Mark McGurl's The Program Era ends with an insightful reflection on the problem of "scale" in literary study -- our almost automatic assumption that we must always scale up the stakes of literary study in order to argue for our relevance.  Bigger, we commonly assume, is better, and will garner for us more funding, more attention, more significance.

This post is a response to a comment made by Andrew Goldstone in a comments thread on Joshua Landy's fascinating Arcade blog post, "Human Minds, Literary Texts, and CD Players."