When readers complain that a piece of literature is too hard, they can be responding to textual opacity, intense and viscerally disturbing subject matter, unlikable characters, the range of reference on which a novel or poem seems to depend, or the density and complexity of its prose or its plot, among many other things. This seminar asks what it means for literature to be difficult and what kinds of difficulties are useful to sit with, to think about, to feel through—and which perhaps are not. We propose that in the face of difficulty—existential, personal, political, environmental—reading complicated, resistant, opaque, emotion-laden, or intensely disaffected writing can be an affectively and intellectually powerful task. As gratifying as it might be agonizing, this literature complicates distinctions between pleasure and unpleasure, impasse and passage, frustration and fulfillment.

One way to approach the seminar’s topic is through what is broadly called “experimental writing,” by which we mean writing that challenges conventional literary forms, that revels in its literariness, and that seeks to imagine new modes of literary practice and relationality. Thought from this perspective, what forms does difficult literature take, remake, and invent? If difficulty implies an undoing, then in what way does it make and unmake literature—and, in the process, subjects, normativities, communities, and worlds? Another approach is to ask whether similar kinds of undoing and remaking occur in work that on its surface looks more conventional. Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life is not experimental in any formal or generic sense, yet it has provoked intense debate about when the painfulness of a reading experience is valuable and when it is not. That is one example of many. Our hope is to elicit a wide range of reflections on what constitutes literary difficulty and what value it might or might not have for its readers.

Among the questions participants might explore, with regard to material from any time and place: How does literature negotiate the seeming ineffability of categories like crisis, trauma, and catastrophe? When and why does difficult literature give rise to frustration, sadness, rage, fear, elation, excitement, or joy? While a reader’s response to challenging reading might mirror the affective turmoil catalyzed by personal, collective, and historical crises, this is just one of the structural relationships that we hope to explore. In other words, resistant writing—or, viewed another way, readerly resistance to literature—does not merely reflect, reproduce, or represent the difficulties that condition it, but mediates and even transforms difficult experience in complicated and unexpected ways. How might we, as scholars and teachers of literature, best think around and with the issue of difficulty itself?