1) This is an interesting thread about which I have some further thoughts, and the power’s out here so by god I will supply them! ... https://twitter.com/schlemiel_zola/status/1248335438521217025

2) I have always thought of literary studies (in my case English) as a fundamental discipline like philosophy and history and math. I still think that’s descriptively true, but now I question what underlies it.

3) That is, I think there’s a disjunction between the historical importance of ‘literature’ variously defined by institutions as a worthy object of study and the ways of studying it.

4) This is in other words a disjunction between the discipline as organized by an object of study (literature) and as organized by a common understanding of how to study it.

5) This is further complicated by the fact that (at least in Anglophone traditions I know about) there was no such thing as Literature (as ‘imaginative writing’ as art as defined institutionally as an object of study until the late-18/early-19c.

6) Which means not only are there vastly different ways of studying the object in the same discipline, but also—and too often we forget this—the object itself is different for different parts of the discipline!

7) This implies something I observe and feel regularly as a scholar and teacher in the field: We are not one discipline. Some of us are social historians or historians of ideas, some philosophers, some art historians, some art critics, etc.

8) And I do think this is something the field (as such) really needs to sort out. That doesn’t necessarily mean fighting it out for what ‘the field’ becomes, but does mean acknowledging and accounting for these major differences and not just calling the hodgepodge a strength.

9) There’s a sense in which a metapolitical desire for solidarity & cheerleading can get in the way of a healthy discussion about what we really are and how we might grow, whether together or apart. /end

Addendum (1/2): To underscore, when I say the objects (‘literature’) are different for different parts of the field, I mean not just different texts but different *in kind*. Pre-19c ‘literature’ means science writing, philosophy, letters, history, poems, fiction, political tracts

(2/2) You can’t responsibly study all of this as if it were art or form or Literature. Which things you study and when would necessarily dictate how you study it, unless you’re just pretending it’s all made, read, & valued like a TS Eliot poem. But it wasn’t!