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

The Question of Literary Value: An Introduction

Alexander Dunst and Pieter Vermeulen

The question of literary value is a surprisingly open one. Literary value is a topic that has only fairly recently become a focus of literary theoretical debate. For a long time, if the question of literary value was posed at all, it was posed as a rhetorical question (that is, as on occasion to reaffirm an alleged truth). For most of the modern period, the value of literature was self-evident: whether literature was valued as a rarified mode of language use or as a privileged carrier of social and moral values, its worth did not need to be argued for. That changed in the last decades of the twentieth century, when a number of feminist, postcolonial, and other critical perspective launched a radical critique of the literary canon, and approaches inspired by Pierre Bourdieu’s critical sociology debunked claims to literary distinction as covert strategies for social promotion. From this revisionary perspective also, however, the question of literary value was not really open: if it had been pre-empted before by the default assumption that literature was self-evidently valuable, its significance as more than a mere social strategy now became automatically suspect.

That literary value can no longer be either simply assumed or categorically dismissed—and that the question of literary value has thus finally been broached—has something to do with the fact that today, the question of literary value is not only no longer rhetorical; it is also no longer merely theoretical. Dwindling readerships, shortening attention spans, shrinking numbers of English majors, increasing competition from other commodities and media, and the realization that today’s elites can very well do without what John Guillory called “the cultural capital of the old bourgeoisie” (1993, 45) have made the distinctive value of literature more uncertain than ever. In this context, simply deflating claims to literary value risks turning into a self-fulfilling and literature-destroying prophecy.

In his book The Problem of Literary Value, Robert Meyer-Lee divides customary approaches to the question of literary value into two categories: ontological approaches, which apodictically state what the value of literature is; and genealogical approaches, which deconstruct and relativize value claims by highlighting the contexts that gave rise to them (2023, 70-98). The problem with these two approaches is that they capture only part of how literary value actually functions. Take, as examples of the ontological approach, Peter Boxall’s statement, in his book The Value of the Novel, that the novel has the power “to represent our shared communities and to suspend the ties that bind them” (2015, 12); or Hanna Meretoja and Pirjo Lyytikäinen’s claim, in their volume Values of Literature, that literature can do “different things”, “ranging from affirmation of social dogmas to its capacities for self-questioning and challenging of moral certainties” (2015, 3); or, most famously perhaps, Rita Felski’s case for the Uses of Literature that advertises its capacity to offer shock, recognition, enchantment, and knowledge (2008).

None of these statements is wrong, exactly. But none answers the question of literary value either: instead, they situate literature within “an anthropology of human needs and desires” (Guillory 1993, 301). They name some of the uses of literature, but they do not situate literature in the context in which it has had to operate in the last two centuries: the context of a capitalist market in which claims to literary value are, as Gerold Sedlmayr and Nathan Taylor demonstrate in detail in their contributions to this issue, complexly entangled with the issue of economic value. Naming the uses of literature does not explain why these uses matter—why they deserve to circulate and thrive in a situation marked by (while not totally subsumed by) economic exchange. As Guillory notes, “[t]he very concept of aesthetic value betrays the continued pressure of economic discourse on the language of aesthetics” (317). Affirmations of literature’s uses do not factor in that pressure.

If turning towards the relationship between literature and financial value looks outward to the economy at large, a more inward gaze has focused on the relationship between value and form, a long-standing concern of literary studies that is given a new twist in this issue by Antje Kley. Where a specifically literary complexity was dear to the New Critics, a more contemporary version espouses the sophistication of prizewinning novels, often moving from strictly formal concerns to the ethical value of literature. In her contribution, Natalya Bekhta draws attention to the unequal distribution of value within literature’s generic system. Bekhta argues that the prominence of the novel, and especially its Anglophone variant, has led to a situation where other genres are taken to task—that is, are denied value—for not conforming to novelistic conventions. Turning from novels to graphic novels, Alexander Dunst argues that we need to look more closely at the interactions between literature and the wider media ecology of which it forms a part to understand how value is produced.

Addressing the question of literary value, then, invites us to account for the (at least) double nature of literature under capitalism: the obvious fact that literature is a commodity, and the equally undeniable fact that in many ways it is not simply a commodity like any other. Even if art and literature are, as Arne De Boever argues in his contribution to this issue, rigorously unexceptional, they are not for all that entirely mundane. The frantic activity on dedicated reading and reviewing platforms—from Youtube and TikTok to Goodreads and Archive of Our Own—show that literature still courts intense attachment. And the difference between, say, Fifty Shades of Grey, and Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead is hard to theorize (which is why it is an open question!), but it is even more impossible to deny. This double nature is not something to simply posit or debunk, but it is something to investigate.

In The Problem of Literary Value, Meyer-Lee undoes the stand-off between ontological and genealogical approaches by proposing a pragmatic account—one that attends to the ways that value is actually produced, justified, challenged, and circulated. In the field of sociology, also, the Bourdieusian critique of value has been complemented by a more descriptive pragmatics of valuation. These pragmatic approaches to value study, in sociologist Michèle Lamont’s words, “how value is produced, diffused, assessed, and institutionalized across a range of settings” (2012, 203). For Nathalie Heinich, this involves a shift “from value to valuation”: from the simple assertion of particular values to the “close observation of the operations by which actors actually manifest the value they assign to this object” (2020, 77). Such manifestations of value need not be verbal or argumentative: they can also exist in modes of measurement (a Goodreads score, a graph of the rising number of downloads) or attachment (gifting a book as a birthday present or carrying it around as a marker of good taste or performative masculinity).

While outside of the study of literature, this pragmatic orientation has spawned the interdisciplinary domain of valuation studies (the journal of that name has been going since 2013; the field brings together anthropological, sociological, and economic approaches), it has made few inroads into literary studies (Phillipa Chong’s study of book critics [2020] is an exception). Meyer-Lee’s work suggests that literature could profit from such a pragmatics of valuation. He distinguishes between things which are tightly bound with their value (think of the relation between pizza and “hunger satisfaction” [2023, 103]) and entities marked by a loose binding. Literature clearly falls within the latter. The idea of a loose binding helps explain how literature can be—and has historically been—linked to many different values. Indeed, the instability of the bond between literature and other values means that the articulation between literature and extraliterary values is not only possible but also increasingly compulsory: Meyer-Lee notes that “the characteristic loose binding of literary value both facilitates and, by that same token, demands linkage to other-than-literary values” (108). As Pieter Vermeulen observes in his contribution to this issue, such explicit linkages are today more necessary than ever, as literature no longer holds the self-evident power it once had—a situation he sees emblematized in Hugo Simberg’s painting The Wounded Angel, which he presents as a diminished and pale counterpart to (Walter Benjamin’s elevation of) Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus.

The looseness of the association between literature and value, then, circumscribes the terrain where the (at least) double nature of literary value can be explored. Ascriptions of value need not be logically consistent: their job is to provide compelling (rather than logical) links that effectively situate literature in discursive contexts that sustain it. This “capaciousness and flexibility” of literary value ascriptions means that “they may plausibly mediate a range of rather different or even antithetical values, without contradiction or incoherence” (Meyer-Lee 116). This tolerance for logical inconsistency (as when a work of literature is valued at the same time for, say, representing minority voices and, say, being a sophisticated work of metafiction) in value justifications emphatically does not mean that our value attachments—to certain writers, to certain works, to a certain idea of the literary—are entirely fungible. On the contrary, it means that the power of those attachments overrides issues of consistency. Günter Leypoldt underlines in his contribution that our strong attachments to literature—which for Leypoldt coexist with weak attachments to them, as when we indifferently select a book to kill time with on the beach—do not allow for relativism. If relativism has often been a theoretical postulate, in the context of literary value, it is rarely a lived reality. This also comes through in Maria Mäkelä’s contribution, which situates the question of contemporary literary value in the digital story economy. This context, which Mäkelä sees as the nonnegotiable milieu in which contemporary authorship operates, compels writers to sustain a consistent narrative about themselves across different media. While this encompassing context exerts an undeniable pressure on the forms and themes of literature, it does not abolish the (let’s call it) semi-autonomy of authors to position themselves in and against that economy.

Several contributions show that the question of the (semi-)autonomy of literature is also a methodological one. As Arne De Boever underlines, posing the question of literary value from a sociological perspective in a way already concedes that that value is a radically truncated one, as literature is hardly given a voice in addressing the question of its own valuation. Several of the contributions to this issue insist that the question of literary value hinges on literature’s residual capacity to emancipate itself from this selbstverschuldete Unmündigkeit: De Boever turns to contemporary fiction as the site where the question of value is negotiated; Antje Kley insists that literary value rests on form (a formulation in which every term matters); and Gerold Sedlmayr argues that any hope of overcoming capitalist value regimes depends on literary values. Cumulatively, the contributions to the issue certainly do not solve the question of literary value. Then again, they might allow us to pose it more carefully.  

References

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

Chong, Phillipa K. 2021. Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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

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

Heinich, Nathalie. 2020. “A Pragmatic Redefinition of Value(s): Toward a General Model of Valuation”. Theory, Culture & Society 37, no. 5, 2020: 75–79.

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

Meretoja, Hanna, and Pirjo Lyytikäinen, editors. 2015. Values of Literature. Leiden: Brill.

Meyer-Lee, Robert J. 2023. The Problem of Literary Value. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Fig. 1. Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow. Bantam, 1974.

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

Understanding Literary Value Requires Institutional Ethnography: The Case of Pynchon’s Pulitzer Scandal

Günter Leypoldt 

Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow appeared in March 1973 and was soon nominated for both the National Book Award (NBA) and the Pulitzer. This may seem unsurprising in hindsight, but during the 1970s the still evolving system of prizes had not always been that open to such hard sells (“One of the Longest, Most Difficult, Most Ambitious Novels in Years”, the New York Times had titled its review [Locke 1973]). When the Pulitzer advisory board overruled the jury’s selection of Gravity’s Rainbow and paused the prize for the year, the scandal that followed in May 1974 reveals important changes of literary authority in the post-45 period. In what follows, I chart these changes and propose that in order to understand the making of literary value, we need to practice some socio-institutional ethnography. To that end, I define varieties of value, consider questions of relevance or “impact”, and distinguish ethnographers from critics.[1]

Gravity’s Rainbow became prizeworthy to the degree that the jury culture during the 1960s saw a subtle but consistent orientation towards academic peer review. The recent history of the NBAs makes this trend visible: founded as a book industry prize in 1936, its early selection committees included book traders and industry professionals that kept winners close to mainstream tastes (in 1937, the prize for most distinguished novel went to Gone with the Wind). With the more academicized literary culture of the 1960s, the nomination and consecration process came to be dominated by credentialed experts (prize-winning novelists, literary journalists, and academic critics). Book industry professionals tried to reverse this trend with a number of largely unsuccessful rear-guard actions. In 1970, for example, the National Book Committee introduced a nationwide poll that gave booksellers a vote in the nominations, a measure that ended badly when the 1971 poetry and fiction juries refused to consider the bookseller selections (Raymont 1971). The poll was abolished, and subsequent juries gave the NBA to John Barth’s Chimera (1973), Gravity’s Rainbow (1974), and William Gaddis’s J R (1976), hard pills to swallow for an already grumbling book industry.

The Pulitzer forced these tensions into the open because it required decisions to be ratified by its advisory board. So when the jury of three scholars—Alfred Kazin, Elizabeth Hardwick, and the Amherst English professor Benjamin DeMott—selected Gravity’s Rainbow, the board’s 14 newspaper executives and University of Columbia trustees overturned it as “‘unreadable’, ‘turgid’, ‘overwritten’, and in parts ‘obscene’” (Kihss 1974, 38).

Cultural historians channeling their inner critic might dismiss the Pulitzer board as a ship of fools, philistines too obtuse to recognize Pynchon’s greatness (the New York Times suggested they “should take a crash course in remedial reading” or “get out of the awards business altogether” [Leonard 1974]). If we look at this issue as ethnographers, however, it seems more coherent to posit a clash between two diverging reading cultures. The board members were perhaps passionate lovers of literature, but as people with day jobs who read fiction after work, they had different literary sensibilities—more attuned, perhaps, to Gore Vidal’s bestselling Burr (which the jury had ranked third, after Pynchon and John Cheever’s The World of Apples). In all likelihood they were invested in the prize system’s promise of serious or “higher” entertainment (as opposed to “mere” entertainment as pleasurably killing time) but for a number of reasons, including training-specific rhythms of perception and generational tastes, they did not resonate with the maximalist fabulism on display in Pynchon’s novel. By contrast, the jury members were steeped in what John Guillory has called the “culture of the school”, with closer ties to scholarly networks and academically housed avant-gardes. They were thus more at home with what then emerged as the experimental cutting edge.

Varieties of Values (Strong/Weak, Sacred/Toxic/Everyday)

While ethnographers can live with the view that Gravity’s Rainbow is both “great” and “turgid”—depending on reception networks—, readers and critics find lived relativism acceptable only in proportion to their disinvestment (their sense that choosing between Vidal and Pynchon is not that important to their lives). Such disinvestment shapes a specific readerly mode, which Charles Taylor (1985) describes as “weak evaluation”. In moments of weak evaluation, we resemble purpose-rational consumers pursuing short-term desires in relatively private spaces. Here, the choice between Vidal and Pynchon becomes a bit like negotiating a plate of pastry: you might adore sponge cake in the morning, despise apple crumble at night, yet have no difficulties in tolerating others with different tastes—pastry habits rarely rope us into culture wars.

Weak evaluation is a common enough practice of everyday reading—on the beach we want whatever suits our situational now (could be Pynchon, could be a TikTok feed). Universalizing weak-value attachments has encouraged the misconception that, literature being mostly about pleasure, pleasure depending mostly on your palate, and there being no arguing about taste, artistic value is an inherently soft target. Such assumptions have bolstered cultural-studies intuitions about the fundamental pointlessness of canons or prizes and an ideology-critical centering of politics as the artwork’s supposedly more tangible core.

However, in moods of “strong valuation” literature can invoke a felt “higher pleasure” that strikes readers with a sense of contact with an identity-defining charismatic center. Whereas the pursuit of weak values is about what we already want, strong valuation follows from what we feel we should want after trusted institutions (artistic or civil-religious) rank our desires into higher and lower kinds. Indeed, the notion of “guilty pleasure” exists because as moral beings we can want to be told what it is good to want, not just to signal legitimized taste (the snob’s efforts of social distinction) but also to orient ourselves towards a greater good (the moral or civil-religious need to connect with collectively defined hypergoods).

Whereas weak-value moods keep Gravity’s Rainbow invisible unless we have an everyday use for it, strong valuation can make it rise above the everyday, even make it look down upon us as a sacred or a toxic thing (the former pulls us into worship, the latter into culture-warriordom).[2] Blood pressures rise, and the Pulitzer scandal can feel as polarizing to us as, say, the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision on Roe v. Wade. In this state of hypertension, Pynchon’s proponents decried the Pulitzer’s mediocrity (Gass 1985), while Vidal came to the board’s defense with a series of essays—“The Hacks of Academe” (1976) and “American Plastic” (1977)—that denounced postmodernism as a scholastic fad ruining the novel.

Critics, Scholar-Connoisseurs, Ethnographers

Within English departments it is common to wade into such debates as critics rather than ethnographers. According to Michel Chaouli’s superb definition, as a critic you ask whether a text “speaks” to you and compels you to “tell [others] about it” (Chaouli 2024, 3). Good criticism can thrive on self-analyses of how Gravity’s Rainbow’s affordances have moved you or left you cold. An ethnography of value, however, also needs to factor in how it affected other participants in the field (Murray 2025).

While this seems intuitive to field-working disciplines, as literature scholars we can feel that our accumulated experience and academic training gives our artistic sensibility an objective edge over other audiences. Michael Clune seems to make this claim when in A Defense of Judgment (2021) he obliges English professors to use their acquired taste to help students improve theirs. But how does my academic expertise give me an edge in anything other than, well, academic expertise? Field-defining skills are key to negotiating the field that defines them (as per Jonathan Kramnick’s Criticism and Truth [2023]). In the case of my own field—academic literary studies—, those skills would be classroom habits of reflexive close-reading, and scholarly benchmarks of multiple re-readability. But few, if any, non-professional audiences feel bound to such skills. The assumption that prestige can be justified or disproven by acute textual analysis seems useful only within collectives with relatively homogenous taste cultures.

An often overlooked source of heterogeneity even within a single taste culture is the socially embedded character of perception: placed within different relational ties, Pynchon’s affordances produce different affective atmospheres (sacred, banal, toxic, indifferent, liberating, constraining, and so on). Since these atmospheres are relational—they emerge only during lived immersion within a network of people and things—attempting to justify Gravity’s Rainbow’s prestige with reference to the text occludes how our own group-specific atmospheric immersion shapes what we experience as the text. In order to see value as an embedded social thing, we need to unlearn the widely shared intuition that true literary-artistic excellence and/or its ideological-political imbrications precede markets and institutions.

Relevance, Impact, Consecrated Consecrators

Ethnographies remain incomplete if they fail to trace the public relevance of values. While democratic societies contain multiple strong-valued horizons of higher pleasure, only few of these get to shape history books, classrooms, and museums. Curating institutions differ vastly in their “impact factor”, that is, their capability to shape what I call the public square, a spatially limited heritage-scape that materializes the literary field’s symbolic weights rather than its commercial or political assets.[3] Picture the public square as a cityscape whose buildings represent authorized prestige (see fig. 2). Here, the most iconic prizes inhabit the best real estate on the block while commercially more dominant institutions occupy more modest buildings (Danielle Steel and James Patterson sold more than one billion copies during their long writerly lives but are still nearly invisible in the public square).

Fig 2. Günter Leypoldt, “The Public Square”.

Whereas genre-fiction writers have a sense of their irrelevance on the public square (“I’d much rather sell books than get good reviews”, John Grisham recently told an interviewer, emphasizing how hard and liberating it was for him to learn over the years how to ignore literary authority [Liptak 2021]), the Pulitzer scandal was a conflict about who gets to inhabit literature’s strong-valued institutional center. And when the smoke of the heritage-making battles settled during the 1980s, Pynchon had become canonical while Vidal had been relegated, in Michael Lind’s description, to “a middlebrow’s idea of a highbrow” (Lind 2016). The reason that the Pulitzer board’s position now seems more “mid-cult” than it did in 1974 is that academic networks have further increased their impact on the public square.

To speak of “impact” is to use a term from scientific peer review that measures a journal’s capability to make a difference in its field. Peer-reviewed journals are curating systems that in theory should remain neutral (insulated from the higher or lower value of the research previously published in them), but that in practice become infected by the esteem that accumulates with selection histories and institutional affiliations (it would take years of bad editorial decisions to ruin the authority of Nature). A similar alchemy of contact charisma, I argue, pertains to cultural institutions: prestige awards like the Nobel, the Booker, or the Goncourt once began their social lives as ordinary curating institutions that over time morphed into “consecrated consecrators” (Casanova 2010, 300)—so enriched by their high-cultural affiliations over the years that they acquired a nearly civil-religious weight.

A common-sense response is to dismiss prestige prizes as establishment smokescreens that a minimal dose of readerly self-reliance will brush away. There is also ideology critique’s secularist habit of dismissing consecrated atmospheres as mere fantasy or fetishism that a more rational view of things should dispel. Yet the idea that readers or critics make informed strong-value decisions outside institutional trust relations, entirely on their own terms—mechanically sampling the texts that are “out there” to separate excellence from trash—is unrealistic not just because of the sheer volume of artifacts (120,000 new novels were published in the US in 2015 alone [English 2016]) but because as moral beings invested in “higher” entertainment we require orientation through collectively produced trust. Such orientation is mediated through institutions: stabilized social ties that connect people, things, and practices in hierarchical relationships. That these relationships are socially produced does not invalidate their relevance to how we experience strong and weak values.

The most tangible manifestation of impact is the well-known award effect: when a prestige prize propels a novel that no one expected to sell more than a few thousand copies into large-scale bestsellerdom. The award effect applies when atmospheres of consecration pull audiences towards aspirational reading, encouraging them to take on books they normally find too demanding or insufficiently entertaining but now approach as providing privileged access to a perceived higher cultural life of the nation. The career of Gravity’s Rainbow is a good case in point. Viking Press worried during production about how to recover the high costs for a difficult 700-page hardcover (Howard 2005), but their intense prepublication marketing campaign, in combination with immediate establishment rave reviews, produced so much Great-American-Novel buzz that a wave of orders lifted Gravity’s Rainbow briefly into the New York Times bestseller list. One year later the additional buzz of the NBA and Pulitzer nominations led Bantam to issue a mass market paperback. The Bantam edition looked like a cheap commodity, but centrally on its front cover it featured a pull quote in large letters as a stamp of consecration: “The most important work of fiction yet produced by any living writer” (see fig. 1).

All of this demonstrates the path dependency—hence relative autonomy—of literary consecration. Prestige effects can turn the most experimental works into aspirational bestsellers (think of García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, or Morrison’s Beloved), but commercial success as such yields no prestige. By the same logic, the more consecrated curators will sell more books (the Nobel even turns poets into bestsellers), but high sales have no consecration effects (as we can gather from the low heritage-making impact of genre-fiction prizes, Goodreads, or Oprah Winfrey). Although the term “bestseller” is often colloquially used to suggest cultural importance, numbers alone tell us nothing about impact: Gravity’s Rainbow sold about 90,000 copies in the first year, with the Bantam paperback reaching an estimated 250,000 over the next ten years (Howard 2005), astonishing figures for an experimental doorstopper. But they are well below Vidal’s Burr (which reached the higher six figures in its first year [Kihss 1974]), not to speak of mass-market blockbuster territory (Peter Benchley’s Jaws sold nearly six million copies in the year before the movie release in June 1975 [“Summer” 1975]).

That institutional authority cannot simply be bought, and sometimes withers through commercialization, is a lesson the Association of American Publishers learned the hard way after relaunching the NBAs as the American Book Awards in 1979. Remodeling them along the lines of the Oscars or Emmys, they added commercial categories, involved booksellers in the selection process, and produced a glamorous TV presentation. The decision-makers soon backpedaled when it transpired that the more commercial platform had not only failed to improve book sales (as prizes make little difference to mass-market blockbuster regimes) but also drained the NBAs of the institutional charisma that had just lifted the Booker Prize in England (McDowell 1983).

Conclusion: How Money and Singularity Reach a Good Match

The Pulitzer scandal shows how more commercial and more market-sheltered regimes of judgment can overlap and disaggregate. Of course, the Pulitzer board members were not just leisure readers but also representatives of a business model that between the mid-nineteenth-century industrialization of print and the more recent conglomeration of publishing has sought to stabilize profit margins by risk-reducing rationalization (Sinykin 2023). And the Pulitzer jury participated in this business model by contributing to the kind of reputational branding that remains important even to conglomerate portfolios (Thompson 2012). Yet the jury also represented a peer-review culture whose regimes of judgment significantly diverge from corporate rationales.

While since the 1950s, the rising conglomerate behemoths have raised the volume of a blockbuster-oriented entertainment industry, literature’s more recent academic patronage systems have provided experimental writers and prize juries with stronger market shelters. Contra neo-Frankfurt-school declension stories (closing minds in conglomerate-driven fetishscapes), the rising commercial turnover in the 1960s and 1970s helped to decouple the value judgments of prestige-prize juries and blockbuster curators in historically new ways. These developments are not reducible to straightforward ideologies because they involved figurational changes to literary culture, including the extension of tertiary education that between 1960 and 1975 produced larger college-educated audiences and more stable subsidies for experimental and avant-garde ecologies (McGurl 2009). These figurational changes are ill-explained by single binaries (Pynchon vs. the conservative mind) or large political-economy frames (cold-war liberalism, late capitalism, et cetera).

From a historical wide angle, the Pulitzer scandal was an iteration of an older conflict—beginning with the eighteenth-century print-market revolution—over how commercial appeal and literary singularity can be brought into a “good match” (Zelizer, 2011). Since money is always involved in cultural production, sustaining good matches requires ongoing boundary work, shielding the literary from self-enclosed ivory-towerism on the one side, and from pandering compromise on the other. As authority over such boundary work has shifted further towards expert curation, aspirational leisure readers occupy a more ambivalent position towards the institutional center. They largely finance the award effect, yet their limited agency within the high-impact prestige economies that dominate the public square means that their sense of strong value is reflected back to them as slightly askew—belated, too easily won, pandering, or simply “middlebrow”. But good or bad matches depend on standpoints unequally represented in social space. While it is relatively easy to determine a literary work’s economic value (measurable in sales), its literary worth requires more laborious ethnography. As a critic, I can know whether or not Pynchon speaks to me, and hope to persuade others about my own sense of a good match. But how can I know Pynchon’s actual life as a strong-valued object before I have studied the public square, as a relational space whose scales emerge from differing collectives that themselves differ in their performative impact?

References

Casanova, Pascale. 2010. “Consecration and Accumulation of Literary Capital: Translation as Unequal Exchange”. Critical Readings in Translation Studies, edited by Mona Baker, pp. 285–303. London: Routledge.

Chaouli, Michel. 2024. Something Speaks to Me: Where Criticism Begins. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Clune, Michael. 2021. A Defense of Judgement. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

English, James F. 2016. “Prestige, Pleasure, and the Data of Cultural Preference: ‘Quality Signals’ in the Age of Superabundance”. Western Humanities Review 70, no. 3: 119–39.

Gass, William. 1985. “Prizes, Surprises and Consolation Prizes”. New York Times, May 5. https://www.nytimes.com/1985/05/05/books/prizes-surprises-and-consolation-prizes.html.

Howard, Gerald. 2005. “Pynchon from A to V”. Book Forum 12: 29–40.

Kihss, Peter. 1974. “Pulitzer Jurors Dismayed on Pynchon”. New York Times, May 8: 38.

Kramnick, Jonathan. 2023. Criticism and Truth: On Method in Literary Studies. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Leonard. John. 1974. “Pulitzer People Are No Prize”. New York Times, May 19: 421.

Lask, Thomas. 1979. “Book Ends”. New York Times, March 4: 12.

Leypoldt, Günter. 2025. Literature’s Social Lives: A Socio-Institutional History of Literary Value. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Lind, Michael. 2016. “The Empire of Gore Vidal: The Legacy of an American Writer”. The Smart Set, Jan. 29. https://www.thesmartset.com/the-empire-of-gore-vidal/.

Liptak, Adam. 2021. “John Grisham on Judges, Innocence and the Judgments He Ignores”. New York Times, October 17. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/17/books/john-grisham-judges-list.html.

Locke, Richard. 1973. “One of the Longest, Most Difficult, Most Ambitious Novels in Years”. New York Times, March 11. https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/18/reviews/pynchon-rainbow.html?_r=2

McDowell, Edwin. 1983. “Publishing: New Life for American Book Awards”. New York Times, November 4: C28.

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. New York: Oxford University Press.

Raymont, Henry. 1971. “Judges of Book Awards Revolt on Use of Nationwide Polling”. New York Times, January 26: 22.

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

“Summer of the Shark”. 1975. Time Magazine, June 23. https://time.com/archive/6846922/summer-of-the-shark/.

Taylor, Charles. 1985. Human Agency and Language: Philosophical Papers I. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Thompson, John. 2012 Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century. 2nd Edition. London: Plume.

Zelizer, Viviana. 2011. Economic Lives: How Culture Shapes the Economy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

[1] For a more comprehensive account, see Leypoldt 2025. I am grateful to boundary 2’s anonymous reviewer and the issue editors, as well as to the organizers and participants of the Erlangen and UC Dublin conferences in June 2025, where I had the pleasure of sharing and discussing earlier versions of this essay.

[2] I use the semantics of the sacred in the spirit of Durkheim and Weber, denoting not religious belief but a practical sense of something larger about which one may have beliefs. Like strong values, the sacred is collective (transcending private purpose-rationalities), identity-defining (raising public monuments and calls for political action), and defined against two outsides: first, the sphere of the everyday, which neutralizes consecrated values (as when texts falling out of the canon become invisible); and second, the profaned or polluted pole of a consecrated hierarchy, which gives consecrated values a toxic presence that riles people into defensive action (think of the recent controversies over Cecil Rhodes, Peter Handke, or Woody Allen). For a more in-depth discussion, see Leypoldt 2025, 277–78.

[3] Note that my use of “public square”—as a  metaphor for the limited space of material heritage-making in which plural prestige economies compete for public resources and authority—diverges from more familiar notions of the “naked public square” (as in Rawlsian debates on whether private morality and religion are to be kept out of procedural law) or the Habermasian public sphere.

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.

Literary Value Emerges In and Against the Story Economy

Maria Mäkelä[1]

One of the global star authors of the 2020s, Édouard Louis, describes an emergent new literary aesthetic in an interview with the Los Angeles Review of Books in 2024:

the implicit doesn’t have a monopoly on beauty … There is a kind of revolution happening from certain points of the literary field, and I believe that interviews are a part of that, part of a possibility to say things without hiding. (Bell 2024)

By celebrating the freedom “to say things without hiding” Louis captures a shift in literary valuation that in the 2020s feels generational and converges with recent post-critical movements in literary theory. Students who primarily value authenticity and relatability in literature and look for authors who share these same values are taught by professors who continue to be steeped in a long twentieth century of literary theory and criticism founded on ideas of literariness and expert interpretations of the implicit, the paradoxical, and the difficult. For Louis, the “revolution” not only abolishes the tyranny of the implicit but also dissolves the generic and platform boundaries between the literary and the non-literary, as well as between text and paratext. In his vision, literary texts function alongside other types, genres, and platforms of storytelling, pursuing a shared rhetorical—and political—goal.

As an upwardly mobile author and a Bourdieu scholar, Louis is intimately acquainted with questions of literary value. His most ambitious autobiographical work Changer: méthode (2021) reads like a full endorsement of Bourdieu’s theories of literature as symbolic capital and its convertibility into other forms of capital:

I want to be clear: for me the key thing was change and liberation, not books or writing. I don’t think my primary obsession was with books. … What I’m writing shouldn’t be seen as the story of the birth of a writer but as the birth of freedom.  (2025, 141)

By underscoring that his escape from poverty, violence, discrimination, and ignorance— conditions he endured as a homosexual growing up in proletarian Hallencourt in Northern France—could have taken any form other than a literary career, Louis stages a performance in which he trades literature’s symbolic capital for the urgency of class struggle and personal liberation. Again, as with the proclaimed aesthetics of the explicit, literature appears as interchangeable with or convertible into something else: it’s a tool or a means among many others. Morgane Cadieu (2024, 2) argues that “parvenue” authors like Louis “need more than one format to contain their cross-class trajectories”. Additionally, I would suggest that the popularity of socioautobiographies like Louis’s is to some degree related to the fact that social media amalgamate the social and the literary.

Louis is a prototypical author of the twenty-first-century story economy. He has successfully commodified a personal story of transformation, aligning with the imperative for authors to embody a consistent, shareable, and scalable story franchise. He maintains the kind of consistent transmedial authorial ethos that is rewarded not only by audiences, but— more significantly—by platform affordances and algorithms. Indeed, the continuity of Louis’s ethos across platforms and genres—from his autobiographical oeuvre to interviews, political pamphlets, essays, and social media profiles—forms an integral part of his aesthetics of the explicit. Paratexts extend both his personal story and its sociological analysis beyond the novels—and vice versa. In the wake of the Gilets Jaunes protests, Louis has successfully intervened in state politics and challenged Emmanuel Macron through a strategic blend of autobiographical narrative and online storytelling (see Cadieu 2024, 62–63):

@EmmanuelMacron, my book rebels against everything you are and do. Do not try to use me to mask the violence you embody and exercise. I write to make you feel ashamed. I write to arm those who fight against you. (Louis on Twitter, 6 June 2018, my translation)

Moreover, in addition to the obsessive focus on the transformation of the self, it is also the repetitive, cyclical, and list-like visual and anecdotal poetics of his literary works that reflects platform value (apart from his participation in the tradition of experimental French autobiographical writing from Rousseau to Ernaux). Although Louis refrains from explicitly referencing social media storytelling, the structural and textual composition in his autobiographical novels evoke the aesthetics of digital platforms: highlighted captions reminiscent of Instagram stories, meme-like aphoristic wisdom, and a dialogicality akin to TikTok stitches or duets, where users juxtapose their argumentative videos with those of others. In Changer, one may find, for example, “Je suis désolé” (“I’m sorry”; 2021, 77; 2025, 55) spread across an otherwise empty page; or explicitness of intention and narrative positioning that verges on naiveté: “Je comprenais que Savoir = Pouvoir” (“I understood that Knowledge = Power”; 2021, 194; 2025, 151). Louis’s obsessive self-exposure and confessionalism does not unequivocally read as liberation but can also be considered – in the spirit of critical, symptomatic reading that predates the story economy – as a form of digitally induced self-surveillance.

While Louis may embody certain Foucauldian aspects of the story economy, he is simultaneously a shareable and scalable author whose compelling narrative conveys a clear, unambiguous sociopolitical stance—readily adaptable to a progressive discourse that thrives in digital spaces. From the perspective of modern or modernist ideals of ‘pure’ literature, the price to pay for relevance and visibility in the story economy is at least a partial loss of autonomy of the literary field as once defined by Bourdieu. Yet for a post-digital author like Louis, this loss marks a revolution, as for him, the boundaries between narrative genres and platforms, as well as the values they promote, have already collapsed.

***

Studies of literary valuation have not sufficiently dealt with the question of the digitalization and platformization of the literary field. Many crucial changes are introduced by the social media-fostered story economy that transform every user—from individuals to businesses and institutions—into storytellers. Research on the digital literary sphere (Murray 2018; Skains 2019; Thompson 2021; Pignagnoli 2023) focuses on the publishing industry, digital paratexts, the erosion of traditional institutions, the emergence of new literary platform elites, and parasocial relationships between authors and their audiences. Yet the effects of storytelling as a revenue model on the literary field and literary valuation remain insufficiently addressed.

Even less attention has been paid to how the platformized commodification of storytelling affects narrative rhetoric and literary form. I am not referring solely to the dominance of the autobiographical mode, to interactive writing practices, or to intermedial experimentations with digital interfaces within print literature, but to much deeper formal resonances between literature and digital platforms. Matti Kangaskoski (2021) names recognizability (manifesting as readability in literature) and a clear affective stance as platform norms that currently contribute to automated responses and a compression of both form and content in the literary field. To this should be added the most typically recognized affordances of social media, such as shareability, replicability, scalability, searchability, and persistence (see Ronzhyn et al. 2022).

The story economy has also prompted the “return” of the author, as the author figure functions now, perhaps more than ever, as a placeholder for intersectional or demographic representativeness and a “right to speak” (Busse 2013; Heynders 2023; see also Gibbons and King 2023, xix). The story economy commodifies personal narratives and capitalizes on experiences of trauma, transformation, and survival (Mäkelä et al. 2021). It elevates individuals’ lives and identities as exemplary and imposes an expectation of consistent ethos, habitus, and moral positioning sustained across media and platforms (Mäkelä et al. 2025). Authors may choose to ride the wave, fight against it, or turn away, but the overall platformization of the publishing industry and legacy media has made opting out very difficult. Today, the formation of literary value needs thus be understood in relation to the platform-driven imperative to produce and reproduce shareable, replicable, and scalable stories that are, moreover, capable of withstanding the critical scrutiny enabled by digital persistence and searchability.

The rise of new digital literary elites, such as BookTokers and GoodReads reviewers, and of the literary genres (such as romantasy) and values (such as relatability) they promote, drives many authors as well as legacy institutions to reinforce the prestige distinction of “Lit Fic” (Vermeulen 2023, 1232) more strongly than before. An author’s popularity on social media, or the affective, networked publics shaping a work’s or an author’s reception, or even the author persona’s ability to embody a particular narrative ethos may not feature explicitly in institutional “grammars of valuation” (1231). More likely, much of evaluative discourse by literary legacy institutions is implicitly positioned against the story economy, for example by celebrating such rarified genres as “nonautofictional metafiction” and complex entanglements of history, memory, and trauma (Vermeulen 1233), or authors who criticize or reject social media (Mäkelä et al. 2025; see also Gibbons and King 2023, xviii). Yet the difference between new digital elites and legacy arbiters may prove a generational rather than an institutional gap, as students in literary departments already represent a pragmatic, post-digital mindset, navigating digital environments where literary value is being “articulated and generated in concrete interactions” rather than stable and taken for granted (Vermeulen 2023, 1235). Therefore, studies on the grammars of literary valuation need to be able to account for platforms and algorithms, too.

The logic of digital storytelling platforms in literary as well as in any other context is completely reliant on what I call “emergent narrative authority”: while popular content is all about individual struggle and survival, no one storyteller can be held accountable for the rhetoric and ethics of the telling (Dawson and Mäkelä 2020). In the literary field, this means that the negotiation of authorial ethos is increasingly guided by algorithms and affordances that traditional literary institutions have no control over. Emergent narrative authority, as a concept, introduces a rhetorical perspective to what social media scholars study as context collapse (see Davis and Jurgenson 2014). In the literary field, contexts collapse and authorial ethos attributions are affected and complicated by platform affordances and values when, for example, citations are detached from novels and juxtaposed with social commentary by authors or audiences. In this context, we can surmise that the tendency in the contemporary literary field to foreground a strong, consistent, and pronouncedly embodied transmedial authorial ethos arises as a response or even as a defense against the emergent, distributed narrative authority of social media platforms and the narrative context collapse they induce. Édouard Louis as an embodiment of intergenerational trauma, structural violence, and literary prestige stands as an emblem of this simultaneously postdigital and reinforced authorship.  Meanwhile, authors’ literary and non-literary gestures of rejecting social media can then be interpreted as attempts to evoke literary value as a counterforce to platformization.

Moreover, the algorithmization of the literary field risks eroding the distinction between discourses of valuation and instrumentalization. On social media, metrics—the number of shares, likes, comments, followers—form an integral part of both narrative rhetoric and its valuation (Georgakopouolou et al. 2020). Followers sharing an author’s inspirational story to engage in affective networks articulate their own identity through shared stories and thus accumulate their own narrative and digital capital. This surely suggests an instrumentalization of literature rather than a celebration of its autonomous value. Yet social media metrics currently constitute the most tangible and visible archive of collective literary valuations in the digital story economy. Quantifiable traces of valuation, from GoodReads reviews and their likes to social media shares of author interviews by the mainstream media, directly affect the public prestige of authors and their visibility.

***

While building his authorial ethos on ruthless authenticity and raw self-analysis, Louis nevertheless says nothing about his social media prominence in interviews nor in his autobiographical literary works. His fellow leftist intellectual star and frequent co-poster on Instagram, Geoffroy de Lagasnerie, asserts that “on Instagram, we seek to produce a different aesthetic of intellectuals: more real and more exciting” (qtd. in Menon 2023). What Louis does not reflect in his trans-platform narrative practice is the value of confessionality in social media and in literature. A ruthless analysis might suggest that in an economy driven by visibility, upward mobility is far more likely to be achieved through social media than through literary distinction.

What ultimately makes Louis so successful is his ability to play a double game when it comes to narrative and digital capital (see Ragnedda and Ruiu 2020) in the contemporary literary field (see Mäkelä et al. 2025). The storification of his split habitus (the fracture between his proletarian childhood and adolescence on the one hand and the identity of a world author celebrated by both the literary elite and online audiences on the other) requires emphasizing the autonomy and value of the traditional literary and intellectual establishments that he is able to conquer and challenge with his aesthetics of the explicit. Yet the tyranny of the explicit in literature, as I have argued, today inevitably means compatibility with platform affordances and values. Louis thus exemplifies the convergence of literary and platform elites, signaling a transformation in literary valuation and a corresponding decline in the autonomy of the literary field in the twenty-first century.

References 

Bell, Stephen Patrick. 2024. “A Wound Is Objective: A Conversation with Édouard Louis”. Los Angeles Review of Books, 3 March. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/a-wound-is-objective-a-conversation-with-edouard-louis/.

Busse, Kristina. 2013. “The Return of the Author: Ethos and Identity Politics”. A Companion to Media Authorship, edited by Jonathan Gray and Derek Johnson, 48–68. Chichester: Wiley.

Cadieu, Morgane. 2024. On Both Sides of the Tracks: Social Mobility in Contemporary French Literature. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Davis, Jenny L., and Jurgenson, Nathan. 2014. “Context Collapse: Theorizing Context Collusions and Collisions”. Information, Communication and Society 17, no. 4: 476–85.

Dawson, Paul, and Mäkelä, Maria. 2020. “The Story Logic of Social Media: Co-Construction and Emergent Narrative Authority”. Style 54, no. 1: 21–35.

Georgakopoulou, Alexandra, Stefan Iversen, and Carsten Stage. 2020. Quantified Storytelling: A Narrative Analysis of Metrics on Social Media. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Gibbons, Alison, and Elizabeth King. 2023. “Introduction: Authorship in Literary Criticism and Narrative Theory”. Reading the Contemporary Author: Narrative, Fictionality, Authority, edited by Alison Gibbons and Elizabeth King, xiii–xxxiv. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press.

Heynders, Odile. 2023. “The Public Intellectual on Stage: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie”. Reading the Contemporary Author: Narrative, Fictionality, Authority, edited by Alison Gibbons and Elizabeth King, 3–22. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press.

Kangaskoski, Matti. 2021. “The Logic of Selection and Poetics of Cultural Interfaces:

A Literature of Full Automation?” The Ethos of Digital Environments: Technology, Literary Theory and Philosophy, edited by Susanna Lindberg and Hanna-Riikka Roine, 77–97. London: Routledge.

Korthals Altes, Liesbeth. 2014. Ethos and Narrative Interpretation: The Negotiation of Values in Fiction. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press.

Louis, Édouard. 2021. Changer: méthode. Paris: Seuil.

Louis, Édouard. 2025. Change: A Method. Translated by John Lambert. London: Vintage.

Mäkelä, Maria, Samuli Björninen, Laura Karttunen, Matias Nurminen, Juha Raipola, and Tytti Rantanen. 2021. “Dangers of Narrative: A Critical Approach to Narratives of Personal Experience in Contemporary Story Economy”. Narrative 28, no. 2: 139–59.

Mäkelä, Maria, Kristina Malmio, Laura Piippo, Matti Kangaskoski, and Markku Lehtimäki. 2025. “Social Media and the Value of Literature: Accumulating Narrative and Digital Capital in the Case of Johanna Frid’s Nora eller Brinn Oslo Brinn”. Tidskrift för Litteraturvetenskap 55, no. 1–2: 227–47.

Menon, Tara. 2023. “Parents and Sons: Édouard Louis’s Chronicles of Class”. The Nation, February 20. https://www.thenation.com/article/society/edouard-louis-class-politics/.

Murray, Simone. 2018. The Digital Literary Sphere: Reading, Writing and Selling Books in the Digital Age. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Pignagnoli, Virginia. 2023. Post-Postmodernist Fiction and the Rise of Digital Epitexts. Columbus: Ohio State University Press.

Ragnedda, Massimo, and Maria Laura Ruiu. 2020. Digital Capital: A Bourdieusian Perspective on the Digital Divide. Bingley: Emerald.

Ronzhyn, Alexander, Ana Sofia Cardenal, and Albert Batlle Rubio. 2022. “Defining Affordances in Social Media Research: A Literature Review”. New Media & Society 25, no. 11: 3165–88.

Skains, R. Lyle. 2019. Digital Authorship: Publishing in the Attention Economy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Thompson, John B. 2021. Book Wars: The Digital Revolution in Publishing. Cambridge: Polity Press.

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

[1] This essay was written in the context of the consortium project Authors of the Story Economy: Narrative and Digital Capital in the 21st-Century Literary Field (consortium PI Maria Mäkelä, Research Council of Finland 2024–2028, decision 360931).

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.