In ‘Formalism as the Fear of Ideas’, his review of Caroline Levine’s Forms, Michael Clune takes Levine specifically and literary critics generally to task for merely pointing out moments where literary authors ‘anticipate’ subsequent developments in various theoretical fields, and for not daring to go further and argue for substantive claims in those fields. He writes:

Merely noting ‘resemblance’, Clune goes on to argue, does a disservice to the real power of literary ideas. Citing the example of H. G. Wells’s invention of time travel and the influence of the concept on theoretical physics, Clune points out that ‘Literature is full of the most astonishing ideas on every imaginable topic’, and literary critics interested in interdisciplinary research and connections between literary study and ideas and other fields should not limit themselves to merely noting resemblances – we need to take the next step and look for the open discovery of new ideas.

Clune's point is well taken, but his dismissal of the emphasis on ‘anticipation’ moves too quickly. As Julie Orlemanski puts it (in a phrase I have quoted once already), ‘I am inclined to give more credence to what we do in our discipline than to what we say about what we do.’ The prevalence of this interpretive technique reveals something about the experience of literature, and it would be too hasty to abandon it in pursuit of more expansive forms of interdis-ciplinarity. Criticism that notes the way a writer anticipates later theoretical developments reflects at heart the basic impulse to connect the ideas in literature to issues that readers are concerned with now, and is thus simply the latest iteration in a lengthy tradition of reading for the content, even when it calls itself reading for the form.