This article is part of the b2o: an online journal special issue “The Question of Literary Value”, edited by Alexander Dunst and Pieter Vermeulen.
The Question of Literary Value: An Introduction
Alexander Dunst and Pieter Vermeulen
The question of literary value is a surprisingly open one. Literary value is a topic that has only fairly recently become a focus of literary theoretical debate. For a long time, if the question of literary value was posed at all, it was posed as a rhetorical question (that is, as on occasion to reaffirm an alleged truth). For most of the modern period, the value of literature was self-evident: whether literature was valued as a rarified mode of language use or as a privileged carrier of social and moral values, its worth did not need to be argued for. That changed in the last decades of the twentieth century, when a number of feminist, postcolonial, and other critical perspective launched a radical critique of the literary canon, and approaches inspired by Pierre Bourdieu’s critical sociology debunked claims to literary distinction as covert strategies for social promotion. From this revisionary perspective also, however, the question of literary value was not really open: if it had been pre-empted before by the default assumption that literature was self-evidently valuable, its significance as more than a mere social strategy now became automatically suspect.
That literary value can no longer be either simply assumed or categorically dismissed—and that the question of literary value has thus finally been broached—has something to do with the fact that today, the question of literary value is not only no longer rhetorical; it is also no longer merely theoretical. Dwindling readerships, shortening attention spans, shrinking numbers of English majors, increasing competition from other commodities and media, and the realization that today’s elites can very well do without what John Guillory called “the cultural capital of the old bourgeoisie” (1993, 45) have made the distinctive value of literature more uncertain than ever. In this context, simply deflating claims to literary value risks turning into a self-fulfilling and literature-destroying prophecy.
In his book The Problem of Literary Value, Robert Meyer-Lee divides customary approaches to the question of literary value into two categories: ontological approaches, which apodictically state what the value of literature is; and genealogical approaches, which deconstruct and relativize value claims by highlighting the contexts that gave rise to them (2023, 70-98). The problem with these two approaches is that they capture only part of how literary value actually functions. Take, as examples of the ontological approach, Peter Boxall’s statement, in his book The Value of the Novel, that the novel has the power “to represent our shared communities and to suspend the ties that bind them” (2015, 12); or Hanna Meretoja and Pirjo Lyytikäinen claim, in their volume Values of Literature, that literature can do “different things”, “ranging from affirmation of social dogmas to its capacities for self-questioning and challenging of moral certainties” (2015, 3); or, most famously perhaps, Rita Felski’s case for the Uses of Literature that advertises its capacity to offer shock, recognition, enchantment, and knowledge (2008).
None of these statements is wrong, exactly. But none answers the question of literary value either: instead, they situate literature within “an anthropology of human needs and desires” (Guillory 1993, 301). They name some of the uses of literature, but they do not situate literature in the context in which it has had to operate in the last two centuries: the context of a capitalist market in which claims to literary value are, as Gerold Sedlmayr and Nathan Taylor demonstrate in detail in their contributions to this issue, complexly entangled with the issue of economic value. Naming the uses of literature does not explain why these uses matter—why they deserve to circulate and thrive in a situation marked by (while not totally subsumed by) economic exchange. As Guillory notes, “[t]he very concept of aesthetic value betrays the continued pressure of economic discourse on the language of aesthetics” (317). Affirmations of literature’s uses do not factor in that pressure.
If turning towards the relationship between literature and financial value looks outward to the economy at large, a more inward gaze has focused on the relationship between value and form, a long-standing concern of literary studies that is given a new twist in this issue by Antje Kley. Where a specifically literary complexity was dear to the New Critics, a more contemporary version espouses the sophistication of prizewinning novels, often moving from strictly formal concerns to the ethical value of literature. In her contribution, Natalya Bekhta draws attention to the unequal distribution of value within literature’s generic system. Bekhta argues that the prominence of the novel, and especially its Anglophone variant, has led to a situation where other genres are taken to task—that is, are denied value—for not conforming to novelistic conventions. Turning from novels to graphic novels, Alexander Dunst argues that we need to look more closely at the interactions between literature and the wider media ecology of which it forms a part to understand how value is produced.
Addressing the question of literary value, then, invites us to account for the (at least) double nature of literature under capitalism: the obvious fact that literature is a commodity, and the equally undeniable fact that in many ways it is not simply a commodity like any other. Even if art and literature are, as Arne De Boever argues in his contribution to this issue, rigorously unexceptional, they are not for all that entirely mundane. The frantic activity on dedicated reading and reviewing platforms—from Youtube and TikTok to Goodreads and Archive of Our Own—show that literature still courts intense attachment. And the difference between, say, Fifty Shades of Grey, and Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead is hard to theorize (which is why it is an open question!), but it is even more impossible to deny. This double nature is not something to simply posit or debunk, but it is something to investigate.
In The Problem of Literary Value, Meyer-Lee undoes the stand-off between ontological and genealogical approaches by proposing a pragmatic account—one that attends to the ways that value is actually produced, justified, challenged, and circulated. In the field of sociology, also, the Bourdieusian critique of value has been complemented by a more descriptive pragmatics of valuation. These pragmatic approaches to value study, in sociologist Michèle Lamont’s words, “how value is produced, diffused, assessed, and institutionalized across a range of settings” (2012, 203). For Nathalie Heinich, this involves a shift “from value to valuation”: from the simple assertion of particular values to the “close observation of the operations by which actors actually manifest the value they assign to this object” (2020, 77). Such manifestations of value need not be verbal or argumentative: they can also exist in modes of measurement (a Goodreads score, a graph of the rising number of downloads) or attachment (gifting a book as a birthday present or carrying it around as a marker of good taste or performative masculinity).
While outside of the study of literature, this pragmatic orientation has spawned the interdisciplinary domain of valuation studies (the journal of that name has been going since 2013; the field brings together anthropological, sociological, and economic approaches), it has made few inroads into literary studies (Phillipa Chong’s study of book critics [2020] is an exception). Meyer-Lee’s work suggests that literature could profit from such a pragmatics of valuation. He distinguishes between things which are tightly bound with their value (think of the relation between pizza and “hunger satisfaction” [2023, 103]) and entities marked by a loose binding. Literature clearly falls within the latter. The idea of a loose binding helps explain how literature can be—and has historically been—linked to many different values. Indeed, the instability of the bond between literature and other values means that the articulation between literature and extraliterary values is not only possible but also increasingly compulsory: Meyer-Lee notes that “the characteristic loose binding of literary value both facilitates and, by that same token, demands linkage to other-than-literary values” (108). As Pieter Vermeulen observes in his contribution to this issue, such explicit linkages are today more necessary than ever, as literature no longer holds the self-evident power it once had—a situation he sees emblematized in Hugo Simberg’s painting The Wounded Angel, which he presents as a diminished and pale counterpart to (Walter Benjamin’s elevation of) Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus.
The looseness of the association between literature and value, then, circumscribes the terrain where the (at least) double nature of literary value can be explored. Ascriptions of value need not be logically consistent: their job is to provide compelling (rather than logical) links that effectively situate literature in discursive contexts that sustain in. This “capaciousness and flexibility” of literary value ascriptions means that “they may plausibly mediate a range of rather different or even antithetical values, without contradiction or incoherence” (Meyer-Lee 116). This tolerance for logical inconsistency (as when a work of literature is valued at the same time for, say, representing minority voices and, say, being a sophisticated work of metafiction) in value justifications emphatically does not mean that our value attachments—to certain writers, to certain works, to a certain idea of the literary—are entirely fungible. On the contrary, it means that the power of those attachments overrides issues of consistency. Günter Leypoldt underlines in his contribution that our strong attachments to literature—which for Leypoldt coexist with weak attachments to them, as when we indifferently select a book to kill time with on the beach—do not allow for relativism. If relativism has often been a theoretical postulate, in the context of literary value, it is rarely a lived reality. This also comes through in Maria Mäkelä’s contribution, which situates the question of contemporary literary value in the digital story economy. This context, which Mäkelä sees as the nonnegotiable milieu in which contemporary authorship operates, compels writers to sustain a consistent narrative about themselves across different media. While this encompassing context exerts an undeniable pressure on the forms and themes of literature, it does not abolish the (let’s call it) semi-autonomy of authors to position themselves in and against that economy.
Several contributions show that the question of the (semi-)autonomy of literature is also a methodological one. As Arne De Boever underlines, posing the question of literary value from a sociological perspective in a way already concedes that that value is a radically truncated one, as literature is hardly given a voice in addressing the question of its own valuation. Several of the contributions to this issue insist that the question of literature value hinges on literature’s residual capacity to emancipate itself from this selbstverschuldete Unmündigkeit: De Boever turns to contemporary fiction as the site where the question of value is negotiated; Antje Kley insists that literary value rests on form (a formulation in which every term matters); and Gerold Sedlmayr argues that any hope of overcoming capitalist value regimes depends on literary values. Cumulatively, the contributions to the issue certainly do not solve the question of literary value. Then again, they might allow us to pose it more carefully.
References
Boxall, Peter. 2015. The Value of the Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Chong, Phillipa K. 2021. Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Felski, Rita. 2008. Uses of Literature. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.
Guillory, John. 1993. Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Heinich, Nathalie. 2020. “A Pragmatic Redefinition of Value(s): Toward a General Model of Valuation”. Theory, Culture & Society 37, no. 5, 2020: 75–79.
Lamont, Michèle. 2012. “Toward a Comparative Sociology of Valuation and Evaluation”. Annual Review of Sociology 38, no. 1: 201–21.
Meretoja, Hanna, and Pirjo Lyytikäinen, editors. 2015. Values of Literature. Leiden: Brill.
Meyer-Lee, Robert J. 2023. The Problem of Literary Value. Manchester: Manchester University Press.