The Romance of Consequentiality

Criticism has had a long-standing love affair with the prospect of its own real-world impact. An enchantment with the notion that literary-critical acts might not only change minds but also challenge political structures unites professional readers of all dispositions and allegiances, despite the climate of ideological friction and internecine dispute that has emerged from vociferous method debates in the past decade. Enduring, seductive, deeply consoling—this romance of consequentiality both supplies and reinforces criticism’s ongoing sense of self-importance, becoming a rich resource for sustaining our field’s dreams of social agency. This essay reflects on how that romance is at once instantiated and contested across this special issue, identifying its principal registers in critics’ defiance, longing, and self-conscious aggrandizement. Literary studies’ desire to leave some sort of material footprint has only been intensified by current pressures on the humanities to withstand institutional disinvestment and populist ridicule, on the one hand, while also interpreting and opposing systemically magnified forms of injustice, on the other. A certain baseline level of disciplinary faith is therefore impossible to ignore in these essays—including a faith in the possibility that criticism could still influence constituencies beyond those with whom, in solidarity, it already comfortably converses.