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Tracing the foundational relationship between literary critical practice and our practices in the world, this essay advocates for a minimal consensus for literary studies: to understand it as a public practice geared towards training better readers. Understanding literary studies as a useful endeavour only when it aims not just at talking to itself and its students but also to the wider public, this essay suggests that we should focus on making people have better arguments about literature. We need to stress the practice of interpretation, understood as the public ascription of meaning to a text, which in turn means that literary studies has no point if it does not produce results about which it is possible to argue. In order to do so, however, we need to posit a common ground for literary interpretation different from the personal experience of the text: socioaesthetic experience. Literary studies, this essay argues, should utilise the liberties it has, including a recognition of its expertise in comparison to the ordinary reader, to train people to be better readers of their socioaesthetic experiences in reading, and enjoin them to commune and argue over these experiences.

The work of literary studies: interpretation, argument, and socioaesthetic experience