Steel Traps

Abstract

Abstract Winfried Fluck’s “The Limits of Critique and the Affordances of Form” is hard to argue against. Our field largely rejects individual and collective agency, citing the enormity and ubiquity of the forces arrayed against human actors. And we largely reject the notion of historical progress. Fluck’s conclusion, however, calling on us to think beyond method by critically reevaluating the historical philosophy and aims on which our methods are based, does not offer us a path forward. Others engaging with these questions have offered suggestions. This essay surveys some and hazards that our sense of critical powerlessness in this era of declining English major enrollments may be related to our discipline’s confusion over and/or rejection of what we are actually doing as a discipline. This confusion has emerged from our commitment to theory—in its many directions and manifestations—in place of literature. Ultimately it advocates for a renewed disciplinary and pedagogical investment in literary method and value, and in simultaneously reclaiming a progressive relation to the democracy we have now, animated by the self-critical understanding that our vision of beauty, of good, of personhood, of a democratic future are neither fact nor inevitable, but instead opinions that must contend, always provisionally, with opinions of others, in public.