Literature and Gratitude
Cory Stockwell and Alexandra Morrison
If the concept of gratitude has come increasingly to the fore in recent years, it is probably in part because people find it to be so lacking in contemporary society. In a recent essay, Matthew B. Crawford mused: “our condition as modern people makes the experience of gratitude especially elusive, so when we feel grateful it has an effect that is all the more powerful, bumping us out of a deep spiritual rut.” Like others who have thought about gratitude, Crawford implies that it can allow us to envision a world that is not based solely on instrumental reasoning, and indeed to escape from the reign of general equivalence; rather than opening onto an alternative future, it provides an access of sorts to what is already present, but may be difficult to discern.
While literary inquiry lags behind philosophy and religious studies in thinking about gratitude, it has often turned around this concept even when it has not named it as such. Indeed, we view recent debates about “postcritique”—suggested by works such as Bruno Latour’s 2004 essay “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?” and, especially, Rita Felski’s 2015 book The Limits of Critique, and enriched by the many responses to these works—as heralding a thinking of literature and gratitude. If, as Felski claims, it is necessary to think outside of the critical model (without, of course, abandoning it), we believe that one of the ways to do so is via (to nod to both Heidegger and G. K. Chesterton) a thinking that is itself a thanking—a gratitude that precedes the realm of exchange. We view scholars such as Patrick Fessenbecker (in his conceptualization of “thoughtful reading”), Ryan McDermott (in his view of tropology as a means of inventing the unforeseen), Toril Moi (when she asks what it would mean to “write in admiration”), and Davide Panagia (in his focus on pleasure) as offering building blocks for a form of reading that would be based in gratitude.
If examples of gratitude in literature itself are too numerous to mention, this is because they are to be found not solely in literature’s content—this or that example of grace, giving thanks, etc.—but also beyond it, for instance in what Felski herself calls attunement: we believe that tone and mood are fundamental in this regard. To this end, we invite proposals that address, on the one hand, the place of gratitude in particular works of literature, and that inquire, on the other hand, into the place of gratitude in forming new approaches to literary study, whether or not these approaches take themselves to be explicitly “postcritical.”
Cory Stockwell and Alexandra Morrison
If the concept of gratitude has come increasingly to the fore in recent years, it is probably in part because people find it to be so lacking in contemporary society. In a recent essay, Matthew B. Crawford mused: “our condition as modern people makes the experience of gratitude especially elusive, so when we feel grateful it has an effect that is all the more powerful, bumping us out of a deep spiritual rut.” Like others who have thought about gratitude, Crawford implies that it can allow us to envision a world that is not based solely on instrumental reasoning, and indeed to escape from the reign of general equivalence; rather than opening onto an alternative future, it provides an access of sorts to what is already present, but may be difficult to discern.
While literary inquiry lags behind philosophy and religious studies in thinking about gratitude, it has often turned around this concept even when it has not named it as such. Indeed, we view recent debates about “postcritique”—suggested by works such as Bruno Latour’s 2004 essay “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?” and, especially, Rita Felski’s 2015 book The Limits of Critique, and enriched by the many responses to these works—as heralding a thinking of literature and gratitude. If, as Felski claims, it is necessary to think outside of the critical model (without, of course, abandoning it), we believe that one of the ways to do so is via (to nod to both Heidegger and G. K. Chesterton) a thinking that is itself a thanking—a gratitude that precedes the realm of exchange. We view scholars such as Patrick Fessenbecker (in his conceptualization of “thoughtful reading”), Ryan McDermott (in his view of tropology as a means of inventing the unforeseen), Toril Moi (when she asks what it would mean to “write in admiration”), and Davide Panagia (in his focus on pleasure) as offering building blocks for a form of reading that would be based in gratitude.
If examples of gratitude in literature itself are too numerous to mention, this is because they are to be found not solely in literature’s content—this or that example of grace, giving thanks, etc.—but also beyond it, for instance in what Felski herself calls attunement: we believe that tone and mood are fundamental in this regard. To this end, we invite proposals that address, on the one hand, the place of gratitude in particular works of literature, and that inquire, on the other hand, into the place of gratitude in forming new approaches to literary study, whether or not these approaches take themselves to be explicitly “postcritical.”