Literary Studies Beyond the Academy

Academic literary studies of the early 20th century began by emphatically dissociating itself from popular literary-cultural institutions: periodical book reviewing; mail-order book clubs; and the catch-all derogatory category of amateur ‘home reading’. If studying creative works in one’s vernacular language was to count as a legitimate academic discipline, hard and fast distinctions between literary scholars and everyday book-lovers needed to be drawn.

However, since the rise of cultural studies during the 1980s and book history during the 1990s, everyday book cultures have increasingly featured on academics’ radar. Genre fandoms, suburban book clubs, and heroically ‘resistant’ readers have all been objects of fascination for literary sociologists. Especially since the rise of the internet made popular forms of bookishness globally and readily accessible, literary studies has hosted analyses of readers’ reviews, personal-library curation sites and social-media forms of bookishness both textual and visual in orientation (e.g. bookblogs, literary Twitter/X, bookTube, bookstagram, bookTok etc.).

More nascent is interest in outreach to the secondary-school sector as a prime site where public ideas about literary studies are formed through high-school subject-English. How might literary scholars proactively engage with national and state/provincial curriculum authorities? Can collaboration with the secondary sector facilitate flow-through enrolments at tertiary level? Do even those props of less-confident high-school English students—Shmoop, SparkNotes, and the like—hold potential as objects of scholarly examination? Certainly, the lines between formal education providers and online influencers are increasingly blurring with the rise of online ‘edutainment’ YouTube channels such as Crash Course Literature, The School of Life, and Thug Notes.

This ACLA seminar invites all researchers interested in exploring forms of literary study, reading formations, and bookish identity-making taking place outside, parallel to, or at the fringes of the academic establishment. This includes manifestations in the digital era or their historical antecedents (e.g. extra-mural studies, adult education, distance learning, etc.). We conceive of the academic/public boundary as inherently porous, where academics’ need to repeatedly reassert some fundamental incommensurability reveals more about actual continuities between the academy’s inside and its outside. We particularly welcome paper-givers interested in identifying and analyzing common interests and overlaps between what have often presented as exclusionary social formations.

Graduate students and NTT scholars are welcome! Please be in touch by October 9 to submit a brief bio (100-200 words) and abstract (200-400 words). Questions and/or statements of interest can be directed to Simone Murray ([email protected]) and Alexander Manshel ([email protected]).