Kwame Anthony Appiah’s report on literary studies, the first of the field-specific supplements to the Vanderbilt and Washington University in St. Louis “Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and Humanistic Social Sciences,” finds fault with its subject both topically and methodologically. Topically, literary subjects proper — the history of forms and genres, for example — have diminished in importance in comparison with interests drawn from the social sciences. Methodologically, literary study is marred by delusions of political efficacy, ad hominem arguments on identitarian grounds, and an unearned hostility to the very idea of the literary. These two lines of criticism are obviously intertwined.
The most trenchant of the report’s methodological critiques is on “identity as a basis for criticism.” Appiah prosecutes an attack on a deformed version of standpoint epistemology by which, in the words of the anthropologist David Stoll, an identitarian “truth-standard” replaces other, more legitimate criteria of knowledge. “When a claim that is widely accepted among people who work on, say, Black literature or feminist criticism,” Appiah writes, “is contested by a white person or a man, the identity of the person making the claim is sometimes invoked in the criticism.” A related phenomenon: “I have also seen people criticized because there is a mismatch between their identity and their subject. So criticism of scholars who are white, male, straight, or cis by scholars … who are Black or female or LGBTQ does sometimes reflect a suspicion that the former are very unlikely to ‘get’ questions that are in some sense about the identities of the latter.”
Appiah is unequivocal: Such arguments from identity, like assertions of ethnic ownership of a field or topic and accusations of bigotry or bias meant to diminish a rival’s argumentative standing, are categorically inappropriate. When they become common in any field, that field suffers.
How common are they? In a footnote on Native American literary studies, Appiah points to some fraught debates about “American Indian Literary Nationalism,” which some have taken to mean that only Native scholars can write about Native literature. (Appiah quotes two leading scholars in the field explicitly repudiating the notion that anyone should be excluded on grounds of race or ethnicity.) In another footnote, he refers to an infamous incident at Pomona College in which a scholar was accused by a colleague “of engaging in ‘literary blackface’ after proposing to teach Ralph Ellison’s work.” That is very bad, and we can infer something about the disciplinary conditions in which such a claim could have force. But the report would be more valuable if it had supplied a more robust collection of identitarian critical moves in literary studies.
Conveniently for Appiah’s argument, though, he has himself been subject to versions of identitarian criticism in the wake of the release of the report (though not exclusively from literary critics). A suite of bigoted attitudes have been attributed to him, including racism, antisemitism, and transphobia. As Ben Spatz, a film and creative-writing professor at the University of Birmingham, writes on social media, Appiah is guilty of “white writing,” which supposedly “comes from mathematics via so-called ‘analytic philosophy.’” This style’s false pretense to a “transparent neutral ground of white epistemic conviviality” is a weapon meant to attack “queer, trans, black, and indigenous scholarship for rejecting that cis-white epistemic background.” In this account, Appiah’s skepticism toward some aspects of what used to be called “theory” masks a sort of Nazist anti-intellectualism: “Appiah turns to the cryptojewish (sic) field of critical theory, beginning with the big jew (sic) (Derrida) who smuggled the non-natural-language, too-wide-ranging, crypto-talmudic, uncontainable mess of ‘theory’ into the halls of analytic rectitude.”
In a related vein, the anthropologist Carolyn Rouse, in an interview with The Chronicle, implied that, because of his sexual orientation, Appiah should side with those who would forbid teaching that sex is binary — his failure to do so is figured as a sort of inexplicable betrayal: “People like Anthony Appiah, who are gay, and so I don’t know … why they want us to teach in that way.”
The intellectual climate in which these sort of arguments have currency is one of Appiah’s targets. While his report does not show that it has become universal in literary studies, it is obviously not unheard of. Appiah might have mentioned, for instance, the 2021 cancellation, on expressly political and identitarian grounds, of William B. Warner’s presidential address to the American Society of Eighteenth-Century Studies. Warner was to discuss free speech and the Enlightenment through the lens of contemporary debates about diversity. He was later accused of “racist and genocidal discourses” by fellow scholars.
When it comes to showing that scholarship in literary studies has too often moved away from properly literary concerns, taking up instead a range of social and political commitments for which it is ill-equipped, Appiah’s report, unfortunately, largely avoids the kind of close engagement with books and articles in the field that would be needed to prove the case. Instead, the report focuses on relatively superficial kinds of evidence, like an AI-assisted analysis of the titles and publisher’s descriptions of scholarly monographs that have won prizes from the Modern Language Association (MLA) and the American Comparative Literature Association in recent years. The goal: to show that a drift from primarily literary to primarily social justice-oriented topics has taken place. This is not a satisfactory way to go about evaluating the direction of the field, at least not in a report that aspires to something like definitiveness. As Gabriel Hankins objects in these pages, the data analysis of research outputs risks merely reproducing “the bad binary distinction built into the prompt.” (Some of the other appendices, for instance a survey of job advertisements showing that identity and social-justice themes have been ascendant in job advertisements, tell a more persuasive story, if a necessarily limited one.)
When Appiah descends from the report’s characteristic generality and engages directly with literary-critical arguments, he is deft and persuasive. He does so at length only once, though, in a treatment of Caroline Levine’s The Activist Humanist, published in 2023, which stands in for the deleterious politicization of the field at large. Levine argues that the study of literature should be reformulated under the sign of what she calls “affirmative instrumentality”; the idea, as Appiah summarizes, is that “literary study … can be enabling for political engagement,” because there are similarities between what Levine calls the “forms” of both works of literature and sociopolitical institutions.
This has not been uncontroversial. As Jonathan Kramnick and Anahid Nersessian wrote in Critical Inquiry about an earlier iteration of this line of Levine’s thought, the allegedly political implications of any given form depend on nothing more than the subjective assertion of the critic:
As being a formalist and promoting social change appear, for Levine, to be the same thing, one need only add a personal approval or disapproval to the recognition of a form to arrive at a political conclusion. … Sometimes forms lead to the redistribution of the world’s wealth. Sometimes they organize atrocity and oppression. One approves of the first, and one doesn’t approve of the second, and it is the act of the approving or disapproving that recognizes the existence of not only a form but also the politics it represents and the politics it demands.
Perhaps sensing the justice in Kramnick and Nersessian’s critique, The Activist Humanist’s most dramatic gesture is to abandon formal analysis of any kind and conclude with a “workbook” that, as Appiah describes, “is designed to help students discover forms of political engagement with the climate crisis that involve no literary attention or involvement at all.” The inclusion of this workbook, Appiah suggests, is a kind of admission that the supposed political power of Levine’s style of formalist reading is a mirage. “There is no evidence in the book,” Appiah writes, that “literary study … can be enabling for political engagement.” After all, “the success of the workbook, which she calls an ‘experiment,’ wouldn’t show this, since there is nothing specifically literary about it.”
Appiah’s criticism seems obviously right to me (I have criticized Levine’s work on similar grounds to Appiah’s in an exchange with Levine in the scholarly journal Book 2.0 and in these pages: “Levine has many good, if rather obvious, ideas about how citizens might fight for the environment. But none involves [literature], and none is specific to scholars.”) The question is whether The Activist Humanist can be read as symptomatic of larger trends in the field, or whether it is an outlier. Hankins argues something like the latter. It would be “misleading,” he says, to treat Levine’s work “as metonymic of the debates and fields in which she intervenes. Indeed, reactions from within the field to Levine’s positions have been heated, to say the least.”
Hankins is right that Levine’s brand of activist humanism is close to sui generis. Scholarly monographs in literary theory do not by and large offer “experiments” like Levine’s “workbook.” Nevertheless, as Aaron Hanlon puts it in these pages, a general drift toward topics “oriented around political causes … is beyond debate,” at least in some parts of the field. Levine’s work can be both exceptional and symptomatic at once. And Appiah is surely right that the substitution of activism for scholarship it counsels is incompatible with the future of literary studies as a discipline. The Activist Humanist serves in his report as a warning, a point beyond which the discipline that produced it simply disappears.
What is missing from Appiah’s report is the kind of close engagement with a wide swath of criticism in literary studies that would fill out the picture suggested by the data and by the criticism of The Activist Humanist. In 2015, the University of Chicago English professor Lisa Ruddick, concerned that her discipline had in places fallen prey to a kind of fashionable nihilism, undertook to “check” her “sense of the field against a core sample of contemporary criticism” by reading over almost a decade’s worth of ELH: English Literary History, the most prominent journal in its area. Why didn’t Appiah, whose remit was all of literary studies, do something similar with PMLA, a publication of the MLA, of which he himself is a past president?
Or, if that would present too heterogeneous a field for coherence, why not select a relatively narrow topical sample — say, Shakespeare studies — and offer an analysis of how the field has changed over the past 15 years by reading through issues of Shakespeare Quarterly and examining the conference programs of the Shakespeare Association of America? The findings of such a study would plausibly have implications for the larger discipline; at any rate, they might provide pointers for further research. The lack of any extended interpretive investigation into a literary-critical corpus renders the report’s findings less conclusive than they could be.
That is a real deficit. But it does not evacuate the report’s importance. Politicization is not a mirage. It is not a hallucination of Appiah’s. It is good that the field is being forced to talk about it. “Scholars should welcome interdisciplinary contestation and dispute over fundamental questions of truth and method,” Hankins writes in his critique. Like the larger report, Appiah’s field report is far from perfect. But to dismiss it entirely is to make the perfect the enemy of the good.
Thank you for doing this excellent—and, I imagine, lonely—work.
While I'm sympathetic to your criticisms, I think you're a bit too optimistic about how well your alternative approaches could have worked. How could a report short enough to be read have included "close engagement with a wide swath of criticism in literary studies"? My sense is that they faced a kind of impossible dilemma. Identify a few examples in the disciplines they're discussing and subject them to close reading and criticism, and they'd have been dinged for cherry picking. (As they largely have been.)
But if they'd gone with the broader survey approach, of which there are a few versions one can imagine, it would have been much harder to verify claims about frequency. E.g., if Appiah told us: "I read the last n issues of Shakespeare quarterly, and here's my high-level view about how it's changed" it would have been easy to respond: "well that's just, like, your opinion man."
A particularly extreme version of this approach---one that would have allowed them to make claims about a lot of literature, and would have obviously drawn serious criticism---would have been training an LLM to classify instances of objectionably politicized scholarship. They could have sicced such an LLM on lots of literature, but the reaction would have obviously been skepticism about the reliability of the classifier.
It seems to me that producing a report readable in less than year defending their claims to the satisfaction of generally skeptical critics would have been pretty much impossible. Maybe I'm not being imaginative enough.