Critical modesty: Literature, pluralism, and the work of reading

This study argues that the history of literary criticism is a secular one. To say this is to make the relatively uncontroversial claim that academic discourse is related to conceptions of public life as well as to make the more substantial claim that this relation is not natural or neutral but one with its own particular history, form, values, and ideals. This claim requires tracing more carefully the intellectual and critical history of literary studies as it relates to prevailing modes of public life, political deliberation, and legitimate sources of knowledge, particularly during its institutionalization in twentieth century. In this story, we can see the way secular conceptions of public discourse restricted professional criticism to a narrow set of academically legitimate practices, objects, and dispositions---for example, critical distance, impersonality, and a conception of the text as a materially discreet unity distinct from the interpretative process. My work examines Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, Ian McEwan, and J.M. Coetzee as authors and essayists who write about the novel but refuse the discourse of professional, secular criticism. In this refusal, I trace the reemergence of an alternative "uncritical" tradition of reading and argument, one that privileges dispositions of hesitation and modesty as well as techniques of persuasion, rhetoric, and affect-imbued-thinking crucial to political pluralism. These writers offer unconventional examples of political action---thinking small, collaboration, dinner parties, and diary writing---that help open space in political deliberation for a much greater variety of persuasive practices than secularism currently legitimates. Such variety, they insist, is necessary to respond ethically and forcefully to the complexity and scale of global politics today.