Literary Criticism

Reflections from a damaged field The last time The Chronicle Review published a collection of our coverage of literary studies, we called it “Endgame.” We assembled the package at the end of 2019 and published it in the first week of 2020, to coincide with the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association. The essays ranged widely, but the overall tenor was elegiac. As Eric Hayot had recently documented, only the most delusional optimist could feel hopeful about the institutional future of the field.Then Covid came. Hiring, already at an all-time low, paused. What would this mean for scholars?By now, it’s plain that the hiring crunch that began in 2009 will never be reversed. That’s roughly three academic generations who have been either partially or, since Covid, entirely debarred from the field. For many decades, what happens in departments of literary studies has seemed to matter to the culture at large, and the collapse of the discipline is no different, as witnessed by the att