he end of “Literature”? • gary e. davis • berkeley


	Project

	the end of “Literature”? waymaking into comparative thought gary e. davis	April 3, 2026

A writer for The New York Review of Books, 2018, avowed that “the literature
of modern times exalts the self,” but “exacerbates the very condition it then soothes.” Asserting that in a publication which vastly invalidates the belief seems embittered. He also believes that “literature is good for… keeping the market supplied” with excessive drama, which may unwittingly be a sign of his publishing difficulties.

Anyway, “the situation of the writer” (¶ 2 earlier) is quite relevant, even decisive. The soured market view is complemented by the enthused view of elder academic J. Hillis Miller, who celebrates Literature evolving out of “Literature” into inter-
sectional cultural studies. The first sentence of his first chapter of On Literature, 2001, is indeed decisive:

The end of literature is at hand. Literature’s time is almost up. It is about time. It is about, that is, the different epochs of different media. Literature, in spite of its approaching end, is nevertheless perennial and universal. It will survive all historical and technological changes. Literature is a feature of any human culture at any time and place. These two contradictory premises must govern all serious reflection “on literature” these days. (refs.2.13 p. 1)

The end, then, can be usefully posed as evolving telos in self-renewal. Literature is an institution in “perpetual crisis” (refs.2.14 p. 2) because evolving essentially involves critical points of disequilibrium. “For some [literary critics, the crisis] is the inevitable and enabling condition of literature and literary questions….being sustained by the paradoxes that seem to endanger it” (ibid.).

The “end of ‘Literature’” is really (I will argue) the assension of interdomainal studies (beyond intersectional cultural studies) which may give contemporary humanities altogether (research and teaching) endless durability.

In the beginning, textuality extends memory vastly. A “literary” mind expresses
a highly literate mind: a widely, highly, deeply valuing reader of one’s times,
a high-scale mind.

These days, researchers across specialties talk of “extended mind,” “distributed mind,” and “collective intelligence” as if such scaling is recent because that’s tech-
nologically stark. In fact, Literature was firstly and always textually-extended mind, implicitly troping manifold interdomainity of loving sophistication (philo-
sophy) which is, ideally (as scholarship), inter-textual and inter-genric (genre-ic). That is the real implicature of traditionally aestheticizing Literature through con-
text-transcendental tropes in rhetorics of conceptual blending.