Literature Against Criticism

Front matter

MARTIN PAUL Eve

University English and Contemporary Fiction in Conflict

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Contents

About the Author

Style

Acknowledgements

Part I: Introduction

For those working in university English departments in the early twenty-first century, these words will probably sound all too familiar: “[t]his man possesses great eloquence. See that he is denied justice for some time and arrange for all his grandiose speeches to be recorded”. Yet, despite the plausibility of the scenario, this passage is not a sadistic diktat issued from a university administrator to an unsuspecting humanities underling, perhaps enforcing lecture capture or a similar contemporary technology. It comes instead, in rough translation, from a Ninth- or Tenth- Dynasty Ancient Egyptian story called the Tale of the Eloquent Peasant. Briefly summarised, this narrative recounts the plight of a peasant who, having been robbed, pleads his case before the high steward and proves to be so articulate that the case is referred to the king. The king’s response is that the steward should continue to deny the peasant’s petitions in order that the latter’s increasingly eloquent speeches on the theme of injustice can be transcribed and recorded. The king orders this delay of justice because he wishes the speeches to be compiled into a literary text for his own future entertainment. At the conclusion, the peasant is eventually given justice (after having his speeches read back to him) and the text is delivered to the king.

We know of the Tale of the Eloquent Peasant from a papyrus fragment, now held in the British Museum in London, where the formal legend on the display proclaims that the story represents “a questioning of social and divine justice”. For my purposes in this book, however, which will go on to explore the ways in which certain novels play with the institutional authority of university English, this ancient text has two more significant features. Firstly, in a historicist mode, the text demonstrates metafictional tropes well before the first millennium. The text knowingly plays with its own constitution, depicting acts of inscription from phonos (speech) to logos (written text). Indeed, the self-referential framework at play in this text demonstrates that metafiction is a conceit as old as literature itself, as others have already suggested.’ Even if I haven’t begun here with the more well-known and likely contemporaneous Epic of Gilgamesh, the historical placement of the Tale of the Eloquent Peasant within the First Intermediate Period gives a starting point for metafiction that defies more recent attempts to situate the form most prominently within a postmodern movement harking back to romanticism.” Secondly, in a broader sense, the story focuses on a self-educated and eloquent subject from an outsider class. In the social strata of its time, peasants were not supposed to demonstrate learning through fluent and coherent speech (eloquence). This tale, then, stages a set of complex interactions between class and education, learning and refined talent but also, through its metafictional nature, between what we might see as social/literary ‘genre’ (codified social/literary/class expectations) and canon (birth right).

Fig. 1 The Tale of the Eloquent Peasant. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

1 Most notably, Patricia Waugh, Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction (London: Methuen, 1984), pp. 18-19 suggests that much fiction can be understood as falling on a spectrum of metafictive practice.

2 In this work, I choose not to define the terms ‘modernism’ or ‘postmodernism’ in toto outright. This is not only because it is tedious to encounter every work that undertakes this task, but more importantly because it is impossible and always selective. I instead opt here to make clear the aspect of (post)modernism to which I am referring at a given moment, be it epistemology vs. ontology à la Brian McHale, ludic play, temporal distortion or any of the other characteristics frequently assigned under these taxonomies.

The Tale of the Eloquent Peasant is important for me because it historically refracts the interlocking aspects of a twentieth- and twenty-first-century fictional practice with which I will grapple in this book: games of hierarchical power and legitimation played out before backdrops of institutional monopolies on knowledge, all within a self-aware literary domain. This intersection of knowledge, power, and self-awareness can be seen in this particular first instance of the eloquent peasant when the reader of the tale is thrown by the disjunction between the two clauses. One might expect the sentence “this man possesses great eloquence” to be followed by a sentence of praise, of reward. After all, across history it has been common to see eloquence as a virtue. For, as Catherine Packham has deftly traced, eloquence has been core to a quest for the power of the sublime from Cicero through to David Hume, with the ancients and the moderns perhaps differing on whether human nature should seek such power.’

In more recent days, however, it has become increasingly true that those deemed learned within formalised spaces such as the academy have usually gained their positions of authority through repeated combined performances of eloquence and education: demonstrably satisfying tests, appraisals, accreditations, ‘excellence frameworks’, and other exercises, usually within strictly codified and prescribed linguistic formulations of academic discourse. In the contemporary academy, the ability to express new knowledge within pre-defined norms of expression (deemed eloquent because the form must efficiently but clearly communicate) is a virtue.

However, despite the fact that eloquence is valued by the king in the ancient tale, there is an unexpected relationship at play in the story’s matrix of knowledge, power, aesthetics, and value. This is how the tale derives its startling force: the eloquent peasant is disciplined, engendering an unexpected causal relationship between virtue and chastisement, a situation about which those in the contemporary academic humanities may feel empathetic. In a similar way to many of the fictions that will be examined throughout this book, this tale’s shock factor is possible because the text anticipates its readers’ expectations

3 Catherine Packham, ‘Cicero’s Ears, or Eloquence in the Age of Politeness: Oratory, Moderation, and the Sublime in Enlightenment Scotland’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 46.4 (2013), 499-512, http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/ecs.2013.0043.

and normative value judgements surrounding the charged encounter between class/social situation and eloquence. This expectation is set because the tale takes the parable form of a moral panic about class transgression through non-institutional knowledge and eloquence. Concerned as this text is with justice and class, the Tale of the Eloquent Peasant clearly establishes a social and literary generic terrain that is familiar to most readers, even if this set of expectations changes over time. The tale then acts to at least temporarily subvert those literary and social expectations, all framed within a didactic parable of justice and power.*

In the crafting of literature, or any kind of rhetoric, there are certain prerequisite factors if authors wish to play this type of game with audience expectations. One must know roughly the identity of one’s readers and what that audience group are likely to think, sometimes across heterogeneous discourse communities. In its historical context, the Tale of the Eloquent Peasant is a story designed for educated readers, perhaps akin to the early reader-response work of Stanley Fish who speaks of “informed readers”. After all, there was no widespread mass literacy in the First Intermediate Period. Although, therefore, it is likely that the tale was communicated in oral form, there is a doubled self-referentiality at work here. On the one hand, the original ‘reader’ of the tale must have been educated and would probably have been of an upper class, while the contemporary reader of the story may experience the greatest disquiet if he or she identifies with the peasant. On the other hand, though, the content of the story itself has an antiintellectual bent, a disciplining function designed to keep the eloquent peasants — suppressed by hereditary class-based educational structures rather than any meritocratic system — in their place. I am no ancient historian and the reading here is a contemporary take on a classic. The analogy, though, is striking in the context of my work here: for this is a book about the sometimes hostile reactions to practices within university English that continue to run through a strain of twenty-first-century

4 The inversion of order is, of course, temporary. Like Bakhtin’s famous carnival, the tale ends with order restored and the normative moral precepts and expectations emerge only strengthened by the momentary misrule.

5 Stanley Fish, ‘Literature in the Reader: Affective Stylistics’, in Is There a Text in This Class?: The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), pp. 21-67 (p. 48).

fiction. As with the Tale of the Eloquent Peasant, I will argue that the works to which I refer in this volume have a disciplining function, although they are not, now, primarily concerned with institutional royalty in opposition to the commoner. Instead, ironically given the prophecies of much of the anti-humanism and anti-intentionality that dominated poststructuralist literary studies in the 1980s and 1990s, the texts studied in this book inscribe their authors as royalty and academic readers as their peasants. They toy, I will argue, with university English’s traditional hierarchies of authority and legitimation while reversing the monopoly on literary-critical speech that academic English has attempted to claim.

This is a book about the way in which a specific sub-form of contemporary fiction interacts with the academy, the story of which is a fascinating power game played between two symbiotic (but heterogeneous) cultural institutions: the university and the novel. Fundamentally, it is a book about contemporary literary fiction’s contribution to the ongoing displacement of cultural authority away from university English. In this work I argue for the prominence of a series of novelistic techniques that, whether deliberate or not on the part of the author, function to outmanoeuvre, contain, and determine academic reading practices. This desire to discipline university English through the manipulation and restriction of possible hermeneutic paths is, I contend, a result firstly of the fact that the metafictional paradigm of the high-postmodern era has pitched critical and creative discourses into a type of productive competition with one another. Such tensions and overlaps (or ‘turf wars’) have only increased in light of the ongoing breakdown of coherent theoretical definitions of ‘literature’ as distinct from ‘criticism’. As the literary works that I cover here then “train their readers in a hermeneutic of suspicion”, as Rita Felski puts it, following Paul Ricoeur, they also discipline the academy in order to legitimate themselves over and above their critical counterparts from which they do not consider themselves formally discrete.° I argue here, then, taking up a challenge issued by Peter Boxall — that such novels exhibit a “resistance to evaluation” — that the “world-making power of prose fiction” in the contemporary era relies upon the ability of the novel to

6 Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), p. 43.

“reject or suspend the forms of community that it helps to create”.’ It is the project of this book to ensure that the fact that these rejected or suspended communities are so often academic communities does not go unremarked upon.

Secondly, I argue that this disciplinary function is situated amid larger ongoing shifts of legitimation. Indeed, I will go on to show that literature and university English now often find themselves fighting each other within the new world of information-dominated knowledge work described by Alan Liu. For the environment within which university English and the novel now co-exist is one in which “the academy can no longer claim supreme jurisdiction over knowledge”, as Liu puts it. It is, though, also an environment in which “the future of the literary” is difficult to foresee in the light of the prominent ahistoricist paradigms of the knowledge economy.® In a world that values the constant replacement of the old in the name of innovation, what room is there for tradition to be balanced against the individual talent? For Liu, then, an investigation of the aesthetic value in new paradigms of managerial creation is a “vital task” for “both literature and literary studies”, if these practices are to survive in any form.’ However, here I remain more cynical that such a battle will be fought as allies and chart an alternative narrative in which contemporary literary studies and literature are instead both ‘digging in’ to protect themselves, trying to reclaim the increasingly scarce conventional authority of their forms, even though it may be too late. Taken together, this set of literary practices betrays what I will come to refer to as an ‘anxiety of academia’ within the space of literary production.

This trope of ‘anxiety’ is taken not only from the most obvious referent, Harold Bloom’s ‘anxieties of influence’, in which there is an ambivalent relationship between a text and those texts that influenced it, but also from Ian Hunter’s riposte to Jonathan Culler. Hunter asks of Theory and critique: “in what historical or institutional circumstances do people learn to become disdainful of certain knowledges as ‘common

7 Peter Boxall, The Value of the Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), p. 11.

8 Alan Liu, The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), pp. 3, 21.

sense’, and to become anxious about themselves for ‘taking things for granted’?”" I suggest that this anxiety of the self, a kind of competitive desire to be the ‘most critical’, is playing out between the institutions of the Anglo-American university and the novel in the historical circumstances of the early twenty-first century.

This investigation of fiction and the university does not quite take the form that readers might pre-suppose, though. To dispel any misconceptions from the outset, it is worth stating up front that this volume is not as concerned with campus novels or ‘university fiction’ as an initial appraiser might infer from the above summary. While it is hardly surprising that academics are interested in fiction that represents the university and that we might expect the challenges of legitimation to play out in such texts, this type of novel has already been expertly documented and remarked upon by Mortimer R. Proctor, John Lyons, Ian Carter, Janice Rossen, Kenneth Womack, Péter Székely, Elaine Showalter, and others." Of course, there are many extant and well-known readings of the campus novel. For instance, Terry Eagleton suggests that a particularly English fascination with the campus novel stems from the fact that it can offer a recuperative setting far-enough dislocated from middle-class existence to an institutional space that

10 Jan Hunter, ‘The Time of Theory’, Postcolonial Studies, 10.1 (2007), 5-22 (p. 8), http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13688790601153123. It also strikes me that many of the anxieties in this space are actually competitive also against the natural/empirical sciences. Hunter and Felski do not go far enough, for my liking, in looking at how the contemporary sciences actually share many of the conditions of negative knowledge. Falsifiability and a desire to militate against false appearance through intersubjectivity are critical to the natural sciences. Of course, both the human, natural and empirical sciences may derive their critical stances from earlier philosophy; its roots can be found in Ancient Greece, not just in the more recent Kantian approaches. But the continuation of the mode feels more like a transformation of natural and empirical scientific practice in another legitimation problem: that of the two cultures.

11 Mortimer R. Proctor, The English University Novel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957); John Lyons, The College Novel in America (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1962); Ian Carter, Ancient Cultures of Conceit: British University Fiction in the Post-War Years (London: Routledge, 1990); Janice Rossen, The University on Modern Fiction: When Power Is Academic (London: Macmillan, 1993); Kenneth Womack, Postwar Academic Fiction: Satire, Ethics, Community (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002); Péter Székely, ‘The Academic Novel in the Age of Postmodernity: The Anglo-American Metafictional Academic Novel’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, Eötvös Loránd University, 2009), http://doktori.btk.elte.hu/lit/szekelypeter/ thesis.pdf; Elaine Showalter, Faculty Towers: The Academic Novel and Its Discontents (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009).

is both deviant and other while remaining safe, known, and farcical.” We also know, though, that the strong influence on contemporary US literary production of professionalised writing training via MFA programmes makes it likely that most authors would have ready firsthand knowledge of a campus background to draw upon (to which I will return later). Indeed, the best joke I have heard on this theme in recent days is that “bad books on writing tell you to ‘WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW’, a solemn and totally false adage that is the reason there exist so many mediocre novels about English professors contemplating adultery”.’* Rather, then, than re-work the classic formula of complicit laughter at Lucky Jim or to take the counter-stance of denouncing the campus novel as inherently conservative, in this book I examine novels that are at once interlinked with the academy and the practices of university English even while, at the same time, these texts are often not engaged in direct representation of the university. These parameters of exclusion and method in my selection of texts are more thoroughly explored in Chapter Two.

Instead, one of the primary ways in which this competitive interaction with the academy is manifest in the works that I cover here, I argue, is through a specific anticipation of an academic discourse-community as an idealised reader-community (with some more words on my echoing of Umberto Eco’s famous formulations to follow). That is, as with the Tale of the Eloquent Peasant’s anticipation of its educated audience demographic, much contemporary ‘literary fiction’ is aware of the conditions under which it will be read within the university’s literary studies departments and therefore finds itself already one step ahead of its readers. While this paradigm of idealised/model readers harks back to problems of the “hermeneutic cycle” that have been central to debates about critical interpretation for many decades now (and are cyclical in their mutual production of idealised text and idealised readers), the specifically evolved form of academic interaction that I chart here can be seen as anew emergence, or at least a newly realised instantiation of

12 Terry Eagleton, ‘The Silences of David Lodge’, New Left Review, 1.172 (1988), 93-102; although, as Merritt Moseley points out, even comedic novels about academics do not have to be, by definition, satiric. Merritt Moseley, ‘Introductory: Definitions and Justifications’, in The Academic Novel: New and Classic Essays, ed. by Merritt Moseley (Chester: Chester Academic Press, 2007), pp. 3-19.

existing practices." In the novels of Sarah Waters that I explore in the penultimate chapter of this study, for instance, the very narrative path relies on a constriction of interpretation that functions differently when read by academics versed in the work of Michel Foucault. This certainly constitutes a new technique that is different from the paradoxical anti-hermeneutic jibes of, say, Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), which may nonetheless mock academic or symptomatic reading practices as onanistic.’ In this way, this book argues that the academy is woven both more broadly and more deeply into the fabric of the contemporary literary fiction scene than might be supposed were an investigation limited to works that focus on depictions of the university.

In detailing the range of specific thematic uses that such engagements with the academy can serve, it is my contention that some types of fiction now play this game and deploy knowledge of academic discourses and practices as a specific literary and market strategy. While this shares some affinities with the type of “writing back” to the academy that Judith Ryan perceives in the post-Theory novel — and some of the instances studied in this volume do pertain to the deliberate injection of literary-critical and theoretical jargon into texts — I want here to voice a broader hypothesis about the role that this might play in terms of literary legitimation and authority." Whether one considers it in David Mitchell’s satire of over-privileged undergraduate life at Cambridge in The Bone Clocks (2014), in the high-academic aphoristic style of one of Zadie Smith’s sub-narratives in NW (2012), or in any of the works discussed in more detail in this volume, toying with academic discourse and reading practices is now a deliberate textual strategy that is used to claim a ‘literary’ quality for a work.” The tacit inscription of the social

14 See, Umberto Eco, ‘Overinterpreting Texts’, in Interpretation and Overinterpretation, ed. by Stefan Collini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 45-66 (p. 64).

15 For instance, this novel accuses the over-interpreting reader of having one’s ‘hands in your pants’, linking over-interpretation to masturbation. This is not a specific technique, though; it is a generalised critique of over-interpretation and an attempt to forestall all meaning even while the text overloads its symbolic register to an extraordinary degree. Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow (London: Vintage, 1995), pp. 695-96.

16 Judith Ryan, The Novel After Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011).

17 For example, see the section entitled ‘Ideology in popular entertainment’ and its antecedent entry. Zadie Smith, NW (London: Penguin, 2013), p. 213.

conventions of English studies into a set of literary conventions is a legitimation strategy for fiction in the era of mass higher education that can be seen as a type of metafictional, generic, and market practice. It is metafictional because this process of interpellating specific ‘academic’ readerly communities must involve and signal a degree of explicit textual self-awareness. It is a generic practice because we can describe the paradigm in a number of works, as will this book, and because we can then chart how new works might fit this prescription. It is a market practice because, I will argue, the structures of value and accreditation in the academy are now pitched into a type of competition with fiction because of the collapse of viable gatekeeping and canonisation mechanisms. Finally, it is a practice that is particularly relevant in the era of mass higher education because broadened access to training in techniques of critical and close reading destabilises the authority of the academy and of literary fiction.'®

These three areas of investigation — metafiction, genre, and markets — form the overlapping points of interaction that are explored throughout this book in its engagement with contemporary fiction. These investigations are centred around the institutional form of the university and framed through the lenses of critique, legitimation, and discipline.

Genre, Canons, and Markets

Works of contemporary fiction are ‘legitimated’ through the overlay of diverse structures of value, from multiple sources (some market, some institution-based), atop the material processes of literary production. For some authors, selling millions of copies will serve as a legitimation of their writing. For others, appearing alongside prominent authors in a literary quarterly, in order to “generate cultural and actual capital” as Amy Hungerford puts it, might suffice.” For some, simply appearing in print will be enough. Even just from an authorial perspective, there are, indeed, multiple sources from which literary value can be generated.

18 For more on this, see Ronan McDonald, The Death of the Critic (London: Continuum, 2007).

19 Amy Hungerford, Making Literature Now (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016), p. 10.

What, though, is the specific role of the university in the ascription of literary value?

Certainly, the aspects within the novels that I will read here pertain to the university and around university English. This is not, I will hypothesise, because these works have a straightforward desire to belittle academics; this is not a book exclusively about parody, pastiche, or satire, although these elements play a role in the broader function that I posit for such fiction. It is rather because, in one of the narratives that I will trace, university English and other disciplines of literary study form one of the contexts for literary publication and reception. To see a response from fiction to such an environment is unsurprising, especially given the rise of mass higher education and creative writing programmes. A more specific framing of this context, however, is that university English can be seen as the weaker relation of the market gatekeeping system for literary fiction, of which publishers form the stronger, obverse side. This weakness contributes towards the ofttouted ‘legitimation crisis’ in university English.

To understand this observation it is necessary to backtrack to the ongoing influence of the ‘canon wars’ of the 1980s and 1990s in which traditionalist aesthetic formalists attempted to preserve and defend an overwhelmingly white, male canon against the protestations of Marxist, feminist, and postcolonial schools (among others that might now be said to include critical disability studies), who viewed such a canon as a reflection of socio-historic, rather than aesthetic, conditions. This dilemma over value persists, as has been recently demonstrated by Mark Algee-Hewitt and Mark McGurl in a meta-analysis of various claimed literary canons.” Algee-Hewitt and McGurl conduct two separate computational/quantitative analyses in their pamphlet, a product of Stanford’s ‘literary lab’. After initially appraising a more traditional set of corpora, these social, structural inequalities remain manifest: only 15% of authors algorithmically selected for inclusion were women while a mere 5% were non-white.”! To this end, the authors then conducted a second analysis with additional corpora contributed by some members

20 Mark Algee-Hewitt and Mark McGurl, Between Canon and Corpus: Six Perspectives on 20th-Century Novels, Pamphlets of the Stanford Literary Lab (Stanford: Stanford Literary Lab, 2015), https://litlab.stanford.edu/LiteraryLabPamphlet8.pdf.

of the editorial board of the journal MELUS (Multi Ethnic Literature of the United States), members of the Postcolonial Studies Association, and the editorial board of the Feminist Press (although this revised model still yielded only 10% non-white and 17% female).” For the purposes of the current discussion of contemporary fiction, however, what is perhaps most relevant are the principles of value selection that pervade Algee-Hewitt and McGurl’s corpora. For their analysis they chose to use four corpora that are publisher/reader selected and only one corpus created by an academic.” This is telling and indicative of a broader structural trend. Namely, that the processes that shape value in the literary sphere, even in this appraisal, are mostly based on the market, with academic aesthetic judgement forming only a weaker correlative portion of the gatekeeping system.

My claim that academic value-judgements are the weaker relation of publisher filtering systems is most clear when one considers the processes of market gatekeeping and canon formation for twenty-first-century literary fiction. These questions have been raised most pointedly in recent times not only by James F. English but also by Robert Eaglestone, who writes of the problematic fact that “it is taken as axiomatic that ‘serious’ or ‘literary’ fiction is a genre of its own (‘Booker fiction)”, a genre that is key to academic study.” Furthermore, Eaglestone notes of the publishing market that:

in the main agents, and trade publishers are very unhelpful and resistant to academics. They do not see the point of us, which is odd as we sell many, many thousands of copies of their books to our students (nearly a captive audience, in fact) and more importantly we create the intellectual and cultural infrastructure within in [sic] which their business grows. (“I studied her in college so I downloaded the new one straight away”.) Yet this, too, reveals that one issue in contemporary fiction is what we might

23 Modern Library Board’s List of 100 Best Novels of the 20th Century, the Modern Library Reader's List of 100 Best Novels of the 20th Century, the Radcliffe’s Rival List of the 100 Best Novels of the 20th Century, Larry McCafery’s List of the 100 Best Novels of the 20th Century and the Yearly Best-selling Works of the 20th Century.

24 Robert Eaglestone, ‘Contemporary Fiction in the Academy: Towards a Manifesto’, Textual Practice, 27.7 (2013), 1089-101 (p. 1097), http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09502 36X.2013.840113; see also James F. English, The Economy of Prestige Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005).

call the “contemporary history of the book”: the ways in which the business of publishing helps to shape and control contemporary fiction.”

While I do not attempt in this work to conduct an empirical investigation into this claimed resistance of publishers (as, say, a series of interviews might), I do want to chart a range of complex resistances to and intersections with the academy that are explicit and implicit in much contemporary fiction. I will suggest that these form a new way of considering the relationship between academics, publishers, and authors of such works that centres on a reconfiguration of institutional authority.

Part of this reconfiguration can be voiced through a concern, following Eaglestone, but one that is also linked to Franco Moretti’s observations on canon limitation in ‘The Slaughterhouse of Literature’ .”° My concern is this: the books that academics working on contemporary novels will consider part of the canon of literary fiction must have already been published and, therefore, pre-filtered. But this is not necessarily the way in which the dissemination of contemporary fiction works or will work in the future. In the realms of science/speculative fiction and other genre forms, the self-publishing movement has gained a great deal of momentum, facilitated by the near-zero dissemination cost (although not labour-cost) per-copy in the digital environment. Yet, as nearly all sources agree, self-publishing in that ‘special’ yet small genre of prize-winning ‘literary fiction’, to which Eaglestone alludes, remains extremely difficult.” As Felski notes, “the works that we study and teach [...] could never come to our attention without the work of countless helpers: publishers, advertisers, critics, prize committees, reviews, word-of-mouth recommendations, syllabi, textbooks and anthologies, changing tastes and scholarly vocabularies”.”*

25 Eaglestone, p. 1096.

26 Franco Moretti, ‘The Slaughterhouse of Literature’, MLQ: Modern Language Quarterly, 61.1 (2000), 207-27.

27 David Henry Sterry, ‘Self-Publishing Literary Fiction: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: Cari Noga Reveals All to the Book Doctors’, Huffington Post, 20 August 2014, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-henry-sterry/selfpublishing-literaryf_b_5695364.html.

28 Felski, p. 170. Felski does attribute “last, but not least, the passions and predilections of ourselves and our students” but I feel that these are subsidiary to the market discoverability factors.

This accounts for at least some of the reasons why publishers might be disdainful towards academics, if Eaglestone’s assertion that such disdain exists is, in fact, true. Yes, academics select (value) a subset of a publisher’s list for promotion through teaching and research, thereby creating an environment in which such writing can flourish. However, it is only a subset. Publishing remains a business fraught with financial risk in which cross-subsidy must be judiciously applied between works that will sell and those that will flop with no sure-fire predictive technique for determining a novel’s reception. The value judgements made by academics to canonise works is not undertaken in advance of publication, which would mitigate this risk to some extent. Instead, academics expect publishers to take the risk of publication and only then will the academy’s blessing be bestowed, once this prefiltering mechanism has been completed. Canons comprise books, not manuscripts. It may also be the case that the role of a commissioning editor is very different to the role of a literary critic. In this case, the academy’s labour of value conferral is working in a different space to those of editorial staff and is of no use whatsoever to those gatekeepers at publishing houses who must anticipate the shape of an unknown and potentially unknowable literary market, venturing their own capital, only for academics to reward it after the fact.” Academic value judgements may confer a cultural prestige on works but this is at least one step removed from the economic realities and difficulties faced by publishing houses.