Wednesday, 22 May, 13:15-15:15, Tampere University,
Room: Pinni B 1096 (Kanslerinrinne 1)
Literary Value in a Postliterary Age: Contemporary Grammars of Valuation
The value of literature is no longer self-evident. For those of us who are invested in the survival of literature, this puts us in a tricky position: we have to justify the value of literature in nonliterary terms, but we must also make sure that those nonliterary value domains (ethics, politics, memory, identity) don’t make literature redundant. In this presentation, I explore how this paradoxical situation invites us to center the question of literary value. I argue that it is less important to define literary value than to track concrete discursive practices of valuation. By putting discourses of valuation at the heart of the study of contemporary literature, we can arrive at a better explanation for the emergence of some of the dominant modes of twenty-first-century fiction such as the literature of witness, the network novel, biofiction, or autofiction.
The lecture will be followed by a series of responses from Natalya Bekhta, Kuura Juntunen, Maria Mäkelä, and Matti Kangaskoski, as well as general discussion.
Suggested reading: Pieter Vermeulen “Reading for Value: Trust, Metafiction, and the Grammar of Literary Valuation,” PMLA 2023, 138:5. (Link to the article)
Pieter Vermeulen is an associate professor of American and comparative literature at the University of Leuven. He is the author of three books (Romanticism after the Holocaust [2010]; Contemporary Literature and the End of the Novel: Creature, Affect, Form [2015]; and Literature and the Anthropocene [2020]) and co-editor of several special journal issues and books (most notably Memory Unbound: Tracing the Dynamics of Memory Studies [2016], Instituting World Literature: Writing, Translation, Markets [2016], and Pluralizing the Minor: Forms, Figures, Circulation [2024]). His current writing project is a book on contemporary literary value on which this presentation draws.