Figure 1. Hugo Simberg, The Wounded Angel. Wikimedia Commons.

This article is part of the b2o: an online journal special issue “The Question of Literary Value”, edited by Alexander Dunst and Pieter Vermeulen. 

Literary Value is Nonliterary Value

Pieter Vermeulen

Ever since it was first shown to the public during the exhibition of the Finnish Artists’ Association in Helsinki in October 1903, Hugo Simberg’s painting The Wounded Angel has continued to elude stable interpretation. When the work was first exhibited, Simberg “put a long dash where its title should have been” (Levanto 1993, 78); he only provided a title when the painting was later submitted for a Prize competition. No further interpretive clues were offered. The painting presents two ordinary boys (whom Seamus Heaney, in his poem inspired by the painting, refers to as “manchild number one” and “manchild number two” [qtd. in Karhio 2012, 34]), one of whom looks at the viewer with what one commentator has called “an expression of worried solitude and remorseful restraint” (Heinz 2011, 143). On the stretcher they carry between them, we see an androgynous figure that looks like an angel— with its wings and white dress. If the boys are clearly presented as “sturdy, robust, and rooted in the earth” (Lakeland 2017, 157), the angelic figure does not for all that offer a clear contrasting figure of ephemeral transcendence: one of its wings is injured and seemingly smeared with blood, and its pure whiteness is spoiled by what look like traces of dirt from its encounter with the soil. Its dirty head bowed, the creature carries a bunch of flowers, which look like the same flowers that also dot the scene’s background. There is an undeniable awkwardness in this constellation of figures: rooted in the earth, condemned to one another, yet visibly mismatched.

The Wounded Angel has often been read biographically, as presenting “an image of victory over fatal illness” after Simberg’s recovery from a disease that almost killed him (Levanto 1993, 81). It has also been read as a religious admonishment, accusing the audience of having fallen short of buoying up the angel through proper acts of faith (Lakeland 2017, xi). Yet such readings of the painting as either a reminder of transcendence  or “an internalized and transfigured depiction of a personal passion play” (Levanto 1993, 81) do not fully account for the eminently enfleshed nature of the constellation of figures: the awkwardness of bodies thrown into proximity of and dependency on one another. This embarrassment is expressed in the three figures’ resolute avoidance of eye contact with one another: the boy in front expressionless, staring in front of him; the angel’s eyes cast to the ground; the boy at the back staring at the audience as if to accuse them of having failed to prevent him from having to adopt responsibility for the angel so prematurely. The grown-ups who could have saved these figures from each other, it seems, have left the scene. However unwillingly, the boys and the angel are abandoned to one another.

Which is to say: whatever diminished suggestion of transcendence the painting conveys is sustained by the boys carrying the angelic figure. The suggestion of transcendence—or indeed semi-transcendence: angels have, after all, only ever been “God’s middle managers” (Kotsko 2012), they have never been properly divine—depends on the acts of care of two decidedly earthly creatures. Far from having the power to redeem the world it has joined, the angel has itself become a pale part of an irredeemably mundane reality. As Paul Bové notes in his interpretation of the painting, the wounded angel is “thrown at [the manchildren’s] feet, in a truly mundane landscape” and “become[s] a burden from which they cannot escape” (Bové 2021, 36). Yet if the angel depends on the boys’ support, they also in a very real sense depend on it: in the trackless landscape, on a road to nowhere specific, at an age too old for innocence and too young for self-confidence, for the boys, in their nondescript clothes, it is the assignment to sustain the angel that orients their movement and endows them with, just perhaps, some sense of purpose. In a world abandoned by transcendent powers, the source of that assignment can only be the fragility and vulnerability of the angel itself—a kind of wounded albatross around their necks. It is this circularity (a fragility that compels acts of care that sustain the belief in something that transcends fragility) that saves the paintings’ scene of abandonment from becoming a desultory scene of dejection.

Something that once intimated the existence of higher things; something that once participated in those higher things, but that now depends on secular support to escape its reduction to the merely mundane: if this description captures the tenuous existence of Simberg’s wounded angel, it is also, I submit, a suitable emblem for the social life of literature today. If the value of literature used to be self-evident, it no longer is. Today, literature finds itself in competition with other commodities that spark joy and offer meaning: videogames, hiking trips, shopping apps, woodworking workshops (the triviality of this list is the point). Nor can literature be counted on to provide the cultural capital that it once offered. Already in 1993, Jon Guillory foresaw that the prestige that literary sophistication used to provide would become “increasingly marginal” to new elites and that we would soon see the consolidation of a “professional-managerial class which no longer requires the cultural capital of the old bourgeoisie” (Guillory 1993, x, 45). Today, the ultra-rich who rule the world no longer show any interest in literature.

Today, there is very little that prevents literature from being reduced to the status of a pure commodity. In this situation, the backlash against the traditional humanist celebration of literary value that arrived in literary studies in the last quarter of the twentieth century—most notably in work inspired by Pierre Bourdieu, which disarmed claims to literary value as covert strategies for social promotion—is not something that literary culture can really afford. With the distinctiveness of literature as something other than a commodity at stake, the persistence of literary value cannot be taken for granted. Which is to say: literary value is something that has to be actively justified in order for literature to persist.  

There is very little that prevents literature from being reduced to the status of a pure commodity, just as there is preciously little that saves Simberg’s creaturely angelic figure from its abandonment to the merely mundane. Except, of course, the care of the manchildren, who somehow respond to the angel’s vulnerability, its demand for succor, and who make that response their mission. Literature, also, today depends on explicit legitimations of its value by its stakeholders: publishers, writers, translators, reviewers, critics, teachers, and others who make up literary culture. In the field of sociology, a Bourdieu-style critical sociology that sees it as its mission to puncture claims to distinctive value has, since the 1990s, been complemented by a less overtly normative and more descriptive pragmatic orientation that observes how value is generated and articulated in particular situations. This entails 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” (Heinich 2021, 77). Such pragmatic approaches study, in sociologist Michèle Lamont’s words, “how value is produced, diffused, assessed, and institutionalized across a range of settings” (Lamont 2012, 203). This pragmatics of valuation has made few inroads into literary studies, where the overtly Bourdieu-inspired projects of Gisèle Sapiro and Pascale Casanova continue to define the contours of world literary studies, and where a more covertly Bourdieusian literary sociological ethos continues to animate the study of post-45 literature. The muted example of Simberg’s Wounded Angel suggests that a more pragmatic consideration of actual valuation discourses might be more attuned to the awkward reality of contemporary literature’s existence on the contraptions that keep it suspended between transcendence and banality.

Once we attend to the pragmatics of valuation—the discursive stretchers that sustain the illusion that literature remains afloat, even if Simberg’s painting shows the angel’s garment to drag along the ground—we notice that they increasingly justify the existence of literature (as more than a commodity) by tying literature to more robust value domains. Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, the singularity of literature has often been justified in nonliterary terms: through its singular capacity to witness to past atrocities (consider, for example, W.G. Sebald or Nobel Prize winners like Imre Kertész, Herta Müller, Svetlana Alexievich, or Han Kang whose work involves trauma); to forge empathetic connections (the biofictions of Colum McCann and Colm Tóibín for example come to mind; but one can think also of the newly sincere David Foster Wallace Industrial Complex); or to imagine cosmopolitan communities (in the dejected mode of Teju Cole’s Open City, for instance, or in more upbeat and sprawling globe-spanning novels or novels of migration). Literary value is sustained through its articulation with political, ethical, affective, and memorial value domains. These domains serve as what sociologist Niklas Luhmann calls “Anlehnungskontexte”: “supporting contexts” that sustain a literature no longer capable of sustaining itself (Luhmann 1995, 256). In this dispensation, where commodification and delegitimation work to reduce the distinctiveness of literature, literary value is always nonliterary value: it is an effect of successfully justifying literature in nonliterary terms.

The angel’s downward gaze, in its avoidance of eye contact, conveys that this is in many ways a shameful situation: a situation of dependence and fragility. The angel could decide to cover its eyes with the bandana, but it instead faces up to its disgraceful condition (an awful lot of contemporary literature obsessively thematizes its own quasi-redundancy). The first manchild’s expressionless gaze conveys that theirs is a task that needs to be performed and that asking questions is a luxury they cannot afford. The second manchild’s confrontational gaze, for its part, betrays a resentful if impotent memory of a time when our relation to literature was plain and pleasant. Yet he marches on; the muted palette of the landscape and the grayed sky have little else to offer. 

Let’s also say explicitly what Simberg’s wounded angel is most pointedly not: it is not Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus, a figure that more confidently radiates spirituality, and even less the angel of history that Walter Benjamin saw in Klee’s painting and that critical theory developed into a paradigmatic figure of historical witness to suffering. Indeed, the angel of history’s famed capacity to condense “a chain of events” into “one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage” was often elevated into a poster figure for critical theory’s ethos of witnessing to historical atrocities without “mak[ing] whole what has been smashed” (Benjamin 1968, 257)—without canceling the fragmentation it records. This messianic capacity for heightened witnessing without false integration can be repurposed as an allegory, not only for the project of critical theory, but also for a particular conception of literature’s transcendent powers (its paradoxical power, that is, for indexing the universal or the spiritual while remaining committed to the everyday—a conception that is as central to the work of someone like Erich Auerbach as it is to the reflections of the New Criticism). Yet that conception is not the one we find in literary value discourse today: the insistence on literature’s capacity of witnessing, while widespread (in the reception of Sebald, in the proliferation of trauma fiction), is less a celebration of transcendent power than a somewhat desperate way of articulating literary with memorial value so as to avoid that literature comes crashing down to earth and never gets up again. This is the situation emblematized in Simberg’s lesser angel. As Bové notes in his comparison of the two figures, Simberg’s creature “does not … bring messianic redemption from history but adds itself—in its perpetual failure—as a ruin to the … world” (Bové 2021, 34). Simberg’s angel inhabits the world not as a redemptive force but as a thing that becomes part of an unredeemed reality.

Importantly, relating literary to nonliterary value is only half of the work that literary value discourse needs to perform. The relation between literature and other value domains cannot become too intimate, so as to avoid that literature is absorbed by them. Justifying literature through its capacity for enhancing empathy, for instance, should not end up as an advertisement for the powers of empathy—which can then be reattached to, say, videogames or mindfulness training. Celebrating literature’s capacity for reconnecting to the past is perfectly useless for the persistence of literary distinction if the value of reconnecting to the past can best be satisfied through, say, AI creations, or even plain old historiography. The articulation of literary and nonliterary value, then, needs to strike a delicate balance between forging a compelling association and yet insisting on the distinctive literariness of that connection. In contemporary literary culture, the insistent distinctiveness of literature is preserved through a preference for works that are, while far from experimental, at least formally interesting: self-reflexive (often in the guise of autofiction), often multimedial (again: Sebald is a crucial example here), intertextual and somewhat mysterious in the way different narrative units are juxtaposed (which explains the prevalence of parataxis, or juxtaposition without subordination, in the narrative grammar of so many celebrated works of twenty-first-century literature). Ambitious works of literature today aggressively insist on their literariness so as to make sure the discourses connecting them to more robust value domains don’t absorb them. Literary value, today, persists through an always tenuous balance between external justification and aggressive differentiation from nonliterary realities.

In Simberg’s painting, this insistence on distinction is most apparent in the curved shape of the creature’s wings. The rest of the painting is marked by straight if slightly sloping lines: the upstanding manchildren, not yet tall enough to carry the composition; the nearly symmetrical borders of the mountains, the lake, and the land; and the two symmetrical lines of the stretcher that, while fated to be kept straight, cannot quite avoid the tendency to follow the slight slant of the landscape. The wings, Lance Olsen notes, are arching up “like gigantic feathery parentheses separating her from the surrounding text of the world” (Olsen 2003, 111). If this painting seemed to escape the complexity and vulnerability of the literary condition I have taken it to emblematize, it here begins to be infected by the instability it seemed to ward off. Parentheses separate, but parentheses are, if nothing else, also inescapably textual. They always risk being read as merely more text. There, for now, is where literary value persists.

References

Benjamin, Walter. 1968. Illuminations: Essays and Reflections.  New York: Harcourt, Brace & World.

Bové, Paul. 2021. Love’s Shadow. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Guillory, John. 1993. Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Heinich, Nathalie. 2021. “Emotions and Valuations: Notre-Dame de Paris on Fire as a Case Study for Axiological Sociology”. Valuation Studies 8, no. 1: 63–79.

Heinz, Anderson. 2011. “It’s All In the Eyes”. Mercer Street 2: 141–45.  

Karhio, Anne. 2012. “Seamus Heaney, Paul Durcan and Hugo Simberg’s Wounded Angel”. Nordic Irish Studies 11, no. 1: 27–38.

Kotsko, Adam. 2012. “Agamben Symposium: Adam Kotsko”. Political Theology Network 11 June. https://politicaltheology.com/agamben-symposium-adam-kotsko/.  

Lakeland, Paul. 2017. The Wounded Angel: Fiction and the Religious Imagination. Collegeville, Minnesota: Liturgical Press.

Lamont, Michèle. 2012. “Toward a Comparative Sociology of Valuation and Evaluation”. Annual Review of Sociology 38, no. 1: 201–21.

Levanto, Marjatta. 1993. Hugo Simberg: ja Haavoittunut enkeli / Sårad Ängel / The Wounded Angel. Helsinki: Finnish National Gallery.

Luhmann, Niklas. 1995. Die Kunst der Gesellschaft. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.

Olsen, Lance. 2003. “The Wounded Angel”. The Iowa Review 33, no. 1: 109–21.

Stephen Doyle, “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (John Le Carré)”; courtesy of the artist.

This article is part of the b2o: an online journal special issue “The Question of Literary Value”, edited by Alexander Dunst and Pieter Vermeulen.

Literary Value Rests on Form

Antje Kley

This essay examines each of the terms of its title claim in an attempt to contribute to the current discussion of both the value of literature in a multimedia age, and of the authority that literature may be attributed in, for instance, interdisciplinary work.

Laying out the field of literary valuation, Pieter Vermeulen (2023) draws a distinction between two current types of value assessment in literary studies, the accounts of which he finds either sociologically reductive or unduly detached from literature’s market context.[1] Vermeulen argues that the first type is interested in the instrumental relation between literature and the market: work by such authors as Dan Sinykin, Mark McGurl, Alexander Manshel, and Jeremy Rosen “tends to cast claims to literary value as strategic efforts to occupy particular market niches—most notably the niche of ‘Lit Fic’” (1232). The second type of value assessment—presented in Vermeulen’s account by Rita Felski—is interested in literature’s aesthetic uses. To avoid the shortcomings of both, Vermeulen draws on recent sociological work in the wake of Bourdieu—by Luc Boltanski, Natalie Heinich, and Michèle Lamont—that develops a pragmatics of valuation dedicated to accounting for “how value is generated and articulated in concrete interactions” (1233).

My own take on value and authority is interested in the literary textures or materialities that invite or justify valuation rather than in the grammar of public valuation in specific instances. Vermeulen might therefore group my argument along with Felski’s, but both our concerns ultimately grapple with that unequal field of tension between the market and aesthetics.[1]

Literary value rests on form. It sometimes seems that, in a capitalist world, value cannot be thought outside of economic market logics (Herrnstein Smith 1995, 178; Vermeulen 2023, 1232). In the interest of developing a critical perspective, it also seems vital, at the same time, not to surrender to those logics altogether and to continue articulating other types of value that matter to us. Therefore, I propose to heuristically tone down the noise of the literary market and its value ascriptions in order to focus on the affordances of literary textuality in comparison to other forms of text such as legal, political, scholarly, scientific, or journalistic writing. For now, I’m less interested in how one literary text is valued over others, but primarily in the basis on which texts within the uneven and dynamic field of publishing are recognized and valued as literary in contradistinction to nonliterary types of text. What, in other words, does literary writing—as opposed to legal writing or journalism—have to offer to socially situated reading subjects within the context of variously mediatized ecologies of attention and knowledge?

My claim is that any writing presented as literary invites diverse types of vicarious aesthetic experience by its construction of imaginary worlds, and by temporarily allowing reading subjects some degree of distance from their specific social contexts. The effects of aesthetic experience in immersive or close-reading processes are hard to pin down. Scholars who take aesthetic experience seriously rather than dismissing it as frivolous or pointless have variously described it as relaxing, reassuring, refreshing, emotionally intense, activating, informative, intellectually invigorating, or in some other way expansive. Through the reading subject and their contexts of reception, the affordances of literary textuality connect different types of worlds: imaginary models and empirical realities. In this respect, literature is ill-described as an autonomous realm that exists unfettered from economics, politics, and the cares of the rest of the world.[4] In contradistinction to such claims to aesthetic autonomy—and against the charge of attempting to de-commodify a clearly commercial product (Vermeulen 2023, 1232)—, I acknowledge both the inevitably social and economic nature of any kind of writing and the social and institutional framing of processes of evaluation. At the same time, culturally heterogenous versions of literary writing are de-pragmatized in ways that journalistic writing, scholarship, legal writing, and political argument are not. De-pragmatized uses of language—i.e. language uses uncoupled from field-specific functional strictures—may result in an imaginative but hardly an economic “otherworldliness”, nor in a “blissfully de-commodified celebration of the uses of literature” (Vermeulen 2023, 1232).

So, I seek to elucidate the value of literary forms of language use that, in the process of functional social differentiation, have come loose from direct instrumental or pragmatic ties—which is not the same as becoming autonomous in the sense of ‘art for art’s sake’. Instrumental or pragmatic ties put systematic constraints on the play of language in such fields as journalism, theoretical and empirical research, politics, or the law. In contradistinction to these latter fields, the field of literature enjoys the capacity and freedom to project ideas in explicitly imaginative ways: speculation, satirical or ironic distortion, the fantastic, genre patterns, incompatible perspectives, artifice, self-referentiality and metafiction have their proper place here.

Roland Barthes elaborates this distinction between different social fields’ textual production and their respective relation to language in his essay “From Science to Literature” (1989). He compares non-pragmatic literary discourse to linguistically much more constrained discourses, using as an example the empirical sciences. While scientific and literary discourse are both constituted in language, he argues, they “do not assume—do not profess—the language which constitutes them in the same way” (4). In scientific discourse, language is used as a transparent instrument subservient to scientific “operations, hypotheses, and results” (4; see also Daston and Galison 2010); for literature, in contrast, language is its condition of existence. Barthes’ claim can be said to pertain to heterogeneous manifestations of the literary, from the literary classic to genre fiction, experimental poetry to aphorism, from realist and experimentalist drama to street and post-dramatic theater. Arguably, in the multimedia age, manifestations of the literary in different media still offer the one arena in which the exploration of the materiality, the inherent logic, and the powers of language has its place—along with the practice of “prolonging [or recalibrating] our attention” (Guillory 2025, 83) in the process of reading or listening.

I share Barthes’ appreciation for the literary exploration of language in its explicit and contextualized production of truth claims. According to his argument, literary writing’s existence in and playful exploration of language throw into sharp relief the construction of objective truth that, in the empirical sciences, for instance, passes innocently through seemingly neutral registers of language.[5] Along these lines, Ansgar and Vera Nünning speak of literature, and in particular narrative fiction, as self-reflexive “world-building institutions” which serve to test what is involved in processes of worldmaking, self-making, community-building, and truth-claiming (2010, 12–16). Revealing truth as a discursive product does not devalue it but shows its dependence on contextualized construction and defense. Literary language has the capacity to flesh out the ethical and political implications of this epistemological assumption.

As Barthes argues:

Ethically, it is solely by the passage through language that literature pursues the disturbance of the essential concepts of our culture, “reality” chief among them. Politically, it is by professing (and illustrating) that no language is innocent, … that literature is revolutionary. (5)

Affirming Barthes’ structuralist take on the ethical and political value and function of literary language, I see those functions at work in literary writing as it transports readers to fictional worlds. This transport, enabled by de-pragmatized forms of language use, produces a distinct gap between the reality that shapes readers’ lives and a different world that provides fictional vantage points from which to assess the realities that readers believe they know.

I am using the term ‘gap’ here in a different way than Wolfgang Iser does in his reception theory. Whereas Iser (1974) refers to semantic gaps within texts—formal features that call for imaginative bridging by the reader—, I refer to an epistemological gap. Produced through form, this is a gap between a fictional world and the reader’s experiential world: an extra-textual gap which calls on the reader to relate the two worlds. That gap between real and imaginary worlds may, depending on the use of form, assume various qualities, sizes, and dimensions. Literary form might push that gap into the foreground, exhibit and reflect its qualities. Or it might make the gap slight and hide it behind the suggestion of mimesis. Alternatively, form might work towards giving the gap changing shapes within a single text. The literary ‘suspension of disbelief’ and the affective and/or intellectual involvement or immersion this suspension elicits may serve to question, expand, renegotiate, or transform established archives of knowledge, experience, norms, and values. The reader’s multisensory involvement may also provide comfort, reaffirmation and closure. Imaginative fictional worlds and the gaps they produce in relation to readers’ lived realities might delight, provide “critical solace” (James 2016; 2019), temporary respite, escape, or an intellectual endeavor—some type of pleasurable, vicarious aesthetic experience that opens new vistas of an unknown provenance. Through play, irony, fantasy, contradiction, exaggeration, temporal or spatial distance, literary texts open up alternative forms of understanding inner and outer worlds.

According to Sacvan Bercovitch, the function of such displaced literary doublings of the world is “to challenge our knowledge of [the world out there] in ways that return us more concretely, with more searching cultural specificity, to our nontranscendent realities” (1998, 71).[6] However, these new vistas are not in themselves benevolent or gainful, as an aggressive cultural politics from the “alternative right” makes all too clear.[7] As Ansgar and Vera Nünning remind us: “because any and every constructed world serves particular interests” it is “important to defend the plurality of worlds against the desire of homogenisation” (2010, 4). Media-generated worlds, and literary language in particular, provide space for reflection, for affective and cognitive development, as well as invitations to adopt ideas of various shades and guises. Evaluating those ideas requires contextualization and defense.

Making value judgments—i.e., the practice of distinguishing those texts that we find compelling from the ones we don’t, and explaining why—thus becomes a more explicitly normative issue. Particularly in light of a worldwide trend toward an aggressive cultural politics fueled by alternative-right populism, it is worthwhile to articulate contextualized and well-argued normative evaluations of a literary work’s ethics and politics. Michael Clune is one critic who has explicitly pursued this in his Defense of Judgment (2021). He claims that “for decades now”, professors of literature “have felt unable to defend” and have “bent over backwards to disguise” the value judgments they make (1–2). The barriers he lists to articulating artistic values—from elitism and subjectivity to narrowmindedness and irrelevance—are very recognizable (2). Clune also argues that the “resistance to judgment is historically and conceptually bound up with commercial culture” (3), so that artistic criteria have become all but elided by consumer preferences and market mechanisms (183). His claim aligns with my contention that insisting on valuation as a predominantly economic process abandons the idea that other types of value might even exist.

At the same time, Clune’s argument insists—a little recklessly, to my mind—that a commitment to artistic judgment requires giving up on a foundational concern with form in order to distill a text’s ideas:

The prospect of judging works by the quality of the ideas they contain cuts against the perennial formalism of the field, the tendency—derived from Kantian aesthetics—to turn every question about the artistic value of literature into a question of form. … [I]n practice [formalism] prevents literary scholars from constructing viable interdisciplinary methods adequate to literary content’s inevitable traversal of disciplinary boundaries. (100)

Clune demands that an artistic evaluation practice must separate content from form, that it must scrape ideas from their apparently superfluous packaging, so that they might find a larger audience who might be distressed by reflections of form. For the sake of his argument, Clune adopts a parochial sense of formalism. While briefly acknowledging that the “capacity to interpret and evaluate the formal dimensions of works is important” (106)—a strange acknowledgement, given that following his line of argument, it remains unclear why it would be—, he describes formalist reading as radically self-contained, limiting or “reducing literary value to formal criteria” (105, emphasis mine). Instead, he proposes distilling “literary ideas” (104) that would interest people beyond literary studies, separating them from reflections on form, because those “simply … don’t matter” outside of literary studies (106).

I see two major points of contention here. First, it might make sense, in specific contexts, to focus on the results rather than the process of a principled consideration of a literary text’s formal mediation of its ideas. But that does not cancel the necessity of registering the affordances of the literary text’s form. Moreover, since a literary text’s language and structure are not transparent, its ideas are hard if not impossible to separate from their formal mediation. Secondly, any concern with form goes beyond a self-sufficient enumerative identification of formal devices. In an explication of function, an account of form relates formal devices to literary historical, socio-cultural, economic and geopolitical contexts of production and reception (Levine 2015).[8]

Three brief examples may serve to indicate how literary forms afford the particular delivery of the respective texts’ content. We might, for instance, find significant interventions into and expansions on public discourse in Anna Deavere Smith’s one-woman play Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992. The script pulls passages from some 300 interviews and casts them into a series of monologues which comment on the LA riots from a variety of specifically situated perspectives. The condensation and collage of the monologues and the presentation of the various subject positions from which they are uttered by a single versatile actor draws focused and extended attention to the multilayered social and cultural concerns involved in the riots. Similarly, we might find that Claudia Rankine’s short lyric essays in her collection Citizen (2014) expand the vocabulary, syntax, and semantics of public discourse. In the aftermath of the deaths of Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, and Renisha McBride, Rankine’s adaptation of the lyric tradition (which traditionally favors interiority) minutely details the experience of racialization and allows individualized experience to resonate collectively. The integration of multi-medial visual images in the printed material and the creation of repetition, fluid transitions, and echo effects serve to focus and dilate readers’ attention to the publicly relevant implications between private experience and structural conditions. In my third example, Hernan Diaz’s historical novel Trust (2022), we might find a story of misogyny and capital’s assertion in the face of economic crisis in an experimental fourfold novel-within-a-novel. Beginning with a fictional story of a Wallstreet tycoon, followed by the tycoon’s memoir and the story of the memoir’s ghost writing, the novel ends with the diary of the tycoon’s wife. The text’s shifting perspectives and registers afforded by the fourfold narrative structure shed light on gender and class relations, the interdependencies of cultural and economic capital, the interlocking dynamics of public and private conflict, and the production of authority and truth.

Literary value rests on form. Thinking about how to articulate the connection between literary value and literary form, I settled on ‘resting on’. The phrase is somewhat nondescript. ‘Rests on’ sounds as if the connection between value and form were unproblematic and static—as if value just sits there, resting. The phrase also invites the question whether the first gust of wind will sweep value off its ‘resting place’. One reason why this special issue is launched is that we perceive the winds around the value of literature to be high. I take the connection between literary value and literary form to be a wind-resistant, even if highly adaptable one. I would call this adaptably stable connection to form constitutive of the literary. This is not the same thing as claiming that literary study is “reduc[ible]”, “restrict[ed]” or “identical to the study of form”, as Clune fears the profession insists (2021, 105, 107). Indeed, Clune’s own reading practice undermines his claims regarding the separability of form and content. While his readings do not foreground form, they generate their articulation of the text’s ideas from a consideration of form. Clune’s reading of Dickinson’s poem “I heard a Fly buzz—when I died—”, for instance, refers to lines, stanzas, aesthetic structure, tense arrangements, self-reflexivity, the speaker, voice, and perspective; it points out ambiguities and contextualizes theoretically as well as historically in order to explain the poem’s literary knowledge production about death. Literature in all its diverse guises delivers content in recourse to form. ^[9] Clune’s call for a non-objectifiable engagement with the literary text speaks to a lifeline between literary value and form (106–107): He suggests that readers submit their “values, concepts, and perceptions to reorganization by the work” (183). This reorganization of readers’ senses necessarily relies on the forms in which the myriad, undisciplined ideas literary writing projects, are cast.

To be clear, I share Clune’s impatience with a type of formalism that chooses to remain inattentive to the social relations which allow texts to resonate (131). His generalizing insistence that “[t]he formalism practiced by literary critics has no extraliterary significance” (2021, 104), however, is carelessly overstated (see also James 2023, 821–24). It is overstated in particular in light of his own project of strengthening outspoken evaluations of literary knowledge production which, as I have argued, rests on form in adaptable but structurally stable ways.

Literary value rests on form. I use ‘form’ as a capacious term that includes the affordances—the possible functions—that forms assume in specific historical, social, and institutional contexts of production and reception. Clearly, I am not concerned with isolated identifications of rhyme schemes or renditions of consciousness. No form is self-sufficient. Levine (2015) has clarified that forms of speaking, of material construction, and of social action are always connected to contexts of production and reception, to other forms and their functions in specific contexts (see also Funk, Huber, and Roxburgh 2019). Literary form in particular encompasses language registers and imagery; rhythm and the handling of time, space, and setting; the orchestration of voices, perspectives, and character constellations; intermedial allusion and narrative or mythical patterns, as well as genre traditions. On the basis of these devices and the suspension of disbelief they orchestrate, literary form invites reading subjects to understand projected imaginary worlds in relation to and beyond what they know—experientially, cognitively, and implicitly—about themselves and about their environments.

With Gayatri Spivak, I would contend that careful reading practices attuned to the specificities of literary language and to the variations of literary form “enhance rather than detract from the political” force of literary writing (2012, 351–52). Special attention to the specificities of literary form allows readers to read beyond (while always in the light of) what they already know. Peter Boxall explains the affordances of literary form as the twin effects of representation and critique of social realities (2015, 11). He advances his argument in reference to the novel, but I propose to expand it to literature in general to claim that literary writing “both shapes the world and resists its demands” (12). Literary form deserves attributions of value because it connects imaginary and non-transcendent realities. More specifically, literary writing sets, as Boxall writes,

the relationship between art and matter, between words and the world, into a kind of motion, to work at the disappearing threshold between the world that exists and that which does not, between the world that we already know and understand and that which we have not yet encountered. (13)

The value of imaginary worlds constructed in form thus lies in their capacity to sustain our thinking and our being by training our imagination to reach beyond what we already know (Spivak 2012, 353; Boxall 2015, 37–38).

By way of conclusion, I return to my initial question: what does specifically literary writing have to offer to socially situated reading subjects within the context of variously mediated ecologies of attention and knowledge? I have argued that specifically literary writing derives the contour and strength of its ideas from its formal mediation. It explores the shaping powers of language that are neither innocent nor transparent; it gathers, recalibrates, or prolongs readers’ attention; and it thus invites readers to suspend disbelief and transports them to imaginary vantage points. With its affordances, literary writing trains ways of looking at the world through the perspectives it provides, and it resists or accommodates the world’s demands. It exercises the muscle of readers’ imaginations to sustain their thinking and being beyond what they already know or believe they know. With its readings attentive to form, literary studies may bring this authority of the literary to interdisciplinary research contexts, enriching them with specifically literary forms of knowledge production.

References

Barthes, Roland. 1989 [1967]. “From Science to Literature”. In The Rustle of Language, translated by Richard Howard, 3–10. Oakland: University of California Press.

Baßler, Moritz, and Heinz Drügh. 2021. Gegenwartsästhetik. Konstanz: Konstanz University Press.

Bercovitch, Sacvan. 1998. “The Function of the Literary in a Time of Cultural Studies”. In ‘Culture’ and the Problem of the Disciplines, edited by John Carlos Rowe, 69–86. New York: Columbia University Press.

Boxall, Peter. 2015. The Value of the Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Citton, Yves. 2017. The Ecology of Attention. Translated by Barnaby Norman. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Clune, Michael W. 2021. A Defense of Judgment. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Daston, Lorraine, and Peter L. Galison. 2010. Objectivity. Princeton: Zone Books.

Deavere Smith, Anna. 2003 [1994]. Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992. New York: Dramatists Play Service.

Díaz, Hernan. 2022. Trust. New York: Riverhead Books.

Emre, Merve. 2017. Paraliterary: The Making of Bad Readers in Postwar America. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Felski, Rita. 2008. Uses of Literature. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

Felski, Rita. 2020. Hooked: Art and Attachment. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Funk, Wolfgang, Irmtraud Huber, and Natalie Roxburgh. 2019. “What Form Knows: The Literary Text as Framework, Model, and Experiment”. Anglistik: International Journal of English Studies, 30, no. 2: 5–13.

Guillory, John. 2025. On Close Reading. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Herrnstein Smith, Barbara. 1995. “Value/Evaluation”. Critical Terms for Literary Study, 2nd ed., edited by Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin, 177–84. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Iser, Wolfgang. 1974 [1972]. The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

James, David. 2016. “Critical Solace”. New Literary History 47, no. 4: 481–504.

James, David. 2019. Discrepant Solace: Contemporary Literature and the Work of Consolation. New York: Oxford University Press.

James, David. 2023. “Exporting Expertise”. American Literary History 35, no. 2: 818–30.

Levine, Caroline. 2015. Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Leypoldt, Günter. 2026. Literature’s Social Lives: A Socio-Institutional History of Literary Value. New York: Oxford University Press.

Meretoja, Hanna, Saija Isomaa, Pirjo Lyytikäinen, and Kristina Malmio, editors. 2015. Values of Literature. Leiden: Brill Rodopi.

Nünning, Ansgar, and Vera Nünning. 2010. “Ways of Worldmaking as a Model for the Study of Culture: Theoretical Frameworks, Epistemological Underpinnings, New Horizons”. In Cultural Ways of Worldmaking: Media and Narratives, edited by Ansgar Nünning, Vera Nünning, and Birgit Neumann, 1–28. Berlin: De Gruyter.

Rankine, Claudia. 2014. Citizen: An American Lyric. Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press.

Spivak, Gayatri. 2012. An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Strick, Simon. 2021. Rechte Gefühle: Affekte und Strategien des digitalen Faschismus. Bielefeld: transcript.

Vermeulen, Pieter. 2023. “Reading for Value: Trust, Metafiction, and the Grammar of Literary Valuation”. PMLA 138, no. 5: 1231–36.

[1] Herrnstein Smith (1995) relates the distinction between a more precise notion of economic value and a broader, more elusive and abstract notion of value to the meaning dimensions inherent in “the English wordform” (178, 179).

[1] On ethnographies of evaluation in weak and strong taste cultures, see Leypoldt 2026 as well as Leypoldt’s contribution to this special issue.

[2] Yves Citton (2017) introduces the term “ecology of attention” as a challenge to “economy of attention”.

[3] See, for instance, Meretoja at al. 2015; Boxall 2015; Felski 2008; 2020; Emre 2017. John Guillory (2025) distinguishes immersive reading and close reading as two divergent practices, even though both attend to texts closely: “close reading interrupts immersive reading in order to initiate [the] rarified technique” of second-order observation in which the reader does not only observe the text, but also reflects upon their own act of observing (84).

[4] A recent structuralist attempt in that direction by Moritz Baßler and Heinz Drügh (2021) has been much discussed in German-speaking academic contexts .

[5] Daston and Galison (2010) provide a historical account of the production of scientific objectivity.

[6] See also A. Nünning and V. Nünning 2010, 6–8 and James 2019, 1–40.

[7] See Strick 2021. In his exploration of the strategic affect management on the political right, Strick argues that the right is ill-understood as the opposite of democracy but must be seen as one of its expressive forms. In order to complicate automated distancing moves, he chooses to speak not of the “far right” but of the “alternative right”, of “reflexive fascism”, and of “affect production on the right”. I here adopt his term “alternative right”.

[8] With much effort and little spirit, Clune takes apart Caroline Levine’s attempt to strengthen a much more capacious sense of form. He backs up his dismissal of formalism by tracing what he perceives to be the shortcomings of her argument (2021, 100–107). As chief among them he identifies her engagements with other discourses beyond the literary. From his perspective, using conceptual tools from other disciplines (history, sociology, political science, economics, etcetera) reduces the literary to illustrations of ideas articulated elsewhere. While I recognize that this happens, a transfer of concepts from other disciplines does not necessarily make the literary a mere illustration of empirical findings or theoretical claims. The assumption that it does relies on a correspondence theory of truth and a mimetic notion of representation that find little traction with Levine’s fundamentally constructivist take on literary writing and the act of mediatized worldmaking.

[9] On the dependence of literary value on form see also James 2019: 1–40; Spivak 2012, 354; Funk, Huber, and Roxburgh 2019.

 

 

 

 

 

Figure 1: A fragment from the panel “Pain of the Earth” by Volodymyr Priadka and Volodymyr Pasivenko (Vernadskyi National Scientific Library, Kyiv). Photo by Roman Malenkov.

This article is part of the b2o: an online journal special issue “The Question of Literary Value”, edited by Alexander Dunst and Pieter Vermeulen.

Literary Value = The Value of the Novel

Natalya Bekhta[1] 

The novel is the most valuable literary genre today, in a symbolic as well as in an economic sense. Guido Mazzoni has pithily defined the modern novel as “the genre in which one can tell absolutely any story in any way whatsoever” (2017, 16), highlighting the novel’s synonymity with narrative itself. The novel is also frequently synonymous with literature in general: Sarah Colvin’s (2025) examination of epistemic injustice in literature, to name one example among many, is structured as a reading of a set of prominent contemporary novels. Peter Boxall has also drawn attention to the novel’s “unique ability to put the relationship between art and matter, between words and the world, into a kind of motion” (2015, 13) that tries to make sense of the existing world and creates a vision for new ones. Speaking of worlds, Debjani Ganguly has offered a study of “this thing called the ‘world’” after 1989 and conducted it on the basis of one genre, the “Anglophone novel” (2016, 4) understood as a global phenomenon. Mark McGurl, finally, while recognizing that “the contemporary genre triad” also includes, in addition to the novel, epic and romance (2021, 27), still frames his study of “contemporary American fiction” (49) as a study of the novel in the age of Amazon.

In short, the novel—especially, its Anglo-American variant—acts as the key genre of contemporary literature and as a shorthand designation for the most versatile inquiries of literary and cultural theory today, which I take to be a strong sign of its symbolic value.[2] But the prevalent interest in studying literary and extra-literary phenomena on the basis of the novel is not merely a reflection of the international literary field, where the novel is a dominant aesthetic form and a favorite commodity. It is also a self-perpetuating process, where the current world-literary dominance of the novel dictates the topics and directions for theoretical inquiry, thus reinforcing this very dominance and the novel’s cultural prestige. Put differently, the novel conditions literary theory, literary critique, and readerly expectations to such an extent that other prose genres become invisible for theory and readership. Alternatively, these prose genres find themselves dismissed as failed novels and ‘genre fiction’, where the latter yet again reveals the novel’s special status above or outside the system of literary genres.

I am not disputing the centrality of the novel in the contemporary literary field, which has made the genre a worthy object of extensive and careful attention. At the same time, such valorization in the context of literary theory has created a deformity: it has become increasingly difficult to distinguish the formal features and aesthetic imperatives of other prose genres and evaluate them according to criteria, conventions, and expectations that are not related to the novel (see Bekhta 2025a and 2025b for elaboration). This narrowing down of the scope of theoretical and critical attention is particularly visible in the considerations of pre-modern and non-Western literary phenomena. Thus, texts with epic, utopian, satirical, biographical, or explicit political aspirations—all remnants of the pre-novelistic world-system of genres—are usually treated as (experimental) variations of the novel or, if studied in a historical perspective, as contributions to the novel genre’s uninterrupted developmental history.

Thus, in Estranging the Novel (2021) Katarzyna Bartoszyńska examines Irish and Polish literary traditions and texts by Narcyza Żmichowska, Oscar Wilde, Jonathan Swift, Ignacy Krasicki, Witold Gombrowicz, and others. She rightly notes that, given the centrality of the novel to most influential histories of literature, these Irish and Polish texts (and peripheral literatures more generally) are usually approached as “a series of flawed imitations” (2021, 4) of a particular kind of (realist, British) novel, which these national traditions could only belatedly develop. Her solution to this critical bias is not to redraw genre history altogether but to expand the category of the novel so that it can include previously excluded texts and traditions as special kinds of novels and noteworthy, if marginal, contributions to its formal development (Bartoszyńska 2021, 14, 127)—which is to say, as contributions to the development of literary fiction in general.

In addition to such attempts at rehabilitating certain fictions as properly novelistic, another recent trend in literary theory is to rehabilitate the value of ‘genre fictions’: SF and fantasy, romance and horror, young adult fiction and comic books are becoming legitimate objects of study. These fictions, as Stephen Shapiro has argued, “were consigned to the low status as sub-literary” in the first place because of the novel’s rise to prominence in the late-eighteenth century as a literary-cultural form that could speak to new liberal and individual-centric (rather than collective) concerns and maintain the nascent divisions between amateur and expert spheres and between the political and private domains (2026, 31). In the context of Early American Studies, Shapiro and Philip Barnard note: “Before 1820, the novel was still in flux, formally speaking, and coexisted with a host of alternative forms of expression. Yet once the novel became dominant, it became so dominant that it tended to obscure or efface the prior existence of these other forms as contemporaneous competitors” (Barnard and Shapiro 2022, 552). This dominance has produced anachronistic approaches to non-novelistic form and skewed theoretical pictures of early modern periods—and, I should add, of world-literary traditions that have followed alternative genre paths, such as those of Eastern Europe (of which more below).[3]

By way of experiment and in order to try and defamiliarize the novel as a genre, we can pit it against another genre term, very much alive today in non-literary contexts: utopia, that “honorable, if unnovelistic, mode of fiction” (Elliott 1970, 104). Works by Jonathan Swift and Ignacy Krasicki, studied by Bartoszyńska, already point us in this direction. Interestingly, utopia also comes up in Boxall’s The Value of the Novel, in the discussion of the relationship between fiction and the law. Boxall starts this discussion with Thomas More’s Utopia (1516)—“a work which can be considered a prototype of the novel form that developed more fully in the early eighteenth century” (Boxall 116). While a retrospective inclusion of such an unquestionable bestseller as Utopia in the long history of the novel doesn’t raise immediate objections, if we look at the reception of various utopias in their own historical moment, they often evoke explicit formal tensions precisely in relation to the novel.

Let’s consider the example of Aldous Huxley’s Island (1962). Robert C. Elliott has described it as the utopia of our times, the “post-modern vision of the good place that speaks most cogently against despair” (1970, 129). But it’s hardly been read as a utopia and, consequently I’d say, it is hardly talked about, compared to Huxley’s dystopian favorite Brave New World (1932). Dystopias, unlike utopias, offer a set of formal properties familiar to the readers of the novel: plot tensions, psychological conflicts, complex or conflicted characters, and so on. Upon its publication, Elliott remarks, Frank Kermode deemed Island one of the worst novels ever written and Wayne Booth struggled with pronouncing an aesthetic judgment on the book altogether—since, he claimed, there were no criteria for its “nameless and tricky genre” yet (Booth qtd. in Elliott 1970, 129).

Another illuminating case, although in a different way, is the reception of the key European utopia of the twentieth century—Volodymyr Vynnychenko’s The Sun Machine. Written during 1921–1924 and published in 1928, this is a remarkable text, an 800-page positive utopia written at a time firmly associated with the rise of dystopias. These dystopias came to be emblematic of the Soviet region and its political system and continue to capture the imagination of contemporary readers still—think of all the books, comics, and films that have been generated by the storyworlds of Orwell, Huxley, or Zamyatin. What is remarkable about The Sun Machine is not just its resolute optimism regarding the possibility of utopian transformation after the Great War and after the violence of the revolutions in Ukraine and elsewhere in the former Russian empire. What is also remarkable is The Sun Machine’s immense success: upon its publication, three consecutive editions were sold out, leading to queues in libraries across Ukraine and, at the same time, to endless literary-critical polemics about its qualities.[4]

Unlike Island, The Sun Machine was published with the genre label “A utopian novel”. But in this case, renowned literary scholars and influential critics proceeded to question how fitting that label was with respect to the text (see, e.g., Biletskyi 1928; Zerov 1929).[5] While ultimately rejecting the utopian status of The Sun Machine but praising it for opening up a new, fresh chapter for the development of the literary novel in the Ukrainian literary field at the time, both Oleksandr Biletskyi and Mykola Zerov found multiple formal flaws in the book: Vynnychenko’s characters lacked psychological depth, the motivation for their actions was often unclear and it didn’t align with their (stereo)typical psychological portraits, or—and most interesting for my purpose here—the author was playing tricks on the reader by arranging the plot in a certain way. Zerov (1929, 189), for example, notes that the novel’s initial set-up, having lured the reader in with a rich and intriguing constellation of potential storylines and narrative conflicts, turns out to be false! Instead, it transpires that the one real conflict, central to the book and driving the plot, is the utopian invention of the sun machine and Vynnychenko’s real interest is not offering a convincing fiction but, in fact, a thorough and polemical examination of a certain social ideal. In other words, it turns out that The Sun Machine does in fact subordinate any formal features and values associated with the modern novel to its utopian agenda.

It is worth citing Elliott here again: “Most writers of fictional utopias have had far more interest in, and commitment to, the social-political aspects of their work than to the fiction, which they have considered largely instrumental—a means, not available to the philosopher, to ‘strike, pierce [and] possess the sight of the soul’, as Sidney puts it in the Apology for Poetry” (1970, 111).[6] In short, if literary theory and criticism cannot pinpoint this “nameless and tricky” genre and proceeds to measure literary utopias with the novel’s yardstick, this then often leads to a critique of utopia’s formal qualities and aesthetic flaws or to ahistorical evaluations of its political propositions.

***

Today the novel’s dominance over prose fiction and its successful and irreversible cannibalization (or novelization) of its former rivals has become an axiom of literary theory. At the same time, theory keeps running into ‘curious’ or ‘faulty’ exceptions from this rule (Franco Moretti’s [1996] Modern Epic, for example, is built around such an exception). If these exceptions are not discarded as formally or aesthetically flawed novels, they are incorporated into the long and bifurcating history of the novel by assimilation (as is the case in Bartoszyńska 2021). My present counter-suggestion to what I perceive as a dominant trend in literary theory is twofold: First, what if we turn the argument around and ask whether the potential genre rivals to the novel retain at least a residual presence? Entertaining such a possibility, we would be able to set the novel into a heuristic opposition[7] with other prose genres and thereby reveal its often invisible conventions and narrative expectations. Utopia, for example, can productively illuminate a number of issues related both to values expressed by a literary work of art and to the parameters of value creation in the literary-theoretical field (as I have briefly discussed in the case of Huxley’s Island and Vynnychenko’s The Sun Machine). Second, from world-literary and literary-historical perspectives, theories of literary value, implicitly or explicitly focused on the novel, are partial or incomplete. Current theoretical debates in world literature, for example, expose a hierarchy of literary traditions whereby those that lack ‘the Big Novel’ do not join the production of literary concepts.[8] In other words, treated as ‘immature’ in the formal sense, they can only figure as objects of literary analysis but almost never as subjects in the development of its conceptual apparatuses. Arguably, the absence of the literary semi-periphery, such as Eastern-European or “second-world” literatures, from the theoretical vocabulary is in part due to the poetic-satirical inclinations of its canons (Bekhta 2025a) or, in the case of peripheral or “third-world” literatures, it stems partly from their preference for shorter prose forms and allegorical modes of expression (Pravinchandra 2018; Jameson 2019). A rehabilitation of non-novelistic genres within contemporary literary theory – and I’m not speaking about interventions into the literary field, of course! – can potentially make it easier to appreciate the complexity of world-literary history and move beyond developmental arguments, which tend to line up various literary traditions and genres into one long history of the novel (for details see, e.g., Shapiro 2023).

In sum, the symbolic power of the novel conditions contemporary debates about literary value as it also dominates literary theory more generally. This power remains underexamined, but we can see it at work in misreadings of and confusion around other, non-novelistic genres, such as utopia. We see it in the structure of literary-historical arguments that project a developmental trajectory of the rise and spread of this particular genre, confining non-novelistic literary traditions to a place on the receiving end of such movement. We can discern it in the habitual slips of terminology, where a study of a set of novels from a particular place and time (although never from the world-literary peripheries) can also mean literary fiction in general, allowing for bold and far-reaching book titles. Literary theory does need shared canons, however imperfect and dynamic they may be: they are convenient, if we want to have any kind of scholarly exchange or draw on potential common ground in a classroom. But we also need to illuminate the largely homogeneric focus of such canons, and we need to be able to see the conventions—and limitations—at work in a genre so dominant that it often becomes invisible.

References

Barnard, Philip, and Stephen Shapiro. 2022. “Un-Noveling Brown: Liberalism and Its Literary Discontents”. Early American Literature 57, no. 2: 549–54.

Bartoszyńska, Katarzyna. 2021. Estranging the Novel: Poland, Ireland, and Theories of World Literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Bekhta, Natalya. 2025a. “Beyond the Novel: Satire in Eastern Europe and Volodymyr Rafeyenko’s Mondegreen”. In Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction. 66, no. 1: 12­–22.

—. 2025b. “The Novel Goes Utopia: On Volodymyr Vynnycheko’s The Sun Machine”. Studia Universitatis Babeș-Bolyai Philologia 70, no. 3: 41­–58.

Biletskyi, Oleksandr. 1990 [1928]. “Sonyachna mashyna Volodymyra Vynnychenka”. In Literaturno-krytychni statti (Literary-critical articles), edited by M. L. Hroncharuk, 121–31. Kyїv: Dnipro.

Boxall, Peter. 2015. The Value of the Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Brier, Evan. 2024. Novel Competition: American Fiction and the Cultural Economy, 1965-1999. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press

Clover, Joshua, and Christopher Nealon. 2017. “Literary and Economic Value”. In Christopher Nealon, Infinity for Marxists: Essays on Poetry and Capital, 195-213. Leiden: Brill.

Colvin, Sarah. 2025. Literature and Epistemic Injustice: Power and Resistance in the Contemporary Novel. London: Routledge.

Elliott, Robert C. 1970. The Shape of Utopia: Studies in a Literary Genre. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Ganguly, Debjani. 2016. This Thing Called the World: The Contemporary Novel as Global Form. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

—. 2020. “The Global Novel: Comparative Perspectives Introduction”. New Literary History 51, no. 2: v–xvii.

Jameson, Fredric. 2019 [1986]. “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism”. In Allegory and Ideology, 159–86. London: Verso.

—. 2019. “Commentary”. In Allegory and Ideology, 187­–215. London: Verso.

Mazzoni, Guido. 2017 [2011]. Theory of the Novel. Translated by Zakiya Hanafi. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

McGurl, Mark. 2021. Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon. London: Verso.

Moretti, Franco.1996. Modern Epic: The World-System from Goethe to García-Márquez. London: Verso.

Mufti, Aamir R. 2018 [2016]. Forget English! Orientalisms and World Literatures. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Nünning, Ansgar. 2025. “Literature as a Laboratory for Forms of the Good Life. The Potential of a Scientific Metaphor and the Value of Literature.” In New Conjectures and Directions in Literary and Cultural Studies, edited by Magdalena Pfalzgraf, Anna Sophia Tabouratzidis and Ansgar Nünning. REAL Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature, Vol. 39. Tübingen: Narr.

Pavylyshyn, Marko. 1989. “Artist or Moralist? Volodymyr Vynnychenko’s ‘The Solar Machine’”. Australian Slavonic and East European Studies 3, no. 2: 17­33.

Pravinchandra, Shital. 2018. “Short Story and Peripheral Production”. In The Cambridge Companion to World Literature, edited by Ben Etherington and Jarad Zimbler, 197–210. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Shapiro, Stephen. 2023. “The World-System of Global Gothic, Horror and Weird”. In The Edinburgh Companion to Globalgothic, edited by Rebecca Duncan, 38–52. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

—. 2026. “The Undead’s Capitalist World-System”. In The Cambridge Companion to World-Gothic, edited by Rebecca Duncan and Rebekah Cumptsy, 25­–43. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Soroka, Mykola. 2006. “Mistse dlya utopii”. Krytyka, no. 105-106: 33­–36.

—. 2012. Faces of Displacement: The Writings of Volodymyr Vynnychenko. Montréal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.

Syvachenko, Halyna. 1994. “’Sonyachna mashyna’ V. Vynnychenka i roman-antyutopia XX storichchya”. Slovo i chas, no. 1: 42–47.

Vynnychenko, Volodymyr. 1989 [1928]. Sonyachna mashyna [The sun machine]. Kyїv: Dnipro.

Zerov, Mykola. 1929. “‘Sonyachna mashyna’ yak literaturnyi tvir”. In Vid Kulisha do Vynnychenka: Narysy o novitnioho ukraїnskoho pys’menstva, 173–91. Kyїv: Kultura.

[1] Work on this essay has been funded by the Research Council of Finland (grant decision no. 361957).

[2] The concept of value in the symbolic sense cannot be fully separated from its economic meaning, as Joshua Clover and Christopher Nealon (2017) have demonstrated, but in this essay I stick to the focus on the ties between the novel and literary theory without discussing the economic meaning of ‘value’ explicitly. See also the contributions of Sedlmayr and Taylor in this cluster. For a recent discussion of value of literature in relation to the utopian question of how to live well see Nünning 2025.

[3] I should also note an increasing recognition of a more granular genre dynamic in the contemporary literary field, but this recognition seems confined to genre theory at the moment. See, e.g., Brier 2020, which studies the formal repercussions and literary effects of the emergence at the end of the twentieth century of a new prestige economy in which the American novel lost its privileged cultural standing and started to compete with cultural forms from the fields of cinema, music, and journalism.

[4] It also went through three editions in the authorized Russian translation by Rosalia Vynnychenko, thus reaching far across the Soviet Union.

[5] And the debate continued till the end of the century. See., e.g., Pavlyshyn 1989 and Syvachenko 1994. See Soroka 2006 for a defense of utopia.

[6] Cf. Halyna Syvachenko on The Sun Machine: “Here, just like in the expressionistic works in general, the main idea is set. Instead of the unity of form and content, form itself has a derivative function and plot [sjuzhet], even if it isn’t explicitly schematic, offers characters as ‘mouthpieces for ideas’, tentative placeholders for the author’s thoughts, or supportive elements in the allegorical fabula, in the artificial [!], fake narrative conflict” (1994, 44).

[7] I use ‘opposition’ here in the linguistic sense, where meaning is understood as differential because it emerges out of relations of words to other words within the same system: E.g. the meaning of ‘hot’ only makes sense if there is ‘cold’ and so on. In the system of genre, in other words, the limits of the novel would become clear when it’s set into a comparative or oppositional relation to another genre.

[8] In addition to the general leaning of world-literary theory towards the cultural Anglosphere, as has been long pointed out. See Mufti 2016.

Fig. 1: Issues of the comics anthology magazine Raw, edited by Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly. 

This article is part of the b2o: an online journal special issue “The Question of Literary Value”, edited by Alexander Dunst and Pieter Vermeulen.

To Understand Literary Value Today, Look to Visual Culture. Or, What the School of Visual Arts Tells Us About the Emergence of the Graphic Novel

Alexander Dunst

One of the more consequential developments in the study of literary value over the last two decades has been a renewed appreciation of literature’s institutional embeddedness. From James English’s study of the prize system (2005) and Mark McGurl’s focus on creative writing programs (2009) to more recent considerations of book reviewing (Chong 2020) and corporate publishing (Sinykin 2023), this attention has brought about a more fine-grained understanding of how different constituents collectively construct literature as worth their while. A similar interest characterizes a number of the contributions to the present cluster of essays, including Natalya Bekhta’s critique of the overemphasis on the (Anglophone) novel in literary studies, Günter Leypoldt’s argument for an ethnography of value, Maria Mäkelä’s consideration of literature in an age of social media, and Pieter Vermeulen’s interest in social acts of valuation.

While the research I have just mentioned elaborates on the changing processes of valuing literature, my own interest in these issues lies in how the nonliterary becomes valued, somewhat contradictorily, as literature. Practices of creative writing to use a purposively broad term, may be formalized in university education, or become enmeshed with digital platform affordances and the values espoused by prize committees that distinguish between the merely middlebrow and the award-worthy. In contrast, this short essay will trace how a particular medium sought to establish itself as literature, and what that history can tell us about literary value. As a consequence, I will be looking at the border regions of the literary field or, to use a phrase coined in a different context, at the “contact zones” of literature and the larger media ecology of which it forms a part (Pratt 1991, 33–40). My case study will demonstrate that literature continues to function as a term of value or distinction for media formats aiming to increase their prestige and attract new audiences within the larger cultural field.

Despite efforts to understand literature as part of a larger media system, most scholarship in literary studies remains reluctant to adopt this more wide-ranging perspective.[1] The reluctance, itself a largely institutional dynamic, is all the more surprising, and even detrimental to literary studies, as literary reading increasingly becomes one of many ways of engaging with culture rather than holding a privileged place within it. Bekhta’s argument that the equivocation of the novel with literature per se leads to blind spots in understanding its object of study may therefore be extended to the format that I focus on, namely the graphic novel (Bekhta).

Two curious, if minor, cases of oversight provide a gateway into the present inquiry. McGurl’s The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing is one of the many examples of literary scholarship that speak broadly of contemporary fiction without engaging with graphic novels.[2] Only in a footnote does McGurl mention the “recent rise of the graphic novel to respectability” (2008, 447) and gives the examples of Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, and Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon’s Watchmen, the first two notable for being memoirs rather than works of fiction. However, McGurl does not connect the graphic novel to the topic of his own book, namely the historical significance of the rise of creative writing degrees for US literature. Extending this analysis, the edited volume After the Program Era explicitly seeks to remedy such lacunae, arguing on its very first page that:

[N]onfiction, drama, screenwriting, graphic novels, and electronic literature have increasingly become part of the creative writing curriculum, and work still needs to be done to understand the ways in which the form and content of these genres and modes have been influenced by this development. (Glass 2016, 1)

Somewhat surprisingly given this programmatic statement, the first mention of the graphic novel in the volume remains the only one throughout. How, then, have the “form and content” of the graphic novel—widely, if problematically, used as an umbrella term that subsumes nonfictional writing such as graphic memoirs and graphic journalism—been shaped by the inclusion into creative writing curricula?

A more complete study of that history remains to be written.[3] In its absence, I offer a brief sketch of how The School of Visual Arts (SVA) in Lower Manhattan, maybe the most prominent program teaching comics as an artistic practice in the United States, played its part in the transformation of comics into literature. For my account, I mainly draw on so-called “registration booklets”, which are kept in the SVA’s archive and during my visit there, in January 2020, were available for the years 1972 to 2015. These booklets, which elsewhere might be called module handbooks, list and describe courses, provide the names of teachers, and declare the aims and values of what is taught. Insofar as a course description cannot capture how students responded to their teachers’ aims and outlines, these documents are limited in scope. However, they provide insight into an element of comics and, indeed, literary culture that has rarely been considered.

The tradition of creative writing programs that McGurl traces only forms one contributing strand to this history. Comics writing and drawing is taught at different kinds of institutions, including research universities, liberal arts colleges, and most frequently at art schools. The degree denominations are similarly varied, ranging from hyphenated phrases like “Creative Writing: Graphic Novels and Comics” or “Creative Writing: Comics and Graphic Narratives” to more straightforwardly named MFAs in comics, in visual narrative, or in sequential art. Higher education as a place for training visual artists rather than literary authors then forms the other strand relevant to this account. In Art Subjects: Making Artists in the American University, Howard Singerman traces the shift from nineteenth-century ateliers and academies to the emergence in the 1920s of the first master programs in fine art, better known under the abbreviation MFA, and their spread with the G.I. Bill after the Second World War. While the denomination has remained, this period saw a move towards reconceptualizing the fine as visual arts, influenced by the arrival of members of the Bauhaus from Germany (Singerman 1999, 69–70). It is no coincidence that the first institution training comics artists, founded as the Cartoonists and Illustrators School, renamed itself to reflect this development in 1955/56. Coming during a period of sustained growth for higher education, the name change reflected the ambition to understand cartoonists as visual artists.

Nonetheless, the education at the SVA remained focused on newspaper and magazine comics until the early 1970s (Gabilliet 2010, 503). Judging from the registration booklets, three teaching personalities dominated the program during the 1970s and early 1980s: Harvey Kurtzman, the founder of Mad, the serial comic books and magazine that ran from 1952 to 1956; Will Eisner, author of The Spirit comic series whose A Contract with God became an early, although not the first, example of the graphic novel; and finally Art Spiegelman, the co-editor of the magazines Arcade and Raw that brought an avant-garde aesthetic to American comics, who would go on to win a special Pulitzer for Maus.

The course descriptions of these years emphasize the artistic and, to a lesser extent, the literary ambition of comics. Kurtzman’s course, offered for several years, was titled “Political-Social Comics Art”, while Eisner taught a workshop in “Comic and Continuity Art” that aimed at creating both the more traditional comic strips and comic books (SVA, “Registration Booklet 1974–75”, 43 and 46). Other courses spoke of “visual literature” in their descriptions and emphasized adaptation from word to image, including poetry and the nineteenth-century novel (SVA, “Registration Booklet 1972–73, 65). When Spiegelman joined in the academic year 1977–78, he initially taught a historical overview titled “The Language of Comics”. Beginning in 1981, the cartooning major at the SVA started to advertise a new “Experimental Comics Workshop” taught by Spiegelman, which described itself as “devoted to testing the expressive possibilities of comics outside a commercial art context” and as grappling “with the problem of creating other new outlets for their [the students’] work” (SVA, “Registration Booklet 1981–82, 101).

The now traditional way of theorizing how teachers at the SVA conceived of comics at the time would be to speak, with Pierre Bourdieu, of an intensified phase of experimentation in the pursuit of a “pure aesthetic” (1993, 265). Bourdieu’s comment on experimentation remains pertinent. It’s less clear, of course, what “pure aesthetic” means in the context of comics, or whether that term captures something useful in the description of artistic change. If we want to move closer to how such experimentation might unfold, the dynamics of categorization and legitimation summarized by Michèle Lamont provide a more detailed model for how actors assign and contest value within institutions. Lamont mentions several categorization dynamics, including classification, equivalence, signaling, and standardization (2012, 204–205). Of these four, the first three are all present simultaneously, yet clearly in a state of flux. The course titles and descriptions classify comics as art and literature, sometimes directly with the help of compound phrases like “comics art” or “visual literature”. At other times, the language of adaptation from literary sources signals what might be called an aspirational equivalence with that source material: consider, for example, Spiegelman’s emphasis on “expressive possibilities” that more purposefully understands comics as a non-commercial, even potentially avant-garde, form.

What’s notable is the relative dominance of equating comics with art during this era and the absence of the moniker “graphic novel”, a term that appeared as early as 1964 in a fan publication and that authors and publishers increasingly used to refer to comic books during the 1970s (García 2015, 20). Two initial conclusions can be drawn from this, subject to correction based on a wider archival survey in the future. First, that the eventual adoption of the term “graphic novel” for book-length comics was by no means inevitable; nor was the book as a dominant format for the circulation and audience reception of contemporary comics. The repeated classification of comics as, and the equivalence sought with, art signals an alternative route that emphasizes drawing or other artistic techniques (watercolor, collage, linocut, etc.) over writing, image over text, and art exhibition over book publication. None of these elements are absent from contemporary graphic novels, but they tend to be overshadowed due to the eventual adoption of a term that established different priorities. Secondly, the relative preference for art rather than literature during this period of conceptual flux makes perfect sense for teaching comics at an art school like the SVA. But it begs at least two additional questions. Did a similar vocabulary of experimentation, proposing both art and literature as aspirational equivalences, exist in other institutions teaching comics?[4] And, most pertinently for the question of literary value: what led to the eventual adoption—or, in Lamont’s term, the “standardization”—of comic books as graphic novels?

After the breakthrough book publication of volume I of Maus in 1986, Spiegelman left the SVA while Eisner and Kurtzman continued teaching much as before. It took until 1992 for the term “graphic novel” to appear in the SVA’s registration booklets. Under the title “Graphic Novel for Cartoonists”, the course description promised “a unique blend of the excitement and flamboyance of the adventure comic book and the drama, authenticity and sophistication of serious illustration” (SVA, “Registration Booklet 1992–93, 158). Although the booklet repeatedly named the instructor as a “K. Jansen”, the emphasis on visual art makes it more likely that Klaus Janson taught the course. Together with Frank Miller, Janson had illustrated Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, a book that signaled the transformation of superhero fiction into graphic novels upon publication in 1986, the same year that Maus was released. Immediately below Janson’s, another course description emphasized writing skills for comics, including story, characterization, and plot, marking renewed attention to basic aspects of literature.

Over the next few years, uses of the designation “graphic novel” slowly expanded. In the 1994–95 booklet, a course titled “Science Fiction Art for the Graphic Novel Illustrator & Cartoonist” continued the somewhat awkward conjunction of literary and artistic terms, as if explaining the graphic novel’s relevance to art students. Similarly, a course on “Illustrating Words and Images” defined its aims as “an exercise to integrate literary and visual forms of communication” (SVA, “Registration Booklet 1994–95, 159-160). References to comic art or visual art did not disappear during these years but were increasingly accompanied by literary vocabulary. To return to Lamont’s sociological register, the course descriptions of the 1990s add elements of legitimation to the earlier categorization dynamics. The repetition of the term “graphic novel” can be seen as enacting its diffusion (Lamont 2012, 205).

At the same time, the course descriptions implicitly negotiate or contest the value of comics by arguing for the necessity of creative writing skills. The growing importance of such expertise for aspiring comics authors shows how creative writing pedagogy spread to other areas of artistic endeavor. At least in the case of the SVA, the adoption of novelistic storytelling in the medium of comics did not originate from within higher education but answered the example of established comics artists such as Spiegelman and the publishers keen on selling comics under the “graphic novel” label. Nonetheless, my case-study exemplifies how educational institutions have successfully promoted the value of literature even in areas where that might not be readily apparent.

In Lamont’s account, practices of valuing, diffusion, and negotiation work towards stabilization and standardization. Outside of the art school context, standardization arrived with the introduction of the shelf category “comics and graphic novels” in 2003 (Chute 2008, 462). Within the SVA, a stable conception of comics as graphic novels may similarly be traced to the 2000s. Starting with the 2002–03 academic year, a course in the “History of Storytelling” described a sequence from early comic strips and comic books to “the growth of graphic novels, and current developments in electronic media” (SVA, “Registration Booklet 2002–03, 162). The following year, an advanced storytelling workshop led by David Mazzuchelli emphasized “the voice of the author/artist”, a turn of phrase that privileges narrative elements. Perhaps most succinctly, “Storytelling I: Foundations of Comics Narrative”, taught by Jessica Abel, defined the graphic novel “as a personal mode of expression that achieves a meaningful balance between tradition and experimentation” (SVA, “Registration Booklet 2008–09, 210).

These descriptions accomplish the integration of visual and textual aspects very much on literary terms. Artistic skill continues to form the foundation of the graphic novelist’s craft but becomes subsumed under the demands of a narrative voice that prizes individual authenticity. In the process, Spiegelman’s experimentation outside of commercial contexts gives way to a “meaningful balance” that enables the graphic novel’s integration into the literary marketplace (Dunst 2023, 9). At the same time, the historical evolution suggested by the course on the “History of Storytelling” indicates that stabilization always remains temporary, with varieties of digital comics providing further horizons of change.

Drawing on earlier work in cultural sociology, Lamont suggests that institutionalization depends on the rhetorical force and resonance of specific acts of valuation, as well as the ability to successfully resolve conflicts (2012, 205). Addressing these points individually, it could be said that the conjunction of “graphic” and “novel” ties comics to the dominant literary genre of the novel in what I have called an aspirational equivalence. Literature functions as a reference value by which comics seek a metaphorical proximity that emphasizes forms of storytelling that can reasonably be called novelistic. The institutional resonance of this equivalence stems from the fact that US-American comics emerged within newspaper publishing and were already moving towards book publication when the graphic novel arose as a designation, with countercultural head shops and specialized comics stores replacing news vendors in the second half of the twentieth century. The challenges of shifting towards literary publishers and mass-market book stores should not be underestimated. This shift in production and distribution took another two decades to achieve but was accomplished precisely around the equivalence proposed by the term “graphic novel”. The conflict resolution mentioned by Lamont would seem to lie in the conception of the graphic novel as “a personal mode of expression” (in Abel’s words). Thus, the graphic novel channels “the voice of the author/artist” in a way that retains the emphasis on individual subjectivity promoted by countercultural and alternative comics in the 1960s to 1980s, which first established cartoonists as artists. In fact, there is a growing body of evidence that graphic novels, and contemporary US comics at large, have in the past decades only become more visual, with text diminishing in importance as digital printing has supported ever more detailed images and a wide range of artistic styles (Cohn et al. 2017, 19–37; Dunst 2023, 104–46). Thus, authorship subsumes and sustains artistry, both creatively and—what may count for more—by creating a profitable outlet for comics artists and industry within literary publishing.

Where does that leave the issue of literary value? For all the theorizing in this cluster of essays around use and exchange value, around more narrowly literary and wider societal values, the relationship between literature and other media remains largely absent from the discussion. This seems somewhat puzzling at a time when literature is ever more closely tied other cultural forms, whether by way of movie, television, audio or indeed comics adaptations, the integration of photographs and other visual material into literary texts, or the largely audiovisual marketing of literature and literary authorship on social media platforms (see Mäkelä, this issue).

This media ecology consists of different institutions, individual and collective actors including readers, artists, editors, and many others, as well as material objects and intellectual traditions of unequal prestige. Clearly, it was this power imbalance that attracted cartoonists to equate their visual narratives with novels. During the period of emergence that I have analyzed, the arguments for the graphic novel at the SVA drew less on the intra-literary (formal sophistication) and societal values (diversity and ethical witnessing) identified by Pieter Vermeulen and others for contemporary literature (2023). These become increasingly central with the integration into mainstream publishing, but the main equivalence remains with the novel tout court, its narrative possibilities and promise of cultural elevation. In this sense, the emergence of the graphic novel may offer a measure of reassurance to those who fear that the value of literature has eroded to a point where literature becomes indistinguishable from other commodities.

Ultimately, the history of the graphic novel at the SVA showcases the need to pay closer attention to the complex processes of assigning worth that take place within culture, or to what Raymond Williams famously described as “the relationships between elements in a whole way of life” (1961, 63). If that continues to pose a formidable challenge, it remains the case that any account of literary value that focuses solely on its socio-economic aspects or literature’s established genre system without taking account of larger media dynamics may end up with answers limited in scope and descriptive power.

References

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1993. “The Historical Genesis of a Pure Aesthetic”, in The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, edited by Randall Johnson, 254–66. New York: Columbia University Press.

Boxall, Peter. 2013. Twenty-First Century Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Chong, Philippa K. 2020. Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Chute, Hillary. 2008. “Comics as Literature? Reading Graphic Narrative”, PMLA 123, no. 2: 452–65.

Dunst, Alexander. 2023. The Rise of the Graphic Novel: Computational Criticism and the Evolution of Literary Value. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

English, James F. 2005. The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Value. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Gabilliet, Jean-Paul. 2010. Of Comics and Men: A Cultural History of American Comic Books. Transl. Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press.

García, Santiago. 2015. On the Graphic Novel. Transl. Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press.

Glass, Loren, editor. 2016. After the Program Era: The Past, Present, and Future of Creative Writing in the University. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press.

Lamont, Michèle. 2012. “Toward a Comparative Sociology of Valuation and Evaluation”, Annual Review of Sociology 38, no. 1: 201–21.

McGurl, Mark. 2009. The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Murray, Simone. 2025. The Digital Future of English: Literary Media Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Pratt, Mary Louise. 1991. “Arts of the Contact Zone”, Profession: 33–40.

Singerman, Howard. 1999. Art Subjects: Making Artists in the American University. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Sinykin, Dan. 2023. Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature. New York: Columbia University Press.

Vermeulen, Pieter. 2023. “The Indie Nobel? Stockholm, New York, and Twenty-First-Century Literary Value”, Journal of World Literature 8: 484–499.

Williams, Raymond. 1961. The Long Revolution. London: Chatto & Windus. 

[1] See Simone Murray’s recent call for such an approach (Murray 2025).

[2] Boxall 2013 is another well-known example.

[3] The only critical engagement with teaching US-American comics that I am aware of can be found in Jean-Paul Gabilliet’s Of Comics and Men and concentrates on the early years of The School of Visual Arts (SVA) in New York City, the educational institution I will also focus on in what follows. However, his overview ends in the 1970s, the decade in which graphic novels really come into being (2010, 493 and 500–503).

[4] Most programs teaching comics as creative writing or artistic expression seem to be comparatively new but, once again, only a broader history would be able to establish an overview of past and current institutions.

Photograph by the author.

This article is part of the b2o: an online journal special issue “The Question of Literary Value”, edited by Alexander Dunst and Pieter Vermeulen. 

Literature and Literary Studies Can Contribute to a Revaluation of Economic Value, or, Imagining a Beyond to Capitalist Realism with Brian Massumi

Gerold Sedlmayr

In Thesis 8 of Theses on the Revaluation of Value: A Postcapitalist Manifesto (2018), Brian Massumi states: “The dominant notion of value in our epoch is economic” (2018, 5). While he therefore focuses on probing sustainable ways in which to rethink exactly this kind of value, the adjective “dominant” implies that other notions obviously exist but have been pushed into the background. These include, I assume, ethical and moral values. In the Oxford English Dictionary, such “values in the plural” (Nünning 2020, 330) are defined as “The principles or moral standards held by a person or social group; the generally accepted or personally held judgement of what is valuable and important in life” (Oxford English Dictionary 2025, def. II.6.d). Another notion that has been marginalized by the wide reach of the economic—the one that interests me here—is that of literary value.

Massumi’s manifesto rests on the idea that, in the twenty-first century, capitalism has subsumed all areas of life. As a postcapitalist, however, Massumi is not willing to follow theorists such as Mark Fisher, who, in his influential Capitalist Realism, claimed that an alternative to a society structured by a capitalist market logic is not thinkable anymore. With the notion of “capitalist realism” Fisher famously sought to capture “the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it” (2009, 2). Massumi, by contrast, claims that an alternative can be imagined. Not prepared to subscribe to the fatalistic “TINA” doctrine (“There Is No Alternative”), he demands

to take back value. For many, value has long been dismissed as a concept so thoroughly compromised, so soaked in normative strictures and stained by complicity with capitalist power, as to be unredeemable. This has only abandoned value to purveyors of normativity and apologists of economic oppression. Value is too valuable to be left in those hands (2018, 3; Thesis 1).

Although Massumi, as mentioned above, does not talk about literary value explicitly, it is conspicuous that many of the concepts which are crucial for his project of developing “a strong alternative conception of value” (3; Thesis 2) are concepts that are equally central to literary studies. Some of the most important of these are creativity, narrative, fabulation, affect, and beauty. In what follows, I suggest that interventions such as Massumi’s can give some productive impetus to discussions of literary and aesthetic value—and also, more generally, cultural value—particularly because they draw our attention to the interrelationship between these types of value and notions of economic value. After all, notions of aesthetic and literary value only emerged as specific objects of investigation once Western societies developed into industrialized market societies. In the second half of the eighteenth century, literary value and exchange value emerged in conjunction with and in distinction from each other. In the words of John Guillory: “A concept of specifically aesthetic value can be formulated only in the wake of the political economy’s discourse of exchange value” (1993, 316). Mary Poovey has shown that, still “at the end of the seventeenth century, one of the functions performed by imaginative writing in general”, of which she considers “Literary writing” to be a subset, “was to mediate value—that is, to help people understand the new credit economy and the market model of value that it promoted” (2008, 1-2). This mediating function, however, was given up at the turn of the nineteenth century: “it was not until Literature was declared to be a different kind of imaginative writing that a secular model of value completely at odds with the market model was articulated. When this occurred, Literary writing gave up its claim to be valuable in the old sense, precisely by insisting that it was more valuable in another, more novel sense” (2). Obviously, this view is still valid, at least among scholars of literature and culture: would not the great majority of us readily agree that we decided to study literature and not, say, economics, because we believed this pursuit to be of a ‘higher’, ‘truer’, and more ‘universal’ kind than the ‘shallow’ one of the ‘worshippers of mammon’? And is it not also the case that the issue of literary value has become so fashionable again in the last decade or so because we feel that the status of literature as cultural capital has begun to massively erode in the age of new media?

What genealogical enquiries such as Poovey’s into the historical becoming of the meaning(s) of value reveal is that literary value, precisely because its discursive emergence was so closely tied to the emergence of exchange value, cannot be properly re-considered without bearing the estranged kinship between literary and economic value in mind. This is all the more important because the respective attempts at demarcating a particular disciplinary field—whether it is ‘literature’ in literary studies or ‘the economy’ in economics—and hence at defining value in a manner specific to that field for a long time tended to gloss over the fact that lines of connection between those fields have never been wholly severed. On the one hand, ever since the early-modern patronage system ceased to exist, most literary writers have been dependent on the economic success of their works. Seen from this perspective, all attempts at distancing literary value from an economic ratio tend to become suspicious maneuvers: literary works, after all, are commodity products. On the other hand, in the words of Melissa Kennedy, “economics is a narrative of human interaction, invented and imagined into being with the help of figurative language and dominant story tropes” (2020, 158). Representations of ‘the economy’ make use of linguistic strategies that are also employed in literary texts, which is the reason why “literary studies’ interpretative and critical approaches open new ways of framing and engaging with economic criticism” (158). Economics is not as objective and, in the ethical sense, ‘value-free’ as it would like to be (see Sedláček 2011, 7).

This brings me back to Massumi. If we want to envision going beyond capitalist realism, Massumi writes, value will have to be “uncouple[d] … from quantification. Value must be recognized for what it is: irreducibly qualitative” (2018, 4; Thesis 5). Precisely because “[m]arket-based thinking”—by which he means, I assume, the kind of thinking represented by orthodox economics—is based on “the quantitative notion of value” (5; Thesis 8), the predatory tendencies of the prevailing economic logic can be disrupted and overturned by mobilizing the qualitative aspects that likewise determine the market. One example Massumi mentions early on is the real-estate sector, whose volatility cannot be wholly explained by way of endogenous factors—that is, factors internal to the market. If a neighborhood is expensive, this is also because it holds promises for the potential buyer that cannot be measured through mere quantitative means, namely a specific “quality of life” (8; Thesis 10) which in turn represents a specific form of symbolic capital. Therefore, “fluctuations internal to the operations of the market fundamentally hinge on a certain privileged non-economic factor: affect. Markets run on fear and hope, confidence and insecurity. … Affect cannot be considered to be squarely outside the market, but neither is it a formal market mechanism that is recognized as inside its system” (8; Thesis 11). Since for Massumi the term ‘affect’ refers to those qualitative factors which are both within and outside the market, they constitute what he calls its “immanent outside” (9; Thesis 11). To put his sophisticated argument in a nutshell: for him, it is precisely affects’ vital “excess-over”, their “overspilling” of quantitatively measurable market dynamics (9; Thesis 11) that we need to tap in order to return to a qualitative notion of value.

For Massumi, it is significant that the late-capitalist economy has itself created the conditions for its subversion through its ever-increasing financialization. Its prevalent tools, particularly financial derivatives such as futures contracts, predominantly operate in a virtual space in which a future outcome is imagined yet can never be securely predicted. According to Arjun Appadurai, “the derivative’s claim to value is essentially linguistic. Furthermore, its force is primarily performative, and is tied up with context, convention, and felicity” (2016, 4). In this way, financialization itself exceeds the limits of economic rationalism and protrudes into a virtual space whose aesthetic potential Massumi intends to mine, precisely because this space is only barely controllable by the financial sector. To put it differently, the speculative free-play of derivatives, Massumi believes, might provide a model for alternative instruments capable of turning over capitalist turn-over: “The turning of the turnover of capitalist surplus-value requires the alter-valuing of [capitalism’s] self-driving process. … A word for the alter-value that could drive a postcapitalist process is creativity” (19). This is exactly where aesthetics comes in. Quantitatively determined economic ways of thinking, Massumi suggests, might be deprived of their hegemonic status by putting a new stress on alternative and primarily qualitative forms of exchange. In order to identify such forms, he falls back on explicitly aesthetic categories: “Zest, beauty, wonder, and adventure provide aesthetic categories that might pave the way for the revaluation of values to go beyond normative criteria and judgment” (95; Thesis 77).

In a long section of his book that he tellingly captions “Fabulation” (2018, 111; Thesis 94), Massumi offers fourteen “[s]peculative strateg[ies]” (112–24). I would need a lot more space than I have here to explain them in any detail. However, even if I had, I would certainly question some of them, not least because I do not agree with everything Massumi characterizes as these strategies’ “anarchistic aspect” (119). More importantly, I would doubt their viability simply because I consider most of them as unrealistic, including those I support. This, however, is exactly the point. Their un-realistic, radical-utopian nature is meant to stimulate imagining an alternative to capitalist realism. Stimulating the imagination is precisely what they have in common with literary texts. At the same time, the fact that these strategies concretely aim at imagining a future makes for an uncanny analogy with futures contracts which, as their name indicates, allow speculators to envision a future profit. In Jens Beckert’s words: “The strongest similarity between literary texts and fictional expectations in the economy is that in both, actors proceed as if a described reality were true. … Expectations [of economic profit] are … fictional, based on imaginaries of the future or based on the ascription of transcending qualities, not on the foreknowledge of the future and the object as an empirical reality” (2016, 67). Yet whereas financial speculation is based on a quantitative notion of exchange value, Massumi’s speculative imagining is aimed at the release of a qualitative “surplus-value of life” (16; Thesis 16). In this sense, I read his approach as a radical-utopian suggestion to mobilize the potentialities of both literature and today’s hyper-financialized economy in order to eventually turn them against the latter.

My use of the phrase “radical utopianism” to characterize Massumi’s venture is taken from John Storey, according to whom “[r]adical utopianism confronts ‘realism’ with possibility. It gives us the resources to imagine the future in a different way. … [R]eality is the social ordering of the real into a hegemonic consensus. … When it is claimed that radical utopianism is unrealistic, it is against such constructions of reality it is contesting, rather than against some absolute reality” (2019, 1, 3). One of the concrete measures Massumi proposes to implement is the creation of a “digital affect-o-meter” with which to register “affective intensity” (121) in a “participation-based gift economy” (120). Whatever one might think about such a project, the point is not its immediate applicability but rather the development of a vocabulary for forms of speculation alternative to those that dominate the economy right now: “No account of value can do without criteria of evaluation. These terms [zest, beauty, wonder, adventure] provide elements of a vocabulary for the evaluation of the quality of the process coming to expression” (95; Thesis 77). As the section title indicates, this vocabulary is one of “Fabulation” (2018, 111; Thesis 94); it allows for imaginative, radical-utopian forms of speculation.

Taking my cue from Massumi, but in a much less grand and ambitious way, I suggest that we can put the insights of literary studies to valuable use in any project that investigates the narratives through which a specific economic system is legitimized in order to have a basis from which to develop alternative vocabularies. After all, is that not what literature ideally does and what therefore contributes to its value? In The Singularity of Literature, Derek Attridge describes literary “verbal creation” as “a handling of language whereby something we might call ‘otherness’, or ‘alterity,’ or ‘the other,’ is made, or allowed, to impact upon the existing configurations of an individual’s mental world—which is to say, upon a particular cultural field as it is embodied in a single subjectivity” (2004, 19) In addition, if the impact of the verbal creation is meant to be so strong as to disclose a genuine alternative, such an alternative can only be effectively envisioned once you have gained a proper knowledge of the reality, the “particular cultural field”, in relation to which it is supposed to introduce a difference. As John Clarke puts it: “Understanding the myths, stories, fantasies and fictions that work to sustain the apparent necessity of the dominant way of ‘doing’ the economy is a necessary critical moment” (2020, 30). Such understanding of economies as “imagined” (18), however, does not automatically mean (along the lines of Massumi’s anarchic manifesto) that every established way of ‘doing’ the economy has to be rejected as a whole. As I indicated above, I am actually skeptical about some of Massumi’s ideas, also because, in 2025, seven years after their publication, some of them may already require revision. For example, in times in which it has become abundantly clear how easily the digital space and AI technology can be manipulated and configured to roll back progressive thinking, Massumi’s trust in “[t]he possibilities for distributed agency offered by interactive digital platforms” (2018, 121; Thesis 94) has come to sound almost naïve.

Yet this is where another affordance of literature becomes relevant and so contributes to its value. The fact that it trains us in productive critical thinking by allowing us to read and interpret the world as a complex text also enables us to enter into negotiations over what is worth preserving. This might be, for example, the idea of the welfare state—an idea which was foundational for postwar democracies such as the UK or Germany but has been under severe attack for decades. Oddly enough, as voting behavior in recent years has illustrated, even many of those most likely to suffer from an erosion of the welfare state increasingly tend to support neoliberal agendas, obviously because the propagators of austerity policies are able to tell more effective stories—stories about, for instance, ‘benefit scroungers’, or about the inefficiency and sluggishness of state-run welfare institutions that allegedly do nothing but impede the pioneering spirit of entrepreneurs courageous enough to take a risk.

In 2009, at the height of the financial crisis, Fisher claimed that the naturalization of such narratives amounted to the abolishment of the ethical value system which had been the basis of the postwar consensus in Britain and elsewhere: “neoliberalism has sought to eliminate the very category of value in the ethical sense. Over the past thirty years [i.e., since the 1980s], capitalist realism has successfully installed a ‘business ontology’ in which it is simply obvious that everything in society, including healthcare and education, should be run as a business” (2009, 16–17). Although it is a commonplace among scholars of literature to claim that literary texts are exceptionally well-suited to mediate ethical values, it is perhaps less customary to likewise stress that literary texts also act as mediators of economic ideas.

Accordingly, it is worth pointing out that theories such as Massumi’s can only be effective if we, as scholars of literary and cultural studies, develop a genuine interest in understanding how the economy works. As Lawrence Grossberg puts it in “Considering Value: Rescuing Economies from the Economists”, a chapter of his book Cultural Studies in the Future Tense: “cultural studies”—as well as literary studies, I would add—“does need to take questions of economics more seriously, especially because of the specific realities, relations, and forces of the contemporary conjuncture. But … cultural studies [as well as literary studies] has to find another way of taking economies seriously, of incorporating economic questions into its analysis, which would not reproduce the reductionism of many forms of political economy” (2010, 105). In this sense, in the contemporary conjuncture dominated by populist political rhetoric, the zombie-esque revival of authoritarianism, and the rise of technocapitalism, a further important aspect that contributes to the value of literature can be found precisely in its anti-reductionism, in the ways in which it, through its status as a network interlinked with other networks (Meyer-Lee 2015, 341), keeps up a continuing exchange with the discourses that shape our lives, one of the most dominant of which is the economic discourse. The complexity of literature prevents the prefiguration of any one definitive value system, of course; literature is not positivistic in this sense. Rather, the production of literary value, not wholly dissimilar from that of exchange value, is dependent on a specific, historically contingent context and on the willingness of all parties involved to open up a space for genuine negotiation on equal terms. In a time in which digital media increasingly condition people to mostly read short and easily understandable texts in quick succession, the idea that literature, which requires patience and also the ability to tolerate ambiguity, can still function in this sense might be naïve. Whether it can still open up such a space is the litmus test it has so pass if it wants to remain relevant and be a purveyor of public value.

References

Appadurai, Arjun. 2016. Banking on Words: The Failure of Language in the Age of Derivative Finance. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.

Attridge, Derek. 2004. The Singularity of Literature. London and New York: Routledge.

Beckert, Jens. 2016. Imagined Futures: Fictional Expectations and Capitalist Dynamics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Clarke, John. 2020. “Why Imagined Economies?” In Imagined Economies / Real Fictions: New Perspectives on Economic Thinking in Great Britain, edited by Jessica Fischer and Gesa Stedman, 17–34. Bielefeld: transcript.

Fisher, Mark. 2009. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Winchester: Zero Books.

Grossberg, Lawrence. 2010. Cultural Studies in the Future Tense. Durham: Duke University Press.

Kennedy, Melissa. 2020. “Imaginary Economies: Narratives for the 21^st Century”. In Imagined Economies / Real Fictions: New Perspectives on Economic Thinking in Great Britain, edited by Jessica Fischer and Gesa Stedman, 157–74. Bielefeld: transcript.

Massumi, Brian. 2018. 99 Theses on the Revaluation of Value: A Postcapitalist Manifesto. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Meyer-Lee, Robert J. 2015. “Toward a Theory of Literary Valuing”. New Literary History 46, no. 2: 335–55.

Nünning, Vera. 2020. “Culture and Values”. In Key Concepts for the Study of Culture: An Introduction, edited by Vera Nünning, Philipp Löffler, and Margit Peterfy, 323–58. Trier: WVT.

Oxford English Dictionary, “value (n.),” September 2025, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/5277092424.

Poovey, Mary. 2008. Genres of the Credit Economy: Mediating Value in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Britain. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Sedláček, Tomáš. 2011. Economy of Good and Evil: The Quest for Economic Meaning from Gilgamesh to Wall Street. New York: Oxford University Press.

Storey, John. 2019. Radical Utopianism and Cultural Studies: On Refusing to Be Realistic. London and New York: Routledge. 

This article is part of the b2o: an online journal special issue “The Question of Literary Value”, edited by Alexander Dunst and Pieter Vermeulen.

Literature isn’t Invaluable—But It Can be Redundant

Nathan Taylor

Theodor Adorno once suggested that it’s pure ideology to believe anything like a fundamental human need for art exists (1997, 330). We might as well live in a world with no art at all. We’d get by just fine, Adorno surmises, not only because art doesn’t satisfy our most basic physiological needs, but also because we live in a system—monopoly capitalism—that perpetually manufactures false needs. Inevitably, any perceived need for art would be satisfied by something else. In such a world, art is nice to have, but it doesn’t sustain us, even when, as Adorno feared, it becomes an accessory to those transactions and exchanges that do—as in the culture industry.

Adorno’s suggestion—a kind of thought-experiment–is an exercise in considering what art, or literature, is worth. Yet unlike many proponents of aesthetic or literary value, Adorno is willing to concede that art might well be a superfluous or redundant part of life under capitalism (against a cultural elite that imagines art to be a necessary feature of their world). For the thinker of negative dialectics, however, that redundancy is a virtue, part of art’s power of determinate negation, its capacity to “break up the external exchange of need and satisfaction” (1997, 331). In its redundancy, Adorno is arguing, art refuses the transactional economy of commodity exchange that otherwise liquidates, as he might put it, all human life under capitalism.

I rehearse Adorno’s thought experiment because its basic logic is still with us in discussions of literary and aesthetic value. When humanists today defend art’s value or critique its ideological character, they tend, like Adorno, to imagine that some aspect of the aesthetic might escape capital’s value relations, whether they describe that escape, with Adorno, as superfluity or, more positively, as art’s immaterial worth. Even thinkers who don’t share Adorno’s patent sense for aesthetic negativity subscribe to a similar value exceptionalism, as some critics have usefully described it.[1]

Take Michael Clune’s recent Defense of Judgment, for instance, which puts a contemporary spin on the old genre of the defense of literature. Like Adorno’s thought experiment, Clune’s apologetics gnaw at common sensibilities about art, in this case by exposing the bad-faith positions that “professors” of literature (in both the sense of academic instructors, and the older sense of those who profess or avow) adopt when they claim equality but judge hierarchically. Clune, by contrast, concedes the elitism of judgment as a singular pathway to a “sphere of value not subject to market determination” (2021, 37). Judgment, by this account, acts as a bulwark against the market’s own metrics of value like popularity and sway, which Clune takes to be adjuncts to sales figures masking as falsely democratic ideals of preference. As part of an aesthetic education—one that requires, Clune admits, training, expertise, and a sizable investment of time and money—judgment points to artworks “that are worth our time”, and in doing so moves beyond economic value to “promise … values we may not yet know how to value” (182).

Taken together, Clune’s and Adorno’s critiques exemplify a particular brand of aesthetic exceptionalism, which we might more aptly describe as alternate inflections of a discourse of the invaluable, in all the semantic ambivalence afforded by that prefix “in-”. Clune treats art as a repository of something immeasurably valuable; Adorno as a negation of the economic laws of value that dictate exchange relations. One (Clune) reaches beyond the economic, the other (Adorno) pits itself against it. Both, however, align art and literature with a distinctly non-capitalist form of value—an invaluable value. Notwithstanding their political differences, or the fact that capital’s prospects of producing value look very different in 1970 than they do in 2021, Adorno and Clune share, in other words, a framing of the aesthetic in antagonism to what each respectively identify as resolutely capitalist modes of valuation.  They treat aesthetic works less as exceptions to “the nets of the market”, as Clune puts it (2021, 10), than, with Adorno, as the vicars of values “no longer distorted by exchange, profit, and the false needs of a degraded humanity” (1997, 310).

Look around a bit and you’ll find plenty of other iterations of this double discourse of the invaluable. Its origins are undeniably Romantic, a trademark feature of an aesthetic movement that was historically coeval with capital’s reorganization of social life around the production of economic value. Friedrich Schlegel, for one, was explicit in dubbing literature “infinitely valuable” and thus paradoxically incommensurable to any other object of value (Schlegel 1967, 156). In doing so, he was following upon Kant’s Third Critique (1790), the widely acknowledged source of any attempt to demarcate artisanal or craft work from fine or free art as one that is produced without regard for remuneration and judged without interest.[2] In post-Kantian aesthetics, the double discourse of the invaluable would prove profoundly influential in attempts to describe the unusual dynamics of cultural production.[3] Even the most resolute critics of economic value flirt at times with the discourse of the invaluable, as when Marx, knee-deep in debates about productive and unproductive labor, likens Milton to a silkworm: “Milton produced Paradise Lost in the way a silkworm produces silk, as the activation of his own nature” (1976, 1044). It’s easy to blame this on Marx’s residual romanticism, but the fact is that Marx’s organicist metaphor of the silkworm would seem to hold open the prospect that certain kinds of art-making escape capital’s law of value.

Value, from within

In pointing to the enduring allure of the invaluable, I’m not suggesting we relinquish the attempt to locate a way out of the value relations we live in (abolishing those relations remains a worthwhile endeavor). I am urging that we think more precisely about what those value relations entail. The frame of the invaluable does this by revealing something otherwise obscured by the either/or-logics of aesthetic exceptionalism: while both negative (Adorno) and positive (Clune) inflections of the invaluable suggest a privative relation to economic value (either contravening or surpassing a capitalist form of value), they still remain squarely within the problem of value. That is, they adhere to a third, alternate sense of the prefix “in-”: less grammatically nullifying than relational in the sense of being located within, even installed in a regime of valuation. The question becomes how the shibboleth of the invaluable operates this side of the laws of value it combats, laws which generate the desire for a discourse of the invaluable in the first place.

In their account of literary value, Joshua Clover and Christopher Nealon target positions like Adorno’s and Clune’s for how they imagine discrete domains of aesthetic and economic value, “endlessly worr[ying] over their degree of separation or intermixed-ness” (2017, 212). Usefully, Clover and Nealon dispense with the hackneyed terms of aesthetic autonomy to demonstrate how such models promulgate a story about modernity that can be alternately triumphant or tragic but which is always incremental and linear (“a story in which there is simply ‘more capitalism’ now than there once was”) (212). Such a narrative, they argue, is quick to devise a social ontology of subsumption which literature might variously resist or succumb to. In holding open the prospect “that there is some kind of value external to capitalist value”, these domain models neatly separate the politics of the aesthetic from the economics of value expansion under capital; they imagine literature and art might point the way to modes of non-capitalist valuation in which the political economy of value would have no sway (213). Where domain models falter, per Clover’s and Nealon’s argument, is less where they desire an alternative to capitalist valuation than where they overstate the political effectivity of aesthetic value as an “opposing form of value” or overlook the historical development of artmaking in its relation to the shifting and often volatile ways capital reinforces its efforts to expand value (208). Any proper understanding of literary or aesthetic value would, by contrast, begin by assessing that relation, by offering a measured historical account of “the particulars of how we have ended up organizing life so as to produce value” in the first place (196).

This critique might strike some as unapologetically materialist (it is), but its import for assessing the invaluable is patent. For one, it prompts us to think more intensely about the social basis of a desire for the invaluable, for an enclave of non-economic value. It also demands a more robust historical account of art and literature’s position within the arrangement of social life around value production. These are tall orders, but one way forward, I’d argue, would be to query whether the sort of fine art or literature we’re inclined to label invaluable might not more properly be described in terms of its worthlessness, that is: its dynamics of devaluation. Rather than construe this circumstance of an art rendered worthless, redundant, or superfluous to economic value production as an outside to value (as Adorno surmised with his thought experiment), we might grasp its superfluity as both an effect of and condition for capital’s efforts to expand value, as part of capital’s internal dynamics. What the materialist approach to value clarifies is this: what capital throws off as superfluous or redundant for the expansion of value doesn’t lie outside the value relation but is rather its most glaring consequence. Superfluity is, then, the negative corollary to an extended process of accumulation; the inverse to a superabundance of commodity goods and a paradoxical feature of the build-up of social wealth in the form of value—a dynamic that contemporary crises and so-called “jobless recoveries” make overwhelmingly clear.[4]

From this angle, we can see that Marx might in fact have been onto this sense of the invaluable when he labelled Milton an unproductive worker. Marx’s metaphor of the silkworm might seem to suggest a Romantic escape from the capitalist industry of letters, but his point in specifying Milton’s unproductivity is this: the value of Milton’s literature can only be assessed by first assessing its position within the larger arrangement of social life around the production of value. As Sarah Brouillette points out, Marx isn’t saying that Milton’s literature “articulates the pristine, original, self-grounding individual imagined by bourgeois aesthetic theory” (2019, 527). What he is saying is that unlike the assembly-line-like writer churning out texts for a publisher to sell in a literary marketplace, Milton is not valorizing capital when he puts pen to paper. The social setting of his artistic work is different, even redundant, but it nevertheless remains defined by its relation to that social arrangement.

What are the consequences of this sense of the invaluable for literary study? For discussions of literary value? To get a handle on what a more ambivalent sense of the invaluable might mean for how we appraise literary value, we could do worse than to turn to the literature present at the genesis of both that form of value and the discourse of the invaluable—a literature that would prove influential for nearly all discourses of value in the value-obsessed nineteenth century, and one which would subsequently find its way into Marx’s own thinking of value: German Romanticism.[5]

Superfluous Life

In 1838, the German Romantic Ludwig Tieck published a short novella titled Of Life’s Superfluity (Des Lebens Überfluss) in a novel literary format: the paperback literary periodical. This publication was significant—beyond its place and format of publication—for several reasons. For one, Tieck was an epochal figure. He was hanging around in Jena, the hub of early Romanticism, when the Schlegel brothers were translating Shakespeare and working through the aftershocks of Kant’s critical philosophy, which for Tieck as for the others of his cohort implied that art is sacrosanct. Tieck was around when Goethe died in 1832, as politics grew heated in the restoration years that followed the French Revolution and when early socialists began devising their own romantic alternatives to industry. Tieck watched the Prussian guild system collapse and the market for factory laborers rise. And sitting in the relics of a feudal court, he saw a new generation of radical writers like Marx and Heine (who despised Tieck) flee to political exile as Europe inched towards yet another revolution. All of this is to say that when Tieck published a story about life and superfluity in 1839, he’d long been witnessing the reorganization of social life—and its art—around the production of what he, decades ahead of Marx, called surplus.

The novella’s plot is simply told: two banished lovers, one bourgeois, one aristocrat, are forced into exile and withdraw entirely into the confines of their impoverished attic apartment. Compensating for their economic deprivation and isolation in a gruellingly cold winter, they turn their surroundings into a refuge for poetic life, doubling down on their romantic commitment as they renounce any and all material possessions as frivolous surplus. Their renunciation is part of what the male protagonist, Heinrich, dubs a cynical—in the sense of Diogenes—philosophy of poverty. As the lovers run out of firewood, the situation grows desperate. Heinrich, under the influence of one Crusoe-tale too many, elects to chop down and burn the wooden staircase that connects the lover’s apartment to the outside world—a move that both solves and exacerbates things by fully severing ties to the mundane and “prosaic” world, as he describes it (Tieck 1854, 18). Yet what should’ve put an airtight seal on their poetic enclave ultimately does the opposite: the world of prose returns in full force in the novella’s final scene when the owner of the house—the lovers’ landlord—shows up, police in tow, with an eviction notice, seeking restitution for the violation of his property.

The saving grace—and turning point—comes with the arrival of an old friend, who managed to locate the lovers-in-hiding by way of a prized 1477 edition of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales that Heinrich, tight on funds, had pawned off, but in which he’d noted his current address. Along with the Chaucer edition (a book Tieck well knew marked a new print age of literary distribution), the friend—a speculator—brings Heinrich a hefty return on an investment he had brokered in a colonial joint-stock company. As the friend puts it: “The capital which you had entrusted to me at the time of my departure has so rampantly grown in India that you might now consider yourself a rich man” (67). That’s enough to placate the landlord, who had mistaken Heinrich for a property-destroying socialist revolutionary but who’s happy to receive redress after all. In the end, that capital and the rare book act as the novella’s deus ex machina, restoring order and marking the lovers’ turn of fortune towards a less threadbare life.

It’s a dramatic and tightly wound story. Even worse, it’s an overwrought one, begging to be read as a tongue-in-cheek allegory of Romanticism’s own unwinding, written by its longest-living representative. The allegory operates through a matrix of cliched references to Romanticism itself: its penchant for medieval romances and tales like Chaucer’s, its obsession with arabesque and ornate forms, and its penchant for the absolute and unconditional, in the sense of the self-enclosed, the inwardly absolved of the world, and the stubbornly indolent (what in the heyday of theory was called ‘inoperativity’).[6] But Tieck’s allegory, like all allegories, has a second layer: its explicit concern with economic value. The novella offers a compendium of a new vocabulary of capitalist value, from “surplus” and “superfluity” to “consumption” and “capital”. And it would appear upon first glance to promulgate the “cozy axiomatics” of Romantic anti-capitalism, as Gayatri Spivak once put it: “use good, exchange bad; use concrete, exchange abstract, etc” (Spivak 1999, 177). But what makes Tieck’s novella late Romantic is how it employs the protocols of Romantic irony to evoke and parodically depose those axiomatics simultaneously.

Back to the staircase: If the novella is begging to be read as an allegory of the invaluable value of the poetic—which finds abundance in absolute minimalism, and wealth in renouncing material needs—this allegory pivots on the question of whether there exists a “bulwark” against the encroachment of market value, to frame it as Clune might. In Tieck’s novella this bulwark is the staircase that Heinrich destroys to hold the “prosaic” world at bay. Tieck’s text is clever in its use of symbols and its form: it refuses any absolute “inside” or “outside”, any unidirectional up or down, and it knows that antitheses are, like the staircase, still a form of relation. So even when the staircase is gone, its owner is not. Hence the landlord, whose arrival on the scene not only marks the return of the prosaic (after its negation) but also the self-defeating logic of conflating surplus with superfluity. Heinrich confronts the landlord with his philosophy of cynical poverty, arguing that the staircase was a superfluous and “empty luxury”, a redundant relic of the prosaic economy he rejects (thereby following the example of Diogenes, who threw away his wooden cup after seeing a peasant drink water with his hands). The landlord, however, counters: “I once saw a guy hold his mouth straight up to the faucet to drink … so your Mr. Diogenes might just as well have chopped off his hand” (Tieck 1854, 61).

The landlord’s point is this: unconditionality has its own painful conditions and any effort to be absolved of those conditions, to withdraw into the invaluable space of the absolute, to make a virtue of deprivation, isn’t a pathway to another sort of overabundance but an exercise in frivolity. Here, the dual layers of the text’s allegory collapse into each other. Heinrich’s Romantic attempt to valorize an unconditional poetic existence runs up against a value relation that had rendered him superfluous to its prosaic world. As he puts it: “The world left me and I left the world to the extent that nobody was willing to appraise my value at a noteworthy amount” (45). Heinrich’s hope was that to be superfluous to the world might mean to be afforded the luxury of resigning. But he is forced to admit that to be invaluable is in fact to be devalued, cast off as surplus in the specific sense of redundant and worthless to that world’s circuits of valorization, yet still painfully accountable to them.

The novella patiently works through the paradoxes of this worthlessness. It maps a social space in which a valuable enclave of non-value might be defended to the point of its collapse; and it insists on the impossibility of such an autarkic space of non-value. Ultimately, Tieck’s novella operates beyond a “domain model” of value by virtue of the way it stages the deus ex machina of capital and its superintendents—the investor, the cop, the landlord. The prescience of Tieck’s play with surplus and superfluity is crucial here. It’s 1838. It would be another two decades before Marx would identify the ‘moving contradiction’ of capital in the way it reduces its very source of growth, “posit[ing] the superfluous in growing measure as a condition—question of life or death—for the necessary” (Marx 1993, 706). But that reduction is what Tieck’s novella enacts in a register for which the term allegory turns out to be a stretch. Tieck’s text takes the purported unconditionality and invaluable value of Romantic literature literally. It says: in an age of seemingly self-aggrandizing capital, Romantic literature’s trademark surfeit—the poetic overabundance that Friedrich Schlegel at the outset of the century still called invaluable—flips into redundancy. Tieck’s prose still cleaves, just barely, to the Romantic fantasy of being rid of conditionality altogether. But it also stages the breakdown of that Romantic idea, which buckles under the pressure of a nascent realism, one that consists in demonstrating that fantasies of the invaluable last only as long as it takes to be evicted. In other words, it cancels out its allegory of Romantic absolution from the world by pointing to the overt and very prosaic fact that to be in excess of the world is simply to be redundant to it.

Our discussions of literary value might benefit from attending more carefully to this redundancy, not as the basis for an invaluable aesthetics but for how it anticipates an ambivalent dynamic of value production that continues to exert its pressure today—capital, cops, landlords, and all.

References

Adorno, Theodor W. 1997. Aesthetic Theory. Translated by Robert Hullot-Kentor. London: Bloomsbury Academic.

Agamben, Giorgio. 1993. Infancy and History: The Destruction of Experience. Translated by Liz Heron. London: Verso.

Beech, Dave. 2015. Art and Value: Art’s Economic Exceptionalism in Classical, Neoclassical and Marxist Economics. Chicago: Haymarket Books.

Boever, Arne De. 2019. Against Aesthetic Exceptionalism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1995. The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field. Translated by Susan Emanuel. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Brouillette, Sarah. 2019. “Literature and Culture”. Bloomsbury Companion to Marx, edited by Jeff Diamanti, Andrew Pendakis, and Imre Szeman, 525–31. London: Bloomsbury Academic.

Clover, Joshua. 2019. Riot. Strike. Riot: The New Era of Uprisings. London: Verso.

Clover, Joshua, and Christopher Nealon. 2017. “Literary and Economic Value”. In Christopher Nealon, Infinity for Marxists: Essays on Poetry and Capital, 195-213. Leiden: Brill.

Clune, Michael W. 2021. A Defense of Judgment. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Kant, Immanuel. 2000. Critique of the Power of Judgment. Translated by Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, and Jean-Luc Nancy. 1988. The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism. Translated by Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Marx, Karl. 1976. Capital, Vol. 1. Translated by Ben Fowkes. New York: Penguin.

Marx, Karl. 1993. Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy. Translated by Martin Nicolaus. New York: Penguin.

“Misery and Debt: On the Logic and History of Surplus Populations and Surplus Capital”. 2010. Endnotes 2. https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/misery-and-debt.

Schlegel, Friedrich. 1967. “[Lyceums-Fragmente]”. In Kritische Friedrich Schlegel Ausgabe, Vol. 2:1, edited by Hans Eichler, 147–64. Paderborn: Schöningh.

Simmel, Georg. 2011. The Philosophy of Money. Translated by Tom Bottomore and David Frisby. London: Routledge.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1999. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Tieck, Ludwig. 1854 [1838]. Des Lebens Überfluss. In Ludwig Tieck’s Schriften, Vol. 26, 3–70. Berlin: Reimer Verlag.

[1] On economic exceptionalism see Beech 2015; on aesthetic exceptionalism see Boever 2019 as well as his contribution to this issue.

[2] Here’s Kant: “Beautiful art must be free art in a double sense: it must not be a matter of remuneration, a labor whose magnitude can be judged, enforced, or paid for in accordance with a determinate standard; but also, while the mind is certainly occupied, it must feel itself to be satisfied and stimulated (independently of remuneration) without looking beyond to another end” (2000, 198). Tellingly, Kant’s double freedom is what Marx inverts when he notes that the historical prerequisite for capital is the laborer’s freedom “in the double sense that as a free individual he can dispose of his labour-power as his own commodity, and that on the other hand he has no other commodity for sale” (Marx 1976, 272).

[3] The double discourse of the invaluable plays an outsized role in sociologies of culture as well, from Georg Simmel’s Philosophy of Money to the “pragmatic” sociology of Luc Boltanski today. Arguably, it is this discourse which constitutes the central object of study for Pierre Bourdieu’s study of the “restricted field” of cultural production as well, which begins with an analysis of an “economic world turned upside down”, one in which artists’ insistence that their work is priceless (“without commercial value”) facilitates the emergence of a distinctly non-economic set of criteria for evaluating a work’s worth (1995, 81). For Bourdieu, a work’s status as economically invaluable is its condition of possibility for becoming valuable within the symbolic economy of the restricted field, which paradoxically can be converted back into economic capital.

[4] On surplus and superfluity in this sense, see “Misery and Debt” (2010).

[5] Marx’s penchant for the sort of Romantic fairy tales that Tieck helped establish as a genre is well documented. It’s notable, however, that Marx’s own fairy-tale rhetoric is most evident when he’s writing about the lumpen with little awareness of Tieck’s fairy-tale like novella about surplus and the lumpen. On Marx’s fairy-tale lumpen see Clover 2019, 194.

[6] See Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy 1988. Giorgio Agamben, an eminent thinker of inoperativity, discusses Tieck’s novella in another context in Infancy and History (1993).

Photograph accessible here. 

This article is part of the b2o: an online journal special issue “The Question of Literary Value”, edited by Alexander Dunst and Pieter Vermeulen.

Literary Value is Unexceptional

Arne De Boever

What’s your understanding of literary value?

How would you begin to answer this question?

Tell me what literary value is, and I will tell you about your politics.

I will begin to formulate my answer from within[1] literature, and specifically from within a particular novel, Ben Lerner’s 10:04. 10:04 explicitly takes on the question of literary value and self-consciously, almost in spite of itself, stands out as one of the most important (that is, most valuable) English-language novels of the first two decades of the twenty-first century—indeed, by now you may have grown tired of hearing about it.

The novel includes a scene that features Alena, an artist friend of the novel’s narrator Ben, throwing a piece of an already broken Jeff Koons balloon sculpture onto the hardwood floor of her studio, where it shatters further. “It’s worth nothing” (Lerner 2014, 132), Alena hisses—and indeed, all of the art in her Institute for Totaled Art is what the novel refers to as “zero value” art (129). Specifically, it’s art that due to some kind of damage—sometimes visible, sometimes not—has been deemed to be a total loss by insurance companies. Such art is not destroyed, however, but stored in a warehouse, and Alena has convinced an insurance company to donate some of these works to her institute, where they are displayed as art without value. Clearly, this is a scene in which the financial value of art is destroyed. And it is satisfying, Ben comments, to see “an icon of art world commercialism and valorized stupidity” (131)—a Koons—smashed to pieces.

Consider, however, the sentence that immediately follows Alena’s hissed declaration of zero value: “not for the first time, I wondered”, Ben reflects, “whether Alena was a genius”, some kind of “chthonic deity of vengeance” (132). If the financial value of art is destroyed in this scene, Alena’s downwards gesture is immediately also lifted up, and expressed as another kind of value: the value of a work of genius, even some kind of earthly goddess. While it seems clear what kind of value this scene destroys (namely, financial value), the kind of value that it institutes is—apart from the fact that is not supposed to be financial value—much less clear. Indeed, even its separateness from financial value, which the novel seems to assume, is uncertain: for doesn’t Ben Lerner, by writing about Alena’s Institute for Totaled Art, which is a fictionalized version of the actually existing artist Elka Krajewska’s Salvage Art Institute, bring value to Krajewska’s project—value that will, almost inevitably, at some point translate into financial value again? Through the grants that Krajewska will, in part thanks to Lerner’s writing, be able to get for her project? The honoraria that she will receive for talking about it? The increase in the financial value that her other work might accrue thanks to the attention that the Salvage Art Institute receives, et cetera? And isn’t my very own mortgage in some small part being paid off by the thus seemingly inescapable financial value of Alena’s art, given that I teach 10:04 and receive a salary for my work? So perhaps “the market’s soul” isn’t as easily chased away as 10:04’s narrator Ben, as well as Ben Lerner, suggest (if we can take the essay from Harper’s in which the claim about the market’s soul and “art outside of capitalism” first appeared at face value [Lerner 2013]).

I am interested in the value that this scene, in which the financial value of art is destroyed, also posits. I am particularly interested in how this non-financial value of art is posited: through terms like “genius” and “deity”, which draw from a Romantic and theological register, even if we are told that the deity in question is a “chthonic” one (meaning, from the inner soil of the earth—the ancient Greek underworld).

What’s your understanding of the non-financial value of art?

How would you begin to answer this question?

These are, in the end, questions about the autonomy of art—of the literary, visual, and performing arts. The specific issue I want to consider is: what might be the politics of the answers we give to such questions?

*

Since 10:04 invites us, in this context, to consider the value of contemporary art, a recent debate about value in contemporary art might be instructive. I have in mind the back-and-forth between the painter Neo Rauch and the critic Wolfgang Ullrich about the autonomy of the artist and the work of art, about which I have written elsewhere (Boever 2025).

At the center of this debate is Rauch’s painting “Der Anbräuner” (2019), which is featured at the top of my text. Rauch, a German painter who was born in former GDR (he hails from Leipzig), makes this painting in response to the critic Ullrich (a Wessie), because Ullrich has accused him of peddling a rightist politics in the ways he talks about the autonomy of art. Nostalgic for the days of East Germany (which Rauch perceives as having been colonized by the West and its values—capitalism, multiculturalism, et cetera), Rauch longs even beyond that for the times of the Romantic artist to whom we defer as a kind of genius, outside of the reach of criticism. Rauch makes a clear case for aesthetic autonomy and for the special value of art, but the problem is, according to Ullrich in his engaging little book Feind Bild Werden (“Becoming the Image of the Enemy”), that the terms in which Rauch makes his case have become entangled in the discourse of the political right. There has been what Ullrich terms a “Rechtsverschiebung” (“a shift to the right”) of the idea of autonomous art (Ullrich 2020, 12), which is being articulated today in exceptionalist, theological, and sovereign terms that Ullrich considers problematic (Ullrich uses the word “majesty” in this context [55]). Art and the artist are being talked about as “Kings”: this is the fundamental problem. As Ullrich sees it—and one can think of this as a kind of aesthetic “No Kings” protest—, we need to get back to a leftist articulation of aesthetic autonomy.

But the situation Ullrich encounters is that autonomy, on the left, appears to be out. There, the valuation of art is often not so much made in terms of aesthetic autonomy but through reference to “identities” and “issues”—art-adjacent values that are currently, and perhaps increasingly, used to value art. This is an aesthetic condition that scholars have characterized as “post-autonomous” (see Ullrich 2022), in which the value of art is precisely in dispute at a time when identities and issues seem to be valued more. How this condition relates to previous debates about literature and politics, for example Jean-Paul Sartre’s notions of “committed literature” or “engaged literature” (“littérature engagée” [Sartre 1988]), is something that would need to be assessed—in a longer text—through the lens of debates about Sartre’s text “What is Literature?” and the ontological question it poses, as well as about the notion of aesthetic autonomy and its relation to politics, commitment, and engagement (for example, in the writings of Theodor Adorno [Adorno 1992] and, more recently, Nicholas Brown [Brown 2019]).

What troubles me in this debate is what, using the terminology I have been developing elsewhere, I would characterize as the “exceptionalist” articulation of aesthetic autonomy that we find in it. I suggest we pause, as Lerner’s word “chthonic” invites us to do (for why, of all things, chthonic?), over the justification of aesthetic autonomy through terms like genius, deity, majesty—in short, through the theologico-political register of sovereignty (which, as political commentators left and right are noting, is currently “having a moment” [Nicas 2025]). Certainly when it comes to what Ullrich terms “the rightwards shift of the idea of autonomous art”, this political dimension—central to the history of the political right, as for example Maggie Nelson in the opening pages of her book On Freedom notes (Nelson 2021, 5) —would be difficult to overlook.[2]

At the same time, I will admit that I am also troubled by the post-autonomous position of the contemporary aesthetic left to which, today, such exceptionalism is often seen to respond: a position that risks precisely always subordinating aesthetic autonomy—and by implication, literary value—to the various issues of the day (feminism, climate change, structural racism, et cetera). To be clear, I am not saying that these are unimportant issues. At the same time, whither autonomy under such post-autonomous conditions of valuation? And might not the rightist, exceptionalist articulation of autonomy as we encounter it today be a reaction to the contemporary leftist regime of post-autonomous valuation? Might there not be a way in which post-autonomous valuations of art awaken and reinforce exceptionalist articulations of aesthetic autonomy? Could this not be a part of what constitutes the steady flow of “scandals” (from the Greek “skandalon”, meaning “trap” or “snare”) and “shitstorms” (Han 2017) of our time, in which right and left seem bent on “trapping” and even “canceling” each other again and again, without an end in sight. Did the same issue—autonomy vs. post-autonomy—trouble Sartre’s plea for an engaged literature? If it didn’t, why not? How to get out of this spring snare?

*

When thinking about literary value, the debate between Rauch and Ullrich should probably be a warning case:

1/ Let us not articulate literature value in a way that risks being complicit with non-democratic values on the political right.

2/ At the same time, let’s not allow post-autonomous aesthetics to prevent us from articulating autonomous literary value.

The goal would need to be, or so at least it seems to me, to return to an autonomy discourse that stands separate from both those political formations and insists on the value of literature while at the same time not slipping into aesthetic and political theology, and allowing for the literature-adjacent values that have become prominent in our time. While such a theology may at some point have been considered a thing of the past, it seems to be getting a new lease on life today—under the current political conditions—, and it is worth being attentive to its persistence.

To return to literary value: consider the difference between an academic giving a talk at a university, and a creative writer in the auditorium down the hall reading from their work. Academics don’t typically read from already published work; but the creative writer does just that. Why? No one will come ask for the academic’s autograph after their talk, but the creative writer will sign copies of their books after reading. Why? And then consider the questions: the academic’s audience will come in swinging a hammer, arguing with them about the theses they’ve laid out. As for the creative writer: they get asked questions like … what’s your writing routine? Do you write early in the morning or late at night? Standing up or sitting down? What’s your writing drug of choice? It’s as if these little habits will provide the secret to their genius: if we adopt them ourselves, perhaps we too can be great writers!

I do not offer this compare-and-contrast because I am envious of the creative writer’s treatment. I draw out these differences because they arguably mark the difference between the secular and unexceptional realm of scholarship (no one wants to hear a scholar read from their already published work, no one asks for their autograph, no one wants to become them), and the exceptionalist, theological realm of the literary.[3] Articulations of literary value, I propose, should strive to work against such exceptionalism. Unless, that is, they want to advocate for a politics that, in literary quarters, is typically considered dubious: the politics of genius, deity, majesty—monarchical sovereignty, and all of the abuses for which it sets us up. Tell me I’m exceptional / I promise to exploit you…, as Courtney Barnett has it in “Pedestrian At Best”.

What was it again that Immanuel Kant, in his influential attempt to articulate the autonomy of the aesthetic, said about beauty (in Section 15 of his “Analytic of the Beautiful”)? That it was “Zweckmässigkeit ohne Zweck”, “purposiveness without purpose”, “purposiveness without an end” (Kant 2000, 111). Taking some distance from Kant, might such a formulation—which in Kant provides the framework for aesthetic judgments—provide a key to the position on literary value that I’m trying to articulate?[4] “Wertigkeit ohne Wert”, “Worthiness without worth”, “validity (or maybe valence?) without value”… I like how such a formulation—which would mark a kind of value formalism, and bring value within the realm of beauty—manages to both assert autonomous value and unexceptionalize it by insisting such value is without value. I like how such unexceptionalization foregrounds the genealogy of literary value, in other words, the fact that literary value is the outcome of the performative and crucially collective history of attempts to state such value. Might such a history not be constituting itself around an empty place (to recall the work of the democratic theorist Claude Lefort [Lefort 1986]), as a will to power that can always only temporarily be settled (rather than ontologically locked in)?[5] This is not an argument against attempts to articulate literary value but a reminder that whatever we judge literary value to be (and this of course begs us to reflect further on the exact relationship between judgment and value), it remains without value—a “without” that is an invitation (perhaps even a solicitation or summons) to articulate it again and again.[6] To some, this might sound like the work of secular democracy, as an antidote to political theology.[7] And so I’m looking around me at the state of world, and I’m wondering: Couldn’t there be value in that?

A thesis, then: Literary value is the secular, unexceptional process of such value’s plural-democratic articulation. This understanding of literary value counters theological-exceptional approaches to literature’s “sacredness”.

*

Given the political import of such an approach to literary value—as a secular, unexceptional and plural-democratic process against the theology of the sovereign nation-state[8]—it is not much of a stretch to characterize the work of articulating literary value in this way as a form of what the Palestinian-American scholar Edward Said memorably called “secular criticism” (Said 2010). I close, then, by noting that Said theorizes secular criticism in The World, The Text, and The Critic through a reflection on the critic Erich Auerbach writing in exile. This suggests an exilic understanding of literary value as a notion that, always at a removal from itself, establishes and accrues its value through the process of literary value’s articulation. The repetitiveness of this process can be characterized, in Said’s terms, as “a way of showing that history and actuality are all about human persistence, and not about divine originality” (Said 2000, 113). Literary value is the process—this process’s history, and ongoing, present reality—that reveals the human persistence to articulate literary value.

Whether today, we do this in the melancholic, crisis-mode of Walter Benjamin’s angel of history or with the affirmative, joyful flair of a discipline confident about the value, whatever it may be, of its foundational object of study, makes all the difference.[9]

References

Adorno, Theodor. 1992. “Commitment”. In Notes to Literature, Volume 2, translated by Shierry Weber Nicholson, 76–94. New York: Columbia University Press.

Boever, Arne De. 2025. “Aesthetic Theology: A Politico-Philosophical Investigation”. Philosophy Today 69, no. 1: 25-40.

Bové, Paul. 2021. Love’s Shadow. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Brown, Nicholas. 2019. Autonomy: The Social Ontology of Art under Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press.

Clune, Michael W. 2021. A Defense of Judgment. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Han, Byung-Chul. 2017. In the Swarm: Digital Prospects. Translated by Erik Butler. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Kant, Immanuel. 2000. Critique of the Power of Judgment. Translated by Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.

Kornbluh, Anna. 2019. The Order of Forms: Realism, Formalism, and Social Space. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Lefort, Claude. 1986. The Political Forms of Modern Society: Bureaucracy, Democracy, Totalitarianism. Edited and introduced by John B. Thompson. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Lerner, Ben. 2013. “Damage Control: The Modern Art World’s Tyranny of Price”, Harper’s, December. https://harpers.org/archive/2013/12/damage-control/.

—. 2014. 10:04. New York: Faber and Faber.

Nelson, Maggie. 2021. On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint. Minneapolis: Graywolf.

Ngai, Sianne. 2020. Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Nicas, Jack. 2025. “Sovereignty is Having a Moment”, New York Times 28 July. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/28/briefing/sovereignty-is-having-a-moment.html.

Plot, Martín. 2014. The Aesthetico-Political: The Question of Democracy in Merleau-Ponty, Arendt, and Rancière. New York: Bloomsbury.

Said, Edward. 2010. The World, The Text, and The Critic. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1988. “What is Literature?” and Other Essays. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Ullrich, Wolfgang. 2020. Feind Bild Werden: Ein Bericht. Berlin: Klaus Wagenbach.

—. 2022. Die Kunst nach dem Ende ihrer Autonomie. Berlin: Klaus Wagenbach.

[1] A polemical opening remark: I refuse to begin from without a literary text. It is perhaps characteristic of the state in which the study of literature has landed today that many if not most answers to the question of literary value begin from without literature, and can proceed almost entirely, if not indeed entirely, without actually reading literary texts. (Why this avoidance? Let us—in comparison—imagine a special issue on, say, the value of philosophy. Which philosopher would begin to address the value of philosophy from without philosophy, for example from a sociological point of view?) How can a discipline that posits the value of its object from without that object survive the current challenges to its existence? Such a discipline seems bound to be subsumed by other disciplines or subdisciplines—sociology, economics, history, media studies, et cetera. To posit literary value from within literature means to resist these developments and come up with better answers.  

[2] In discussing her decision to stick with the term “freedom” as the central term for her book, Nelson notes her “long-standing frustration with its capture by the right wing”, a capture that, she goes on to observe, “has been underway for centuries” (Nelson 2021, 5).

[3] There are, of course, star scholars who are able to make the jump from one realm to the other. One can think of a scholar like Judith Butler, for example, who may be signing copies of their work after a talk.

[4] The distance is marked by my confusion of the beautiful and the valuable. It’s worth noting here the marked interest in Kant in contemporary contributions to literary value studies: I am thinking in particular of Ngai 2020 and Clune 2021, but also Kornbluh 2019.

[5] On Lefort as a critic of political theology, see Plot 2014.

[6] I insist here (with a nod to Hannah Arendt) on the pluralism of such an approach, and I distinguish between pluralism and relativism since I deem some articulations of literary value to be better than others. As I see it, pluralism does not come at the cost of judgment, and no judgment is final. As I’ve indicated elsewhere, my position is not simply another plea for horizontalism.

[7] Others may want to reflect this insight economically and criticize how it continues, and even conditions, the generation of literature’s economic value, leading us back to the scene from Lerner’s 10:04 with which I started. On this, see Nathan Taylor’s contribution to this special issue. Much would depend here, of course, on the particular economic or political values that are being valued. I.e. our discussion would need to move from a value formalism to a discussion of specific values proposed.

[8] Please note that I am not arguing against the sovereign nation-state in general—I am arguing against the theology of such a political formation.

[9] This difference is at the heart of Bové 2021. For a different way of thinking value beyond Benjamin’s Angel, see Pieter Vermeulen’s contribution to this issue.