Moving Beyond Institutionalism

As a graduate student, and later as a junior scholar specializing in the literatures of the Americas, I sought out many books, articles, and reviews by members of the Post45 group. I consider one of the books produced in its milieu, Mark McGurl's The Program Era (2009), to be among the most important scholarly monographs I've ever read. McGurl's book taught me to look beyond the good dog/bad dog polemics about creative writing that were so prevalent in literary and academic circles at the time and to see just how essential university-based MFA programs were to the development of US literature after World War II. McGurl also demonstrated how attuned the major authors of the period were to this shift, such that some of their most canonical works could be interpreted in part as fictionalized portraits of the programs they inhabited. This, in a nutshell, was the lesson of the early scholarship of Post45: not only did the size and scope of cultural institutions in the United States greatly expand over the course of the twentieth century, but many of the writers, filmmakers, and artists who passed through them apprehended their organizational structures through intricate textual allegories.1 Although I don't agree with every aspect of The Program Era, I will always admire the clarity with which the book articulated its argument for an institutional mode of literary study.  

In subsequent years, however, as Post45 scholars fanned out in search of additional postwar institutions upon which to apply the McGurlian method, the links they established between literary texts and their institutional contexts grew, in my opinion, increasingly tenuous. A significant source of The Program Era's success was McGurl's ability to convince his reader that the university creative writing program was the dominant literary institution of the postwar period, both for its ubiquity and for its systemic commitment to concrete aesthetic principles ("write what you know," "show don't tell," etc.). While later Post45 literary scholars gave compelling accounts of the institutions they studied — small presses, magazines, international organizations, literary prizes, etc. — they had more difficulty establishing how the governing logics of those institutions made their way into verbal artifacts themselves. The cumulative effect of the group's allegorical readings simply highlighted the underlying problem: each time a new Post45 scholar argued that x novel was an allegory for y institution, that interpretation underscored less the hermeneutic power of the institutional approach than the inevitably partial nature of the allegorical readings of the novel that preceded it (Toni Morrison's Beloved can only allegorize so many institutions before one suspects that it may not allegorize any institution at all). A similar kind of methodological exhaustion also seemed to be happening on the cultural materialist side of the field. Among the inheritors of Fredric Jameson, the rich and variegated tradition of Marxist literary analysis was largely boiled down to the view that if you located the one "real" mechanism of neoliberal capitalism, you could unlock the secret to its cultural production. Increasingly, scholars in this vein identified a single feature of the contemporary US economic system (finance, debt, just-in-time manufacturing, "too late capitalism") and made the case that that feature explained the literature of the period. By treating texts and authors as derivative of a narrow set of institutions or economic conditions, both methods risked obfuscating the multiplicity of cultural factors that exist at a given historical moment and minimizing the degree to which such institutions and conditions are shaped by collective mobilizations. "Mobilizing Literature: Social Movements and Post-1945 Literary Studies" was my attempt to challenge core methodological assumptions of the institutionalist and cultural materialist paradigms by highlighting the extent to which an array of social movements with different ideological orientations have driven literary change in the United States since the early 1960s. 

In his response, Adam Kelly helpfully asks whether "cultural materialism" is the proper umbrella term to designate the second of those paradigms, and I'll begin my own response by clarifying that the object of my critique was not materialist scholarship as such but the neo-Jamesonian variant of it that has gained such ascendancy in post-1945 studies. As Kelly correctly surmises, my own approach is deeply informed by the thought of Raymond Williams, particularly his influential contention that (to quote him as quoted by Kelly) "'the undeniable experience of the present' complicates the base/superstructure dichotomy of classical Marxist materialism." Despite their evident awareness of Williams' critique, Jameson's heirs often treat literary texts as unmediated barometers of complex economic processes, never fully acknowledging the debt those texts owe to the languages of the social movements that put such economic processes on the cultural agenda in the first place. Kelly is right to believe that my essay proposes a return to Williams, or at least to his insight from Marxism and Literature that "any abstraction of determinism, based on the isolation of autonomous categories . . . [is] a mystification of the specific and always related determinants which are the real social process."2 Part of the reason I gravitated towards Kelly's own scholarship in my essay — and why I believe his recently published monograph New Sincerity: American Fiction in the Neoliberal Age (2024) represents such a consequential intervention in post-1945 study — is his extraordinary attentiveness to the range of "always related determinants" that mediate the relationship between literature and political economy. Although he explicitly grapples with the role that neoliberal governance played in the transformation of the US cultural field from 1989 to 2008, Kelly unapologetically refers to the New Sincerity as an "aesthetic" that draws on a shared "sensibility" and "structure of feeling."3 His reading of this "post-boomer" generation of writers always retains the sense that its fiction does not merely reproduce the dominant economic logic of the period but engages with it critically and self-consciously. 

The other responses in the cluster mostly concentrate on my portrait of post-1945 US literary studies, and I appreciate the opportunity to elaborate on my approach to the field and to Post45 as a group. It's worth underscoring from the outset that my academic training was primarily in Latin American and comparative literary studies (I received my BA in Spanish and my PhD in Comparative Literature); this formation has decisively shaped my perspective on the literatures and cultures of the United States. One of the main arguments of my first book, Anxieties of Experience: The Literatures of the Americas from Whitman to Bolaño, was that Latin American readers perceived far more clearly than American authors themselves how deeply a commitment to experiential literature underwrote the rise of a geographically specific US literary field in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Like McGurl, Jameson, and the founders of Post45, I believe that the nation-state remains an essential category of cultural analysis, even as I recognize the merits of (to quote the Post45 book series website) "work that takes seriously the decreasing specificity of a national literature in the wake of the 'American Century.'" In his response, Ignacio Sánchez Prado contends that "Mobilizing Literature" represents "an Americanist turn that in some ways undoes [Lawrence's] rich work on transnational and hemispheric configurations of US literature." Perhaps that's true, but when I claimed in Anxieties of Experience that the Americas were composed of "a set of overlapping literary fields that are at once regional, national, and hemispheric," I did not mean to imply that scholars should discount the specificities of national or regional traditions.4 To the contrary, I turned to the Bourdieusian language of literary fields to challenge what I saw as a growing tendency within hemispheric studies toward minimizing differences between US and Spanish American literary production in the name of North-South solidarity. As I have argued elsewhere, I worry that the propensity to see the transnational as an ethical imperative rather than an analytic frame risks effacing the very real ways that national borders continue to regulate literary, political, and economic life.5 I subtitled my essay "Social Movements and Post-1945 US Literary Studies" (my emphasis) precisely because I wanted to interrogate a specific field imaginary. My sources and texts would have been different if I had been writing on hemispheric literary studies and social movements, Latin American literary studies and social movements, or literary studies and social movements more broadly.

"Mobilizing Literature" synthesizes a large body of research from multiple disciplines. I'm grateful to Cheryl Higashida, Irvin Hunt, Patricia Stuelke, and Cristina Pérez Jiménez for painting a fuller picture of the social movement scholarship that is relevant to my argument. Higashida offers a persuasive reminder that scholars in "left literary and cultural studies" have laid the groundwork for the kind of work I'm proposing, especially in their efforts to track continuities between the cultural politics of the Popular Front in the 1930s and 1940s and those of the movements of the 1960s. Her attention to the concrete intersections of US-based mobilizations of the midcentury and international movements — pro-Communist, anticolonial, Pan-African, etc .— is a particularly welcome contribution. Hunt, drawing on Kevin Quashie, rightly urges attention to the more interior forms of social protest that may be less visible when seen through the "collective action frames" I posit. Stuelke discusses a range of scholars who have attended to "the institutionalization of radical postwar social movement ideas and aesthetics" in the years following Jameson's "Postmodernism" essay. And Pérez Jiménez usefully points to numerous Latinx cultural initiatives that emerged in the wake of the movements of the 2010s (Occupy, BLM, and #MeToo) and that followed a different trajectory from n+1, the New-York-based cultural magazine whose arc I trace in my essay. To my mind, these interventions are all in line with the shift in methodological emphasis I advocate in "Mobilizing Literature." However, it is worth emphasizing that whereas the vast majority of the scholars the respondents cited were trained in literary or cultural studies, my essay also drew substantially on research in history and sociology. The fact that the prominent movement historians or sociologists I cite go unmentioned — Abdul Alkalimat, Fabio Rojas, Sarah Soule, David Snow, Komozi Woodard, Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, Clarence Lang, Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua, and Mike Davis, among others — reinforces my view that we still lack a robust interdisciplinary approach to social movements in post-1945 literary studies. Of course, I make no claim to novelty in highlighting the nexus between movement politics and US literary history. As I state explicitly in "Mobilizing Literature," there is excellent scholarship on the role that movements have played in catalyzing specific traditions, groups, and writers in the United States, as well as a substantial body of work on cross-movement influences and interactions (the Barbara Christian essay that Stuelke cites in her response, which locates Alice Walker at the "conjuncture of the black arts movement and the women's movement," is a perfect example of the latter). What my essay argued was that, for those who take "US literature" as their primary unit of analysis, significant gaps remain in the existing account of how successive social movements with distinct and often competing ideological framings have structured the literary field since World War II.  

It's clear from Stuelke's response that she believes we should put the synergies of radical and progressive movements at the heart of that story. I believe that movement differences are equally decisive. Stuelke mentions the formation of the Writers Against the War on Gaza in October 2023 as an instance of "the relationship between literature, social movements, and cultural institutions" that "continues to be worked out in real time." I agree, but as cultural analysts, we cannot limit ourselves to studying only the movements with which we are ideologically aligned. In the wake of the Hamas-led attack of October 7 and Israel's ongoing genocidal assault on Gaza, the Palestinian solidarity movement has been met with an equally powerful (and far better funded) Israeli "solidarity" movement, one that has resulted in the criminalization of dissent in the academic and literary worlds, the rise of sanctioned anti-Muslim and anti-Arab sentiment, and perhaps even the electoral victory of Donald Trump. On the cultural front, it has also led to a newly weaponized Jewish identity politics, which has sought to platform pro-Israeli Jewish authors, filmmakers, and cultural commentators while methodically silencing pro-Palestinian voices, including those of Jews who oppose the actions of Israel. However one positions oneself with respect to contemporary movements, a vindicationist method for analyzing them is insufficient. I advocate an approach that takes seriously movements that are progressive and conservative, radical and reformist, issue-based and identity-based, iconic and lesser-known.  

In his response, Dan Sinykin writes that my description of institutionalism as the "veritable credo" of Post45 no longer holds true, "given the evolution of Post45, its membership, and its board." He observes that Amy Hungerford, arguably the main figure in the early phase of Post45's development, "left the group nearly a decade ago," and he lists several current board members (including some working in a Marxist/cultural materialist mode and others working on social movements) who "don't fit neatly into the organization as Lawrence describes it." In his response, Francisco Robles speaks to recent efforts in Post45 to increase its intellectual and embodied diversity, while acknowledging that such efforts have coexisted uneasily with the group's ongoing association with "academic and para-academic whiteness." Both these contributions offer sensible correctives to my characterization of Post45 in "Mobilizing Literature." I should have more explicitly recognized the diversity of methods, backgrounds, and people that currently compose the group. And I should have been more attentive to the degree to which the group's current members engage with social movements and the scholarship on them. Robles's recently released book in the Post45 series, Coalition Literature: Aesthetics on the Move in Midcentury US Multiethnic Writing (Stanford, 2025) is one of the many indicators that, as Sinykin puts it, my essay is "observing and contributing to a shift already underway." In their own ways, however, each corrective confirms my sense of the early impulses of the Post45 group; these impulses continue to condition — even dialectically — its more recent developments. 

Indeed, the very acknowledgment of Post45's transformation in recent years returns us to a central question about institutional identity that I posed in "Mobilizing Literature." Which version of Post45 represents the "real" Post45? Is it the institution that was founded in 2006 as an invitation-only "collective" by nine white scholars who mostly did their PhDs in English at the same institution (Johns Hopkins) and with the same advisor (Walter Benn Michaels)? Or is it the much more diverse and inclusive organization that emerged in the wake of the social movements of the 2010s? As Pérez Jiménez aptly reminds us, the increased diversity I track in my longitudinal analysis of n+1 "can also be observed in other established, historically white mainstream venues" of the 2010s and early 2020s. Given that Post45 itself is one of those venues, the way we characterize its transformation bears directly on the differences between a movement- and an institution-based method. According to Sinykin's and Robles's narratives, Post45 initiated its transformation around a decade ago, in the years immediately following the first wave of Black Lives Matter (2013-14), at a time when majority white cultural institutions in the United States were under enormous pressure to diversify. Obviously, it's a good thing that Post45 embraced that imperative, yet a primary purpose of my reading of n+1 was to dispute the institutionalist tendency to displace agency for such shifts from movements themselves to the cultural institutions that responded to them. For the same reason that n+1's post-Occupy radicalization does not offset its origins among a group of "sad young literary men" from Harvard, Post45's post-BLM transformation should not be used to efface its origins in a coterie of scholars that largely shared the same intellectual commitments, academic pedigree, and identity position.  

What is at stake in evaluating the full trajectory of Post45 is not merely our ethical positioning toward institutional evolution. The problem is that methods that rely primarily on internal dynamics to explain institutions often fail to recognize the degree to which external forces compel them to continually rearticulate their motives, their incentives, and their narratives about who they are and should be. Moreover, as Robles notes in his response, the fact that Post45 as a group has strengthened its commitment to inclusion does not necessarily mean that the institutionalist method (or, I would add, the neo-Jamesonian one) has fully taken on board the theoretical insights of ethnic studies or transcended what Robles refers to as its "unchecked whiteness." To be clear, my critique of those methods in "Mobilizing Literature" concerned the validity of their conceptual frameworks, not the identities of the scholars who employed them. My argument was that the institutional paradigm inaugurated by McGurl (who was not himself a founder of Post45) left unresolved certain causal relations between movements and institutions, just as Jameson's materialist paradigm left unresolved certain causal relations between movements and capital. I appealed to Alkalimat's The History of Black Studies early in the essay because I believe it offers an important counterpoint to dominant institutionalist narratives about the post-WWII period through its detailed account of how the black liberation movements of the 1960s created institutional structures in addition to modifying existing ones.6 All that said, I admit to being baffled by Stuelke's accusation that I "bracket" the very scholarship in ethnic studies I suggested had been sidestepped in recent institutionalist work. 

My sense after reading these responses is that a broader conversation about Post45's history would be beneficial to the group and to the field of post-1945 literary studies more generally. Post45's growth in the academy was intimately tied to its founding generation's success in gaining a foothold in elite private and public universities in the United States, and it seems evident that the group made its symposia invitation-only in part to control access to its expanding prestige network. Of course, as Juliana Spahr, Claire Grossman, and Stephanie Young have argued, all writers and academics in the United States depend on such networks to a certain extent.7 — I'll be the first to acknowledge the advantages I derived from my time as a graduate student at Princeton. What strikes me as qualitatively different about Post45 is the decision of its early members to convert their network into an institution, complete with a book series, a peer-review journal, and an online magazine. From the beginning, Post45's theoretical defense of institutionalism closely aligned with an institutional practice of disciplinary gatekeeping, whose most visible aspect to those external to the group was the sheer ratio of citations of Post45 to non-Post45 authors in their scholarship. The steps that Post45 has taken to remedy its exclusionary measures in recent years — including the creation of application-based graduate conferences — are a positive development, and Sinykin's and Robles's willingness to organize this cluster is a welcome sign of their openness to debate. Still, I believe that the members of the group would gain further clarity about the stakes of the institutional method by applying that method to the incentive structures that gave rise to Post45 itself. I wholeheartedly support Robles's call to defend academic institutions against the reactionary forces currently conspiring to dismantle them, just as I supported earlier efforts to defend academic institutions against neoliberal austerity measures. At the same time, I believe that the effectiveness of that defense will rest in part on the accuracy with which we are able to describe those institutions and our place within them. 

An equally significant challenge to the field, to my mind, will be the preservation of a version of literary studies that does not simply replicate the structures of our scarcity-driven attention economy. In today's social media environment, where information is valued principally for the speed and brevity with which it can be communicated, single-variable arguments about contemporary literature will continue to find a receptive audience in the mainstream. Yet literature is — as it has always been — a complex, multi-factorial practice. The ultimate goal of "Mobilizing Literature" was not to negate the role of economic or institutional factors in shaping literary production; rather, it was to insist that we need more sophisticated ways of understanding their relationship to contemporary cultural life. I hope that my essay will galvanize more scholarship on social movements in post-1945 literary studies. Just as urgently, I hope it will lead to serious debate about the foundational assumptions of the field.  

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Jeffrey Lawrence (@jefflawcdm.bsky.social) is Associate Professor of English at Rutgers University-New Brunswick, where he teaches twentieth and twenty-first century US and Latin American literatures and cultures. He is the author of Anxieties of Experience: The Literatures of the Americas from Whitman to Bolaño (Oxford, 2018) and co-editor with Anjuli Gunaratne of the forthcoming volume The Global Anglophone (Routledge 2025), based on a 2023 special issue in Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies. His debut Spanish-language novel, El americano, was published by Chatos Inhumanos press in 2024.

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Acknowledgments: I discussed the ideas for "Mobilizing Literature" with many people, and many people read drafts of the original article and/or this response. I particularly wish to thank Jordan Brower, Luis Moreno-Caballud, Dora Zhang, Nicholas Gaskill, Luis Othoniel Rosa, Brenda Navarro, David Kurnick, Andrew Goldstone, Carter Mathes, Jeanne-Marie Jackson, and Paul Franz.

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