The Locations of Value(s)

This interview explores Gisèle Sapiro’s work on the contributions of field theory to the study of value. Field theory highlights the struggles that structure the possibilities for action within specific fields. The discussion covers field theory’s role in analyzing the production, circulation, and contestation of value; how semantic ambiguity shapes discourse; the dynamics of ideological conflict and their implications for legal and political action; and the concept of autonomy. It also examines the interplay between knowledge, power, and symbolic capital.

We investigate the role consumers play in making literature in translation visible to other English-speaking readers. Analyzing book reviews from Goodreads, we identify three interpretive strategies readers use: literature as experience, as art, and as ethnography. Some readers use novels to find commonalities with others around the world, while others engage in literary voyeurism, reinforcing cultural stereotypes and ethnocentrism. Our findings show how consumer critics engage in cultural valuation and the effect digital platforms can have on the reception of literature in translation.

This essay examines the genre of the multigenerational family saga alongside the institutions that have encouraged its popularity and prestige. Reading Homegoing and A Kind of Freedom, I argue that the genre has flourished by appealing to the interpretive strategies of both the university English department and the middlebrow book club. Its recent focus on marginalized peoples is well-suited to the “empathetic” and pedagogical reading practices of both institutions. I close by questioning whether empathetic reading practices have become a recipe for learned and compassionate inaction.

Andrew Sarris and Pauline Kael’s debate over the value of the auteur theory is frequently historicized as a debate over the value of authorship study as such. This essay, through a close reading of “Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962” and “Circles and Squares,” argues instead that their disagreement is better understood as concerning the value of cinema and cinema culture more broadly. Sarris argues for auteurism as a method of expanding the recognition of cinema’s value as a major art, while Kael argues that theoretical models always simplify the lively humanistic work of aesthetic culture.

In recent decades, new Hebrew poetry has been characterized by poetic accessibility and clear statements. To understand this fundamental shift in the contemporary poetic idioms, it is not enough to cite the weakening of the institution of criticism itself, following processes of neoliberalization in the institutions of literature and journalism and the rise of social networks; we must also consider contemporary ­poetry’s rejection of the old relations of power and authority vis-à-vis institutional criticism.

This essay, drawn from the book Styles: A Critique of Our Forms of Life, proposes a “stylistics of existence.” The essay sketches out how the question of style appears across diverse philosophical and literary texts. It identifies three reigning logics of style — distinction, modal logic, and individuation — before arguing that any discussion of style must entail an interrogation of values. Within this context, it suggests, literature has an important role to play insofar as it can foster an open inquiry into style, conceived as the site of ethical and political struggles over how to live.

This essay is an effort to indicate how aesthetic politics needs to take more seriously questions of value. In doing so, we will revisit Joseph Raz’s influential account of value pluralism, as well as Robert Pippin’s critique of it. My basic contention is that most accounts of aesthetic politics presume a version of value pluralism, but they do so at the expense of the difference they nevertheless wish to honor and inspire.

Since the 1980s, perhaps no thinker has defined the central problematics of Marxist criticism more than Fredric Jameson. His death in 2024 prompts questions about what new directions left literary studies has pursued in recent years and might pursue in the future. This essay explores two recent tendencies. The first probes the limits of historicism and reopens the question of aesthetic value, while the second explores the limits of the cultural turn and redirects attention to political economy and Marxian value theory. Ultimately, the essay pays tribute to Jameson by historicizing his work.

This article examines the productive relation between law and literature in late 19th-century Argentina through a reading of Pot Pourri: Whistlings of an Idler, the first — and highly controversial — work of novelist and legislator Eugenio Cambaceres. Placing the novel in relation to the debates regarding civil marriage throughout the 1880s, I read the themes of adultery and transgression in Pot Pourri as a literary intervention on the question of sovereignty over marital life, thus foreshadowing the emergence of a new order of law in the form of a consolidated liberal state.

This article argues that in an era that produces enormous quantities of waste, “reading” garbage can free us from the modern obsession with cleanliness and the fantasy of a pristine nature. It examines Hebrew literary texts with garbage at their center — the medieval Ben ha-melekh ve-ha-nazir (The king’s son and the ascetic), and the contemporary work of Israeli writers Raquel Chalfi and Haviva Pedaya — in the context of the “dirty Jew” trope, often depicted in opposition to nature. Particularly through Pedaya’s Be-‘ein he-ḥatul ( Eye of the cat), I point the way to a theory of writing garbage.