Analytic Scale and the Literary Object

Eric Hayot, Comparative Literature and Asian Studies, Penn State University

What happens if we describe the current situation of literary criticism as a “crisis in largeness”? For one, recent theories of “world” literature and of quantitative textual analysis can be made to share a genealogy, one that allows us to imagine “scale” as a central feature of the ontology of literary object. This opens, in turn, the door onto a resistance to “large” scales as a feature of generic poststructuralism, which valorizes the horizontal or rhizomal against the structured and the vertical. That’s a nice story, but it doesn’t actually correspond to the way people read. So the question is whether we need to reconcile our practice to our theories of scale, or vice versa. And the next question is to ask what kinds of theories of the objects of literary analysis we have, when we subject those objects to the weight of criticism.

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