Institutional Recalcitrance, Institutional Refractions

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Jeffrey Lawrence's "Mobilizing Literature" argues that Jamesonian cultural materialism and McGurlian institutionalism "have set the agenda for critical debate" among scholars of post-1945 US literature, and that these schools have failed to register the importance of social movements. I think the latter claim — the failure to register — is debatable and would love to see, in Lawrence's longer project, which I eagerly await, a sustained demonstration through close reading. Here, I offer two other criticisms. 

The first is admittedly local to the present venue. Lawrence argues that "McGurl's insistent institutionalism has become the veritable credo of the Post45 group. The characteristic gesture of Post45 scholars has been to select a US-based (or US-dominated) institution and to show how that institution has shaped the global literary field." For evidence of this, he cites Mary Esteve, Loren Glass, Amy Hungerford, and me — rightly so. But it is wrong to suggest that institutionalism is Post45's "veritable credo" today, given the evolution of Post45, its membership, and its board. Hungerford left the group nearly a decade ago, for example; Annie McClanahan, a leading Marxist (or cultural materialist) critic, has been on the board for about a decade and has been one of the co-editors of the journal for five. Francisco Robles, a scholar who thinks deeply about social movements — see his Coalition Literature — has been an editor at Contemporaries for several years and is now on the board. Sunny Xiang, Kate Marshall, Gloria Fisk, and Carlos Alonso Nugent are current board members who don't fit neatly into the organization as Lawrence describes it. Institutionalism is one mode associated with Post45, but does not characterize the group today; this institution's changing predilections, which include committed attention to social movements, might suggest that Lawrence is observing and contributing to a shift already underway. 

Second, I'm not convinced that Lawrence's case studies accomplish what he hopes they do, at least not yet. His most substantial case study takes up n+1 to illustrate how Occupy Wall Street "decisively shifted the contours of the post-1945 US literary field" and produced an "epistemological break." Certainly, he shows that's true of n+1. But the entire field? Where's the evidence? Here is what he offers: "an extraordinary number of aesthetic experiments, ranging from periodicals, gazettes, and books collectively authored by encampment participants to new publishing initiatives adhering to the principles of open source or copyleft. An influential example of the latter was the Commune Editions imprint founded by Bay Area poets." He also notes explicit mentions of Occupy in 10:04 and The Overstory. I would love to learn more of the specifics about these periodicals, gazettes, and collectively authored books. Skeptically, I might suggest that Lawrence is pointing mostly (though not exclusively) to marginal literature, which doesn't persuade me that contours have been decisively shifted or that we have witnessed an epistemological break. To demonstrate such a break, Lawrence needs to reckon with the core of the literary field, as it is typically understood, which entails reckoning with the field's core institutions and the attention economies that flow through them. Can we see these shifts and breaks in publishers, reviews, prizes? At Penguin Random House, The New York Times Book Review, the National Book Award? Maybe Lawrence rejects this picture of the literary field, the concept of the literary field itself, or the idea that an epistemological break would be evident in the cultural mainstream; if so, I'd like to see him make these arguments. We ought to celebrate the print culture that Lawrence points to — but I'm not yet convinced that it does what he says it does. 

Mainstream literary institutions are conservative and resistant to the change demanded by social movements, and so overestimating the cultural effects of social movements brings risks: it can lead us to think we have come further than we in fact have, to underestimate the challenge at hand. This is one lesson of Richard Jean So's Redlining Culture, which rewrites post-1945 US literary history by showing, at least according to publishing data, that it was never as multicultural as syllabi tend to make it out to be. Syllabi are as they are for good reason, even as they can imply a distorted version of literary history. The loud canon wars of the 1980s and 1990s distracted from the quiet persistence of white supremacy, as the vast majority of works of fiction published by major publishers continued to be written by white authors. We need to reckon with the recalcitrance of institutions even as we work to bring to light the consequence of their counterforce in social movements. 

Dan Sinykin is Associate Professor of English at Emory University and the author of Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature (Columbia, 2023).

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