Can literary criticism create its own object of study?

There were a few odd moments in the Chakrabarty article that didn’t appear have anything in particular to do with climate change, and that struck me as containing much larger concepts than expected. They were extremely easy to pass over in reading, so my goal here is to take a second look at one of these and try to suss out the implications for literary study.

The moment in which I’m interested is on page 215 of the article, quoted below. For reference, Chakrabarty is here discussing his third “thesis” and the tensions between a deterministic (or biology-driven) view of humanity and a kind of socio-historic one that deals with the human as a subject with freedoms, etc.:

“All disciplines have to create their objects of study.”

The first fascinating part about that statement—besides the impression that it may eventually be found on an introspective tote bag—is its offhand, declarative quality. The style of the statement itself belies the expansiveness of the concepts behind it, and the sweeping gesture with which it scoops up those concepts seems somewhat out of place in Chakrabarty’s analysis.

It would be absurd to say, for example, that medicine has to first create a human being in order to study one, but the fact remains that medicine had to create the human as a being, a body, an object that can be studied and understood in medical terms before it could fit into that paradigm. Chakrabarty also says, “Absent personhood, there is no human subject of history,” but history has to do more than create the human as a person in order to study it (215). History actually has to conceive of persons as entities with the capacity both for an individual and shared past, and with the concept of a present or future against which that past can be set to mark it out as history. It also has to create “history” itself as a thing that can be codified and measured.

The immediate problem, of course, is a chicken and egg scenario. Can something be properly called a “discipline” without an object of study? Or does the act of creating the study-able object also simultaneously create the discipline, the possibility of that object being studied?

Given that paradox, what would this look like for literary study? I’ll use my primary text, Woman on the Edge of Time, to push on the notions presented in Chakrabarty’s statement.

On one level we have the easily-accessible physical object of literary study, which may not in fact be all that simple. There are dozens of material and conceptual definitions of “book” that can be argued, and the advent of digital books makes the category even muddier. I chose Woman as a literary object based on its bound physicality (signifying “book” in some way) and its complex, fictional content, but can we really argue that the discipline of literary criticism created the literary object in the first place? Or, in the act of choosing texts, did the field of literary criticism (and by extension, I) created an object out of “literariness” instead? In other words, the object that literary criticism studies could actually be something like “value in/of literature.”

This gets even stranger if we consider Woman as part of the genre of science fiction, since science fiction studies is embroiled in an endless battle over what “counts” as science fiction. Certainly the story has all the elements of a sensible definition of science fiction—there is a utopia/dystopia binary in an imagined future, a seedy and near-dystopian present where neurological experiments are taking place, and a set of extreme technological inventions in the future that are represented as at once horrifying and banal. But did science fiction criticism create an object called “science fiction” out of those things?

And what about the protagonist, Connie Ramos? When we analyze her, we take into account certain categories of human-object (in the sense of a bounded concept, not necessarily in the sense of objectified): woman, middle-aged, Latina, victim, mental patient, etc. But can we say that the discipline of literary criticism has created her? If “all disciplines have to create their objects of study” as Chakrabarty suggests, what object can be said to have been created by our own? Or does the very nature of literary studies require a multiplicity of objects?

To close, I’ll leave this with a scene from Woman where Connie learns that all children are genetically engineered, and a woman from the future tells her the reason: “Finally there was that one thing we [i.e. women] had to give up too, the only power we ever had, in return for no more power for anyone. The original production: the power to give birth” (Piercy 97). In the novel, the ability to create objects and persons changes shape over time—it might help to think of the creation of a study-able object in a similar way, i.e. as an unstable process that we have to free up to be reconstituted as something else.