Against Literary Activism

Abstract This article addresses the potentials and shortcomings of prominent current attempts to articulate platforms for public literary humanities. While the pressing polycrises of the twenty-first century call for a resurgence of committed literature—and, accordingly, a public-facing critical practice and ethics—a scenario for public literary humanities still remains to be scripted. We argue that the vagueness of the term “literary value” is one crucial obstacle in this context. It weakens the opposition to literature’s commercialisation and in fact tends to lead to an unproductive reiteration of traditional, canon-bound conceptions of what “good” literature is. We perceive a similarly weak definition of “value” in the public humanities at large, but find in Judith Butler’s encouragement to trust in extra-academic publics a promising perspective that we deem applicable to a budding public literary humanities as well. Drawing on historical (Bertolt Brecht) and current (Vinod Kumar Shukla) examples, we are able to show that such a literary and critical practice can only be conceived when the established notion of literature as private and solipsistic is overcome.