The Future of Literary Study: An Experiment in Guesswork

The fundamental structure of literary study has stayed remarkably constant during the last seventy-five years: professional teaching and research have revolved around “criticism,” or the exegesis of individual works, and every other aspect of literary study has been treated as contributory to “reading.” There is almost no precedent for this pattern of activity in anything now recognized as the history of criticism. If these claims are at all correct, then studying literature differently would likely mean a redistribution of status among the subdisciplines, with such traditional fields as poetics, erudition (roughly, literary scholarship), and even evaluation pursued alongside criticism, as ends in themselves.