Introduction: futures of literary studies

What if it is not actual methodological debate but the consequences of framing a facet of differences between current literary critical positions as a large-scale method war that stand in the way of what ought to be the common goal of our discipline, namely to articulate the possible and indeed necessary futures of literary studies? This essay argues that the notion of a new method wars in literary studies should be understood as a narrative about literary studies whose rise and function must be analysed before the backdrop of a moment when the discipline itself is in crisis, a narrative construction of the reality of contemporary literary studies that gives rise to very real consequences. To analyse the new method wars as a narrative construction means to ask how, why, and to what end we tell this story about ourselves and to probe its effects in the context of a general crisis of our discipline. The narrative of the method wars at worst perpetuates those experiences and views of our discipline that add to already existing toxic conditions in a discipline defined by rampant precarity. In this essay and throughout this special issue, we seek to resist the pull of warfare: the easy pull of denouncing, discrediting, misrepresenting, and otherwise doing injustice to the critical positions that we and our contributors may reject. At the same time, it is not to accept the ease and banality of the middle ground in the face of genuine theoretical convictions. Our questions, we think, remain acute: How do we think about the future of literary studies in the funerary climate that has engendered the belief that we need to fight our internal wars for survival? How might (must?) our understanding of what literary criticism is and does change? How do we formulate possible futures for literary studies while grappling with the significant problems that our present poses? In this essay and in this issue, we stage hopeful interventions that seek to contribute to the effort to explore the futures of literary studies by way of and conceived as a collective endeavour. Together, we advance a call for better, more useful, more active, more networked, and, yes, even for abandoned versions of the always multiple and joyously contradictory discipline we call literary studies.

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