The panel brings together four eminent scholar-critics of American literary studies to share their perspectives on the diverse practices in that field and to take stock of the prevailing ideas and practices. It takes its name, as a predecessor panel did in 2019 and as two subsequent panels in Lisbon will do, from Matthew Arnold's famous essay, not to embrace Arnold's vision but to invoke its once-pervading auspices as the occasion to deliberate over the premises and purposes of critique. Indeed, the MLA convention has played a crucial role in bringing forward such panels in recent years, for the need for discussing what we are doing and why has perhaps not been so acute in many, many years. Surely there has also been a demand for exactly such fora. Americanists in particular, perhaps as a result of their vigorous eclecticism, antimonism, and diversity, have felt keenly the need to evaluate our moment--a moment, as many have observed, when the idea of a national literature has come to seem problematic--and measure our possibilities going forward. Especially so, in a university-economy threatening to shrink the Arnoldian ground upon which English departments were first instituted, on the one hand, and, more broadly, in the urgency of our national politics.

Our speakers, in their turn, will address these and cognate issues, first, in the contexts with which they are most familiar and on which they reputations have been built, and second, the ramifications that cut across subspecialties. As Giles observes, in his famous essay, Arnold praised Edmund Burke’s capacity to be “carried . . . by the current of thought to the opposite side of the question,” which he saw as exemplifying the intellectual mobility that he associated with the “sphere” of criticism. As part of a career dedicated to the expanding the extranational base of American criticism, Giles addresses what is at stake in designating “American Literary Criticism” as American, together with the politics linked to Arnold’s “definition of criticism” as “disinterestedness.” Rather than simply deconstructing the liberal agenda implicit in his understanding of criticism as a “free play of the mind,” Giles attends to the complications involved in Arnold’s assertion that “the critic must keep out of the region of immediate practice in the political, social, humanitarian sphere.” Nor could this challenge be more urgent to the extent that such a desideratum remains relevant to American literary criticism in the age of Trump.

Brickhouse turns to the rise of catastrophe studies both as a subfield focused on catastrophe and as a critical mode. Amitav Ghosh asks literary scholars and readers of all kinds to accept that our historical moment of climate catastrophe is a period of “great derangement”—produced in part by our collective socialization under the regime of the modern novel. Literary novels, along with “a range of governmental practices . . . informed by statistics and probability,” exiled catastrophe from their purview; the modern novel, “unlike geology, has never been forced to confront the centrality of the improbable.” The genre itself is part of a “broader imaginative and cultural failure that lies at the heart of the climate crisis.” Whether or not we agree with Ghosh on the modern novel, it seems clear that American literary studies has a special responsibility, in the present time, to think about catastrophe during our period of collective “derangement. The US has historically produced, along with its GANS, a specially large portion of the world’s GHG emissions. At the same time, we are a field with a venerable history of pronouncing critical states of emergency, from Cold War criticism through criticism in the Age of Terror. Not all such scholarship is universally loved or respected, and certainly not across time. But perhaps we can learn from our prior modes of catastrophism—not by dismissing them as wrong-headed or mistaken, but by drawing from their imaginative resources.

Saldivar believes that it is necessary today for American criticism to explore the new instances of the “color line” and its attendant racial symbolism in the context of twenty-first century migration, diaspora, and border “humanitarian crises.” He ponders how would we proceed if we were to redo the early works of criticism, interpretation, and analysis that originally shaped critical race and ethnic studies: What should be the function of criticism under today’s conditions of the relentless internationalization, globalization, and transnationalization of cultural and literary studies? At the end of the second decade of the 21^st century, a new paradigm for broadly global as well as for more local area studies has emerged, a new poesis of comparative study, based on a new sense of the dynamics of how knowledge is generated, human resources are used, and a recognition of the rich reservoir of knowledge that exists in developing countries.

For Lye, the current function of American literary criticism is to be found in response to the condition of permanent employment. Not least in the US academy where the structural adjustment of the humanities (and the attendant job market crisis) in the last decade, the return to Marx coincides with a resurgent interest in rereading Capital, particularly Capital Vol. I, which is fundamentally about permanent unemployment resulting from the logic of accumulation. Distinguishing this cultural Marxism is the linkage of the relationality of class and race to the longstanding problem of the division between intellectual and manual labor, doubtless because American Marxists have sought to abstract capital’s laws of motion through the concrete history of US social relations. A historical materialist conceptualization of racial formations, indeed, may be the strong suit of American Marxism. Although the productivity of what is basically an Althusserian conceptualization of ideology for US literary studies is an intellectual history already well apprehended, the literary critical method, theory, or practice that follows from this tradition is less certain.

Speakers have a strict limit of 1000 words, 9-10 minutes. Since many who follow their disparate careers will be attending, there is a keen need to allow for questions and discussion, so the moderator will restrict his own remarks.