Jessica Swoboda, BA alum and PhD Student, in Conversation with Adam Riekstins, Current MA Student
This past week I received the opportunity to interview Villanova alumna Jessica Swoboda '15 (B.A., Honors, English and Humanities), who is now completing her PhD in English at the University of Virginia. Her articles in The Point magazine, “Plural Visions: A reflection on ‘Criticism in Public’” and “Practicing Acknowledgement,” explore new ways of interpreting literature and interrogate characteristics of modern academia, both of which she examines further in her dissertation, “Entangled Relations: Characters, Interpretation, and Aesthetic Experience.” During her time at UVA, she has received multiple research grants from the English Department as well as an Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences Summer Research Fellowship. From 2018-2020, she was the Irby Cauthen Jefferson Fellow, a title she holds again this academic year. Jessica also serves as the Head Copy Editor for New Literary History and as a contributing editor for The Point.
Thank you very much for allowing me to interview you. I read your two articles “Plural Visions: A reflection on ‘Criticism in Public’” and “Practicing Acknowledgement” on The Point and they were both fantastic critiques of literary criticism and academia today.
Thank you! It’s funny you use the word “critique,” considering so many people would say I am against critique because I care about the affective dimensions of aesthetic experience, hah! One recent book even accused people invested in new methodologies of calling for the abolition of critique and advocating for a world in which critique no longer exists. I can’t wrap my head around how people get that from Rita Felski’s The Limits of Critique or from Toril Moi’s Revolution of the Ordinary. That couldn’t be farther from the truth. But the insistence that it is the truth is symptomatic of something that has inspired much of my writing: that people are unwilling to engage those who challenge their perspectives—unwilling to take what they say seriously. Too many people are imposing their own agendas onto what they read, which I see as responsible for the glaring misreadings and the vitriol that consumes much of the literary studies discourse today.
Can you start by telling me about your “Criticism in Public” project?
As I write in “Plural Visions,” “Criticism in Public” was inspired by the Twitter War I was part of after my essay “Practicing Acknowledgment” came out. Senior scholars balked at my characterization of critique and especially at my diagnosis of the state of literary criticism. The responses proved my point, I think—that there’s a habitual lack of attentiveness in how literary scholars have come to engage each other’s work. I set out in “Criticism in Public” to figure out how literary studies might foster a more collegial environment and how we might argue better—that is, how we might manage disagreements productively and come to value criticism’s interpersonal stakes.
The series, which featured twelve scholars who also write for public venues, taught me three things: (1) that the academic reins can stand to be loosened; (2) that plurality is a benefit not a detriment to literary criticism; and (3) that we should think of our interlocutors as characters in a story we’re telling. The first and third reason have to do with fostering creativity, and the second reason has to do with ceasing the merciless infighting over the purpose of literary criticism.
You talk in “Plural Visions: A reflection on ‘Criticism in Public’” about how some scholars are afraid to dive into different writing styles, since not everything they work on will necessarily help their academic career. From senior scholars, you say this dedication to academic writing “came from their fear that essays for magazines wouldn’t be considered critical contributions or interventions in a discourse.” In your opinion, what do you think will help future scholars divorce academic writing from public writing? Do you believe the problem lies in conditioning institutions or with scholars?
I don’t think academic writing should be seen as divorced from public writing. My belief is that they need to be seen as mutually enriching. My generation of scholars is showing how scholarship is producible beyond the bounds of academia and that it’s no less rigorous because it is. They’re also showing how their research feeds into their public work, their public work into their research. There’s a desire within us to make our writing interesting to more than a handful of people. Just look at the work of Lauren Michele Jackson, Joel Rhone, and Anna Shechtman, for instance. They’re models for me.
But there are still some people out there who turn their noses down at public writing, and that’s impacting scholars who write for a variety of venues on both the job market and the tenure clock. As a discipline, we need to start broadening our conception of what scholarship is and can be and, as a result, see public work as a contribution to a scholar’s profile, not as a detriment to it. The landscape is changing, and we need to move with the times rather than be stuck in the field of the traditional academic monograph and articles and all the formulas and rubrics that come with them. Universities, too. Universities are quick to celebrate their professors when their trade book tops a bestseller list or when they win a prestigious award for their book reviewing; they are less quick to do so when it comes to those professors’ job or tenure applications. That’s also a problem.
You ask “What place, then, do politics have in literary studies?” Some people would debate that literary studies is solely a political area. Can you speak to the alternative opinion of aesthetic or affect criticism (post-critique) that you’ve been studying?
I want to emphasize that postcritique is not against politics, which a lot of its antagonists (i.e. Bruce Robbins, Robert Tally, Jeffrey DiLeo, Anna Kornbluh) argue. Postcritique simply says that literature—and literary criticism—is about more than just politics and suggests that our affective responses and aesthetic attachments are worth taking seriously. But these antagonists will argue that because “postcritics” take all this seriously and attend to “surfaces” more than to “depths,” they’re complicit in neoliberal structures, friends of fascists, and perpetuators of capitalism. Huh? All postcritique says is that our affective responses to texts can be ways into interpretation and analysis (more things its antagonists say it’s against) and that texts are entangled in networks of relation, including affective ones, that are worth examining because they can unveil said text’s social, political, and ethical dimensions.
You highlight a breakdown between accessibility of writing between academic and public audiences. Do you think that academic writing should be more accessible to the public, or rather that academic writing should be seen as less elitist? You suggest the answer might be “a give and take, not a fight to the death with permanent winners and losers.”
The line you quote is actually in reference to my argument about argument, so I’ll answer this by way of Toril Moi’s interview for “Criticism in Public.” She said, “I have often given up on reading academic tomes because they’re too deadening, so awfully dry, boring and turgid, with sentences that fall apart and never-ending paragraphs. . . . If academic writing was always interesting and fun to read, then it would be a joy to read up on scholarship.” This captures exactly how I feel about academic criticism. I don’t necessarily know if it has to do with elitism or accessibility. I think it has more to do with writing about what you believe in and staking a claim in what you write. But we need courage to do that, so we need to figure out how to cultivate this kind of courage. And that starts with those who are teaching and advising graduate students, I think—they need to help them develop courage. That’s what will enable our writing to reveal us—what you care about, what inspires you, how you see the world. The absence of all of that is what makes writing—any kind—boring, robotic, turgid.
In your article, “Practicing Acknowledgment,” you talk about the concept of attunement and its relation to humanities. Can you briefly describe what that word means in your own words and why you think it’s essential to helping us understand more not just about literature, but the arts in general?
Attunement means getting it—helps us think through why it is that we love, feel stuck to, a certain song, or movie, or novel, or TV show. In my “Writing About Attunement” course, I have my students listen to their favorite song and jot down whatever comes to mind as they do. The result of the exercise is that students unknowingly draw their own web of attachments. On their paper at the end of the exercise might be the mood of the song, their mood while listening to it, the name of a family member who recommended it to them, where they were when they first heard it, the memories it conjures in them. The list goes on. The exercise reveals how we are all caught in tangles of ties that can reveal things both about ourselves and the artwork we’re interacting with. It’s an exercise that shows what kind of interpretative possibilities become available when we account for the first-person experience, when we account for affect. The more interpretative possibilities that become available, the richer our understanding of an art object becomes.
You note you’re a student of Dr. Rita Felski, author of The Limits of Critique. In what ways has learning from her and her work changed your vision on the way we interact with literary criticism?
Working with Rita has been one of the best things about graduate school, if not the best thing. Obviously, her work has influenced my own, and I think my work shows that influence. At least I hope it does. But the impact she’s had on me is much bigger than that. For instance, I remember being immediately attuned to her way of approaching questions in her “Critical Methods” course the second semester of my first year. She demonstrated this commitment to teasing out all sides of a problem—say, about symptomatic reading or reader-response theory—despite her own reservations about a particular method, and to figuring out each position’s argument before making her own. I’m interested in figuring out more productive ways to argue and engage each other as scholars because of that class. Rita models—in the classroom, in her work, as a mentor—what I see as the best path forward. In her work, she resists the status quo; she reveals she’s willing to challenge and be challenged, to change and be changed; she demonstrates her deep knowledge of debates both within and beyond literary studies; she shows how first-person aesthetic experiences can lead to interpretation; she writes amazing sentences. She sets the bar high for how to write, for how to argue, and for what literary criticism should be, and that’s a bar I will constantly fight to reach. And as a mentor, she focuses not on dragging my work for its flaws but on helping me take it further in its possibilities. I wouldn’t be the scholar, thinker, or writer I am today without her.
Lastly, I want to acknowledge your time spent as a student at Villanova University. What were the most influential and pivotal moments of your time here as an undergraduate?
It’s hard to answer this question without first acknowledging my time as a member of Villanova’s field hockey team. Villanova Athletics prioritizes academics and cares about the development of their student-athletes in ways few other athletics departments do. For instance, my coach, Joanie Milhous, encouraged me to do things that were absolutely pivotal to where I am now but that field hockey coaches at other universities might have discouraged: be in the Honors Program, work in the Writing Center, and take classes that conflicted with our team strength and conditioning times but were important to my academic growth. She even attended the awards ceremony for undergraduate research long after my final season ended, just to support me. Joanie really cared about both my academic and athletic abilities and made sure I was finding ways to nurture both, and I’ll always be grateful that she did.
On the academic side of things, Megan Quigley’s “Modern British Novel” class was a turning point for me. Thinking through the implications of “only connect” in Forster’s Howards End and the psychological richness of Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway energized me and laid the foundation for what would become my research interests. Plus, Megan made me a better, more attentive reader and writer. Working on my Honors thesis with her and Helena Tomko (Humanities) was another pivotal moment. They cultivated a space where I was free to pursue the questions that moved me and provided me with the guidance and structure I needed to accomplish my goals. To this day, Megan and Helena remain two of my biggest supporters; I’m now lucky to also call them great friends.
Do you have any advice for those interested in engaging with the field of literary criticism?
No one will see as you see, read as you read, or write as you write. Honor that fact! You will feel pressured to conform to rubrics and run with the trends, but resist. Your work will be better—more exciting, more interesting—because you have. Though of course you want to listen to those who are helping you deepen your analyses, refine your questions, and develop your arguments, be wary of those imposing their agenda onto yours or telling you that the only way forward is by doing X or Y in this very specific, confining, uncreative way. And always take your opponents’ arguments seriously—work to understand them on their own terms and engage them thoughtfully in your writing—but write for those who are on your “side,” because otherwise you’ll always be writing from a position of defense, with your vision getting lost in the crosshairs.
Thank you so much for your time.
You can read some of the pieces by Jessica which were under discussion in this blog post below:
“Plural Visions: A reflection on ‘Criticism in Public’”
Practicing Acknowledgment
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| Jessica Swoboda BA '15 |
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