'What is valuable about literary studies? What is its point and purpose? In The Values of Literary Studies: Critical Institutions, Scholarly Agendas, leading scholars in the field illuminate both the purpose and priorities of literary criticism. At a time when the humanities are increasingly called upon to justify themselves, this book seeks to clarify their myriad values and ideologies. Engaging the idea of literary value while at the same time remaining attuned to aesthetic, ethical, political and psychological principles, this book serves to underscore the enduring significance of literary studies in an academic climate that is ostensibly concerned with expediency and quantification. As a sophisticated examination of literary theory and criticism, The Values of Literary Studies: Critical Institutions, Scholarly Agendas provides a comprehensive and hopeful view of where the discipline is now and what avenues it is likely to take from here.' (Publication summary)
Table of Contents
1. The value of criticism and the project of modernism Anthony Cascardi
2. Caprice: individual subjectivity in literary criticism Helen Small
3. The phenomenology of literary valuation Charles Altieri
4. Literature is history: aesthetic time and the ethics of literary will Alan Singer
5. Dead on arrival: time and the value of old books Kathleen McLuskie
6. The price of value Christopher Nealon
7. To shelter the nothing that happens Julian Murphet
8. When literary criticism mattered Simon During
9. Literature among the objects of modernist criticism: value, medium, genre James Chandler
10. 'Value!': Psychoanalysis, value, literature Jean-Michel Rabaté
11. Afterlives of comparison: literature, equivalence, value Natalie Melas
12. Feminism, gender and the literary commons Robin Truth Goodman
13. The value of world-making in global literacy studies Debjani Ganguly
14. Multiple versions of fictional minds: manuscript research, digital editing and enactive cognition in literary studies Dirk van Hulle
15. After suspicion: surface, method, value Rónán McDonald
16. Literary experience and the value of criticism Derek Attridge.
'To think about the study of literature as possessing “values” is, I think, already to skew things. In the Anglophone tradition, something has “value” if it can be measured in external units. Adam Smith famously argued that a value of a thing is measured either in terms of what might be substituted for it (its exchange value) or in terms of its quanti able utilities (its use value). In this framework, value is primarily an economic concept, but, at least from Jeremy Bentham on, it has also been a governmental one. Although earlier philosophers like John Locke or David Hume did not deploy the term, Bentham introduced it precisely to advise those he calls “legislators” on how to manage a population’s happiness. As such, it quickly came under attack: “ Worth was degraded into a lazy synonyme of value ; and value was exclusively attached to the interests of the senses” as Samuel Coleridge put it. (Introduction)
