Situating the Method Debates

Abstract

What we might call the literary method debates have taken on a life of their own over the past few decades. These debates in no way reflect the full scope of new methods in the literary field, however, and have tended to focus on generalized discussions of ways to read, both formally and affectively. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's essay on paranoid and reparative reading, “Paranoid Reading,” is often seen as the starting point for these debates, especially given their central concern with the limitations of suspicion as both method and mood, reading posture and affect (Best and Marcus; Felski,Limits). Other key contributors to the discussion about method have been less interested in the mood or ethos of the practitioner than in the object of study and the techniques required to capture it, as in the case of arguments for distant reading (Moretti), descriptive or “thin” reading (Love), and the new formalism (Levine; Kramnick and Nersessian). There are problems, of course, with assuming that these debates over method capture the energies and commitments of the field, especially given new work on race and ethnicity, queer and trans theory, the environmental humanities, and disability studies, all of which have transformed method and stance in their own right. And yet the method debates are generating a wide discussion over the conditions and direction of the field, for reasons that don't all concern questions of method.