The Locations of Value(s): An Introduction

Inquiring about value requires grappling with the diverse practices through which we develop and express appreciation of the life-matter continuum. It also involves considering the divergent and, at times, incompatible logics by which value is assigned. If anything distinguishes evaluation from desire or inclination, it is the demand that value be recognized communally, or, at least, intersubjectively, hence the need to render what we value intelligible to others through strategies of justification that are themselves open to dispute. The inherent contentiousness of our grounds for attributing value is further complicated by the fact that, at a certain level of generality, statements about value are empty.[1] We do not always know what will count as an instance of value — what will, in effect, constitute love, freedom, or justice. Moreover, whatever ultimately qualifies as solidarity, for example, may significantly alter how we arbitrate that value in the future.

Despite its contentious nature, value (and values) remain central to the enjoyment, study, and commercialization of literature. This is not only because literary works are objects of exchange and praise (of valuation and evaluation), but also because judgment is a foundational practice within literary studies and accounts for a considerable portion of the texts that qualify as literary.[2] And judgment is, as we know, one of the most historied and, in turn, value-laden notions in European culture. What Immanuel Kant theorized as a “judgment of taste” — elaborating on the writings of Alexander Baumgarten, Edmund Burke, and David Hume — is sustained by the transcendental idea of freedom and reflected in art’s resistance to heteronomous ends. Because such judgment does not rely on preexisting norms or standards of beauty, nor subsume a particular under a given universal, Kant characterized it as “reflective” (as opposed to “determinative”) and deemed it an expression of our capacity for autonomous rational and imaginative activity. Indeed, our “capacity to appreciate reflectively,”[3] is, for Kant, integral to the practice of individual and collective freedom, since the formation of taste occurs not only in and through community, but also for the community itself, as Robert Pippin unconventionally argues. The point is not merely that individuals refine their judgment through exposure and reflection, but that the community is responsible for encouraging such education. This responsibility does not presuppose the capacity to predict how others will respond; rather, it reflects a justified expectation — what one can legitimately ask of others within a shared way of life.[4] This belief in the cultivation of freedom and the imagination through taste is a far cry from a deflationary view of the aesthetic, which confines creativity, in a postmodern fashion, to perpetual rethinking, reimagining, revaluing. As the Mexican poet and essayist Malva Flores would quip: “Yo repienso / Tú configuras / Él resignifica / Nosotros reformulamos / Ustedes recontextualizan / Ellos re[ponga lo que corresponda] / Nadie crea nada / Todos simulamos.” (I rethink / You configure / He resignifies / We reformulate / You recontextualize / They re[fill in the blank] / Nobody creates anything / We all simulate.”)[5] Flores’ poem attests to the enduring (though contested)[6] appeal of aesthetic and intellectual autonomy, as do some of the pieces included here.

Literary texts, then, elicit and are saturated with judgments. From the perspective of creation and interpretation, one could say that, at minimum, those judgments orient formal choices and are, therefore, integral to literary hermeneutics. For instance, in the case of narratives, values guide characters’ decisions and shape focalization and emplotment, continuing to operate even when left unnamed or unmarked, as in Hernán Díaz’s Trust (2022), where conflicting value systems emerge through multiple narrative perspectives.[7] When values are not directly thematized or do not transparently mirror the author’s commitments, they remain active beneath the surface — even in nihilistic or affectively neutral styles. Yet these values become most perceptible when high social stakes elicit empathy and call for ethical responsibility, bringing us to another location of value in the weightier domain of morality.

For the purposes of this issue, “value” refers to the dispositions, practices, and criteria grounding judgment and appreciation, even when not formally codified, and to the forms of knowledge through which such principles and criteria are recognized, taken up, or contested. Here we’re concerned not only with what we value, but also with how we come to value. We approach value through several interrelated domains: the ethico-political; aesthetic debates on autonomy and taste; Marxist theories of value and cultural critique; and sociological accounts of the literary field as a dynamic space in which multiple value systems exert symbolic and material force and position social actors in relation to one another. This conceptual plurality unsettles essentialist understandings. If value truly resided in the object, then a work of literature would be valuable simply because it possessed some inherent quality. Because worth is not intrinsic, however, it cannot be conveyed as positive content. Rather than something possessed by objects or individuals, value is better understood as performative: It varies across contexts and materializes through practices of assessment, recognition, and enactment.

In what follows, we make space for different interpretive approaches to value, with the awareness that its study inevitably wrests the term back from its highly politicized uses (e.g., “family values,” “traditional values,” or the designation of political subjects as possessing — or lacking — values). Our point of departure is the simple observation that statements about the merit of consuming and studying literature — and, therefore, about literature’s status in the market of cultural goods and services — are often based on determinate views of how literary texts function as sites of value: through their circulation, their representational strategies, the dispositions they foster in readers, or their capacity to contest, repair, remember, and reimagine. One such view is ideology critique, which conceives of literary interpretation as a propaedeutic to social and political change. But many other approaches rely on analogous claims.

Several prominent scholars, trusting in literature’s capacity to change hearts and minds, assume that literature’s value lies in its reception — specifically, in the way the intricacies of literary form train readers’ cognitive dispositions toward outcomes understood to be epistemologically, ethically, or politically desirable. One paradigmatic example is Martha Nussbaum’s contention that sophisticated literary styles model for readers a more granular capture of a person’s particularities and of the context of their actions. Such moral attention, cultivated by intellectual and affective engagement with select works of literature, leads to “a fine development of our human capabilities to see and feel and judge; an ability to miss less, to be responsible for more.”[8] Similarly, Joshua Landy argues that some literary texts can serve as training grounds for higher-level cognitive tasks, such as assessing the soundness of an argument, interpreting a metaphor, detecting irony, and, in a Pyrrhonian fashion, adjudicating claim and counterclaim. The value of this training is ultimately expressed in ethical terms: If all goes well, cognitive fitness leads to self-actualization — by deepening one’s faith in a religious context, reenchanting the world in a secular one, finding harmony within oneself, or attaining peace of mind through relinquishing the desire for certainty.[9]

More recently, calls for revaluing aesthetic judgment and education have rehearsed similar arguments, though often with broader political ambition and somewhat less precision. Joseph North laments the dominance, since the 1980s, of what he calls the “historicist/contextualist”[10] paradigm, which tasks scholars with “merely observ[ing] culture” (12) while discouraging any transformative aspirations. In response to what he sees as the neoliberal quietism of historicists, North wishes to overturn contextualism and restore criticism’s role as a tool for engaging “the whole range of our social practices for encountering value” (15). Michael Clune, for his part, finds fault with the discipline’s egalitarianism — by which he means the refusal of aesthetic hierarchies and, therefore, of aesthetic judgment. This egalitarianism, he argues, is noxious because it reduces cultural value to market preference, denies literary expertise, and, most gravely, impedes an important educational goal: learning to interrogate and change one’s values.[11] These scholars conceive of reading as a privileged site for engaging with value. On the one hand, reading is formative in that it organizes certain values; on the other, it has the potential to be ­transformative — though not in a didactic or therapeutic sense. Instead, reading re-actualizes configurations of value while also offering a spatial opening — a kind of contact zone — where the reader’s value systems enter into relation with those encoded in the text.

But any consideration of literary works as sites of value would be incomplete without accounting for their place in the circuits of production and circulation. From this perspective, value is no longer a matter of individual judgment — however “subjectively universal” — or of readerly cultivation through education; rather, it emerges as a socially mediated relation, structured by labor and exchange. Economic value becomes its own criterion of excellence, an effect of the equalizing logic of the capitalist market and its deepening encroachment on life. In this way, fictional works — such as Trust, to return to our earlier example — register normative conflict without foregrounding it, instead treating it as symptomatic of deeper fractures within the social and economic order.

The convertibility of monetary worth into moral, political, and aesthetic value (and vice versa) has long been a foundational concern for Marxist critics and sociologists of literature. Fredric Jameson was especially influential in rethinking the concepts of base and superstructure by proposing that literary texts do not merely reflect or question ideology; rather, they are themselves ideological acts that inscribe capitalist contradictions in their form and attempt to symbolically resolve or displace them. And despite sustained criticism,[12] Marx’s labor theory of value remains another crucial framework for understanding the relationship between culture and the economy. Thus, Sianne Ngai theorizes ambivalent judgments (“the cute,” “the zany,” “the interesting,” and, later, “the gimmicky”) as aesthetic categories grounded in conflicting affective intensities (such as fascination and repulsion) that register our uneasy relation to capitalist production and exchange. In the case of the gimmick, this unease appears simultaneously as attraction to and disappointment in technological advancement, which promises to generate value more efficiently.[13] At the same time, value, understood as the product of abstract labor and exchange, has also served to elucidate the colonial condition. Decolonial scholars have drawn on and interrogated historical materialism, exposing the complexities of value production and adjudication. Denise Ferreira da Silva, for instance, has introduced the concept of “unpayable debt”[14] to uncover the conflict among ethical, legal, and economic regimes of value inherent in raciality, thereby redefining decolonization as a utopic demand for “the return of the total value expropriated from conquered lands and enslaved bodies.”[15]

This issue does not propose a clear way out of the conceptual tensions around value, offer a comprehensive survey, or stage a perfunctory confrontation among competing perspectives. Rather, we note that despite their differences, each argument presupposes some idea of the values at stake, and more importantly, of what valuing entails. When these arguments describe or prescribe extratextual attitudes, behaviors, dispositions, and states of affairs — whether individual or collective — they call for an account of how to relate different levels of analysis: form, history, and reception. Yet this expectation is often met only partially, fragmentarily, or not at all. This is perhaps not a fault of individual arguments but a consequence of our “professional deformation”: the perspectival partiality that marks all specialized practice and, more broadly, the division of cognitive labor. As John Guillory observes, the limits of our disciplinary vision — conditions of possibility for our work — are compounded by a longstanding difficulty in defining our aims and by the nearly irresistible demand to overstate the value of our endeavors (13). If literature’s semiotic complexity makes it a favored object for studying value, then the limits we encounter should be read as occasions to think further, ideally in dialogue with the other disciplines that also take value as their object. The contributions that follow take up this critical task. In a comparatist spirit (and in line with this journal’s commitment to fostering cross-cultural dialogue), we’ve sought to gather languages and disciplines: literary studies, cinema, sociology, and intellectual history; Spanish, French, English, Ukrainian, and Hebrew. In the same spirit, we have translated or republished scholarly essays, articles, and book chapters, alongside new pieces. Our aim in doing so is to foster dialogue through unexpected juxtapositions of literary and theoretical corpora, as well as scholarly styles, thereby pushing against the unavoidable limits of any single viewpoint.

Our interview with Gisèle Sapiro traverses her prolific body of work and introduces field theory as an adaptable conceptual schema that rigorously and comprehensively captures the interanimations among at least three value spheres: politics (legislation, jurisdiction, and state intervention), economics (markets), and the aesthetic, which here refers both to the institutional actors charged with judging literary worth and to the set of discourses that seek to justify writers’ endeavors. Integrating an interdisciplinary body of knowledge — intellectual and political history, sociology, and literary analysis — Sapiro mobilizes field theory to address issues as diverse as the interplay of censure, literary practices, and credos; conceptual and ideological conflict; the role of the scholar in the face of polarization and that of the writer in a changing legal landscape; and market trends in translation.

This triangulation among politics, economics, and the aesthetic also informs two other articles featured here. Peggy Levitt and Markella Rutherford’s “Consumer Critics Online: Global Citizens or Literary Voyeurs?” describes the clash between, on the one hand, the value of translated literature as a promoter of cross-cultural awareness and literacy and, on the other, the interpretive strategies of Anglophone readers, which tend to reinforce — rather than contest — nationalist biases. Through a quantitative study of consumer reviews published on Goodreads, Levitt and Rutherford offer insight into the evaluative criteria of contemporary readers (“literature as experience,” “literature as art,” and “literature as ethnography”). They also demonstrate how translations inflect aesthetic judgment, since readers seek to acknowledge the formal qualities of the novels they read while correctly attributing merit to both authors and translators. Levitt and Rutherford’s findings invite us to develop widely accessible pedagogical and critical tools to promote translated literature — despite market forces — while avoiding the risks of literary voyeurism.

Standing at the opposite end of the sociological approaches, Alexander Manshel’s book chapter, excerpted from Writing Backwards: Historical Fiction and the Reshaping of the American Canon (2023),[16] is also a case study in failed expectations. “Reading the Family Tree” describes the narrative features of the multigenerational family saga and argues that its wide chronological span and character system are detrimental to the fostering of empathy, even though empathy is the value in whose name many of these novels are awarded and taught. Manshel deftly describes the institutional circuit of schools, universities, book clubs, and literary awards that perpetuate faith in empathy as a politically salutary affect, while promoting a complacent view of history and “learned and compassionate inaction” (38). His chapter is a convincing and well-­documented reminder that response and responsiveness should not be conflated. Action does not follow directly from recognition or identification, but is mediated through more complex evaluative processes.

Like Levitt, Rutherford, and Manshel, Mynt Marsellus’s “Criteria of Value: Auteurism as Late Classical Film Theory” also centers on lay audiences. Marsellus’s restitution of the debate between Andrew Sarris and Pauline Kael on the significance of auteurism revisits romantic standards of aesthetic value (originality and expressiveness) to assemble a normative vocabulary that can be mobilized in the justification of the study of film in the classroom while restoring cinephilia to the heart of film studies. This recovery of a neglected episode in the history of film theory and criticism demonstrates a pragmatic approach to theoretical disagreement: Marsellus privileges the pedagogical consequences of a theoretical position over how intellectually compelling it is. Such an approach, though unusual, encourages reflection on the uses of theory beyond film studies.

As a counterpoint to Marsellus’ plea for cinephilia as a touchstone for theory, we are re-publishing Reut Ben-Yaakov’s essay “The Betrayal of Criticism.” Translated by Michal Sapir, this essay examines a recent shift in contemporary Hebrew poetry toward a simpler, more accessible poetic language. She argues that this development represents a deliberate break from the hermetic style that critics had helped sustain since the 1970s. While acknowledging that the weakening of institutional criticism has had external causes, such as the digital transformation of media and journalism and a decline in literary education, Ben-Yaakov foregrounds the increasingly fraught relation between poets and critics. She identifies Ariel Hirschfeld’s 1989 polemic as a major turning point, showing how Hirschfeld displaced blame onto poets for their hermeticism while overlooking the role critics played in promoting that very illegibility. Ben-Yaakov also interrogates the formalist and generational models of canon formation, followed by Dan Miron and Menachem Perry. Instead of attending to poetic practices, these models have become prescriptive, creating a circularity in which critics rely on predetermined criteria to dismiss emergent and othered voices.

The roundtable “Literary Circulation Beyond the Market: Public Institutions and Cultural Democracy in Contemporary Latin America” features Marcy Schwartz, Yosa Vidal, and Liz Soriano in conversation with Daniel Hernández and the editors. This discussion, which originated at the Librería Garabato in Bogotá, Colombia, was adapted and extended through digital collaboration for this issue. Bringing perspectives as scholars, writers, and cultural mediators, the participants explore the complex relationship between public resources, reading, and literary creation in Latin America. This conversation serves as a testing ground for theoretical propositions advanced elsewhere in the issue while maintaining its conversational clarity. Vidal questions, for instance, whether literary expertise and institutional mediation are still necessary to prevent circulation and taste from being governed solely by the market. Soriano, speaking as a cultural manager, outlines concrete strategies to proactively curb expert judgment by widening access to cultural materials according to the preferences of diverse publics, regardless of the reasons behind their tastes. This exchange also calls for methodological adjustments in the sociology of literature. While circulation beyond the market often appears marginal in the United States, in other contexts, the public sector’s capacity to generate symbolic capital should not be underestimated. These public networks operate in tension with cultural centers consecrated by Euro-Atlantic institutions — such as Pascale Casanova’s Paris, Jorge Carrión’s Barcelona, or global publishers like Penguin.[17] They effectively link literary circles, public initiatives, libraries, booksellers, educators, communities, and lay readers. While acutely aware of the challenges, Schwartz, Vidal, and Soriano insist that the state and the market cannot be treated as absolute categories, nor can the public be contained or determined by either.

Marielle Macé’s monograph Styles (2016) offers a wide-ranging meditation on style as the notional domain of manners and ways of life. Going against conventional associations between style on the one hand and aestheticism and consumerism on the other, Macé argues that the concept of style is potentially relevant to all “how-questions,” especially those that emerge in and through political and ethical conflicts, and therefore deserves the same status within the humanities and social sciences as other fundamental concepts drawn from literary studies, such as narrative. We reprint Styles’ introduction (translated by Victoria Baena) here because Macé’s contention that styles are “the relentless conquest of value played out again and again in every form” (pp. 108) appeared to us as a necessary complement to the meso- and macro-structural perspectives embodied in the sociological work of contributors such as Sapiro, Levitt, Rutherford, and Manshel. Indeed, for Macé, forms in general and literary forms in particular are always invested with values and reasons, which is why the study of literary artifacts has a distinct role to play in a broader understanding of the material struggles for and against determinate forms of life. Like Caroline Levine’s Forms (2017), Marielle Macé’s work synthesizes an extensive body of thought on style to ground the specificity of literary knowledge and bring it into dialogue with the social sciences. We are pleased to make this introduction available to Anglophone audiences.

In “The Problem of Value Pluralism in Aesthetic Politics,” Brian Price continues this issue’s exploration of the politics of aesthetics by arguing that if the aesthetic is to fulfill its emancipatory potential — by enabling perceptual shifts and advancing social change — it must avoid collapsing difference into sameness or confusing moral correctness with political efficacy. Price reflects on how, when we judge certain aesthetic strategies as good and others less so, we do so in relation to a conception of value — standards and criteria of judgment that we rarely name, let alone examine for their consistency. He further notes the field often confuses the languages of autonomy, pluralism, and difference: Resistant practices associated with autonomous artistic forms are celebrated as embodiments of alterity but risk assimilation into capitalist value production. For instance, in Price’s reading, Raz’s value pluralism leaves no ground to publicly defend competing claims as more or less worthy of attention — or, as Pippin would have it, of action in the social realm. He also takes issue with moralistic responses to art, which hamper its ethical function as a space of reflective judgment in which one lingers to better grasp one’s reasons for acting and the porous limits of the self.

In “The Problem of the Future: Fredric Jameson and the Dilemmas of Left Literary Studies,” Peter Conroy explores Fredric Jameson’s legacy within Western Marxism by addressing the claim that Jameson’s historicist paradigm has reached its limit and that contemporary literary studies must now produce new problems in response to shifting historical conditions. His analysis turns to Joseph North’s Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History (2017) and to Colleen Lye and Christopher Nealon’s edited volume After Marx: Literature, Theory, and Value in the Twenty-First Century (2022)[18] — two attempts to rethink value in relation to Jameson’s influence. Conroy argues that if Jameson seemingly suspended the instrumentalization of culture amid widespread depoliticization, North seeks to reverse this suspension. Conroy reads this reversal as a bid to recover the instrumental value of the aesthetic and reactivate moral and political judgment. While sympathetic to this project’s spirit, Conroy counters that Jameson never simply abandoned praxis; his historicism operates as a symbolic act with a narrative causality that deliberately keeps political horizons open. In parallel, he identifies a return to Marx’s theory of value in a stricter economic sense among post-Jamesonian critics. Yet, this return often fails to engage in sustained dialogue with the authors who anchor current debates on economic value, such as Robert Brenner (on the long downturn), Giovanni Arrighi (on hegemonic cycles), or Michael Heinrich and Moishe Postone (on value-form theory). Conroy questions whether this tendency risks pushing literary studies toward a social-scientific direction of inquiry, detaching it from the specific critical judgments and disciplinary commitments proper to the literary field.

In “Toward a New Order of Law: Adultery and Sovereignty in Eugenio Cambaceres’ Pot Pourri: Whistlings of an Idler,” Mauricio Oportus Preller examines how Argentine writer and legislator Eugenio Cambaceres imagines state sovereignty through the literary figure of the Idler, a wayward lawyer and narrator of Pot Pourri. Set in the 1880s, a period marked by the end of post-independence civil wars and the consolidation of the liberal-national state in Argentina, the article places the novel within debates on the separation of church and state and the gradual extension of state jurisdiction over education, the civil registry, and, imminently, civil marriage and divorce. Written when civil marriage was not yet part of the legal order, Pot Pourri stages the paradox of the wayward lawyer’s intervention: By violating the old law, he clears the way for the plenary sovereign state to adopt a modern legal order. In doing so, the novel presents literature as a site where legal and moral authority are renegotiated in advance of legislation. Such legislation does not merely adapt to evolving customs or liberal moralities but overrides a moral-religious conception of marriage and institutes it instead as a state-administered contract. Oportus Preller adds to the issue’s treatment of value by showing that literature anticipates the terms under which social and moral value will be administered, expanding the discussion beyond aesthetic judgment, literary markets, and public cultural mediation.

Tafat Hacohen-Bick’s “‘I Had To Rummage Through It, Rummage Through It:’ Literature, the Anthropocene, and the Aesthetics of Garbage,” translated by Devra Lehmann, turns the focus of this issue from valuation to devaluation. Foraging through an archive of secular and sacred Jewish and Hebrew texts, Hacohen-Bick examines a collection of terms — “filth,” “trash,” and “dirt” — that designate things, animals, and people stripped of value by the logic of a consumer culture in perpetual overdrive. Updating the insights of post-structuralism and psychoanalysis through an ecocritical focus on embodiment and materiality, Hacohen-Bick argues that the modes of abjection underpinning our normative fixation with cleanliness and purity are fundamentally unsustainable. Furthermore, she demonstrates how literature — reading and writing garbage — can encourage us to embrace the abject, even if words are also powerful sanitizers.

We conclude this issue with an excerpt from Alex Averbuch’s poetry collection, Zhydivs’kyj korol’ (The Jewish king), [19] which tacitly redefines value as poetic memory. Averbuch returns the reader to the German occupation of Soviet Ukraine, transforming archival material into poeticized letters and postcards penned by Ukrainian forced laborers (Ostarbeiters) in Nazi Germany and into testimonies from the Holocaust, both of which pass through Dashiv, then a town in west-central Ukraine. The personal, the familial, and the collective intertwine as the lyrical presence struggles against forgetting in Novoaidar, in the Donbas region. Here, we publish the Ostarbeiters’ section, “I thank them for not forgetting about me,” in the original Ukrainian and in English translation by Oksana Maksymchuk and Max Rosochinsky, with accompanying notes. Averbuch adopts a vivid documentary style, working through archival fragments to write beside the voices of those who spoke under harsh material constraints. Unable to tell their full stories, the laborers — identified either by their own names or only by those of their German employers — let troubling details surface between the lines. Value, here, is measured not through wage but through subsistence: Despite long workdays, payment is absent, and instead, they register what they eat and wear, requesting small staples (nuts, seeds, dried fruit, onions, garlic) from home to make their food bearable. But what they miss most is relational in nature: news of loved ones, a photograph, a word that they are remembered. These testimonies and related archives, particularly those tied to local Ukrainian histories, were long suppressed during the Soviet period.

endnotes

1. Joseph Raz, The Practice of Value, ed. R. Jay Wallace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 38–39. ↩

2. John Guillory, Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organization of Literary Study (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022), 47, 355. ↩

3. Robert B. Pippin, “The Significance of Taste: Kant, Aesthetic and Reflective Judgment,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 34, no. 4 (1996): 556. ↩

4. Pippin’s interpretation aligns with Bourdieu’s anti-Kantian definition of taste in that “a shared way of life” is precisely what distinguishes classes from each other and serves and grounds class hierarchy. ↩

5. Malva Flores, Sombras en el campus: Notas sobre literatura, crítica y academia (México City: Bonilla Artigas Editores, 2020), 12. (Our translation.) ↩

6. Not only by Bourdieu, but also by scholars such as Jerome McGann and, more recently, Grant Kester. See Jerome McGann, “Pseudodoxia Academica,” New Literary History 39, no. 3 (2008): 645–56 for a spirited polemic against the legacy of aesthetic autonomy in literary studies; and Grant Kester, Beyond the Sovereign Self: Aesthetic Autonomy from the Avant-Garde to Socially Engaged Art (Durham, Duke University Press, 2023), 280 for a critical history. ↩

7. Hernán Díaz, Trust (New York: Riverhead Books, 2023); also see the essays in the “Theories and Methodologies” section of PMLA 138, no. 5 (2023). ↩

8. Martha Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 164. ↩

9. Joshua Landy, How to Do Things with Fictions   (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 10–11. ↩

10. Joseph North, Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), 3. ↩

11. Michael Clune, A Defense of Judgement (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021), 45. ↩

12. See Peter Conroy’s contribution to this issue on the critiques leveled against Marx’s value theory as well as its renewal in literary studies. ↩

13. Sianne Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012); Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2020). ↩

14. Denise Ferreira da Silva, Unpayable Debt (London: Sternberg Press, 2022). ↩

15. Denise Ferreira da Silva, “In the Raw,” e-flux journal, no. 93 (September 2018). ↩

16. Alexander Manshel, Writing Backwards: Historical Fiction and the Reshaping of the American Canon (New York: Columbia University Press, 2023). ↩

17. Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004); Jorge Carrión, Librerías (Barcelona: Anagrama, 2013). ↩

18. Colleen Lye and Christopher Nealon, eds. After Marx: Literature, Theory, and Value in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022). ↩

19. Oleksandr Averbukh, Zhydivs’kyi korol’ (Kyïv: Dukh i litera, 2021); forthcoming in a bilingual edition as Alex Averbuch, Furious Harvests (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). ↩