So, What Should Academic Critics be Doing, on the Edge of the Now – Skimming the Surface or Plumbing Those Depths?

Abstract

How and where should critics – especially scholars of South African writing – be channelling their energies in a digital age in which the conditions of cultural production have shifted profoundly not only in content but also in the very media of representation? Does the migration from depth-charged literary books to the surface-surfeit of screens involve more than just a change in technology, but also an altered scale of literary-cultural value? This article takes up the public invitation by critic Sarah Nuttall to enter into discussion on precisely these questions, in her various recent articulations about ‘the way we read now’. The article rejoins Nuttall's usefully provocative argument about whether or not ‘the reach of the literary has been receding rather than growing in recent years’, and looks critically at the counter-valorization of ‘surface’ and ‘reality hunger’, incorporating a predisposition towards affect in preference to acts of ‘symptomatic reading’ in the mould of Freud, Marx, Althusser and Jameson. The argument is then routed through a reading of Ivan Vladisavić's novel, Double Negative (2010), suggesting that not only does this work of fiction do what Nuttall suggests the ‘literary’ cannot do, or is not doing, namely capturing the surface real and its engagement with ‘reality hunger’, but it also uses – as its fictional substrate – a complex play with ‘surfaces’ of the real, and their representations, as part of its novelistic objective, which ultimately subsumes the ‘surface real’ in ways that such a category cannot, in turn, do to literature.