In recent debates about the fate of literary criticism in this era of declining support for the humanities, the term “method” is omnipresent. However, the concepts, theories, procedures, and modes of reading that fall under the category of “method” in the humanities vary widely when compared to the natural sciences. What does it mean to say we have a method, or a variety of methods, or indeed to oppose one method to another? This panel offers a timely self-reflexive discussion on the root-concept of “method” in our work. Our objective is to ascertain and define this essential yet uncomfortably flexible concept undergirding our theories, debates, pedagogies, and ultimately our disciplinary validity in the institutional frameworks we inhabit.

Our conversation builds upon recent scholarship that has brought attention, both implicit and explicit, to the formative role of method in literary criticism: Jonathan Kramnick’s Paper Minds (2018); Rita Felski’s The Limits of Critique (2015); Eric Hayot’s Humanist Reason (2021); Critique and Postcritique (2017), edited by Rita Felski and Elizabeth S. Anker. Pertinent articles on the concept’s institutional ramifications include Mark Hewson’s “The Debate with Method in the History of Literary Studies” (Comparative Literature Studies 55 (1), 2018) and the recent cluster on “Cultures of Argument” (PMLA 135.5, 2020).

Analyzing distinct incarnations of literary methods in late nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first century contexts, our panel illustrates the vastly different scales at which method can be considered. Each paper engages with one aspect of method, or with one method, applied to one field of study. Yet, in inhabiting these different perspectives, we wish to avoid the agonistic impulse to oppose one method to another. Instead, we take up the heterogeneity of literary method as a problem, with approaches ranging from optimism, to pragmatism, to skepticism. Each presentation is allotted 17-18 minutes, with a 15-minute unstructured discussion.

Patrick Fessenbecker begins our conversation by asking how we conceptualize method at the global level of the discipline. One way of framing our critical pursuits has been to characterize the procedural content of our methods, or how criticism “works” as a series of scholarly “moves.” However, a clearer image of our field, Fessenbecker argues, transpires when we investigate critics’ deeper, prior motivations—the ones that make criticism worth doing in the first place. Why do critics mine historical material for theoretical insights? Fessenbecker analyzes the justificatory framework involved in this method, which has three steps: reconstructing a historical period and a period-specific intellectual problem; presenting a literary work as a sophisticated intervention into the problem, via its form; re-characterizing the intervention anachronistically for its contemporary relevance. Ultimately, the problem of anachronism is mitigated by the pedagogical value of such distancing. Reading the MLA “Approaches to Teaching” series archivally, Fessenbecker shows that this is often how literary scholars make books valuable to their students as sources of valid and significant ideas.

Continuing this reappraisal of existing methods, Éric Touya takes up the method of “close reading,” the indispensable procedure in modern American literary studies. He considers both its virtues as well one major exclusion that has accompanied it: authorial intent. Touya describes the gradual erosion, visible in the history of Mallarmé interpretation, of the logocentric thinking behind authorial intent. There is a side of Mallarmé’s poetics, Touya finds, that stands in tension with this history: that of poetry’s, and the poet’s, purposive meaning. First, he describes the influence of Mallarmé’s poetics on the Barthesian “death of the author.” Subsequent readings of Mallarmé by Blanchot, Kristeva, Derrida increasingly foreground linguistic signifiers, syntax, spacing and intertextuality. In his own close reading of the poem “Salut,” Touya infers a broader raison d’être of poetry according to Mallarmé, one with ethical, social, and theoretical implications.

Finally, in a skeptical intervention channeling the urgency of this question for a new generation of scholars, Daniel Malinowski argues that we can gain more perspective by suspending our attachment to the epistemological value of method altogether. Why do we still have method debates, he asks, when approaches such as close reading have been shown to be relatively stable across different methodological factions? Taking the field of twentieth century American literary studies as key example, Malinowski argues that “method” stands in for real disagreements about the forces that structure our world and our relationship to them. By viewing method debates in this light, as political rather than epistemological, we can begin to talk about the material rifts that underlie these debates: the diversifying academy and the rise of a permanent underclass of adjuncts and part-time teachers.