Posts in category: Arcade

What is world literature—as seen from Stockholm?

After seeing Vincent Barletta’s recent post on José Saramago’s funeral I was spurred to write a post I’ve been planning for quite a while on the Nobel prize in literature of recent years. I spent Spring Quarter teaching a course on the contemporary global Anglophone novel as seen through the Nobel prize, so I’ve been thinking about the institution of the prize and the way it reflects and transforms literature. I’ve also been considering this and other institutions of “world literature” as sites in which certain ideas about literary autonomy—about art for art’s sake, writerly freedom, aesthetic distance, and so on—continue to play important, even generative roles, long after literary scholarship has ceased to take those ideas seriously.

A colleague who read my previous post suggested to me that I was calling for a basically “positivist” style of literary scholarship, akin to the would-be empirical investigations of nineteenth-century philologists and historians. He didn’t mean that in a positive way. And thereon hangs a twentieth-century literary-historical tale…

I have seen the future of the digital humanities—and it is full of hope! It is also full of many happy afternoons spent following hyperlinks into fascinating, and extremely nerdy, cultural niches. Let me explain…

We all love to see evidence in argumentative writing. We drill the necessity of evidence into our students; and research stands or falls on the quality of evidence used to support the researcher’s claims. In my own work I am a compulsive example-giver, never happier than when typing in a block quote, or reeling off names of authors, or works, that fit into some scheme I am making a claim for. Lately, though, I have wondered how our taste for evidence is shaped by confirmation bias : the very strong cognitive preference to look for, to notice—and to present in scholarship—only evidence that supports our larger claims and pre-existing ideas. In (my idealization of) scientific experiments, the practice of controls is supposed to guard against this bias.¹ What would be the controls of literary scholarship? How would we actively seek out potentially discomfirming evidence? And—here’s the kicker—how can we present the confirmatory value of not finding it?²