Abstract: Metadiscourse about literary criticism often presupposes a distinction between academia’s inside, where we find authorized experts, and its outside, where we find “amateurs” and “the public.” Think, for example, of the commonplace that publishers want academic books with “crossover appeal,” that is, the potential to attract the interest and dollars of a mythical lay reader. Such notions and terms, however, obscure the material conditions of intellectual production and consumption today: how adjunctification, the cratering of the tenure-track job market, underfunding, and attacks on education have fostered what I call “manufactured amateurism” within colleges and universities while driving PhDs into contingent and so-called alt-ac positions, as well as other industries entirely. From my vantage as a university press editor and independent scholar, I argue that there are divisions to be drawn not between inside and outside but, rather, between disparate professional roles, labor conditions, markets for scholarly writing, and access to resources. Redressing the striking absence of publishers from discussions of the state and fate of literary studies, I argue, moreover, that university presses have long occupied a constitutive outside, mediating among far-flung communities and collaborating with scholars to sustain fields such as Victorian studies—and journals such as Victorian Poetry —amid and despite widespread institutional disinvestment. Including publishers in these discussions—both engaging us as fellow knowledge workers and critically reflecting on the role of university presses—helps bring into relief the collectivism at the heart of scholarly work and create the solidarity we desperately need if we want to strengthen and build our shared institutions anew.
Rebecca Colesworthy (Sat,) studied this question.