Who thinks abstractly? “The uneducated.” This question, posed and so answered by G.W.F. Hegel in an 1808 essay, cuts to the heart both of disciplinary tensions in the contemporary academy and of fundamental changes in contemporary social life. Today, to call something “abstract” is often to criticize its obscurity, fictitiousness, or remoteness from concrete, worldly concerns. And yet, in an era of digitization, globalization, and deindustrialization, forms of abstraction fundamentally shape our world, with many of the largest companies today selling data and digital products, not material commodities, and with abstract financial instruments like derivatives and credit-default swaps fueling the global economy. If, as Karl Marx wrote, within capitalist society “individuals are now ruled by abstractions,” their labor departicularized into a fungible “abstract labor,” today economists and sociologists speak of a new “cognitive capitalism” (Yann Moulier Boutang) or “immaterial labor” (Maurizio Lazzarato) in which even the labor process is made abstract.

For decades, however, literary criticism has defined its methods and aims in opposition to those of abstraction. Abstract thinking was a crucial foil against which the New Critics both developed the method of close reading and defended the autonomy of literary criticism. “Where a scientific object requires a process of abstraction to come into existence,” as Nicholas Gaskill has paraphrased these New Critical arguments, “a literary object... resists such abstraction.” Subsequent criticism not only maintained but strengthened this antagonism. With the advent of the “historicist/contextualist paradigm” (Joseph North) in the 1980s, abstraction became not only intellectually but politically conservative—an essentialist attempt to dematerialize the text, separating it from its concrete networks of production, reception, and exchange.

But as a broader culture of abstraction thickens around us both inside and outside the academy, does our continued distrust of abstract thinking end up isolating our field inside a disciplinary utopia? This question seems implicit to a number of recent critical trends displaying a greater openness to abstraction. These include not only the growing body of digital humanities work whose quantitative methods necessarily isolate abstract patterns from texts; but also new abstract formalisms which locate the concept of form at a level of generality beyond the normal boundaries of literary studies (Caroline Levine, Sandra Macpherson); as well as ongoing developments toward larger-scale critical frameworks, such as the institutional scale of literary sociology (Mark McGurl), the conceptual scale of intellectual history (Heather Keenleyside), and the planetary scale of ecocriticism (Ursula Heise).

This panel brings together four scholars whose work helps us better understand the changing role of abstraction within criticism today. The panel’s first paper, Anna Shechtman’s “What Does Media Studies Study?”, takes on criticism’s recent turn toward larger scales of analysis by placing it alongside media studies’ own problems of scale. Shechtman presents a digital philology of the media concept, applying word embedding models to American magazines to trace the evolution of this abstract, overdetermined concept over the second half of the twentieth century. In her paper, Shechtman connects the anxiety over what if anything the media concept signifies to contemporary anxiety around what media studies studies, finding within the abstractness of the word ‘media’ itself an encoding of media studies’ institutional ambiguities. Her paper’s brief tour of the institutional histories of media studies programs in the US, and the diaspora of texts that land on Intro to Media syllabi and Media Studies anthologies, makes visible the institutional politics of abstraction underlying literary studies’ own recent turn to scale.

Expanding on Shechtman’s interdisciplinary framework, Stephanie Hershinow’s paper, “Personhood and Impersonality,” turns to the role of abstraction within recent formalist debates in studies of law and literature. Hershinow focuses on the British eighteenth century as a site both of a contraction of legal personhood (through forces of coverture, enslavement, empire) and a proliferation of experiments with literary impersonality (in narrative voice, free indirect discourse, and minimalist character psychology). Her paper considers the coincidence of these historical and literary-historical trends by making a case for form’s utility as the mechanism that binds the legal and the literary. Largely absent from the recent (re)turn to form, legal formalism not only helps us think about varieties of abstraction that are lived and urgent, but also demonstrates how literary formalism becomes political not by rejecting but by heightening its modes of abstraction.

Pivoting away from engagements with abstraction as a property of critical method, Anna Kornbluh’s paper, “Realist Abstractions: Literary Thinking Contra Concretude,” asks instead what modes of abstraction the literary object might itself promote. Kornbluh proposes that literary critics should embrace and enflesh a theory of literary abstraction that articulates the capacity of literary form to synthesize ideas differently from the quantitative or the conceptual. Literature, Kornbluh argues, is capable of thinking, not only of eliciting feeling or immediately expressing the personal or contextual. Because literature’s exercise of mediacy demands methods attuned to mediation rather than those fixated on immediate uptake in affect or data, Kornbluh draws on the Marxist tradition (especially Theodor Adorno, Georg Lukács, and Fredric Jameson) in order to make visible the abstractions dwelling within examples of free indirect discourse, omniscience, and social sweep from 19th, 20th, and 21st century realism.

Finally, Anna Ioanes’s paper, “Seeing/Race: Visual Economies and the Turn to Abstraction,” responds to Kornbluh’s call for an enfleshed theory of the abstractive work literature itself performs. Ioanes joins together the aesthetic legacies of abstract expressionism with debates in African American studies about the politics of representation in order to theorize abstraction as an aesthetic strategy of literary objects, one which manifests in a visual economy of representation. Drawing on Phillip Brian Harper’s Abstractionist Aesthetics (2015) and M. NourbeSe Philip’s 2008 poetic sequence Zong!, Ioanes demonstrates how abstraction is not an anemic escape from issues of race but in fact constitutes a uniquely generative aesthetics within African-American literature and art. Such an aesthetics of abstraction productively challenges orthodox commitments to realism and verisimilitude, which often simply recapitulate the constraining social conditions that black artists are working to undo and transcend.