our] turn to speak.”Footnote ³⁰

Clearly, there’s a danger here. In offering another of many “calls for a return of ‘close reading,’” I may be exhibiting what Lewis recently called “intellectual retreat or insecurity.”Footnote ³¹ But while I am calling for a return of close reading, I don’t do so in the spirit of retreat to the ivory tower, to sterile intramural hermeneutic debates. In fact, I would like us to be more careful in articulating the use of these debates in the first place. I would ask us to think about the value of the conversations we have among ourselves, and the ways in which these debates—and the different standpoints they produce—impact the larger social world. My wager here is, of course, that they don’t. Public instruction in hermeneutic method would not just recenter close reading at the university; it would also, and perhaps more importantly, ask us to carry instruction outside of the university: to adult education centers, public venues such as bookstores and schools, and other places where a reading public might be engaged with.

Close reading, it bears pointing out in this context, is to be understood in the expansive sense which emerges from a long history in which it has figured as the central method of literary studies, and during which it has seen its reach expanded not just theoretically but also with regard to the objects it is employed on.Footnote ³² I have elsewhere suggested the importance of this expansion and the way it specifically rejects senses of close reading as an elitist practice.Footnote ³³ In the sense and practice I invoke it here, it emphasizes the essential openness to participation that I understand is the hallmark of public literary humanities. It’s also in this sense that my proposal should be understood (at the very least in this sense) to be different from both the New Critical attention to the classical canon of texts as well as the contemporary resurgence of “judgment,” a movement which I see as more geared towards setting up boundaries to public participation.Footnote ³⁴

The most expansive version of this teaching of close reading as a method for communion over a text would, perhaps, suggest that this might also make better citizens. These citizens would recognize that arguments must be grounded in evidence, whether that evidence is intersubjectively validated textual evidence or, in the wider world, similarly intersubjective evidence of an ethical politics, a good economic system, the need for vaccinations, the roundness of the Earth, or any other area of disagreement. In this most expansive version, teaching close reading as a method mobilizes what Jürgen Habermas calls the “agonal character” of deliberative politics: it mobilizes a way by which we can “improve our convictions and come closer to the right solution of problems.”Footnote ³⁵ At the same time, as a practice, it confronts citizens with a “dispute that is consequential and perceptible as a dispute over better reasons.”Footnote ³⁶ Precisely because it allows for the evacuation of much of a moral, ethical, or political dimension, the close-reading-based dispute around textual meaning can potentially be one in which there is pure dispute over reasons, not so much over other social investments.

A final point.

This is virtually a truism, yes. But nonetheless important. There is no universal public literary studies because there is no universal social life, and all literary knowledge is social knowledge. This minimalist manifesto is for its moment and of its moment. Its claim that literary studies must be involved in educating the public about, in the final instance, good ways of contesting meaning and intersubjective truth is one that speaks directly to the anxieties of the present and may, if literary studies survives that long, be no longer either of concern or viable in fifty years’ time. If it comes to that, someone else will need to rethink the discipline’s purpose and public role.

The contemporary moment, with its growing disdain for expertise, the disregard for argument, and ultimately the threat of authoritarianism asks something concrete of literary studies. It asks about its own imagination of its social role in the face of these developments, for answers that would go beyond simply reasserting its own knowledge as determinative. Teaching method is one answer to this challenge, but it is a momentary answer to a momentary (one hopes) challenge.

Today, public literary studies must be an education in method. This is the simplest version of the claims of this manifesto. In teaching close reading as a method to come to an intersubjectively shared agreement on textual meaning, we situate literary studies at the fundamentals of a democratically open society without pursuing concretely political activism. That’s both a bug and a feature: it leaves the moral and ethical dimensions of social life to the deliberations of readers educated in good ways of talking to one another about everything that requires interpretation, from novels to laws to scientific information. The content of these deliberations is open; their structure, however, is less so, for citizens educated in what makes a good way of talking about interpretations. We cannot perfect the world nor save it, but, at a minimum, we might make some of the people in it into better debaters.