Literary studies in academia are in crisis. English majors are declining, tenured positions are being eliminated as professors retire, and whole departments are falling under the administrator’s axe. Somewhat more pressingly, the world is on fire, younger generations are worse off than their parents, and various domestic and international conflicts threaten to erupt into even greater violence. So, what is the purpose of literary theory when literary studies are disappearing within the university and various crises—ecological, economic, political—compound without?

Backlit by the flames of omnicrisis, Anna Kornbluh’s Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late Capitalism and Daniel Wright’s The Grounds of the Novel offer two answers to this question. To them, literary theory can be either avant-garde or lyric, a tool for stepping back from the world or for more fully inhabiting it. Even as crises multiply, they assert that theory remains valuable.

Kornbluh’s theory is almost a weapon: a means of severing the tightening webs of cultural and socioeconomic “immediacy” that threaten to absorb each of us at any moment. For her, theory is essential for creating distance, giving us the breathing room necessary to observe, to think abstractly, and to envision a world that is not identical to this one. This is especially important now because, according to Kornbluh, the pervasive culture of immediacy that surrounds us insists on its “reality,” even when it is anything but.

Wright’s theory, by contrast, is something like a slide: a smooth surface meant to guide you down to the fundamental characteristics of our world and of the cultural objects we build in it. For him, theory is essential for revealing felt but unarticulated foundations, and making them visible. It is what allows us to leave behind false binaries, recognizing the radical pluralism of the social world, and perhaps, he provocatively argues, of the ground beneath our feet.

In this way, Kornbluh and Wright are diametrically opposed to each other, offering competing, exclusive understandings of the purpose of theory. But what they share—as do I—is a faith in theory itself.

If faith in something as abstruse as literary theory seems absurd, consider a more familiar vehicle of human knowledge: the novel. As a form, “the novel” has the capacity to operate in two registers simultaneously, representing both the enormous breadth of the social world and the intricate minutiae of the individual life. There is no reason why theory, taken collectively, cannot or should not do the same, providing us with the language to describe the abstract operations of cultural systems and the concrete foundations of everyday experience. Given the scope of the crisis before us, we will need theory of all stripes to find our way forward.

In the immediate wake of an earlier crisis, the 2008 financial crash, Zadie Smith published an essay titled “Two Paths for the Novel” in the New York Review of Books. She was reviewing two novels—Netherland, by Joseph O’Neill, and Remainder by Tom McCarthy—that she argued represented two interrelated but distinct trends in contemporary literature: the “lyrical Realist” and the “avant-garde,” respectively. Netherland’s lyrical realism places it in a long tradition of novels that take as their fundamental assumptions “the incantatory power of language to reveal truth” and that “the self is a bottomless pool.” Getting inside their characters’ lives and minds, discovering the beauty in quotidian detail, novelists in this vein assert that the aestheticized presentation of everyday life is their primary task.

But to Smith, the successive crises of the new millennium—from the dot-com crash to climate catastrophe to the great recession—threatened the security of middle-class existence (which is what lyrical realists often mean when they say “everyday life”) and, in so doing, called a literary challenger into being. Where lyrical realism relishes the vital indistinction of experience, the “avant-garde” novel takes a more calculating, distanced view of its subjects. Remainder “empties out interiority entirely,” defamiliarizing both everyday life and its representation in fiction; it works by identifying its reader’s expectations and then “gleefully taking them apart, brick by brick.”

The lyric realist and the avant-garde appeared to Smith as two potential paths for new novels to follow, one of which, she hoped, would pull literature out of the detritus of 2008 and into something new.

These same categories offer us a useful framework for articulating the differing approaches of Immediacy and The Grounds of the Novel, and for understanding their respective relationships to our own moment of crisis.

literary theory can be either avant-garde or lyric, a tool for stepping back from the world or for more fully inhabiting it. Even as crises multiply, theory remains valuable.

For Smith, avant-garde literature’s purpose is “to shake the novel out of its present complacency” in order to offer a “glimpse of an alternate road.” Kornbluh aims for something similar, though the complacency she identifies is not limited to the novel, and her aspirations are more broadly utopian.

“Immediacy,” Kornbluh argues, must be understood “as a master category for making sense of twenty-first-century cultural production.” Everything, from shipping logistics to art installations, is attempting to close the gaps opened by space, time, otherness, and language. And that, for Kornbluh, is a problem.

By immediacy, she means its colloquial sense: an increased speed evident everywhere in the freneticism of daily life in the new millennium. Her chapter “Circulation,” for example, addresses the rise of high-frequency trading, a technological arms race where money is made by reducing the time it takes to receive and act on financial information.

But it is in contemporary culture that she identifies a subtler and more insidious pursuit of immediacy in the sense of being unmediated: immediacy as authenticity, direct contact, access to things in themselves. Mediation, for Kornbluh, is the process of “making sense and making meaning by inlaying into medium.” A Picasso self-portrait mediates its subject by inlaying his face into the fragmented discontinuity of Cubist painting, prompting the viewer to reflect on questions of visual perspective and art’s historical development. And Kornbluh’s theory is itself a form of mediation, because it inlays the incoherent jumble of phenomena that comprise our social world into a comprehensible and useful set of categories. The price of this meaning-making is distortion, as the original object is transformed through its inlaying.

Under the regime of immediacy that Kornbluh identifies, however, we seek to do away with the channels that both connect us to and necessarily distort our objects of interest. In “Writing,” this manifests in “a new prevalence of first-person narration” and “the personal-essay boom.” In “Video,” Kornbluh points to an early sequence in Uncut Gems, which seamlessly blends the otherworldly interior of an opal into the more prosaic landscape of its protagonist’s colon. In “Antitheory,” she identifies a recent trend in theory toward genre blending, autobiographical detail, and attention to the texture of the author’s own subjective experience. All of Kornbluh’s examples employ new (or newly prevalent) techniques, she claims. They do so in an attempt to get as close as possible to their subject of interest, to eliminate distance and dissolve boundaries: between narrator and character, camera and subject, philosophy and literature, the object and its representation.

At first blush, the aims of immediacy—authenticity, directness, truth, reality—don’t seem all that threatening. In fact, they might appear salutary in contrast to the pervasive artifice of social media. The issue, in part, is that these cultural products only convey a sense of immediacy, they do not actually evade the distorting effects of mediation.

Take, for example, My Struggle by Karl Ove Knausgaard. This six-volume, 3,600-page work, written in the first person and composed entirely of details from the author’s own life, moves between Proustian recovery of his childhood and quasiscientific documentation of the minutiae of quotidian existence, frequently taking the form of pages-long lists. Knausgaard explicitly rejects literary fiction in favor of genres that he feels “confe[r] meaning” like diaries and essays.

And yet, these genres are no less mediated (and perhaps no more meaningful) than novels, which he describes as “made-up people in a made-up, though realistic, world.” My Struggle’s exhaustive lists may convince the reader that she is receiving direct access to Knausgaard’s life at the moment that he was writing. However, even lists are subject to detail selection and ordering, inevitably disfiguring the original scene which they purport to artlessly reproduce.

Knausgaard represents a much larger literary trend often called autofiction, a broad category whose practitioners include Rachel Cusk, Ocean Vuong, Sheila Heti, Tao Lin, and Megan Boyle. What unifies the disparate topics, styles, and circumstances of these authors, according to Kornbluh, is a shared “revolt against character, form, and fictionality itself,” on the assumption that removing these novelistic features leaves behind a negative space, in which resides “the truth and the real.”

Put bluntly, immediacy is a development in style—as Kornbluh’s title says—not in substance. But it is unique in that it is a sort of paradoxical style. Style, as a rule, makes itself evident; it is what distinguishes Henry James’s intricate meandering sentences from Ernest Hemingway’s startlingly spare prose. In this self-evidence, it “marks the features of an event, era, text or form as having been made,” calling out to the audience to recognize the act of creation that produced the object in front of them. Immediacy, by contrast, attempts to efface its own style and thereby obscure its artificiality. Unflinching honesty and empirical documentation seem to replace the literary feints that intervene between reality and its representation, leaving behind only the author himself—the real McCoy—in all his true, unadorned actuality.

The reason why immediacy is bad, in Kornbluh’s view, is because it conceals this basic fact: that the “event, era, text or form” was made, and thus could have been made otherwise. It naturalizes and essentializes our world rather than defamiliarizing it. This is why she calls immediacy “crisis-continuous.” Because it is so deeply invested in reproducing things as they are, it cannot but fail to offer an alternative vision of what things might be.

One major difficulty that Kornbluh faces in Immediacy is baked into the book’s central claim: How do you demonstrate that some term is the “master category” for a particular historical period? How do you prove to your audience that the pursuit of immediacy unifies nearly all sectors of contemporary cultural production? One way is by hedging. Kornbluh is quick to limit the scope of her claim, turning to theorist Fredric Jameson’s concept of the “cultural dominant.” The cultural dominant names a tendency that emerges at a particular historical moment while acknowledging the existence of alternative and even contradictory trends. Immediacy is dominant, but not totalizing; there are (limited, incomplete) instances of rebellion. But even with this hedging it is quite a large claim for Kornbluh to be making. It refuses logical proof, requiring instead empirical documentation. Her rhetorical bet is that by the end of the work, she will have shown you enough examples of immediacy style, spread across sufficiently disparate domains, for you to acquiesce to its utility as a “prism” for understanding contemporary cultural production. This accretive style of argumentation makes itself explicit in sporadic summaries, inserted in each of her main chapters, of the most salient examples. In her final chapter, “Antitheory,” Kornbluh reminds her readers that together they have identified immediacy:

in literature (autofiction, #OwnVoices, self-help, university writing pedagogy); in the “speak your truth” industrial complex (personal branding, confessionalism); in perspectival cinematography and the intimate ambient video stream; in the algorithmic base of i-tech (exponential information organized by binary oppositions of ones and zeros); and in the instantaneity of the just-in-time, on-demand circulation economy.

Kornbluh acknowledges this stockpiling, naming her method as “list-y, circuitous, roving vibeology,” but balances the leap of faith that this requires from her reader against the argument’s potential payoff: that by recognizing the pervasiveness of immediacy we might reestablish the critical distance from things-as-they-are, which is necessary to imagine things-as-they-might-be.

Recognizing immediacy’s pervasiveness is useful as far as it goes, but in order to fully reverse course we must also understand how it became so dominant. After all, as Kornbluh acknowledges, the “capacity hypothetically exists for cultural aesthetics to resist rather than insist upon this logic,” but by and large they have not—why?

This causal narrative is where Immediacy occasionally falters. Some explanations are clearly and fully articulated, linking a phenomenon step-by-step back up to its cause. When glossing the rise and continuing dominance of the personal essay as a signature genre of the past decade and a half, for example, Kornbluh argues convincingly that it is a result of the systematic decimation of livable writing careers. Without the employment protections offered by “writers’ guilds and staff unions” or the “salaries for hours on background,” writers who would otherwise be producing well-researched journalism focused on the world around them are forced to turn inward for material.

At other points, Kornbluh declines to draw the chain of causation between stylistic developments and the material conditions that ostensibly determine them. In “Video,” for instance, she reads the excessive blood spurts from 21st-century torture porn movies like Saw (2004–present) as “literalizing the stream” of content through which they are distributed, “materializing the infrastructure of image circulation in extreme deluge.” The fact that these movies predate the first streaming platform (Netflix, 2007) goes unaddressed. In these moments, Kornbluh simply states that cultural products “aestheticize,” “mirror,” or “mime” their conditions of production without explaining how those conditions make their way into those products.

As a Marxist and psychoanalytic literary critic, Kornbluh operates on the basic assumption that the economic and psychological conditions of a particular historical moment, which change across time, determine how individuals in that moment perceive the world and thereby percolate out into the cultural objects that they produce—literature, film, television, critical theory. It is this assumption that backstops the claims of “aestheticization,” because the pervasiveness of these conditions means that they will necessarily be reproduced, to a greater or lesser degree, in the cultural products of their historical moment. Kornbluh provides the reader with an accessible summary of the Marxist economic and Lacanian psychoanalytic theory necessary to grasp the argument, but if the reader is not inclined to accept her theoretical assumptions (though I admit I am, for the most part), then large portions of the causal narrative—why immediacy pervades contemporary life—collapse. This is because these frameworks are occasionally deployed as explanatory in themselves, inserting totally determining fields of force where materialist narratives of cause and effect would be far more convincing. This is consistent with Kornbluh’s larger argument about the purposes of theory, but sometimes feels too easy when contrasted with her ingenious analysis of phenomena like the personal essay boom.

However, the utility of Immediacy does not rest directly upon its causal narrative; rather, it depends upon its descriptive accuracy and its incisive analysis of the perniciousness of immediacy style. As Kornbluh says in her introduction, “If the category works, other indications should flash to mind now,” and they do.

Daniel Wright’s most recent work, The Grounds of the Novel, falls squarely into the category. By viewing it together with Immediacy, we can see how their paths diverge, with resultant divergence in approach, objects of interest, and use-value for the reader.

Does the novel simply take its contents from reality, reproducing the world in a mediated, aestheticized form? Or does it exist separately, as Wright claims in his beautifully wrought, pleasurably difficult The Grounds of the Novel, “as a strangely independent world”?

Like Immediacy, The Grounds of the Novel rests its argument on the explanatory power of a unifying concept. For Wright, this is “the ground,” understood both as a literal element of the novel’s landscape (the dirt and rocks that characters walk on) and a philosophically inflected metaphor (allegorizing the foundations of the fictional world characters walk within).

The Grounds of the Novel offers two central claims. First, that when novelists pause to describe the ground (the dirt and rocks kind) in their fiction, they are often simultaneously engaging in “philosophical speculation about the forms and edges of being rather than simply a catalog of descriptive detail.” In novels by Thomas Hardy, Olive Schreiner, Colson Whitehead, Virginia Woolf, and Akwaeke Emezi, among others, Wright interprets descriptions of the ground (and its various guises, like “groundwork” and “the underground”) as metaphors for the novel’s ontological status.

Second, that the world of the novel is quasi-autonomous, “somehow primary rather than secondary” and thus dependent on the real world for its existence. Wright is careful to avoid claiming that the world of the novel exists entirely independent of reality, or that characters are real in the same way that people are real; he adopts Alexius Meinong’s language to describe fictional beings as “subsist[ing]” while real people “exist.” Nevertheless, he wants to develop a framework that maps onto his sense that “fictions are real,” and that “fictional being is indifferent to me,” in other words, that the strict division between fictionality and actuality may not be so strict.

What is the purpose of literary theory when literary studies are disappearing within the university and various crises—ecological, economic, political—compound without?

For his part, Wright aims to discover “a ground upon which to know that fictions are real.” Technically, he is interested in the ontological status of the world of the novel. At its most basic, ontological status describes two different qualities: whether or not something exists, and what else needs to exist in order for that thing to exist. In more concrete terms, Wright asks whether the world of the novel “exists” in the same way that the real world does, and if so, whether or not the world of the novel depends on the real world for its existence.

Many of the major works of novel theory try to articulate the distinguishing features and social functions of the novel with reference to the historical context in which it was written. Ian Watt, in The Rise of the Novel, describes how the ascendence of liberalism and capitalism in 18th-century England allowed for the serious and realistic treatment of the lives of average people in literature, which he takes as the genre’s defining characteristic. In Desire and Domestic Fiction, Nancy Armstrong argues that the novel’s representation of the individual both reflected and helped to produce a conception of personhood and gender that aligned with the interests of the emergent bourgeoisie. In The Grounds of the Novel, though Wright is articulating a theory of the characteristics and functions of the novel, he explicitly rejects the necessity of placing these novels in their respective historical contexts.

Instead, Wright takes an approach which he describes as “antihistoricist,” looking almost exclusively within the texts of the novels themselves to see how their authors understand their ontological status. In his second chapter, for example, Wright excavates the ways that Olive Schreiner and Colson Whitehead employ metaphors of “the underground” in their fiction. For Schreiner, he says, the underground is imagined as “dark fecundity and rootedness” out of which the fictional world springs. For Whitehead, by contrast, it is associated with “constant fugitive movement” away from existing frameworks of novelistic realism. What is the reader to make of this distinction? Wright notes that the “blackness underground” is a racialized metaphor, turning to the work of scholars like Fred Moten and Calvin Warren to tease out the ways that Blackness has been employed as being’s imagined antithesis.

Because of his choice to limit analysis to the confines of the novel, Wright by and large does not take the final step of articulating why authors conceive of the “grounds of the novel” differently. Though he acknowledges that a focus on “the largest and fuzziest abstractions” like ontology may lead one away from the concrete manifestations of “race and racism,” he does not entirely manage to avoid this pitfall. Schreiner was a white South African author writing largely in the 19th century. Whitehead is a contemporary Black American author. We can surmise ourselves how their disparate personal histories and social contexts might inform their differing conceptions of “the underground,” but Wright does not—cannot, by virtue of the limitations he has placed on himself—do so.

Critical theory’s primary task, in Kornbluh’s view, is to take its readers “out of a situation, out of phenomenality, out of ourselves, and into realms of reflection.” It should mediate, distancing us from everyday experience, providing abstract models and well-defined categories (like the “immediacy” of her title) as tools to grasp how the world around us operates so that we can improve it. Immediacy theory does the opposite, immersing itself in indeterminacy, subjective experience, and the world-as-it-is. This manifests in scholarly fads like “autotheory,” which in Kornbluh’s view takes the critic’s subjective experience (rather than the wider world) as its object of interest, and “flat ontolog[ies],” that decline to organize existence hierarchically in favor of a more democratic equality of being.

In many respects, The Grounds of the Novel aligns with this description. Stylistically, it contrasts Kornbluh’s compact theoretical summaries with lyrical excursions into Wright’s own experience as a reader. He locates the project’s animus in his own experience as a “queer philosophy major” reading W. V. O. Quine, a metaphysician who sought to draw a strict boundary—“in or out”—between actuality and fictionality. For Wright, this binarized worldview seemed “obliquely connected to homophobia,” because it does not account for the ways that identity, especially marginalized identity, functions as “a fiction that also comes to feel indispensably real.” His attention to the “largest and fuzziest abstractions” thus leads him to produce just the sort of flat ontology, blurring distinctions between Schreiner and Whitehead, fictionality and actuality, that Kornbluh describes. But through close attention to The Grounds of the Novel we might discover a complementary rather than contradictory purpose for theory. Because, when Wright does step outside of the boundaries of the novel, shedding his most stringent antihistoricist limitations, he produces his most arresting and persuasive readings.

In his final chapter, “Meeting Grounds,” he presents Akwaeke Emezi’s novel Freshwater alongside their nonfiction writing and literary criticism. Freshwater follows Ada, a young Nigerian woman whose body is occupied by ọgbanje, which Emezi describes as “an Igbo spirit that’s born to a human mother.” After experiencing repeated sexual trauma, the dormant ọgbanje becomes available to Ada’s consciousness. Taking seriously the author’s own assertion that Freshwater is a realist novel, two competing interpretations present themselves: one “that would diagnose Ada with dissociative identity disorder,” and the other that would read Ada’s possession as an event that actually occurs. Each implies a different ontology, the Western, which considers ọgbanje “out” in terms of being, to borrow Quine’s terminology, fictional rather than actual; and the Igbo, which considers them “in.” Wright, following Emezi, suggests that we “can comprehend these two kinds of being as equally ‘real,’” the product of parallel understandings of what kinds of beings there are in the world. In this way, he argues, “the novel itself performs … a pluralization of reality,” concerned less with the “in or out” of existence than what kind of existence we are confronted with.

These are the stakes of novel reading, for Wright, training the reader to “navigate the adjacency and overlapping of fiction and actuality even after we leave the novel’s fictional world.” And this is the purpose of theory, that by “thinking carefully about what it means to understand fiction as ‘real’” we can better understand and talk about those qualities of social life—gender, race, identity more broadly—in which social constructions are subjectively experienced as “indispensably real.”

Kornbluh and Wright offer differing visions of the work that theory can perform, what it can do for us. For Kornbluh, it draws connections and demystifies the workings of world around us. For Wright, it helps to give name to the essential but ineffable aspects of our experience as we move through that world.

These are far from the only two paths for theory today. As Smith says of literature, there are other “skewed side road[s],” which offer their own directions. And so this is where the metaphor breaks down, its utility wanes; because, as has hopefully become clear, taking one path or the other, lyric or avant-garde, seems a false choice, as the novel itself shows us.

Theory, conceived of properly as a project in aggregate, can, and must, do it all.