"What Help from Thought?" : American Literary Criticism in a Time of Pandemic

Open Access

Abstract

International audience ; This essay reflects, against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic, on the relevance of literary studies in critical times, as well as on the notion of relevance as a measure of literary history and literary criticism. Drawing on the work of Giorgio Agamben and Wendy Brown, it argues for a model of relevance as untimeliness, where the function of criticism is to derive from literary texts a critical politics that eventually speaks both to these texts' complex historical context and to their readers' present and ever-changing circumstances. It then turns to the nineteenth-century archive to illustrate the untimely relevance of American literary history at the present time. While Dickinson might seem to suggest that "To suspend the breath/Is the most we can" (F1067) in a time of crisis, intimating that literature is essentially the record of our helplessness in the unraveling of the world, the example of Emerson's antislavery lectures, where both the blight of slavery and the cause of abolition are metaphorized as airborne contamination, offer a template for thinking about the dangers as well as the potentialities of viral contagion. American literature . . . captures the "air" or the atmosphere of history and equips us with models to take it in . . . Such is . . . [its] (un)timely relevance . . . at the present time.