There is something utopian about Joseph North’s project to reopen a space within literary studies for criticism. His bold reconstruction, Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History (2017), launched a sustained polemic against what he saw as the reigning historicist-contextualist paradigm of the discipline—represented by Raymond Williams, Fredric Jameson, Terry Eagleton, Gayatri Spivak, Franco Moretti—in which the assumed goal of literary study was cultural and social analysis. Against this, North called for a renewed programme of left literary criticism that would also be a radical aesthetic education, one which aimed to cultivate modes of sensibility and subjectivity that could contribute directly to the struggle for a better society. He presented this as a radicalized version of I. A. Richards’s critical programme from the interwar period, defined by the ‘strength and directness of its connection to the world outside the academy’. He hoped to detect at least intimations of this new paradigm in the work of Isobel Armstrong, Eve Sedgwick, D. A. Miller and Lauren Berlant.footnote¹

To seek to exchange a scholarship that merely interprets the world for a criticism that tries to change it is admirable, even exhilarating. In a field that is generally fractured and fractious, reading a contribution that is both pragmatic and radicalizing in its ambition is bracing. North is so precise and careful, so methodical a writer, that he does not register this excitement in his prose: that is for his readers to do. He does, however, note the project’s reliance on hope. In his response in these pages to Francis Mulhern’s friendly but quizzical review, North reflects on the formidable obstacles in the way of any institutional realization of his project, readily conceding that there is ‘more hope than calculation’ in his prospectus—that it relies on an ‘optimism of the will’. That it is not enough, he knows, but that it is necessary is not in doubt. Lola Seaton, too, in her contribution to the nlr discussion, salvages from Mark Fisher’s coruscating critiques of contemporary culture not only the gleam of a hope that things could be better, but the determination to make them so.footnote²

In this essay I explore some of the obstacles to North’s project in the same spirit of hope; one that recognizes—in frustration and some perturbation—that carrying on as we are is not enough. This is not because the humanities are in crisis so much as because the conditions in which they are being pursued is intolerable, for staff but also for students. The fallout from Covid in the university sector has only thrown this into starker relief. If North’s project is to win a hearing, the state of higher education as a space of employment and learning has to be reckoned with. The conditions of cultural production—indeed, the collapse of the concept of culture, under the sheer weight of material—is a seismic difference between our era and that of I. A. Richards, the founding figure of North’s history whose inaugural practice of criticism within the academy he urges us to re-imagine. On the other hand, in terms of the relation of literary criticism and study to the reading public, Richards’s era can perhaps be conceived as the beginning of ours, the early moment of the volatilization of the ‘general reader’ and of attempts to secure certain types of literature as precious in and of themselves.footnote³

In what follows I suggest that such a programme urgently requires mid-range concepts, to intermediate between the personal and the social or historical, the text, the reader and the world.

First, however, I want to suggest that the aesthetic turn in literary studies has already happened—that North is pushing at an open door. The turn has taken several forms, but where these are not openly nostalgic or idealizing, they converge in a focus on the reader. This often means a focus on the reader’s personal sensibility, or on the reader as personal sensibility, and on valorising that attention as somehow more democratic, or more honest; a recognition of phenomenological priority which is at the same time a shrugging-off of what are seen to be the pretences and proxies of history, theory or critique. This centring of the personal, and of personal aesthetic evaluation, is becoming more and more pervasive across the field of literary studies. Whether this work is critical, let alone radical in North’s world-changing sense, is more complicated. I will explore examples of it below, aiming to tease out of some of its motives and consequences in order to get a clearer sense of their implications for a project like North’s, before going on to discuss some of the material preconditions for that project’s realization.

In a 2012 essay, Rachel Sagner Buurma and Laura Heffernan evoked a spectre haunting Literary Studies:

In the new millennium, a new figure beckons to the literary critic: the figure of the common reader. We see her out of the corner of our collective eye outside the classroom window or walking away from the back of the lecture hall; glimpsed in the public library stacks, but never in ‘the archive’, she leaves her traces in blog comments and Amazon reviews. Her authority derives from her lack of credentials; neither scholar nor critic, student nor expert, she is defined largely by her undisciplinary and undisciplined reading practices.footnote⁴