Model Thinking: Generalization, Political Form, and the Common Good

For decades, many scholars in the humanities have set themselves against generalizations, valuing instead what is local, resistant, exceptional, nuanced, situated, concrete, embodied, and specific. Both close reading and historicizing, two of the major methods in literary studies, emphasize singularity, strangeness, and heterogeneity. This essay argues that the antigeneralizing imperative has also brought with it a moralizing of the large scale, and has prevented the humanities from participating in imagining and building fairer, more egalitarian forms for collective life. It proposes a formalist reading method that embraces generalizations for the common good.