The Ministry of Disturbance

Abstract

Worty’s textualism paves the way for an informalist reconstruction of literary studies by isolating the features of our current practices that best comport with a post-Darwinian aesthetic and a Deweyan conception of democracy. But a few questions remain to be answered. Specifically, a full-fledged theory of literature and literary criticism ought to be able to describe what is particularly “literary” about the texts and methods that are employed in the discipline. From a post-Darwinian point of view, these questions are really not distinct, since what characterizes a particular class of memes is their shared mode of survival within the social practices and institutions where they live. So what literature is depends on how and why it is studied. My informalist reconstruction needs to answer these questions in more detail.