Mapping the Territory

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Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised that it took a scholar of Latin American literature to see what was missing in the study of its US equivalent. Although Jeffrey Lawrence rightly notes that recent accounts of the development of Black Studies and related fields have spotlighted the importance of social movements, he is equally right that such movements - so prominent in the way Latin Americanists think about their field - have been relatively absent from the twenty-year dialogue between the two most influential frameworks for understanding the territory of postwar US literature. Part of the value of "Mobilizing Literature" is to map so precisely the relation between these frameworks - the Jamesonian "cultural materialist" approach and the Post45 institutionalist approach. Lawrence identifies how the institutional focus of Post45 scholarship was designed to address a "genuine aporia" in Jameson's method, regarding how we should comprehend "the structural connections among individual texts, the global capitalist system, and what was once called the American literary tradition."1 The literary sociology so prevalent today in postwar and contemporary US literary studies has not always articulated its relation to Jameson's project in such clarifying terms, but now it can.

A still more significant contribution Lawrence makes in his introductory section is to situate Jameson as the critic who canonized postmodernism as "the first specifically North American global style,"2 and thus provided Americanist scholars, at a moment when national framings were coming under pressure, with "a formally sophisticated and anti-essentialist framework for reading US authors and works in relation to an international system."3 Read alongside Kathryn Roberts's recent historicizing of Mark McGurl's The Program Era - the urtext of Post45 literary institutionalism - as a product of "peak college," Lawrence's article gives us a way to read Jameson's postmodernism as a signature articulation of, and for, the era of US global hegemony.4 This period combined the hard power of US military and financial preeminence with a cultural soft power inextricable from the domestic expansion of higher education and public support for, and promotion of, the American arts. As this era of hegemony draws to a close amid the rise of rival powers abroad and the neoliberal gutting of educational and cultural institutions at home, we may come to view the scholarly paradigms associated with Jameson and McGurl as artifacts of unquestioned US global centrality, of a time when contemporary literature and culture was synonymous, for so many, with American literature and culture.

While Lawrence's opening map of the field will rightly gain much attention for "Mobilizing Literature," I was equally struck by the emphasis he places, in the first and longest section of the essay, on n+1. In describing the evolution of this little magazine as the barometer of a broader cultural shift, his argument here dovetails remarkably closely with the conclusion to my 2024 book New Sincerity: American Fiction in the Neoliberal Age (published in Stanford UP's Post45 series but probably closer to the Jamesonian than the institutionalist pole of the field). Like Lawrence, who graciously cites my work on this point, I identify the early n+1 with a "New Sincerity" sensibility, encapsulated in the closing words of the magazine's first issue: "It is time to say what you mean."5 Like Lawrence, too, I see the Occupy protests as a crucial turning point in the emergence - in n+1 and elsewhere - of a changed cultural sensibility inspired by the material renewal of collective politics, a milieu that my book's conclusion dubs "Sincerity in Common."6 Lawrence's account of n+1's evolution is far more detailed than mine but our overall diagnosis is the same, and our accounts share a note of hopefulness regarding the political and cultural consequences of this shift from New Sincerity to Sincerity in Common.

There are two aspects of Lawrence's argument on which I'd welcome his further thoughts. The first is the designation of Jameson's approach as "cultural materialist." This term more immediately recalls the figure of Raymond Williams, whose work is likewise invoked through the phrase "structure of feeling" which appears twice in Lawrence's essay (once in Jameson's own scare quotes, once without). Williams coined "structure of feeling" to acknowledge how "the undeniable experience of the present" complicates the base/superstructure dichotomy of classical Marxist materialism.7 By articulating shared forms of experience that escape systematic analysis, cultural texts mediate the structure of feeling in a material manner, and Williams saw his method as marking a contribution to rethinking materialism itself, "a way of defining forms and conventions in art and literature as inalienable elements of a social material process."8 The point is that Williams was interested precisely in the kind of evanescent but shared sense of social and cultural change that Lawrence sees as eluding the Jamesonian and Post45 poles of the field. Williams's analytical trinity of dominant, residual, and emergent is relevant here too, and I would be interested to know whether Lawrence would see a return to Williams's brand of cultural materialism as one way to map the emergent structures of feeling associated with social movements, or whether there are limitations to Williams's method that have been overcome by the theorists Lawrence prefers.

The second query I'd raise regards Lawrence's call for a revised understanding of the literary that emphasizes nonfiction. As someone who remains devoted to the novel form as our most profound articulation of the present (I'd cite Jameson's classic The Political Unconscious and Timothy Bewes's recent Free Indirect as support for this view), I find myself wondering to what extent Lawrence's proposed centering of social movements in our field imaginary necessitates a concomitant centering of nonfiction, or whether these are analytically distinct proposals. We might want to adopt both, of course, but I would be interested to know whether Lawrence thinks it would be possible and coherent to have the first without the second.

With two further, fascinating case studies that I have not had the space to discuss here, "Mobilizing Literature" reads very much like the precis of a field-changing book. I know I'm not alone in looking forward immensely to the full elaboration of these ideas.

Adam Kelly is Associate Professor of English at University College Dublin, having previously taught at University of York and Harvard University. He is the author of two books, most recently New Sincerity: American Fiction in the Neoliberal Age (Stanford UP 2024). His articles have appeared in journals including American Literary History, Comparative Literature Studies, Post45, Studies in the Novel, and Twentieth-Century Literature. He is Principal Investigator on "Imaginative Literature and Social Trust, 1990-2025," a four-year project funded by the Irish Research Council Laureate scheme.

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